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Toady
Apprentice
Apprentice


Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 161
Location: South Wales, UK

PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2011 6:00 pm    Post subject: its been a while... Reply with quote

Well yeah its been a while, years infact...

So the history, back in 2004 or there abouts I was given some Sun computers, how cool I thought, but immediately there was a problem, Sun was (or had - I don't remember) dropping support for 32bit sparc systems, that would mean running an older operating system on them, hardly what I had in mind. Looking around I had few options, in fact when it came down to it, it was NetBSD or Gentoo on 32bit sparc - ouch, thats not a choice. Having never run gentoo before I had no idea what I was getting into, add the world of sparc related pain to that and it was quite an experiance.

I should point out at this point that the two machines were SparcStation 20's, one with a single 75MHz CPU and one with dual 50MHz CPU's - you cannot imagion how long compiles took.

I arranged to buy some very much upgraded CPU's on e-bay but the deal went south when the vendor couldn't actually supply them - great. I ended up doing a deal on an Ultra 10 instead. After a much smaller amount of pain this time I had a working machine - it was superb, well almost, the IO performance of those boxes with IDE in them is terrible but it was more about running gentoo - somthing I have compiled myself for my own purposes that made it all worth while.

That lead me on to buy an Ultra II with dual CPU's and SCSI disks for my dad, that became his home server - we ran those sun boxes for a few years before the IO performance finally made us think about other options, well that and the power usage - wow they were thirsty!

At about the same time I was running gentoo on my work laptop too, it was great, never went wrong, virtualbox on top with virtualised windows on top - all was well.

I dont remember the reason but I had to move to a single windows only operating system on the laptop - that and the slow IO performance on the suns made me move to other solutions and for one reason and another I moved away from Gentoo, I have lemented for some time that Gentoo was the best performing OS on my old laptop, not only that but KDE is a rather better beast when you only emerge KDE-Base + exactly what you need.

Yes yes I know where am I going with this, well the short answer is I am back, I had a spair machine that the default install of Ubuntu wouldnt boot for some reason - thats all it took to break out gentoo again, everything was just so easy, took a couple of compiles to get the kernel tweeked right, one long over night compile for KDE-Base and a steep learning curve to get WPA wifi working (and then getting it going AGAIN within KDE - networkmanager is much more simple!)

I'm so happy to be back, for so long I had forgotten what its like to be this *in control* of your own machine - not only that this machine was running Vista - you have no idea how much better it is to be back in Gentoo once more!

To everyone that makes gentoo what it is - thankyou for still being here!
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Toady

Gentoo Laptop
3.1.10-gentoo-r1, Intel Core 2 Duo (32bit)
Gnome on the desk, Intel in the box, on-board everything, but it all works!
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Administrator


Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54096
Location: 56N 3W

PostPosted: Sat Dec 31, 2011 6:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Toady,

Welcome back!
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
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dol-sen
Retired Dev
Retired Dev


Joined: 30 Jun 2002
Posts: 2805
Location: Richmond, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Sun Jan 01, 2012 12:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Welcome back, and Happy New year! :)

Sooner or later nearly everyone comes back ;)

You'll notice several improvements in portage/gentoo as whole.
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Brian
Porthole, the Portage GUI frontend irc@freenode: #gentoo-guis, #porthole, Blog
layman, gentoolkit, CoreBuilder, esearch...
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Thistled
Guru
Guru


Joined: 06 Jan 2011
Posts: 572
Location: Scotland

PostPosted: Sun Jan 01, 2012 1:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes Toady, welcome back! Once you have dipped your toes into the lake that is Gentoo, that's it, addicted to it's awesomeness!
Oh, and happy new year!
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Whatever you do, do it properly!
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Toady
Apprentice
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 161
Location: South Wales, UK

PostPosted: Mon Jan 02, 2012 12:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dol-sen wrote:
Welcome back, and Happy New year! :)

Sooner or later nearly everyone comes back ;)

You'll notice several improvements in portage/gentoo as whole.


Yeah I think there are some parts of the docs that need to catch up tho...

udev and dbus caught me out, they are not in the docs yet, apart from that the buid was really simple.
Portage seems to be working very well indeed, the profiles are rather more sorted too, also I see that emerge --sync is REALLY quick compared to how it was.

I do have some minor issues already but I am sure I'll get some help when I start posting about them in the forums, over all I am glad to be back, its transformed this old laptop into a very usable little machine!
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Toady

Gentoo Laptop
3.1.10-gentoo-r1, Intel Core 2 Duo (32bit)
Gnome on the desk, Intel in the box, on-board everything, but it all works!
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Chiitoo
Administrator
Administrator


Joined: 28 Feb 2010
Posts: 2551
Location: Here and Away Again

PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2012 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Teegrins, and balcome weck! ^^

Been using Linux for a year and few months now after using only windows before, and basically started with Gentoo with zarro Linux experience from before, save for one short lived experiment with Ubuntu, which didn't really get me anything, nor anywhere.

Gentoo is fun, and seems to like me as well since it's been running so well and I have not really had any issues I couldn't easily solve.
And if I couldn't do it by myself, I know there is a great community here ready to assist!


Thank you, everyone.
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