I think the only reason is that MS copies Apache Webserver sources to IIS and adds a few hidden API calls of Windows, gaining an advantage.
So next time you but your favorite copy of Windows server and IIS, remember it's Microsoft's Apache webserver you've been fooled to buy form MS.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
List of articles
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Why Ubuntu sucks.
Ok, despite the popularity that Ubuntu has got I'm posting a rant on it; that's cause it really deserves it. Earlier when I used to use Ubuntu 8.04... no issues, but things have been degrading since then and at the current state and as a system admin, I can confirm that Ubuntu or it's variants are no longer in production quality.
This happened possibly cause of the Windows migrants (or normal users) who just preferred the GUI and next next finish crap but they are actually a part of the community... they are willing to help, unfortunately their help and their opinion causes more problems and myths than solutions. As a result we had more such people adding up in the community and now the state is that almost everything about Ubuntu is complete trash.
Why I decided to write this today is cause one of my clients said “Linux sucks” thanks to Ubuntu (yeah I know it's Ubuntu's fault not upstream).
Why Ubuntu sucks -
- Community – As said before, majority (70% to 80%) of people in Ubuntu community are still under the impression that Ubuntu is a Windows alternative; just judging from the GUI and doing everything from the GUI; they dont even know the difference between Linux and Ubuntu. They have less knowledge, ok, but real issues starts by the fact that these people have attitude and overestimate their knowledge and comment without understanding the main questions.
Overall, to sum up, this is what the Ubuntu community wanna say -
“It doesn't matter how many packages are preinstalled, it doesn't matter how the packages have been compiled, and it doesn't matter how you've configured the kernel or the system, all that matter is if the OS is Ubuntu or not and if it is, it is the best!”.
Now the community will ask "It works perfectly here", and the obvious answer that any non Ubuntu user will give is that all this has been tried on verity of hardware which is true... not even verity, in the same system problems increase over time and I get too many calls.
The community represents the common public, and the common public IS stupid, they don't need to talk to the devs directly!... they need to talk to them though admins or some expert users to ensure that they don't bombard the handful of Senior devs that are still left in Ubuntu. And those admins shouldn't be Ubuntu admins. - Since such people form the larger majority, we just get answers to simple stupid questions like what's the root directory, how you add a new user, how you install software... all repetitive or simple questions. If you have any real questions which points to a real bug/challenge... the community is doomed. 70% of the community does not have the capability to answer this. The remaining 30% are bombarded by repetitive questions so they don't even see the good questions. Let's take some sample old unanswered questions from the 10-11th page of a randomly chosen forum -
“http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581605
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581584
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1563031
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581574
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1563002&highlight=CUPS” - Package quality – Ok, the above is not that much of a real issue, but this is the main issue with Ubuntu. In my case, with every Ubuntu install comes new bugs.
Take the current issue for examples, DVDstyler does not make the final project... some sorta 'error' occurs, possibly causes of unsatisfied dependency.
Ok, so I tried the same with Sabayon with the free spaced hosted by an NFS server running on Ubuntu... and guess what happened? Ubuntu NFS encountered 'errors'... cannot r/w files.
NFS is always giving issues... verity of issues from mounting the served location, to file transfer which at times stops cause of some sorta error which's different every time. Ofcourse the problem gets solved after an Ubuntu 'reboot'. In the end I preferred system rescue CD to get the job done which is unfortunately based on Gentoo – the distro which most Ubuntu users hate with an excuse – 'its not worth it' where as the reality is it's not their cup of tea... how can stupid windows users start using fabulous distros like Gentoo, further more how can they see the advantage?
CUPS hangs too much, the web config page never opens.
I opened a bug to compile mplayer so as to play HD videos, hell yeah they fixed it, but now the HD audio wont come (wma).
That CD/wine bug is there for around 6 months, and no one has a way to fix it.
Now the scanner stopped working.
Overall we have verity of uncountable bugs, it appears the devs maintaining Ubuntu packages not proper devs or contributers... they are Windows devs trying to do some Linux package management; or college IT freshers. Otherwise who else will be interested in Ubuntu anyway... it's just another shining distro! - Horrible dependency of preinstalled package – apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop;apt-get autoclean; nothing more gets removed.
If you wanna remove a preinstalled package in Ubuntu, probably you have to check the dependencies manually to get the job done. I do it for around 10 packages. - Buggy dependency resolution of apt – This is not a major issue, but at times, apt-get autoclean just wont work as expected, and you gotta remove a bunch of orphan packages manually.
- FS corruption – Since the Ubuntu's 'super speed' bootup/shutdown started, at times the FS does get an unclean unmount; it shows up in the next boot.
- Hardware incompatibility – Various small issues with hardware does occur. For example in a few acer laptops, we have issues with the brightness, touchpad keys, alps touchpad etc...
- Ubuntu seems extra slow – All other distros are faster in comparison. You can see the benchmarks.
There're many more (right now and in the making) that I probably forgot about. The current state is such that I'm forced to leave Ubuntu... and I'm glad I'm going to. If you're a system admin or a dev and using Ubuntu, I advice you quit now and start using better thing... maybe Debian itself; yeah Ubuntu community is big, but you gotta see what sorta people it's made off. To the rest of Ubuntu users – I suggest you remain with it and not pollute other distros.
An update -- after more than a year of posting this, I again booted some very old Ubuntu live CDs (7.x and 8.x) to test if they were able to run an ELF executable.
But guess what happened? Bash: ... cannot run executable.
And everything was ok, there was no reason for it not to run. The same worked fine on 2008 Gentoo live CD.
This reminded me that Ubuntu was, is and will always be crap from the beginning of time, not only after 8.04.
An update -- after more than a year of posting this, I again booted some very old Ubuntu live CDs (7.x and 8.x) to test if they were able to run an ELF executable.
But guess what happened? Bash: ... cannot run executable.
And everything was ok, there was no reason for it not to run. The same worked fine on 2008 Gentoo live CD.
This reminded me that Ubuntu was, is and will always be crap from the beginning of time, not only after 8.04.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
DVD video protected disks.
Recently I got up with a challenge to copy a protected DVD video disk... which is actually illegal, but I just did it for educational purposes.
So what is this protection? It happens that some of the data on the DVD is encrypted, the key to this encryption is supposed to be written to the lead-in area of the DVD.
What a DVD player does is read this key for purpose of decryption of the data (video) under question... so the hardware should support decryption if you want to play such a thing.
Luckily most modern DVD writers (everything else below it is obsolete) do support this, thus you can flawlessly copy such a DVD, defeating it's purpose.
Thoughtfully speaking, almost all sorts of DRM is complete crap (almost, cause few are actually effective, that I've discussed later). If any medium makes a sound and produces a video, it can be, in the modern world, captured with no losses... if it plays in a DVD player (it will) you can record the lossless data though S/PDIF DVI or HDMI... if you're applying DRM to a media which has to be played on a verity of hardware manufactured by various corporations, the technology is probably crap, i.e if you want it to be effective there should a few listed hardware devices which should be able to play it, I bet the Chinese will be the first to break such sort of DRM. This actually did happen in North Asia a few months after CSS DRM was launched... they recorded it live, making the copy protection useless.
Such sorta things cause nothing but problems to the end user... as a result they too download pirated.
So let these propritory DRM people learn a few things by NOT buying anything DRM protected. Yeah, protection of copyrighted material is good, but what's the use if it poses no effects at all?... I mean, if you're having copies of the same thing floating as torrents on the Internet what's the use of it?
So in Europe we have a ban on P2P communication, that is effective, but it's clearly in excess... I mean you're trying to deprive people off fundamental rights simply to make Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg richer?.. yeah, why not forbid people to 'record' the movie and music 'in their minds' to ensure they wont be able to reproduce it anywhere else?.. why not just forbid phone calls to ensure the copy protected lyrics are leaked out off your lips?
Hell yeah, that'll make Britney and Spielberg a lot richer...
If you want to have this thing done effectively, you need to target the sites hosting the copy protected material (not 'peers', but the trackers and the sites providing the torrents).
So what is this protection? It happens that some of the data on the DVD is encrypted, the key to this encryption is supposed to be written to the lead-in area of the DVD.
What a DVD player does is read this key for purpose of decryption of the data (video) under question... so the hardware should support decryption if you want to play such a thing.
Luckily most modern DVD writers (everything else below it is obsolete) do support this, thus you can flawlessly copy such a DVD, defeating it's purpose.
Thoughtfully speaking, almost all sorts of DRM is complete crap (almost, cause few are actually effective, that I've discussed later). If any medium makes a sound and produces a video, it can be, in the modern world, captured with no losses... if it plays in a DVD player (it will) you can record the lossless data though S/PDIF DVI or HDMI... if you're applying DRM to a media which has to be played on a verity of hardware manufactured by various corporations, the technology is probably crap, i.e if you want it to be effective there should a few listed hardware devices which should be able to play it, I bet the Chinese will be the first to break such sort of DRM. This actually did happen in North Asia a few months after CSS DRM was launched... they recorded it live, making the copy protection useless.
