How was it using Gentoo in the early 2000s?

[saellaven]

My first Gentoo machine was a dual Athlon 1800 MP with 1 GB and a stack of SCSI drives that I built in 2003ish... I installed Gentoo sometime in late 2005 or early 2006, but for the previous decade or so, I had been running my own distro, which was essentially based on LFS. As the number of computers I was maintaining grew more disparate, I saw Gentoo as a way of automating what I was already doing by hand to help ease maintenance and cut the amount of time I was spent looking for new releases of software. Even then, prior to Gentoo, I was using a script called "comfigure" to help automate having to remember all of my ./configure options for all the different packages I installed.

At the time, portage could be a bit of a pain when slot blockers and other conflicts happened. Most of the time, I could fix it but just fully understanding the error logs, but sometimes, the answer was something you just had to guess at, or, if you were lucky, someone on the forums had already experienced the same thing and gave their answer.

I had considered taking my skills and becoming a dev back then, but there was already a huge divide between the devs and the users and I didn't want to have to deal with the egomania and arrogance of other devs, which, ever since maybe 2010-2012 has only gotten worse, so I opted not to help out on that end of things, though I spent a lot of time helping people on the forums.

The oldest hardware I installed Gentoo on is the same K6-2/450 others have mentioned.

But things slowed down more as more C++ was added, including GCC being changed to use C++ as it's self compiler instead of c.
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Ryzen 3700X, Asus Prime X570-Pro, 64 GB DDR4 3200, GeForce GTX 1660 Super
openrc-0.17, ~vanilla-sources, ~nvidia-drivers, ~gcc

[nikolis]

My first Gentoo machine was a dual Tualatin-S with 2gb of ram, installed from the two original cd's purchased from the online community of Gentoo in 2002.

[krinn]

[NeddySeagoon]

krinn,

Your post put a smile on my face. :)

I'm tempted to dig out my LiveCD-1.4-rc4, boot it in a virtual machine and see if I can recreate that early install.
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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.

[dmpogo]

[erm67]

The closest actual thing to 2002 gentoo is probably guix, but it's getting better.

not because of the dependencies but because of the workflow:

encounter problem
Oh it's been fixed months ago in version bump X
ok easy, emerge world
wait hours with the original problem still lingering around
shit now instead of 1 problem I got many problems, quick revdep-rebuild.sh
Ahh ok now my system is mint ....
mmmhhh what I was trying to do when I encountered the first problem, I don't remember ... nevermind, it was funny anyway
_________________
Ok boomer
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.
Ab esse ad posse valet, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia

My fediverse account: @erm67@erm67.dynu.net

[tinea_pedis]

[NeddySeagoon]

tinea_pedis,

Both Windows and Linux let you set arbitrary resolutions if you know how.

With the nvidia binary blob, which is the same blob for both, you need to use the emergency manual override to make the blob use your arbitrary resolution. I don't know how/if Windows exposes that control. On Linux its up to three options in xorg.config
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[Etal]

[figueroa]

In the face of this gripe session, just saying that, Portage has become wonderful: smart, informative, semi-automatic. Y'all really want to go back to the "good old days?"
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[dmpogo]

[tinea_pedis]

[dmpogo]

[tinea_pedis]

[dmpogo]

[NeddySeagoon]

dmpogo,

CRT monitors don't care about the clock speed as they never see it.

They get three (for colour) analogue video signals and two sync signals.
CRTs don't have a native resolution either, so visual artefacts due to not using the native resolution are missing.

More correctly, monochrome CRTs don't have a native resolution as the phosphor layer is continuous.
What you can get on the screen depends on the spot size and the video bandwidth.
Colour CRTs are different as the screen is made of discrete coloured dots, or vertical stripes is some designs.

What it boils down to is that the resolution is limited by the video bandwidth and the dot spacing.
When you push the limits, performance degrades gracefully.
You can play tricks like turning the brightness down to reduce the spot size, so you get better definition.
The human eye is actually a very poor judge of these things. Its all a matter of taste.

Personally, I can see the interlace flicker on a CRT unless I sit very close, its a peripheral vision thing, so I'm not sorry to be using an LCD.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[dmpogo]

[psycho]

It was better in some ways, worse in others (I started using Gentoo long before opening this forum account...I think maybe around 2003 or 2004)...like most things in the past. I don't really agree that Linux was "harder to use" for having to write our own config files and so on. Certainly it was harder for someone new to Linux to preview it (i.e. to get a Linux GUI desktop up and running and think, "oo, GNOME and KDE look prettier than CDE" or whatever...), but to actually use an OS is not the same as just installing it and getting it up and running, and in my experience it was much (much, much) better to invest a bit of time in learning how to configure things and then have them reliably and consistently follow the instructions in your config files than today's infuriating situation (across just about all software, FOSS or not) where everything's been built to bypass you and make automated decisions based on developers' ideas of how your system ought to work. In the old days it took longer to set stuff up because you had more say in it: people say you "had to" read manuals like that was some kind of disadvantage, but to me the whole point of building my own system was to have control and make decisions about how it worked, and it pisses me off every time another bit of "smart" software says "yeah, you've got a bunch of carefully crafted config files there...but why would I use those when you're an idiot who doesn't really know how you want your system to work...I'm going to ignore all that and auto-configure a bunch of stuff for you and you can spend the next few hours trying to disable my automation and get your system to do what you've actually told it to do", etc. Admittedly it's a pleasant relief when I just need to use some tool (like a client for yet another online meeting system or whatever) and the Linux package "just works", which was rare in the old days. All that stuff is not Gentoo-specific though, it was the situation across all distros. In my experience Slackware involved the most manual work and Mandrake the least: Gentoo was somewhere in the middle, because it did involve a lot of reading and following instructions, but the documentation (including forum discussions here) was good enough that you could basically just follow the instructions carefully and everything would work.

