Hey there :) (an introduction)

alecjw · Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 7:56 pm Post subject: Hey there :) (an introduction)

Hi all, I'm a new member of this forum, and indeed the gentoo community, so I thought I might introduce myself.

I'm Alec, i'm 17 and i'm from Hertfordshire, UK (just north of london). I'm currently studying electronics, maths, physics and chemistry in the 6th form and i hope to study engineering at cambridge in the future, specialising in electrical and electronic.

I've always had an interest in computers, and used windows up until 2006, when i became frustrated with it, being slow and insecure (at one point, my windows machine with its snazzy pentium 4 was taking about 5 minutes to boot up). I had a look into a few linux distros: fedora, debian etc and fell down at the first hurdle: installing them. Then i came across this wonderful thing called "ubuntu". 6.06LTS dapper drake was the cutting edge release at the time. I cooked myself a livecd, managed to install it and thus my love for linux was born. So for about 3.5 years, i'd been happily using ubuntu. But the other day, i updated to 10.04 lucid lynx and realised that my default search engine had changed from google to yahoo. Also, the start page had changed (old, new). I investigated. So it turned out that canonical had been accepting money from yahoo to change it. Until then, i'd put up with the advertising for their update management software which you're faced with when you install and whenever you log in, but this seemed like a step too far for me: i don't appreciate being treated like a suggestible idiot who does whatever he's told to by the advertisers, and that's exactly what this seemed like to me. So i decided it was time for a change. My first choice was debian, due to its similarity to ubuntu and its stronger free-software ethics. I installed it and had it set up within a few hours, and then decided that was too easy so i installed gentoo instead. So thats where i am now. I'm really enjoying the challenge of getting to grips with emerge and portage, and the ability to optimise programs and compile them with the options I want, as opposed to what the debian/ubuntu packagers want is a definite plus. I've seen a performance increase from it too: my bootup time is 14 seconds down from 19 with debian. I could probably get it down further by getting rid of the hardware drivers I don't need from my kernel (which is currently 4,1MB compared to debian's default which is 8.4MB).

So, thats just about it, aside from the mandatory hardware list:
AMD phenom quad core 2.3GHz
4GB DDR2 ram, 800MHz
The cheapest motherboard you can get on ebuyer
500GB SATA hard disk
and a DVDROM drive i found in a skip

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 8:19 pm Post subject:

alecjw,

Welcome to Gentoo and to the forums.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

bendeguz · Apprentice Joined: 10 Feb 2010 Posts: 189

Hey, welcome aboard! Have fun with Gentoo! :wink:

boerKrelis · Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:47 pm Post subject:

Ah, quite the engineering type. You'll love gentoo (if you're patient enough to learn).

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Mar 28, 2010 1:01 am Post subject:

Welcome

You will enjoy

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2605

Welcome to the fora! Please feel free to get involved in Gentoo at any level which you are comfortable; we're glad to have you here.

_________________
“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
---avatar cropped from =AimanStudio---

d2_racing · Posted: Mon Apr 05, 2010 8:14 pm Post subject:

And if you need help, just post on the forum

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

If you follow the instructions at kernel-seeds.org and you put everything you do not think you need into modules, I am sure you can get your kernel size below 2MB and have userland take much less time to start. Right now, my kernel is 1651KB and userland starts about half a second after my the kernel message timer starts.

Note that if you do that, it would be wise to keep your previous kernel available for you to select via your boot loader should anything go wrong. You can set CONFIG_LOCALVERSION in your kernel configuration so the modules for your previous compilation (which I assume had it unset) do not get overridden. Tagging the builds you are not sure about with "experimental" and removing the tag from your kernel configuration it when you are sure things work would be one way of doing things. Also, you can hit "/" on your keyboard without the quotes while in menuconfig to be able to search for stuff (like CONFIG_LOCALVERSION).

Those are some tips I wish I had been given when I started compiling kernels on my own.

Anyway, welcome to Gentoo. You should like it.