Such sorta things cause nothing but problems to the end user... as a result they too download pirated.
So let these propritory DRM people learn a few things by NOT buying anything DRM protected. Yeah, protection of copyrighted material is good, but what's the use if it poses no effects at all?... I mean, if you're having copies of the same thing floating as torrents on the Internet what's the use of it?
So in Europe we have a ban on P2P communication, that is effective, but it's clearly in excess... I mean you're trying to deprive people off fundamental rights simply to make Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg richer?.. yeah, why not forbid people to 'record' the movie and music 'in their minds' to ensure they wont be able to reproduce it anywhere else?.. why not just forbid phone calls to ensure the copy protected lyrics are leaked out off your lips?
Hell yeah, that'll make Britney and Spielberg a lot richer...
If you want to have this thing done effectively, you need to target the sites hosting the copy protected material (not 'peers', but the trackers and the sites providing the torrents).
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Zen kernel overview
Initially looking at the zen kernel, I was thinking 'what's the utility'?... Ok, it's tweaked for the desktop, but I didn't expect much of a difference form the official and the Linux kernel, until I really started to configure it.
It's basically a collection of almost all the patches, enhancements that's around and has been provided for the Linux kernel made into a single kernel – Zen.
These are the key features that I really liked (from Linux-2.6.34) -
•.CFS CPU scheduler – Although I've not tried it much, but it boosts to increase the responsiveness of the kernel. It's coded by veteran kernel programmer Con Kolivas.
•.Tweak for the above or CFQ scheduler and DIRTY_RATIO, BACKGROUND_DIRTY_RATIO – You can set the priority of X to a high value if using CFQ or even tweak the CFS scheduler and even DIRTY_RATIO, BACKGROUND_DIRTY_RATIO which makes sense in desktop systems.
•.Compression mode – You are given 4 compression modes of the kernel including LZO which's the fastest for decompression and increases the boot times by a very small amount (install lzop package for you kernel to compile if you're using this compression method).
•.Additional RCU implementations including Preemptable tree-based hierarchical RCU to boost, again, the responsiveness.
•.Custom CFLAGS.
•.Support for -march=native for compilation.
•.Timer frequency – You can set timer frequencies till 10,000 just in case you wanna experiment.
•.Tuxonice – I think this is not in the official kernel, it claims to be a more efficient suspend method.
•.Reiser4 support – Although it's future is uncertain, it's good enough for the desktops. Enjoy the fastest FS for small files.
•.Many more – which I did not notice.
Overall, if you're a veteran Linux user, it makes all sense to replace the default kernel with this one – personally I did see the desktop becomes pretty responsive when using this kernel; and no, it's not placebo effect, I could point out which kernel am I using when either one were started randomly (The original Gentoo kernel and the newly configured Zen kernel.).
It will be very nice if Zen also includes the patches for the Linux unified kernel.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Why use Gentoo
Hello everyone.
I'm posting here (and will keep updating my post) about what people say about Gentoo, and what doubts do they have about the project and what wars are going on in the communities.
First of all let's see why are you using Gentoo. Gentoo is for -
admins
devs who do not solely develop high level programs
Enthusiasts
Curious minds (about Linux)
And might be Graphs artists also.
Servers
If you're using Gentoo and not anyone or more from the above, then it's a waste of time.
Gentoo is used by admins, devs, enthusiasts cause many of them know/wanna-know Linux good enough, I.e they can handle the technical expertize that Gentoo throws at them; the efforts of editing the configuration file, the efforts of fulfilling the compile requirements, the efforts to configure the kernel, etc... i.e. they are willing to learn and have a bit of time at hand.
The main reason why they use it is either for one or more of the following -
*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Speed – Lowered dependencies, lowered runtime requirements of binaries, known optimization (explained in FAQ), tweaked kernel (if the user has configured his kernel), LDFLAGS, new packages.
*keep uptodated.
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
*Rolling release.
*slots
*architecture.
*Security.
For 'curious minds' or people who are learning Linux, it just provides a playground. If using Gentoo they become enthusiasts, they will most probably use it for any of the above stated reasons but only if they realize the powers of Gentoo and even if they do, they should have an interest to use those powers.
Whatever be, if you continue using Gentoo, you will continuously be learning something or the other since it reviles the inner workings of the new packages and even hardware; the various options they can be compiled with, the various features they support.
*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters) – Related FAQs -
*I can have complete control over the system using any other binary based distribution.
When all binary distributions were providing X with HAL, Gentoo gave it's users an option to compile with without.
If you have an old processor which does not support SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, no use compiling your binaries with it. Also many packages (like ffmpeg and mplayer) support compiling without these.
Why compile blender with openal support when you don't want it?
We use recoll with QT interface, which Ubuntu can't. Although recoll is not in portage but a contributer is maintaining the ebuild (But the portage maintainers wont let him in.)
Uncountable more.
*The package maintainers can build these packages with such features removed/added
Then the no. of packages of the Ubuntu distribution will be close to a billion if they attempted to do so; so many are the number of options.
*You can apt-get –no-install-recommends, then install the recommended ones manually.
There's a difference between a plugin and a dependency, you can remove the plugins but if you remove the dependencies it will result in errors... the devs know that.
In Gentoo we remove the dependencies. Let's take an example of kde-desktop in Ubuntu; here I list the packages that Gentoo would not install (if kdebase-meta is emerged) -
ark kdepasswd khelpcenter4 ksnapshot ksystemlog language-selector-qt libkdecorations4 libkonq5 libksignalplotter4 libkwineffects1 libokularcore1 libpoppler-qt4-3 okular
Anyway, this is not a good example to state runtime dependencies; many more examples exist...including gnome and xfce.
Recently I got another example of the apt dependencies resolution. I accidentally installed fglrx on an nvidia, so I want to remove it now, and along with that, it wants to remove the following -
flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree ia32-libs nspluginwrapper wine1.2
*OK, so I can customize most things using almost any distro...this is Linux, this is opensource.
It's difficult to remove things than adding them – specially in Ubuntu.
You decide to completely remove gnome and add kde instead, but on removing the ubuntu-desktop package, nothing else gets removed in auto-removing.
Furthermore there're many utilities preinstalled not as a meta package...you can't hunt for them in the default stack of the installed 1200 packages, you might remove dependencies off X...who knows.
*What's the advantage?
Satisfaction of the user (others will be discussed later).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Why can't I do this with any other distro?
Cause Gentoo forces you to. Otherwise it will fail to work, or work bad (after which the users say Gentoo is bad).
Gentoo expect you to work on it, for a simple reason – Customization, Gentoo's goal.
It allows you to play around heavy with kernel configs, it will teach you how to boot the system manually, it will explain the factors and options of a compile, uncountable more...
Furthermore in a usual shining distro, you do not know which things worked out of the box without your permission and configuration... you might not stop them since you do not know if it's a dependency of something else.
Anyway, most do agree with this point.
*Speed
*Ubuntu is much faster than Gentoo (yo!...Gentoo has nano second boost in performance).
Ground truth is Ubuntu is one of the slowest distributions around, it's not cause of it's inefficiency, but cause Debian has been modified for ease of use with the expense of speed.
As we all know, easiest doesn't mean the best; same can be said about Linux and windows. And actually Gentoo is one of the fastest distros around. Here are the benchmarks -
http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=unlotto-26045-5690-24680
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574
http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/325624962/linux-performance-benchmark-apache-nginx
http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/306663818/linux-performance-benchmark-system
This is Sabayon's, but it's Gentoo based so -
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sabayon_51_benchmarks&num=1
I personally did certain benchmarks to find Gentoo was -2% to 40% faster on startup times of programs and now I can play HD videos with my broken graphs drivers.
Later on I also did some benchmarks compared to arch to realize that decompression was faster on Gentoo and compression gains were upto 50% with lpaq9m compression algorithm. I also realized that if the compression was a short one, arch was faster, but for prolonged compression, Gentoo was getting much faster with time and reached a point where it was ~50% faster. Although there was no difference in startup times of programs, but the UI seemed sluggish (this was pretty noticeable); anyway no major advantage. The boot time of arch was around half of Gentoo's, this maybe cause I'm using baselayout 1. Base layout 2 is said to decrease the boot times by 100%, I upgraded and yes, the boot times where a bit faster than Arch's. Notice however that I was using Arch on a 4 GB partition and Gentoo was spread across a 4 GB partition (root) and a 8 GB partition and packages installed in arch were very less as compared to Gentoo (I use this Gentoo as mainstream). Also notice that I'm always using reiserfs which has fragmentation problems specially when using it with notail option and my Gentoo installation is around 6 months old and I was using 2.6.31 while Arch was using 2.6.33; these factors are also to be considered with these benchmarks.
The optimization is not cause of the CFLAGS or the compile time parameters of GCC (assume you've set it correctly) (however I'm doubting this after the arch benchmarks), but primarily cause of USE flags which result in binaries of lower dependencies, thus it will search less and load less. Other reasons are LDFLAGS and lower dependencies and packages installed (the more you tweak the USE flags, the more lower the dependencies, so the performance depends on you).
