Gentoo desktop?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 08:59:11PM -0500, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   Generally everything that's available for linux.  There are well over
> 12,000 apps/libs/etc (not counting different versions).  I don't know if
> the mailing list would appreciate a 66 kbyte zip file of a listing of my
> /etc/portage directory
> 
>   Me, me, me.  One word of warning; it's like a manual transmission.
> You have more control than with an automatic.  If you floor the gas
> pedal and leave it there, you'll blow up the engine.  Similarly, if you
> make some stupid choices with Gentoo, it'll blow up on you.  Here are my
> flags for my machine with an AMD CPU.
> 
> CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon -m3dnow -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse"
> CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
> MAKEOPTS="-j1"

That doesn't make sense.  No athlon ever had sse2.  The athlon 64 does,
but it is -march=athlon64 not athlon.

>   This gets the most out of the machine without going into "Gentoo Ricer
> mode".  USE flags are a separate consideration, and depend heavily on
> what you want to use the machine for.
> 
>   Up until this past summer, I used a 1999 Dell with a 450 mhz PIII, and
> 128 megs of main ram.  I used blackbox WM on it, and it was actually
> quite reasonable.  Where it did run into problems was...
> - stuttering and dropped frames with "internet TV"
> - working on 2560x1920 digital photos with GIMP was "leisurely"
> Everything else was almost as responsive as the "latest/greatest"
> machine.  My motto is "I don't run desktops, I run applications".  I
> tried GNOME and KDE a couple of times, and it was painfull.  I've stayed
> with Blackbox mostly out of inertia.  It does what I need.

I also avoid running X on my 486/66 although it serves files and does
firewalling just fine.  And it just runs plain old Debian.  Not sure one
could optimize for it any better than it already is.

KDE and gnome can make a 2GHz machine feel slow, so yeah better to avoid
that unless you have a lot of resources to waste.

--
Len Sorensen
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