Don't use Gentoo because you think that compiling from source code makes it run faster. That's a load of crap because GCC isn't really an optimizing compiler. Infact, I remember seeing some benchmarks where Gentoo, compiled to be platform specific was slower than another distro compiled for i386, or perhaps it was vs Gentoo compiled for i386. You use Gentoo because of the user and support base, the cutting edge packages and Portage. I tried Debian and I tried to like it, but I missed my USE flags in Gentoo.

I've tried several diffrent versions of Linux, and I keep going back to XP... I think I'm just used to how convienent the operating system is, you really don't need to do much to get Windows to work, plus programs like Firefox that are supposed to be "Linux Powered" actually work better I find in Windows than anything...

/me <3 the fact he has never had ATI driver issues unlike the other 99% of the world.

I find it odd that the 7200 didn't work though. There's support for that card available right in the kernel, which works for everyone I know... It's the 9000 series that seems to throw every Linux distro into a hissy fit.

But I also find that even though my ATI card worked in Gentoo, I didn't use the 3d features anyway. I generally rebooted to Windows anyway to avoid the hassle of Wine and the fact that there was no support for many games I played so far. Like FFXI.

However I will point out that I got JK and JO working on it. JO ran amazingly well, better than it did on windows. <3 OpenGL


And to Shintock: Psh. If I can make my current laptop useful, why the hell waste money for a bulky manager with way too much crap for my liking. Plus, it seems that you are under the impression that you can't run KDE or Gnome apps in Fluxbox. You can run QT or GTK under any window manager, providing you have the libraries to run them.

*pokes you in the tummy*

You posted the same thing twice.

No, I didn't. The forums decided it was such important information that it had to post it twice. Stupid VB3.

The only place I've had problems with ATI (other than screwing up X windows settings) would be in Windows. On my desktop, my video card would cause Windows to lock up. Worked just fine in Linux.

My Ubuntu, dualhead ATI 9800 pro, KDE desktop:



These images are hosted on a Ubuntu machine in a closet in my house.

Can you blow that up to two seperate images, the details are alittle hard to desern.

YOU TOOK MY COMPUTER NAME! (mordor)

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]And to Shintock: Psh. If I can make my current laptop useful, why the hell waste money for a bulky manager with way too much crap for my liking. Plus, it seems that you are under the impression that you can't run KDE or Gnome apps in Fluxbox. You can run QT or GTK under any window manager, providing you have the libraries to run them.[/QUOTE]
Oh sweet Jesus, I think I know my way around Linux enough to know that Qt and GTK apps will run under any window manager. All I said was that I like the programs that come installed with KDE. Not to mention, Konqueror kicks major ***.


I agree.

Here's a larger version (not hosted on my machine in my closet).

Kyle90 still has some good points. I've struggled through both a Gentoo stage 3 install (gave up after hitting too much trouble with X) and a Debian Sarge install (gave up after getting confused about wireless drivers) and I still don't know what a make command is doing. I don't know what the kernel is, really. I don't know what kind of thingy a driver is in Linux or what I do with it. I've never really found any kind of guide that explains that. There are guides that tell you how to use a shell and there are guides that tell you how to install a specific driver, but they never tell you how to install drivers in general. I've never gotten a good general base understanding of how Linux works. And I don't know about you guys, but I need that to work it.

If you don't know much about Linux, you might want to try SUSE 9.3, I used it when I needed to use Linux and I didn't have much of a problem with it, the Personal version is free but you do have to pay for the professional... it's on the novel homepage if you want it...

http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/suse_linux/

I tried a stage 1 install of Gentoo - got the first bit sorted, but fell on my face when trying to get the GUI on. Shintock will remember my pain!

/Is getting a mac in a month, might try again with Gentoo once I've got my new baby up and running...

Haha, thanks, that made my day...

I may not know much about Linux, but I do know about computers and SuSe just insulted my intelligence. My install didn't even come with gcc! What's the point? It's overly simplified. It's everything I hate about Windows put in Linux.

In my experience, compile flags can and do make a difference, but it just depends on the program and the optimizations used. Write a SAT solver and you'll see what I mean. My friend researches the SAT problem and found that compiler flags can influence the speed of his algorithm greatly. He spent a lot of time testing out various flags and determining which sets of flags help which algorithms. -funroll-loops was my saviour when I wrote a program to calculate the conversion efficiency of a laser when using said laser to combine atoms and bring them to the molecular ground state. There were tons of integrals required to make the program work, not to mention the fact that these integrals had to be performed at every time step of the conversion. This called for the use of an obscence amount of nested for loops. Fortunately, the length of the loops was predetermined at compile time, so -funroll-loops eliminated the excess assembly code and variables needed to make the program run, making the program quite a bit faster.

On the other hand, I wrote a test suite to compare various sorting algorithms with a heap sort that was modified to exhibit better data locality. The tests required extensive swapfile usage and were completely I/O bound, which is something the optimizations don't really help with. I think that while optimizations help overall, the effect of specific optimizations varies greatly between different programs.

Gentoo and Slackware were my primary distros (well, when I actually used Linux), but I've moved on to BSD. I guess the BSD-like parts of these two distros were what attracted me to them in the first place.

This man is on drugs. As everyone else has said in this thread, if there is only one distro to avoid, its SuSE. You'll install it, and see all the pretty colors, but then realize you can't do a got damn thing with it.

[QUOTE=Cool Matty]This man is on drugs. As everyone else has said in this thread, if there is only one distro to avoid, its SuSE. You'll install it, and see all the pretty colors, but then realize you can't do a got damn thing with it.[/QUOTE]

that's why Mech got banned again.

>.>