Gentoo

vgoraz · Post by **vgoraz** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 12:34 pm

anyone running gentoo linux, i recently decided i am tired of mandrake and would like a more customized almost built from scratch type of linux and well gentoo looks promising. i am not too to fimiliar with the gcc parameters though they mention for building everything and also wondering what a good stage would be to start from. stage 3 seems rather simple but most of the fun work is done for me. so yeah just wondering what any of you think and any suggestions you might have

brian33x51 · Post by **brian33x51** » Thu Mar 27, 2003 10:38 am

I've been using my old bp6 + 2x366 celery's as a firewall/ server for over a year or so now. I had mandrake on it for a while, then decided to put debian on it after a hard drive failure. Sadly I lost 2 debian installs due to 2 more hard drive failures.

After I put an antec 400W power supply on my bp6 (and finally getting it stable again after a year), I put gentoo on it. No problems whatsoever with it, although it is a slow system for doing compiles (well, compared to my dual athlon system I'm using now). I only use it as a server, no X, nothing else special.

So expect no problems.

Since it is a server and any spare machines I have about are either K6-2 or P1 I only use the following:

CFLAGS="-mcpu=i686 -O3 -pipe"

So it works just fine, but there's no way I'm even beginning to push the limits of the machine. As you can tell, I don't even overclock it anymore. Back in the glory days I oc'd the system to 539. Perhaps when I make it into a game server again I'll clock it back up again, I'm very happy with the antec power supply.

martin B · Post by **martin B** » Sun Dec 14, 2003 12:34 pm

the last week i have tested gentoo 1.4 the first time and compared it with debian woody (not native, a lot of backports too), on my passive
cooled bp6(2x466Mhz / 640MB Ram) and an Asus a7v600 (xp2000 / 512MB) .
Gentoo works much faster (and less stable).
so i build avi's on gentoo 15% faster with transcode (Asus-Box)
compilling Xfree4.3 on the bp6 have been done in 7,5 h,
with pentum2 optimation and in nearly 9h at standard enviorment.

the s__t is, that not all progs are compiling at more than one job
(like Xfree) after i set MAKEOPS ="-j 4" in /etc/ make.conf
now gentoo uses the gcc3.2 you can set :
CFLAGS="-mcpu=pentium2 -O3 -pipe".

johnli · Post by **johnli** » Fri Dec 26, 2003 4:23 pm

The trouble with gentoo is you need to take at least a week to get it all installed, and some of us just don't have the time.

Post by **Derek** » Fri Dec 26, 2003 8:21 pm

I have Gentoo running on my Xbox!

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Sat Dec 27, 2003 7:35 am

Derek wrote:I have Gentoo running on my Xbox!

You are twisted!

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:02 pm

the subject shows it. gentoo for xbox (gentoox) is a very stable distribution.
http://flow23.homelinux.net:8080
and after i bought an bp6 it will be stable on it too

.

Post by **Derek** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:24 pm

FloW wrote:the subject shows it. gentoo for xbox (gentoox) is a very stable distribution.
http://flow23.homelinux.net:8080
and after i bought an bp6 it will be stable on it too .

Yeah man!! Awesome!

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:32 pm

i will put it offline when i will complete my bp6 configuration. *arg*

Post by **Derek** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:35 pm

There are some pics in the gallery showing the X-Box running GentooX and browsing to BP6.Com

http://www.bp6.com/board/album_cat.php?cat_id=14

Post by **Derek** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:38 pm

That gives me an idea... I have my X-Box hooked up to my projector which will display up to 1280x1024 (unlike the TV in the pictures). I'll have to take some pics of that

BP6.Com will show up much better!! hehehe

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 6:25 am

make some and post them here please , i wanna see this pictures. you use gentoox home, right?

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:07 am

vgoraz: To answer your questions properly

I am not running Gentoo on my BP6 but I am running it on my Athlon machine. I use Debian on my Gentoo machine in order to be able to skip the compiling. I did play with the idea once though and I might still do it at some point just for fun.

Concerning the stages and what to begin with, I would say that it depends on what you want to do and how much time you have. If you want to learn a bit more and have ample time on your hands then I would recommend starting with stage one. Do stage three if you want to get up and running ASAP. Of course the LiveCD's include binaries if you want to have Gentoo up and running at once.

As for the CFLAGS and so on, this is what I would recommend for BP6 and the Celerons:

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Let me explain the above a bit. These parameters are what you can consider "safe" to use with gcc 3.2 and above. Now many wannabe-hackers, and "knowitalls" will say that you should use "-O3" instead of "-O2" but I disagree, especially for a platform like BP6. "-O3" means even further optimisations that leads to longer compile times and larger binaries. Now I have tested both options (unlike many who would say that you should use -O3 and nothing else) on my Athlon and found that most of the time the speed difference of the binaries is close to nothing so I seriously doubt that you gain anything of importance with the -O3 flag other than larger binaries and longer compile times. I use the -O2 flag on my Überfast Athlon simply because the -O3 gives me nothing. Let me also tell you that while compiling some sensitive programs, the -O3 flag will break the compile but changing it to -O2 will in most cases work just fine.

Let me remind you that most packages in Debian are compiled to be used on a 386 and I have seen comparisons between a moderately optimised Gentoo system and a Debian system (same hardware) where the Debian system has been faster!

If you want a fast system, don't go for the hype and believe that Über-compile flags will make you king of the hill. There are many other ways of making a Linux system fast, like prelinking which I would recommend that you look into.

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 12:06 pm

i will post my results of my gentoo installation with the confs purrkur has had posted soon. and i will run rrdtool as well as on my xbox to monitor my dual cpus etc.

// YOU DONT NEED AT LEAST ONE WEEK TO INSTALL GENTOO.
GENTOO.ORG HAS VERY GOOD MANUALS.WITH THEM YOU CAN MAKE IT IN SEVERAL HOURS.

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Sat Dec 25, 2004 10:01 am

so everything worked fine and gentoo runs stable since 4 days now. i used the flags given above.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Sat Dec 25, 2004 5:49 pm

Thanks for the update!

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Sun Dec 26, 2004 1:45 pm

no problem

System Bogomips 2117.63

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:44 am

# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically built$
# Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=pentium2 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
# OPTIMAL COMPILER-PROCESSES ON A BOARD WITH 2 CPUS

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:01 pm

Oooops. I forgot to mention the "-j" parameter. Sorry about that since it is pretty important to a multi-cpu system. The rule of thumb is to set it to one more than the number of processors you have (hence -j3 that you show).

FloW · Post by **FloW** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:48 am

no problem, you have me

omg i made 2 x 80mm fans on my cpus. fantastic

BP6.Com

Gentoo

Gentoo

gentoo(x) runs on my xbox too

Re: gentoo(x) runs on my xbox too