You don't have to tweak the USE flags every 2 days. Half of the job is done by the devs who provided 'profiles'...even for KDE and GNOME desktops.
If you're using Gentoo of special purpose systems like servers (without X) or as a bank accounting software which does not need any USB support, CD/DVD, media etc.. support, then Gentoo can give you more than 50% performance gains cause of the lost dependencies cause of USE flags.
*Speed is a Placebo effect.
Gentoo is fast and has been reported be numerous Gentoo desktop users and benchmarks (even I did that), and you think all suffer from this disease? To realize if I was a victim, I did startup benchmarks of various applications to realize Gentoo was actually pretty faster than Ubuntu and I'm not infected and if you find Gentoo is not fast you've either misconfigured your system, not configured it well (these 2 are different) or you're having a placebo effect instead.
*I don't think Gentoo's compile time is worth the effort and time.
If you're a complete newbie and do not belong to any of the groups above and considered giving Gentoo a try and actually gone though all those things – it was your stupidity to use Gentoo. Go back to Ubuntu, or try Sabayon, it's Gentoo based but easier.
As for the compile times -
Quote:
Gentoo is used by sensible people who have enough common sense to realize -- "A compilation process needs not to be 'watched'"
I let Gentoo do the compiling, while I'm writing this.
And guess what?....it got compiled loong ago! Did I regret it's long compile time?
Anyway, if you're the sort of guy who keeping trying new software or changes platform every 6 months, then you're at a loss using Gentoo. Gentoo is best used when you install it once and keep using it (even after migrating it to another PC) for 7 years.
*With more powerful hardware, significance of Gentoo's will be lost.
No actually, the opposite is happening. With more powerful hardware you can compile your package with many features; not to mention, the compile times will also reduced – the most problematical part of Gentoo according to the users.
Furthermore Gentoo gives you a feeling of swiftness to your desktop, if a program loads in 1 second...gentoo might do it in 0.7 or 0.5 second; although this sounds less, but it give the user a feeling of the desktop being more responsive, which lots of users like (and that's why many still use XP in the windows world). Anyway finally it depends on your personal preference.
*I'm a graphs artist, how will it help me?
There're benchmarks where Gentoo has performed extremely well when rendering, if you do that you might save quiet a lot of hours. But using Gentoo is tough. If you have a friend who's used to Gentoo, let him help you with this.
As of the people who don't know the load on the system when rendering (and start saying that I'm talking rubbish), it can take weeks to render movies, as a result people use many boxes for this and even small optimizations can result in hours saved. If you argue that it takes equal amount of time installing Gentoo, no it does not as compared to the weeks of rendering and there will be much time saved. Furthermore, rendering is something you have to wait for while compiling is something you don't have to.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=61483
Blender fails to run in Ubuntu under my setup so I cant do any benchmarks no another setup, with a processor faster than mine (it extracts and compiles much faster) and running Ubuntu, render times where ~50% slower.
*My gentoo is slower or equally fast than Ubuntu! It's also unstable...why??
Gentoo provides numerous amounts of tweaking and playing around. If you find it slower, it means you've messed up the configuration. Read the handbook and do what it says, goto the doc page of www.gentoo.org and read the relevant docs (including that of portage and make.conf).
Don't forget to tweak your kernel, which at times does 50% of the optimizations. But is the hardest to configure, for the same reason reasons, it can cause major instability.
Whatever might be the reason, it's not Gentoo's fault it's yours.
*It does not matter how many packages are installed; the speed remains the same.
If you assume this you'll be confessing that Ubuntu is slow cause of inefficiency rather than the excess of preinstalled package.
I did some benchmarks regarding this. First I installed the default Ubuntu, then installed ~800 packages bringing it to a total of ~2000 here are the results -
Light Ubuntu -
time firefox
user 0m1.280s
sys 0m0.260s
time firefox
user 0m0.960s
sys 0m0.100s
time firefox
user 0m0.780s
sys 0m0.190s
time firefox
user 0m0.840s
sys 0m0.170s
time tomboy
user 0m2.240s
sys 0m0.220s
time tomboy
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.130s
time tomboy
user 0m1.160s
sys 0m0.140s
time tomboy
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.070s
time pitivi
user 0m1.460s
sys 0m0.370s
time pitivi
user 0m1.000s
sys 0m0.160s
time pitivi
user 0m0.820s
sys 0m0.090s
time pitivi
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.130s
time totem
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.140s
time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.040s
time totem
user 0m0.720s
sys 0m0.120s
time totem
user 0m0.680s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m2.300s
sys 0m0.240s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.120s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.030s
sys 0m0.190s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.060s
sys 0m0.150s
time evolution
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.100s
time evolution
user 0m0.910s
sys 0m0.050s
time evolution
user 0m0.930s
sys 0m0.060s
time evolution
user 0m0.940s
sys 0m0.040s
time f-spot
user 0m1.500s
sys 0m0.170s
time f-spot
user 0m1.600s
sys 0m0.110s
time f-spot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.150s
time f-spot
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s
time oodraw
real 0m6.781s
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s
time oodraw
real 0m1.032s
user 0m0.160s
sys 0m0.100s
time oodraw
real 0m1.031s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.080s
time oodraw
real 0m1.051s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.110s
time brasero
user 0m0.630s
sys 0m0.080s
time brasero
user 0m0.470s
sys 0m0.040s
time brasero
user 0m0.380s
sys 0m0.060s
time brasero
user 0m0.450s
sys 0m0.050s
Heavy Ubuntu -
time firefox
user 0m1.410s
sys 0m0.290s
time firefox
user 0m0.950s
sys 0m0.140s
time firefox
user 0m0.850s
sys 0m0.150s
time firefox
user 0m0.900s
sys 0m0.140s
time tomboy
user 0m1.640s
sys 0m0.160s
time tomboy
user 0m1.230s
sys 0m0.160s
time tomboy
user 0m1.150s
sys 0m0.170s
time tomboy
user 0m1.180s
sys 0m0.110s
time pitivi
user 0m2.210s
sys 0m0.580s
time pitivi
user 0m1.190s
sys 0m0.110s
time pitivi
user 0m1.140s
sys 0m0.150s
time pitivi
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.100s
time totem
user 0m0.970s
sys 0m0.110s
time totem
user 0m0.700s
sys 0m0.140s
time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.170s
time totem
user 0m0.830s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.180s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.130s
sys 0m0.140s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.150s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.100s
sys 0m0.130s
time fspot
user 0m1.800s
sys 0m0.230s
time fspot
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.190s
time fspot
user 0m1.440s
sys 0m0.160s
time fspot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.140s
time evolution
user 1.290
sys 0.140
time evolution
user 1.000s
sys 0.072
time evolution
user 1.000
sys 0.070
time evolution
user 0.960
sys 0.070
time oodraw
real 0m17.408s
user 0m1.700s
sys 0m0.400s
time oodraw
real 0m0.888s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.040s
time oodraw
real 0m0.905s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s
time oodraw
real 0m1.114s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s
time brasero
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.220s
time brasero
user 0m0.520s
sys 0m0.070s
time brasero
user 0m0.590s
sys 0m0.100s
time brasero
user 0m0.440s
sys 0m0.110s
I did find Ubuntu sluggish after this and boot time tripled. And that's the main reason why Puppy Linux doesn't come preinstalled with 50,000 packages.
Even if you remove many packages off Ubuntu, then also Gentoo will show it's performance gains cause of USE flags (depending on how you've set them).
You can configuration Gentoo to be the most feature rich, by which it will turn to be slower than most distros.
*Known optimization.
You don't know what the developers packing the packages compiled your software with. It might be -O1, -O2, -O3, without sse3 or any new processor feature. With Gentoo nothing like that will happen, as a result you might get performance gains cause of this factor.
Same can be said about package. Who know your mplayer was not compiled with sse3 or with the new Nvidia GPU acceleration support?
Anyway, I've also read that GCC might start automatic optimization for CUDA. Whenever that happens, Gentoo will be the first to get the advantage.
BTW I think Ubuntu devs are using -Os...the installation is so small!
*Lowered runtime dependencies
Since the program in Gentoo has been compiled without support for many things, it will load and work faster cause of lower libraries loaded and also consume lower memory. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about this.
This is what Ubuntu does when it's loading a program -
ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
70
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
74
ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
45
ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
64
ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
55
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
52
ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
51
ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
38
ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
73
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
33
ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
46
ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
36
And this is Gentoo's (under my configuration) -
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
66
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
73
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
65
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
41
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/blender|wc --lines
36
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
55
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
54
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
49
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
48
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
58
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
35
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
45
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
63
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
30
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
42
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
33
de@localhost ~ $
*LDFLAGS
I don't know if these work...or how it works. But many people say it does make speed gains, although I didn't notice any.
*New package
The new package are more optimized, suitable for more multithreading, more stable etc...
Gentoo supports unstable packages, so that means the latest.
*keeping up to date
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
Everyone knows Gentoo has the latest packages and even live ebuild that is the package with the latest commit with the devs.
