Why?

I can’t remember quiet well, but I think, in what linux is concerned, I’ve only ever tried Ubuntu, either in its Gnome or KDE flavor. “Tried”, in the sense of installing and using it for a while.

For a number of reasons, I was a little fed up with Ubuntu, the main of those reasons being the amount of things it has and I did not want. I can’t precise everything, but I’m talking of the Gnome and KDE being full of  “addons”  and configurations by default that just did not interest me and just slowed down my performance. Also, the updates to a newer release always left me stuck with some problem to solve and performance issues.

After talking with some of my colleagues, I ended up with two distributions that interested my: Arch or Gentoo. It seems that both are very good when talking about performance. And Arch is easier to install and configure, I was told. But I decided to go with Gentoo because of the possibility of tweaking the system, fine-grain tweaking, just for my cpu.

Installation

Installation in Gentoo would be something quite hard if there were no documentation. The truth is that if instructions are followed as they are described in the handbook, no major complications should happen. The problem is that it takes time. Other than that, installation is quite straightforward. But of course, installation is based solely upon a shell. So, there’s no graphical interface, no nothing. And you need to do it in a place with internet connectivity.

Performance

I may say I’m a bit of a performance freak. Normally, the first thing that I do after installing a system, is googling (funny how google became a verb…) after “<distribution> performance tuning“. In fact, I can say that the search yields much more results for Ubuntu than it does for Gentoo. This is, obviously, an indicator of the amount of people using Gentoo, but I think it means something more: there is not much more to optimize after installing Gentoo! (This is expected, because, after all, the installation does not leave us with much. It’s a completely clean system.)

I have my laptop, a Toshiba A100-158 (PSAA9E), for 4 years now. The truth is that it never had a faster boot than with Gentoo, or it was so responsive as it is now.

Am I happy ?

Am I happy with Gentoo?

No.

I think that I was expecting much more from Gentoo. It is a fact that is faster than anything I have used till now, but the performance gain does not cover the trouble we have to install and configure it. It took me a week to have a system where I could do my daily work! As a side not, because I am a person who does not like to keep reinstalling my system time after time, after getting the system installed and working, I stopped everything and did a copy of the hard drive (using Clonezilla, btw), to ensure that if anything gone from that point on, I had a complete backup

The truth is I don’t want to go through the trouble of installing (and configuring) Gentoo again for a long, long time.

Todo

In this moment I have KDE running with everything I need. However, I still have some tasks to do:

• cleaning, thoroughly, unnecessary options in the kernel configuration
• getting everything that has to do with power saving working. Hibernation and sleeping do not work very well 8-). Got to study the best configuration to apply.
• Get the multimedia keys working.
• Resolve the issue I have with maximization of windows. This is what gets most on my nerves. It takes more than a second to maximize a window. I must be something about my graphic driver.

One of the things I’ve learned about my computer, is that it does not have have the Toshiba official Bios. Apparently, I have laptop which is made by some kind of outsourcing and Toshiba just brands the hardware. So, my Bios is not from Toshiba which causes me some trouble: for example, the LCD backlight and bluetooth. Even activating the toshiba extras module in the kernel did not work, because the module can’t recognize a Toshiba laptop! Thus, nothing that requires the module works either, namely the toshset utility.

Another pain in the ass is, as usual with linux, my graphics driver. I’m using the open-source driver for Ati, and I am, in general, happier with the graphical performance in Gentoo than I was in Ubuntu. But, still, there’s always that tiny thing that ruins my day, which is window maximizing.This little action, in konsole for example, takes more than 1 second…I think it has something to do with the graphics driver and Xorg configuration. Still, it’s a bug. The truth is that I still haven’t lost much time searching for a solution. However, I tried to switch over to the official Ati driver. But this did not went very well, because after rebooting, I had nothing on the screen. Just black. No virtual terminal, no nothing. Completely frozen system…that was the moment when I used my disk backup…

Another problem I had with my precious laptop was due to an update to the bios I did a couple of years ago. I think it made my hard disk behave in a very aggressive fashion, parking the reading head too often. It’s related to this. I already had installed laptop_mode, so it was easy to solve this with its configuration file:

#
# Power management for HD (hdparm -B values)
#
BATT_HD_POWERMGMT=1
LM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254
NOLM_AC_HD_POWERMGMT=254

Emerge

I must recognize that the package manager in Gentoo is something that intrigues me. emerge is quite a fantastic application. The way it treats dependencies, the way we can define which modules to install in each package through USE flags, the updates…its a beautiful peace of software (or maybe I’m just too naive).

emerge is also part of the reason you feel like you really own your system: you know exactly what you’re installing, how you’re installing, nothing get’s overridden without your consent…fantastic. The downside is that it takes time: KDE, firefox, thunderbird, openoffice are among the apps that took most time installing (compiling), and each took more than an hour (KDE took all night).

Wrap Up

I think that if you had the trouble installing Gentoo on your personal PC, for daily use, you might as well enjoy it, keep it, take the time to “tune” it as well as you can, because the truth is that it enables you to work in a very swift environment.

But the question is: is it worth it?

In my sincere opinion I don’t think so. Gentoo is probably a better choice if you’re an experienced user and want to set up a server (any kind of server) and squeeze the most out of the machine. For a desktop, it’s just a pain in the ass to configure all that is necessary. (One might say that all distributions suffer from this…maybe they should keep it that way? Maybe they should try to be the most user-friendly as possible…?)