I'd forgotten about the overnight OpenOffice builds and the elation when the damned thing finally built successfully and worked properly. Thinking about that though, and the reason why I still built it from source rather than downloading and inserting the generic binary, reminds me of another difference back then: some software really did run significantly faster on Gentoo than on other distros. I remember literally gaping in astonishment at how reponsive my first 64-bit Gentoo desktop was, after whatever I'd been using (a 64-bit Ubuntu or Debian, probably): for some reason there was a period of time there in the early 2000s when some of the typical (in those days) build optimizations (building everything without debugging info and for one's own processor family and so on) seemed to make an impressive and immediately noticeable speed difference. As I recall the early 2000s were the height of Gentoo's popularity, back before drobbins went to Microsoft; maybe simply because other distros weren't so focused on speed (or the appearance of speed...I prefer a desktop that shows up when it's actually ready, over one like Windows that leaps up in two seconds to give the illusion of speed and then refuses to do anything for the next 20 seconds as it finishes doing what it pretended it had already done). The overall Linux community was smaller of course, but Gentoo was much more well known in that community: it had a mixed reputation, the ultimate expert or "guru" distro to some, the ultimate loser/poser/ricer distro to others. Either way, not many newbies at LUG meetings in those days wouldn't have heard of Gentoo, whereas today there are people who've been using Linux for years and still haven't heard of it. At my workplaces it's been all Ubuntu and CentOS, so Debian and Red Hat are known of course, but not much else, and definitely not something as far down the Distrowatch popularity list as Gentoo.

In terms of the match between hardware of the day and portage and so on, I feel as though everything took a little bit longer, but it's so long ago I don't trust my memory of it. Sweet Jesus, I'd have loved to have run the Gentoo of that era on my fast i7 with its 16G RAM and NVMe SSDs and so on: it would slice through world updates like a samurai slicing bread. My first Gentoo box was probably something like a 486 with half a gig of RAM. Of course it was painfully slow downloads back then too, but I remember waiting for stuff to build much longer than waiting for the source to arrive. I think today's hardware with today's portage provides a slightly better overall experience than the way things were in the early 2000s...but maybe it's just that my computers were a bit low-spec for the day and others were having a better time with it. Portage feels a lot smarter these days, but I have mixed feelings about that: on the whole I prefer software to be stupid as a brick, but stable and well documented, so it takes a bit longer to learn how to operate it, but once you've learnt, the thing actually does what you tell it to do reliably from that point on. Still, it can be a case of "ignorance is bliss": maybe if yesterday's dumber portage had to deal with today's software, I'd be wasting so much time trying to get things working that I'd be bitching "for God's sake, why can't someone automate all these manual decisions I'm having to make about every little damned thing, isn't that what software's meant to do?!"

[nikolis]

student in the far 2004

https://postimg.cc/pmrHw4nn

[Tony0945]

[nikolis]

Thank you Tony!

[steve_v]

[nikolis]

yes indeed.

https://postimg.cc/gX5YkFQ5
https://postimg.cc/xNz9XpSd

[monkeygirl]

I remember it taking me 3 days to compile Xorg/KDE on a tiny Japanese netbook but it was worth every stuck-in-console second as random people would ooh and ahh my computer in cafes and on the train when they saw it. I believe this was around the time when Firefox was 0.9/1.0 and browser tabs were not mainstream and IE was considered the end-all browser, compiz and kwin had eye candy virtual desktops to the XP/Vista crowd and Apple was more popular for colourful neon hardware than its UI, and pretty much netbooks were slow with Windows Vista/XP on them, so my little netbook was a Harry Potter spell book to strangers (this was when netbooks like VAIO were must haves... not sure if that was ever the case in the US). Good times. I didn't like how long it used to take to compile software, but I loved how fast and efficient and gorgeous my netbook was. By the time the kernel was 2.6 there were never really any hardware (especially modem) issues that required trade offs for laptops, but I used to build boxes back then and I remember always researching which hardware parts were linux compatible because the 2.4 kernel didn't always meet my computer/laptop needs and I hated when one peripheral or another wouldn't work like I expected it to, e.g., the WiMax dongle that ensured I could never have mobile internet on Linux :cry: I also remember the HAL/Udev wars... and frankly "F" HAL... it was the worst.

[nikolis]

pentium 4 wanted about 9 hours with the kde3.*