Gentoo is usually quick keeping up to date with the updates. Thanks to the maintainers. With this you get the latest features also which is very much seen with amarok and mplayer (that's cause I saw it).
*Rolling release.
As said before, Gentoo is really worth it if you keep one install for 7 years. Update regularly, and you don't have to care about the versions of Gentoo. You can easily migrate Gentoo to another PC (although I've not tried it) and just keep it forever....
*slots
Can you install grub and grub2 together? Can you install KDE 3 and KDE4 with all different KDE versions together?...with Gentoo you can, and only Gentoo can. If you want this feature bad, Gentoo is for you.
Note, not all software can be installed in slots.
*Security.
Gentoo can be made the most secure distribution by selecting the hardened profile and various other tweaks.
Others
*Despite it's advantage Ubuntu is more productive than Gentoo.
Yes, Ubuntu is like a standard Pizza, while Gentoo is the one with that extra cheese toping. Both will satisfy your hunger but you'll be more satisfied with the latter with the expense of higher cost, or a sore tummy or throat (Cheese can cause bad throat).
*Gentoo and Ubuntu cannot be compared.
Why not? Cause it's hard to make Gentoo almost equal to Ubuntu (UI, packages and all)?
The advantage of Gentoo lies in it's lightness, so if you compare kubuntu with Gentoo running kdebase-meta, it's perfectly fare, it's the advantage of Gentoo to install the minimal and Gentoo should get benchmarked with USE flags configured to install the minimal, since that's what Ubuntu can't do.
*dynamic linking.
Dynamic linking results in reduced memory consumption (correct me if I'm wrong) and keeping the package up to date, that is in case there's a security flaw in the shared library, and it get's fixed, the packages depending on it will also have an advantage. We get other advantages of this also, including more speeds depending on what fixes have been made.
In Gentoo you can ensure that you binaries are dynamically linked as compared to binary distribution. For example in Ubuntu, firefox and blender (to name a few) are not dynamically linked.
*You blamed every Gentoo's fault on the user (then what's Gentoo's fault?...how can it improve?).
If there're compile time failures, some runtime error, or some bugs which you encountered, then it's Gentoo's fault. It's recommended to report a bug.
*The Gentoo community is rude.
Although this is not a FAQ, Gentoo community is very polite, but the Ubuntu community is very rude. You call the dependencies resolution of apt horrible, and look at the amount of Ubuntu fanboys (mostly Windows migrants who know nothing about Linux) calling you names. Most people in Ubuntu forum can't tolerate even the least criticism of Ubuntu and start blaming your distribution instead; most of them are new to Linux and don't tend to learn more but also don't hold back to give criticism on a topic they don't know much about.
Cause of this reason (and if this continues) I may stop spreading Ubuntu, or stop Debian administration as a whole and that's why I downloaded a copy of Sabayon and might try Fedora also. BTW I liked Sabayon by quiet a lot.
*You're a ricer.
The Gentoo community itself makes jokes of ricers; ricers are the people who will tweak for even the least gains and go to extreme levels for it. This primarily includes setting of insane CFLAGS and trying new ones out. In reality this is waste of time and I don't do that.
All I do is check out the global USE flags (that too once in 6 months at most...or whenever I feel like), and before most merges, check their USE and set them as per my needs.
If that's ricing to you, go back to windows clicking next till the finish appears and ensure to have 4 expensive antiviruses, antirootkit, antimalware and antispyware with a large and shiny GUI occupying 4 out of 6 cores of your Desktop and using 70% of your 4GB ram.
*You're a Gentoo fanboy
I've explained the advantages and disadvantage of Gentoo, had I been biased, I would have explained only advantages and encouraged everyone to use Gentoo.
I will continue using Gentoo for educational purposes mostly, secondary reasons are performance gains, customization and the fact that I'm an enthusiasts.
*There's no environments that Gentoo can be employed in.
As stated before, Gentoo can be employed as a special purpose systems or the ones which stays offline.
The advantages of using Gentoo as a server distribution is an axiom assuming you know how to configure stuff.
*I still think Gentoo is the worst distribution for anyone.
Even after reading all the above, is most probably because you're some sorta fanboy of some binary based distribution and cant live with the fact that Gentoo has many advantages (as a source based distribution) cause of which many people are using it.
*I hate Gentoo.
Well, it's your personal preference. If you support opensource, there're many people saying I hate opensource.
*Gentoo devs fight! Gentoo is dead -
Although it's not even close to dead, yes the devs do fight and this does cause problems to the distro.
Hope this problem gets fixed soon.
*I still don't believe Gentoo is faster and I still hate Gentoo.
That's cause you quit Gentoo early cause it's hard and you mind could not pop up the fact that you don't need to watch the compilation process and you can multitask duing the install using your favorite shining distro. If you don't like Gentoo admit it, if you did not find it fast doesn't mean it is not fast – it's simply your opinion and the reason why we have so much mixed feelings about this speed factor is cause the configuring Gentoo is hard, and only a few people can do it.
Gentoo expects you to work hard for it to be setup if you don't like it, the distro is not for you; speaking of which others 'out of the box' and shiny distros have done a very bad job when making it 'out of the box'... it works out of the box only under 50% of the setups and there're small problems in almost every disto on almost every computer including the desktops.
Again if you claim that it works 100% for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone.
*I've heard this all before, and yet I'm not convinced to use Gentoo.
It's simply your personal preference, I'm not forcing you to use Gentoo, you can use Debian core, arch or might be Sabayon minimal if you want to have control over your system but not on the compile.
I'm posting here (and will keep updating my post) about what people say about Gentoo, and what doubts do they have about the project and what wars are going on in the communities.
First of all let's see why are you using Gentoo. Gentoo is for -
admins
devs who do not solely develop high level programs
Enthusiasts
Curious minds (about Linux)
And might be Graphs artists also.
Servers
If you're using Gentoo and not anyone or more from the above, then it's a waste of time.
Gentoo is used by admins, devs, enthusiasts cause many of them know/wanna-know Linux good enough, I.e they can handle the technical expertize that Gentoo throws at them; the efforts of editing the configuration file, the efforts of fulfilling the compile requirements, the efforts to configure the kernel, etc... i.e. they are willing to learn and have a bit of time at hand.
The main reason why they use it is either for one or more of the following -
*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Speed – Lowered dependencies, lowered runtime requirements of binaries, known optimization (explained in FAQ), tweaked kernel (if the user has configured his kernel), LDFLAGS, new packages.
*keep uptodated.
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
*Rolling release.
*slots
*architecture.
*Security.
For 'curious minds' or people who are learning Linux, it just provides a playground. If using Gentoo they become enthusiasts, they will most probably use it for any of the above stated reasons but only if they realize the powers of Gentoo and even if they do, they should have an interest to use those powers.
Whatever be, if you continue using Gentoo, you will continuously be learning something or the other since it reviles the inner workings of the new packages and even hardware; the various options they can be compiled with, the various features they support.
*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters) – Related FAQs -
*I can have complete control over the system using any other binary based distribution.
When all binary distributions were providing X with HAL, Gentoo gave it's users an option to compile with without.
If you have an old processor which does not support SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, no use compiling your binaries with it. Also many packages (like ffmpeg and mplayer) support compiling without these.
Why compile blender with openal support when you don't want it?
We use recoll with QT interface, which Ubuntu can't. Although recoll is not in portage but a contributer is maintaining the ebuild (But the portage maintainers wont let him in.)
Uncountable more.
*The package maintainers can build these packages with such features removed/added
Then the no. of packages of the Ubuntu distribution will be close to a billion if they attempted to do so; so many are the number of options.
*You can apt-get –no-install-recommends, then install the recommended ones manually.
There's a difference between a plugin and a dependency, you can remove the plugins but if you remove the dependencies it will result in errors... the devs know that.
In Gentoo we remove the dependencies. Let's take an example of kde-desktop in Ubuntu; here I list the packages that Gentoo would not install (if kdebase-meta is emerged) -
ark kdepasswd khelpcenter4 ksnapshot ksystemlog language-selector-qt libkdecorations4 libkonq5 libksignalplotter4 libkwineffects1 libokularcore1 libpoppler-qt4-3 okular
Anyway, this is not a good example to state runtime dependencies; many more examples exist...including gnome and xfce.
Recently I got another example of the apt dependencies resolution. I accidentally installed fglrx on an nvidia, so I want to remove it now, and along with that, it wants to remove the following -
flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree ia32-libs nspluginwrapper wine1.2
*OK, so I can customize most things using almost any distro...this is Linux, this is opensource.
It's difficult to remove things than adding them – specially in Ubuntu.
You decide to completely remove gnome and add kde instead, but on removing the ubuntu-desktop package, nothing else gets removed in auto-removing.
Furthermore there're many utilities preinstalled not as a meta package...you can't hunt for them in the default stack of the installed 1200 packages, you might remove dependencies off X...who knows.
*What's the advantage?
Satisfaction of the user (others will be discussed later).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Why can't I do this with any other distro?
Cause Gentoo forces you to. Otherwise it will fail to work, or work bad (after which the users say Gentoo is bad).
Gentoo expect you to work on it, for a simple reason – Customization, Gentoo's goal.
It allows you to play around heavy with kernel configs, it will teach you how to boot the system manually, it will explain the factors and options of a compile, uncountable more...
Furthermore in a usual shining distro, you do not know which things worked out of the box without your permission and configuration... you might not stop them since you do not know if it's a dependency of something else.
Anyway, most do agree with this point.
*Speed
*Ubuntu is much faster than Gentoo (yo!...Gentoo has nano second boost in performance).
Ground truth is Ubuntu is one of the slowest distributions around, it's not cause of it's inefficiency, but cause Debian has been modified for ease of use with the expense of speed.
As we all know, easiest doesn't mean the best; same can be said about Linux and windows. And actually Gentoo is one of the fastest distros around. Here are the benchmarks -
http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=unlotto-26045-5690-24680
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574
http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/325624962/linux-performance-benchmark-apache-nginx
http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/306663818/linux-performance-benchmark-system
This is Sabayon's, but it's Gentoo based so -
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sabayon_51_benchmarks&num=1
I personally did certain benchmarks to find Gentoo was -2% to 40% faster on startup times of programs and now I can play HD videos with my broken graphs drivers.
Later on I also did some benchmarks compared to arch to realize that decompression was faster on Gentoo and compression gains were upto 50% with lpaq9m compression algorithm. I also realized that if the compression was a short one, arch was faster, but for prolonged compression, Gentoo was getting much faster with time and reached a point where it was ~50% faster. Although there was no difference in startup times of programs, but the UI seemed sluggish (this was pretty noticeable); anyway no major advantage. The boot time of arch was around half of Gentoo's, this maybe cause I'm using baselayout 1. Base layout 2 is said to decrease the boot times by 100%, I upgraded and yes, the boot times where a bit faster than Arch's. Notice however that I was using Arch on a 4 GB partition and Gentoo was spread across a 4 GB partition (root) and a 8 GB partition and packages installed in arch were very less as compared to Gentoo (I use this Gentoo as mainstream). Also notice that I'm always using reiserfs which has fragmentation problems specially when using it with notail option and my Gentoo installation is around 6 months old and I was using 2.6.31 while Arch was using 2.6.33; these factors are also to be considered with these benchmarks.
The optimization is not cause of the CFLAGS or the compile time parameters of GCC (assume you've set it correctly) (however I'm doubting this after the arch benchmarks), but primarily cause of USE flags which result in binaries of lower dependencies, thus it will search less and load less. Other reasons are LDFLAGS and lower dependencies and packages installed (the more you tweak the USE flags, the more lower the dependencies, so the performance depends on you).
You don't have to tweak the USE flags every 2 days. Half of the job is done by the devs who provided 'profiles'...even for KDE and GNOME desktops.
If you're using Gentoo of special purpose systems like servers (without X) or as a bank accounting software which does not need any USB support, CD/DVD, media etc.. support, then Gentoo can give you more than 50% performance gains cause of the lost dependencies cause of USE flags.
*Speed is a Placebo effect.
Gentoo is fast and has been reported be numerous Gentoo desktop users and benchmarks (even I did that), and you think all suffer from this disease? To realize if I was a victim, I did startup benchmarks of various applications to realize Gentoo was actually pretty faster than Ubuntu and I'm not infected and if you find Gentoo is not fast you've either misconfigured your system, not configured it well (these 2 are different) or you're having a placebo effect instead.
*I don't think Gentoo's compile time is worth the effort and time.
If you're a complete newbie and do not belong to any of the groups above and considered giving Gentoo a try and actually gone though all those things – it was your stupidity to use Gentoo. Go back to Ubuntu, or try Sabayon, it's Gentoo based but easier.
As for the compile times -
Quote:
Gentoo is used by sensible people who have enough common sense to realize -- "A compilation process needs not to be 'watched'"
I let Gentoo do the compiling, while I'm writing this.
And guess what?....it got compiled loong ago! Did I regret it's long compile time?
Anyway, if you're the sort of guy who keeping trying new software or changes platform every 6 months, then you're at a loss using Gentoo. Gentoo is best used when you install it once and keep using it (even after migrating it to another PC) for 7 years.
*With more powerful hardware, significance of Gentoo's will be lost.
No actually, the opposite is happening. With more powerful hardware you can compile your package with many features; not to mention, the compile times will also reduced – the most problematical part of Gentoo according to the users.
Furthermore Gentoo gives you a feeling of swiftness to your desktop, if a program loads in 1 second...gentoo might do it in 0.7 or 0.5 second; although this sounds less, but it give the user a feeling of the desktop being more responsive, which lots of users like (and that's why many still use XP in the windows world). Anyway finally it depends on your personal preference.
*I'm a graphs artist, how will it help me?
There're benchmarks where Gentoo has performed extremely well when rendering, if you do that you might save quiet a lot of hours. But using Gentoo is tough. If you have a friend who's used to Gentoo, let him help you with this.
As of the people who don't know the load on the system when rendering (and start saying that I'm talking rubbish), it can take weeks to render movies, as a result people use many boxes for this and even small optimizations can result in hours saved. If you argue that it takes equal amount of time installing Gentoo, no it does not as compared to the weeks of rendering and there will be much time saved. Furthermore, rendering is something you have to wait for while compiling is something you don't have to.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=61483
Blender fails to run in Ubuntu under my setup so I cant do any benchmarks no another setup, with a processor faster than mine (it extracts and compiles much faster) and running Ubuntu, render times where ~50% slower.
*My gentoo is slower or equally fast than Ubuntu! It's also unstable...why??
Gentoo provides numerous amounts of tweaking and playing around. If you find it slower, it means you've messed up the configuration. Read the handbook and do what it says, goto the doc page of www.gentoo.org and read the relevant docs (including that of portage and make.conf).
Don't forget to tweak your kernel, which at times does 50% of the optimizations. But is the hardest to configure, for the same reason reasons, it can cause major instability.
Whatever might be the reason, it's not Gentoo's fault it's yours.
*It does not matter how many packages are installed; the speed remains the same.
If you assume this you'll be confessing that Ubuntu is slow cause of inefficiency rather than the excess of preinstalled package.
I did some benchmarks regarding this. First I installed the default Ubuntu, then installed ~800 packages bringing it to a total of ~2000 here are the results -
Light Ubuntu -
time firefox
user 0m1.280s
sys 0m0.260s
time firefox
user 0m0.960s
sys 0m0.100s
time firefox
user 0m0.780s
sys 0m0.190s
time firefox
user 0m0.840s
sys 0m0.170s
time tomboy
user 0m2.240s
sys 0m0.220s
time tomboy
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.130s
time tomboy
user 0m1.160s
sys 0m0.140s
time tomboy
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.070s
time pitivi
user 0m1.460s
sys 0m0.370s
time pitivi
user 0m1.000s
sys 0m0.160s
time pitivi
user 0m0.820s
sys 0m0.090s
time pitivi
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.130s
time totem
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.140s
time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.040s
time totem
user 0m0.720s
sys 0m0.120s
time totem
user 0m0.680s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m2.300s
sys 0m0.240s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.120s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.030s
sys 0m0.190s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.060s
sys 0m0.150s
time evolution
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.100s
time evolution
user 0m0.910s
sys 0m0.050s
time evolution
user 0m0.930s
sys 0m0.060s
time evolution
user 0m0.940s
sys 0m0.040s
time f-spot
user 0m1.500s
sys 0m0.170s
time f-spot
user 0m1.600s
sys 0m0.110s
time f-spot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.150s
time f-spot
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s
time oodraw
real 0m6.781s
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s
time oodraw
real 0m1.032s
user 0m0.160s
sys 0m0.100s
time oodraw
real 0m1.031s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.080s
time oodraw
real 0m1.051s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.110s
time brasero
user 0m0.630s
sys 0m0.080s
time brasero
user 0m0.470s
sys 0m0.040s
time brasero
user 0m0.380s
sys 0m0.060s
time brasero
user 0m0.450s
sys 0m0.050s
Heavy Ubuntu -
time firefox
user 0m1.410s
sys 0m0.290s
time firefox
user 0m0.950s
sys 0m0.140s
time firefox
user 0m0.850s
sys 0m0.150s
time firefox
user 0m0.900s
sys 0m0.140s
time tomboy
user 0m1.640s
sys 0m0.160s
time tomboy
user 0m1.230s
sys 0m0.160s
time tomboy
user 0m1.150s
sys 0m0.170s
time tomboy
user 0m1.180s
sys 0m0.110s
time pitivi
user 0m2.210s
sys 0m0.580s
time pitivi
user 0m1.190s
sys 0m0.110s
time pitivi
user 0m1.140s
sys 0m0.150s
time pitivi
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.100s
time totem
user 0m0.970s
sys 0m0.110s
time totem
user 0m0.700s
sys 0m0.140s
time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.170s
time totem
user 0m0.830s
sys 0m0.100s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.180s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.130s
sys 0m0.140s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.150s
time rhythmbox
user 0m1.100s
sys 0m0.130s
time fspot
user 0m1.800s
sys 0m0.230s
time fspot
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.190s
time fspot
user 0m1.440s
sys 0m0.160s
time fspot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.140s
time evolution
user 1.290
sys 0.140
time evolution
user 1.000s
sys 0.072
time evolution
user 1.000
sys 0.070
time evolution
user 0.960
sys 0.070
time oodraw
real 0m17.408s
user 0m1.700s
sys 0m0.400s
time oodraw
real 0m0.888s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.040s
time oodraw
real 0m0.905s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s
time oodraw
real 0m1.114s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s
time brasero
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.220s
time brasero
user 0m0.520s
sys 0m0.070s
time brasero
user 0m0.590s
sys 0m0.100s
time brasero
user 0m0.440s
sys 0m0.110s
I did find Ubuntu sluggish after this and boot time tripled. And that's the main reason why Puppy Linux doesn't come preinstalled with 50,000 packages.
Even if you remove many packages off Ubuntu, then also Gentoo will show it's performance gains cause of USE flags (depending on how you've set them).
You can configuration Gentoo to be the most feature rich, by which it will turn to be slower than most distros.
*Known optimization.
You don't know what the developers packing the packages compiled your software with. It might be -O1, -O2, -O3, without sse3 or any new processor feature. With Gentoo nothing like that will happen, as a result you might get performance gains cause of this factor.
Same can be said about package. Who know your mplayer was not compiled with sse3 or with the new Nvidia GPU acceleration support?
Anyway, I've also read that GCC might start automatic optimization for CUDA. Whenever that happens, Gentoo will be the first to get the advantage.
BTW I think Ubuntu devs are using -Os...the installation is so small!
*Lowered runtime dependencies
Since the program in Gentoo has been compiled without support for many things, it will load and work faster cause of lower libraries loaded and also consume lower memory. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about this.
This is what Ubuntu does when it's loading a program -
ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
70
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
74
ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
45
ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
64
ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
55
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
52
ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
51
ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
38
ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
73
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
33
ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
46
ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
36
And this is Gentoo's (under my configuration) -
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
66
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
73
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
65
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
41
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/blender|wc --lines
36
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
55
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
54
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
49
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
48
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
58
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
35
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
45
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
63
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
30
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
42
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
33
de@localhost ~ $
*LDFLAGS
I don't know if these work...or how it works. But many people say it does make speed gains, although I didn't notice any.
*New package
The new package are more optimized, suitable for more multithreading, more stable etc...
Gentoo supports unstable packages, so that means the latest.
*keeping up to date
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
Everyone knows Gentoo has the latest packages and even live ebuild that is the package with the latest commit with the devs.
Gentoo is usually quick keeping up to date with the updates. Thanks to the maintainers. With this you get the latest features also which is very much seen with amarok and mplayer (that's cause I saw it).
*Rolling release.
As said before, Gentoo is really worth it if you keep one install for 7 years. Update regularly, and you don't have to care about the versions of Gentoo. You can easily migrate Gentoo to another PC (although I've not tried it) and just keep it forever....
*slots
Can you install grub and grub2 together? Can you install KDE 3 and KDE4 with all different KDE versions together?...with Gentoo you can, and only Gentoo can. If you want this feature bad, Gentoo is for you.
Note, not all software can be installed in slots.
*Security.
Gentoo can be made the most secure distribution by selecting the hardened profile and various other tweaks.
Others
*Despite it's advantage Ubuntu is more productive than Gentoo.
Yes, Ubuntu is like a standard Pizza, while Gentoo is the one with that extra cheese toping. Both will satisfy your hunger but you'll be more satisfied with the latter with the expense of higher cost, or a sore tummy or throat (Cheese can cause bad throat).
*Gentoo and Ubuntu cannot be compared.
Why not? Cause it's hard to make Gentoo almost equal to Ubuntu (UI, packages and all)?
The advantage of Gentoo lies in it's lightness, so if you compare kubuntu with Gentoo running kdebase-meta, it's perfectly fare, it's the advantage of Gentoo to install the minimal and Gentoo should get benchmarked with USE flags configured to install the minimal, since that's what Ubuntu can't do.
*dynamic linking.
Dynamic linking results in reduced memory consumption (correct me if I'm wrong) and keeping the package up to date, that is in case there's a security flaw in the shared library, and it get's fixed, the packages depending on it will also have an advantage. We get other advantages of this also, including more speeds depending on what fixes have been made.
In Gentoo you can ensure that you binaries are dynamically linked as compared to binary distribution. For example in Ubuntu, firefox and blender (to name a few) are not dynamically linked.
*You blamed every Gentoo's fault on the user (then what's Gentoo's fault?...how can it improve?).
If there're compile time failures, some runtime error, or some bugs which you encountered, then it's Gentoo's fault. It's recommended to report a bug.
*The Gentoo community is rude.
Although this is not a FAQ, Gentoo community is very polite, but the Ubuntu community is very rude. You call the dependencies resolution of apt horrible, and look at the amount of Ubuntu fanboys (mostly Windows migrants who know nothing about Linux) calling you names. Most people in Ubuntu forum can't tolerate even the least criticism of Ubuntu and start blaming your distribution instead; most of them are new to Linux and don't tend to learn more but also don't hold back to give criticism on a topic they don't know much about.
Cause of this reason (and if this continues) I may stop spreading Ubuntu, or stop Debian administration as a whole and that's why I downloaded a copy of Sabayon and might try Fedora also. BTW I liked Sabayon by quiet a lot.
*You're a ricer.
The Gentoo community itself makes jokes of ricers; ricers are the people who will tweak for even the least gains and go to extreme levels for it. This primarily includes setting of insane CFLAGS and trying new ones out. In reality this is waste of time and I don't do that.
All I do is check out the global USE flags (that too once in 6 months at most...or whenever I feel like), and before most merges, check their USE and set them as per my needs.
If that's ricing to you, go back to windows clicking next till the finish appears and ensure to have 4 expensive antiviruses, antirootkit, antimalware and antispyware with a large and shiny GUI occupying 4 out of 6 cores of your Desktop and using 70% of your 4GB ram.
*You're a Gentoo fanboy
I've explained the advantages and disadvantage of Gentoo, had I been biased, I would have explained only advantages and encouraged everyone to use Gentoo.
I will continue using Gentoo for educational purposes mostly, secondary reasons are performance gains, customization and the fact that I'm an enthusiasts.
*There's no environments that Gentoo can be employed in.
As stated before, Gentoo can be employed as a special purpose systems or the ones which stays offline.
The advantages of using Gentoo as a server distribution is an axiom assuming you know how to configure stuff.
*I still think Gentoo is the worst distribution for anyone.
Even after reading all the above, is most probably because you're some sorta fanboy of some binary based distribution and cant live with the fact that Gentoo has many advantages (as a source based distribution) cause of which many people are using it.
*I hate Gentoo.
Well, it's your personal preference. If you support opensource, there're many people saying I hate opensource.
*Gentoo devs fight! Gentoo is dead -
Although it's not even close to dead, yes the devs do fight and this does cause problems to the distro.
Hope this problem gets fixed soon.
*I still don't believe Gentoo is faster and I still hate Gentoo.
That's cause you quit Gentoo early cause it's hard and you mind could not pop up the fact that you don't need to watch the compilation process and you can multitask duing the install using your favorite shining distro. If you don't like Gentoo admit it, if you did not find it fast doesn't mean it is not fast – it's simply your opinion and the reason why we have so much mixed feelings about this speed factor is cause the configuring Gentoo is hard, and only a few people can do it.
Gentoo expects you to work hard for it to be setup if you don't like it, the distro is not for you; speaking of which others 'out of the box' and shiny distros have done a very bad job when making it 'out of the box'... it works out of the box only under 50% of the setups and there're small problems in almost every disto on almost every computer including the desktops.
Again if you claim that it works 100% for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone.
*I've heard this all before, and yet I'm not convinced to use Gentoo.
It's simply your personal preference, I'm not forcing you to use Gentoo, you can use Debian core, arch or might be Sabayon minimal if you want to have control over your system but not on the compile.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Solving SCSI or any other errors with k3b/cdrtools
Note - This solution appears not to work with cdrkit.
At times you might get SCSI errors when writing to DVDs (cmd timeout after 0.2xx seconds), sg_write issues etc... Just add -immed flag to cdrecord to fix the issue. Set k3b to use immed by default. This issue might be more frequent when using a DVD writer though a PATA to USB connector.
If you get misc. errors in general, then check if the priority of the burning program/backend has been manually set to high, this causes problems.
At times you might get SCSI errors when writing to DVDs (cmd timeout after 0.2xx seconds), sg_write issues etc... Just add -immed flag to cdrecord to fix the issue. Set k3b to use immed by default. This issue might be more frequent when using a DVD writer though a PATA to USB connector.
If you get misc. errors in general, then check if the priority of the burning program/backend has been manually set to high, this causes problems.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Why opensource?
In this article, I'll explain why software is best made opensource and try to cut the common arguments of people who do not support it.
A 'free software' does not make any restriction on the source code, that means the source code is made public and one can, copy, freely modify and distribute it as if it was scientific knowledge. Cause of this nature, developers (software engineers) around the globe contribute bit by bit to the source code; the open nature allows the users and developers to communicate, as a results the software made is completely according to the user's needs and contains the user's various creative opinion.
Thus free software works on donations (though source codes, money donations, bug reports, documentation, translation to languages etc...). The power of free software is not to be underestimated. By almost the whole world, free software is proven to be the best and used by true professional and large organizations, both for it's cost effective, free nature and it's quality. The Linux kernel the one of the best kernel ever and almost all super computers use it. There are large organizations which support opensource like Mozilla, Novel, redhat, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and even Google, thus development of such software by all these organizations and developers around the globe result in rapid, quality and secure software. When it comes to opensource, the competitors come together to do something truly productive.
Compared to software which's not opensource, their main aim will be to earn money, they'll try and beat completion (even the opensource ones), gain a monopoly and hike the prices up (like Microsoft has done); they don't care about the users, nor quality software, they just care about money, they want your money, and they'll force you to pay you money. Once all competition is dead, they will most probably stop developing the software and hike the prices to insanity; they usually make monopolistic restrictive file formats which are only going to open in their proprietary applications, thus making a monopoly, you will not even be able to convert these formats to opensource formats and if the company drops support for it, there's nothing you will be able to do. Such things cannot happen with opensource, even you can copy and modify the source code to your needs and the file format will never be lost no matter how much time has passed, simply cause it's your property, a public property like sciences. One reason for the quality of opensource software is that the people developing these are hobbyists, they are geniuses with an intent to create quality software (unlike the proprietary counterparts) and provide it to you and if people do things with interest, the results are fabulous. Any security loophole is fixed within hours with opesource software since there're people working on it round the clock and around the globe.
Microsoft is the king of monopolistic practices and third grade software and successfully have forced people to use the same cause of the monopoly though their monopolistic practices over time. Each virus of Microsoft Windows is a security loophole which an opensource operating systems, lacks. Bill Gates, founder or Microsoft keeps all money to himself and does not spend any on software, and there's nothing you can do about it. You cannot complain to Microsoft about the viruses, worms, crashes and instability or about Vista's requirement being too hight and it being too slow cause it's simply not your right; they won't give a damn, they will kick you out of their offices, and there's nothing you can do. On the other hand we have open source operating system which are more feature rich than windows out of the box yet having a fraction system requirement, thus one can see the inefficient and third grade quality of software that Microsoft has made, which is many times worst than the open source alternatives. Bill Gates is a billionaire cause he took money form people in exchange of Windows and Microsoft Office and people have no option cause the Window software only worked in Window and the word documents only opened in Office (although that has changed now, this was their main intent) – typical monopolistic practice by Microsoft. Windows has been designed to to help the programmers make Window applications, but it's such that any programs written under windows will only work under windows; this is was the main aim of the design and is as of the current date. The operating system has not been keeping quality (security, stability and speed) in mind but looks only to boost their sales and to gain maximum revenues form it. They don't care about the rest.
If you would have noticed, most PCs come preinstalled in Windows, thus if you buy such a PC you will be forced to pay for Window, we call this Microsoft tax, an fabulous way maintain the monopoly and gain maximum profit, and they all bought it in with the excuse of stopping piracy. There're still many laptops available without Windows preinstalled, buy those. They will save you money and also save the software foundation from getting lower in quality.
There're uncountable number of antitrust cases on Microsoft; and cause of this monopoly people have suffered a huge loss; all these viruses, reformats, worms, crashes is cause of Microsoft's monopolistic practices which has forced people to use Windows and killed all competition. You love XP right? But XP is out of production officially by Microsoft and you will be forced do use Window 7 or Vista and will have to upgrade the hardware to 3 GB ram and a quad core processor; none of which has happened to the opensource. Opensource software is for the purpose of the people; for their good not for money and business like with Microsoft; even if there's no competition for a particular opensource software, the development of the software will never stop, it will keep going better and it will always be free of charge and will never force you to upgrade your hardware. Almost all Microsoft product is closed source, that means they never release the source code, and they might be just copying Opensourced code and selling it to you, you don't know, it's a complete lie.
Another lie is that opensource operating systems have very less viruses cause it's not that much widespread as window; this a complete nonsense reason given by Microsoft, Opensource operating systems are used widely by servers, that is computers with top notch internet connection and powerful hardware which are all the targets of viruses and crackers but very less have been able to blow a hole in it.
Microsoft does not even maintain a repository for windows, even though it's a large organization; it manifests that it does not want to spend money, but just earn it.
Microsoft window's command line interpreter is one of the worst in the world, since they know through this they won't get any returns, the users usually do not use it, so why should they develop it (and I know about Powershell as copied form bash)?
Another big lie by Microsoft to justify closed source is better than opensource is that since the source codes are open, crackers will be able to see the security venerabilities and so breaking a software open will be an easy job in open source software; however this does not happen. The source codes are reviewed by thousands of developers world wide and and any security venerability is caught instantly and fixed within hours; this has been actually seen that Opensource software are the most secure and closed source is the least secure; the most insecure software organization in the world is Microsoft (there are billions (999,999,999,999 + 1) of viruses and security loopholes), the people who made this claim; they realize that people do not understand what's security in a software so are least concerned about it, they are only concerned about the sales and revenues generated, nothing more.
If people would have donated the huge sums of money to the opensource instead of Microsoft, it would have done wonders to the current world of software, there would have been no viruses, no crashes and we would have had an amazing world of stable top quality software we cannot even imagine of at the current date, all cause of monopolistic rubbish organizations like Microsoft. If you want this dream to be true, start now by using opensource software and contributing to the community, they need you.
As of employment of software engineers, the opensource organizations employ them by gaining revenues through advertisements or donations. Thus it cannot be directly stated that opensource decreases the opportunity of employment to developers. If an opensource software is used widespread, the donations will be huge and so the employment and developers of software; thus I urge you to donate. And actually the donations will be more as compared to the sales of the propitiatory counter parts, that's cause everyone will donate, from rich to the not-so-rich, the not so rich although will not be able to buy expensive software but can donate a little, making the difference. A big example is the non profit organization Mozilla foundation which gets donations of order of millions of dollars and all are used for productive purpose including employing coders and not used to make large houses or top the billionaire chart for the owner like what's the case with Bill gates... he's actually decreasing the employment by doing to and keeping huge amounts of money to himself.
People argue, “If Microsoft is monopolistic, so it Intel”, I got the answer to that too.
Why don't we have companies which make real world things (that is equipment and all) in an 'open' way that is why do we not have any organizations manufacturing equipment, for example without any restrictions?
The answer lies in the nature of software. Software can be best developed if made opensource, a software development does not require you to devote yourself completely to it; you can spend a few hours of contribution, and there will be considerable development of the software, after your contribution another contributer can continue your work easily. It does not make sense to make software closed source since two organizations can use each other's technology without knowing it, thus the purpose of making software closed source is lost, closed source software might simply use opensource ones and sell it to you but no one will know what's actually happening. Take the docx file format case which Microsoft lost, the opposing company reverse engineered docx format to realize that it was their proprietary technology, and then they acted... this is just one example, who knows what's written behind the binaries?.. may be 90% of proprietary software works over previously applied software patents. This cannot happen with things like manufacturing plants; the manufacturing processes of other organizations can easily be seen, thus making a patent useful. Organizations which make real world (hardware) product, you need to devote yourself completely to it and the task is such that your strategy cannot be learned easily and in a fast way by anyone. To start off such an organization, you need huge amounts of initial investments and employees; on the other hand, doing the same with software is of a fractional difficulty, you can do it alongside your main work. When there's a software upgrade to a new version, apart form adding new feature, most of the changes are bug fixes... problems with the software that was there with the previous version; if the software is free, it makes all reasons to upgrade, since it's free of cost, upgrading does not hurt. However if the software is not free, think, why should you buy a new version just to iron out the issues in the previous, should it not be free? If you do buy , it'll be like buying a car with lots of flaws in it, and after a year or 2, buying another simply to remove the issues – the faults that was in the previously in the car, and actually this should have been done for free but you paid for it, you where made a fool; to top all reason in combination to this, most of the changes in the new version of proprietary software are bug fixes... so you know what you paid for, few visual enhancements (which made the software appear as if it was 'new') and 90% bug fixes – flaws in the previous software now improved after paying more money. Furthermore, the opensource has gained a very high momentum, thus it makes all sense to support such software and kill closed source money minded organizations like Microsoft.
Unique ways to contribute to opensource.
When we talk about contributions, money plays a
major role... everyone knows about monitory contributions bug
reports/Developer task etc.... However, even if you're not a
technical personnel, and do not even wish monitory contributions (for
some reasons), there're other ways available also -
- Hardware compatibility with Linux is a major issue, actually the manufacturer is to blame. So whenever you find such a product not working out, call the manufacturer straight and complain.
- If he says the hardware is officially incompatible or they can't fix it, tell on their face that their products sucks, and you will never buy their products again and never recommend it to anyone and just demote all their products.
- If he says Linux users fall in the majority, tell him the statistics are wrong and you see all Linux users around you.
- Wherever you see a product which requires drivers and all and the Linux compatibility has not been commented on call the manufacturer and ask about it's Linux compatibility. Regardless of what he says, respond by telling him you need to bulk order the product and need 50 or 100 or even 1000... whatever amount of pieces.
- Check out which companies do not provide any Laptops or Desktops with Linux preinstalled or if there're no products without Windows preinstalled and complain to them about how you're forcing everyone to buy Windows, and decreasing the value of money for their product if someone does not wish to use Windows and you and your friends (or the whole company and take large numbers again.) are preferring computers Without windows installed, but they don't manufacture them.
- If you're using windows do not buy computers with non trial versions of Microsoft Office or any other such product.
- Publicize Linux distros by the following points -
- No need to reformat for life.
- Very stable.
- No security issues like Antivirus, firewall etc..
- For windows there're millions of viruses made daily, but for Linux, there are almost none.
- A 3-d desktop.
- No need to hunt applications on the internet to install.
- Public property, Download, modify and redistribute without fear of being prosecuted.
Although these techniques might not appeal
to many, since they are considered 'bad', that is these (except
the last point) are mostly lies, but you really have no other option.
If GNU is actually going to have that wildebeest image, it'll always
be the prey of predators and always be vulnerable.
By far, Microsoft is the biggest rival of
GNU/Opensource, it's always trying to kill it by unfair means and
causes harm to the people; if they are doing this, the response has
to be the same from the GNU herd otherwise it will be the hunted.
Making a sabayon package.
Like deb and rpm, there're also Sabayon packages
but cause Sabayon is not known much, such packages are hard to be
found. Most probably you will not pass through a scenario where you
will actually not get a package you need inside the official Sabayon
repository, but if you do, here I'll state what you can do to resolve
the issue.
Since Sabayon is based on Gentoo, everything that
works in Gentoo, also works in Sabayon including ebuilds which might
be commonly considered as Gentoo packages and Ebuilds are found at a
very large number, if you did not find a Sabayon package, you will
get an Ebuild and you can make the Sabayon package from this. To get
the ebuild search in http://www.gentoo-portage.com,
or http://bugs.gentoo.org or http://gpo.zugaina.org/ download it and
place it in /usr/portage/app-misc//-.ebuild>.
Example if we have an ebuild named
limewire-5.0.0.ebuild then place it in
/usr/portage/app-misc/limewire/
Make the directories if they are not available.
The ebuild name should strictly be limewire-, that is
in general -. The directory where
this ebuild will be placed in the app-misc directory, should be named
, in this case, limewire. Now drop to the the
root prompt.
Next, you need to create a manifest of the ebuild
by -
ebuild
manifest
then you can safely emerge with -
emerge limewire
From here on, there're primarily 2 ways by which
you can make a Sabayon package, for one of them run the following
commands first -
equo rescue spmsync
Actually emerge is set to do this automatically
after merging any package, but do this again just in case it does not
happen.
As of the insides on how this works, entropy (the
binary package manager of Sabayon) has a separate database to that of
portage, but both need to have the same packages recorded as
installed, to make out for the differences, we run equo rescue
spmsync so Limewire gets recorded in the entropy database and now the
package will be installed in Sabayon, you can see it in Sulfur as
installed.
Next to build a package off it -
equo smart quickpkg
This will be placed in /var/lib/entropy/tmp by
default, override by the switch --savedir.
You should have an entropy package there.
Now let's discuss another way of creating a
Sabayon packages from Gentoo binaries which where made during compile
time by portage (using --buildpkg or quickpkg), assuming you have
such a binary, just -
equo smart inflate
And the resultant Sabayon package will be placed
in /var/lib/entropy/tmp.
For this technique, you just need to have the
gentoo binary, neither the ebuild nor you need to emerge it through
portage.
You can install a Sabayon package with sulfur by
going to file>install from binaries...
alternatively -
equo
You don't need to worry about the dependencies,
they get sorted out by the Sabayon package automatically. Any
dependency in the ebuild or the Gentoo binary will be loaded into the
Sabayon package.
Request your Sabayon package, I'll try to make
them.
Humans defenseless in the wild?
People often consider themselves to be vulnerable like domesticated chicken when lost in the wild... they say that if he's faced with a wild animal, he will not survive... he does not have the natural 'defenses'... that is physically he's defenseless... however I don't think so and here are my opinions.
You would have noticed, that I'm talking a 'he' here... that's cause there's nothing a women can do in the wild, but a man can.
I say humans can mostly handle creatures roughly equal to their own size alone... that is I'm removing some big cats from the list, but not all like cheetah, a small lepord etc... and of course if you encounter a bear, buffalo, wildebeest etc... there's no way you can fight um back. Even the biggest are afraid of poisonous frogs and snakes.
First, we underestimate our physical strength, apart from being one of the largest land animals, we're also one of the strongest, if you did not fear to death or tried running away from a 80KG anaconda, instead decided to fight it aways, most probably you will win.
So let's start with the anaconda... most men are strong enough to lift it up and if we think we're vulnerable... it wont make sense. If the anaconda grabs one arm, we got the other, if it grabs the head and tries to suffocate, we can still move our arms and all for a while, but what if we get a grab of it's neck tight and to top that, what if we twist it bad?... there's absolutely nothing an anaconda can do, death will come at an instant; the creature might not be able to tell but it will realize humans are pretty powerful creatures physically.
A very powerful thing that we can do is kick, ever realized the amount of muscle around your legs... the thickness of your thies and how fat your ass is? And ever realize how high we can jump with it?... if that impulse (of the order of tons) is applied to your rival, you will know the consequence, what if you just dropkick and it hits your competitor straight?... it might fracture a few bones and after that the wild animal will never face a human... it'll be surely shot afraid. Currently we don't keep any nails on our toes, but you would have noticed it grows pretty thick and will actually work like a small dagger if you do have them.
Next comes the weight. So what if you just fall down on the animal... what will it be able to do?... that's right, nothing. So we got the weight advantage. Instead something like this happens to us, we can at least grab um by our hands by at least a small angle, our limbs have enough flexibility to reach our backs, and we can at least attempt!
Then comes the hands. Something that most land animals miss and our unique weapon. Our hands can slide to the animal's throat, then we can grab some of it's vital organs and cause some serious damage after which the animal won't forget till death (which will be soon). Our hands have fingers which are 'sort of' blunt, but what if you combine with all your force and push it into the animal's eyes or ears?, sure that might hurt you, but it'll hurt your opponent harder. Let's see other things that our hands can do – pull it's ears, pock into it's ears, grab the tongue, and best of all... pull his balls, or private organs... or punch the lower back side which's usually uncovered and very vulnerable.
So next time you see a wild animal or even something crazy like a bear or tiger attacking you (and it's too late to run away), instead of trying to run, stand helpless praying for god, or searching for a weapon which you know is not around; think about these few things that you were born with and use them to your best struggle to survival.
Of course prevention is better than cure, even the animals know that, so should you.
Sabayon Gentoo Symbiosis
Although many people might not notice, but this sort of relationship is unique and one of it's kind, this is the most effective relationship an OS can have on another.
The devs of the binary based distros have to compile packages on their own. They need to take care of it's dependencies, compile time parameters, environment, any sorta group etc... this's what all Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora etc... devlopers have to take care of, except Sabayon.
For Sabayon devs all this job is done by the source based distro Gentoo, this might not sound great, but actually it is. You see both Sabayon and Gentoo have users, so by this relationship the users can utilize the efforts that the devs do while making an ebuild (or Gentoo packages if you don't know); efforts like the dependencies, compile time parameters all can be user set in Gentoo... and this is what the Sabayon devs take advantage of. All they do is simply compile the Gentoo ebuilds with standard parameters so as to make a great generic desktop, thus the Sabayon team is effectively of the size Gentoo + Sabayon devs and the Gentoo users are of the size Gentoo + Sabayon; making a large community.
The devs of the binary based distros have to compile packages on their own. They need to take care of it's dependencies, compile time parameters, environment, any sorta group etc... this's what all Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora etc... devlopers have to take care of, except Sabayon.
For Sabayon devs all this job is done by the source based distro Gentoo, this might not sound great, but actually it is. You see both Sabayon and Gentoo have users, so by this relationship the users can utilize the efforts that the devs do while making an ebuild (or Gentoo packages if you don't know); efforts like the dependencies, compile time parameters all can be user set in Gentoo... and this is what the Sabayon devs take advantage of. All they do is simply compile the Gentoo ebuilds with standard parameters so as to make a great generic desktop, thus the Sabayon team is effectively of the size Gentoo + Sabayon devs and the Gentoo users are of the size Gentoo + Sabayon; making a large community.
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