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Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

rachelbythebay.com

271–280 of 284 posts

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#271

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

The guide was pretty good as I remember, I ran Gentoo through most of university. It did take a while from a stage1 install though.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#272

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. Might give it a try again.

It might have a lot to do with the high profile nature of gentoo on the /g/ board on 4chan. There are a lot of people still on the gentootrain.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't clear to me, but in the light of your comment, I see that it's plausible. Thank you. It always throws me when someone suggests an exercise, and someone, in reply, says, "Or instead, do this other thing." I'm oddly reminded of when we were recruiting and asked people to write some code to solve a specific task and bring it to the interview for discussion. Someone said "This spec is obvious nonsense" and pr…

That's hilarious. You would at least want to get right the spec you came up with yourself, one would suspect.

“Look my code is perfect, I’m not a BA so the spec might be off!”

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#274

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. Might give it a try again.

> Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense.

I used Gentoo as my main OS for multiple years over a decade ago, installed it a couple of times, and helped with the localization of several documents, but I still remember the installation being basically the same as it is now.

I’m honestly wondering what is meant by this statement?

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily a myth anymore, strangely. If you apt/rpm install something nowadays, it probably wasn't built with support for newer CPU instructions (AVX, AES-NI, sometimes even SSE4). -march=native is gonna have a much bigger effect now than stage 1 Gentoo installs did in the mid-2000s. (and, yes, I do remember waiting a full day for KDE to compile) https://web.archive.org/web/20080704112619/http://funroll-lo...

> -march=native is gonna have a much bigger effect now than stage 1 Gentoo installs did in the mid-2000s. Actually, probably quite the contrary. All x86-64 chips are required to support SSE2, which lets you use SSE for floating-point instead of x87 floating-point, which is a big speed win. But the newer extensions are specialized SSE instructions, which generally require manual use of instructions to utilize; special…

Thanks for the more detailed information. I was under the impression that compilers would automatically use SSE3+ and AVX when appropriate.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#276

This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse ma…

I bought the computer, installed Mandrake Linux on it via CD but didn't know how to configure the modem. So I would make notes/print out manuals regarding modem configuration and try them at home daily - until the sweet sweet line noise of connection happened and I was online.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. Might give it a try again.

> Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense. I used Gentoo as my main OS for multiple years over a decade ago, installed it a couple of times, and helped with the localization of several documents, but I still remember the installation being basically the same as it is now. I’m honestly wondering what is meant by this statement?

In the past you used to be able to choose from various stages, which went down to _very low_ level. Now you must start from stage 3, which is already a (slim, but) fully bootstrapped/running installation, which you customize from there.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#279

This is basically what early Gentoo releases were like... A hilariously minimal tool chain and a txt guide to compiling and configuring every piece between basically nothing and a functioning web browser. A typical speed run took a day because compilation times were long. And if you realized late that you'd made a fatal mistake, starting over took a loooong time. #pepperidgefarmremembers

We run two servers and one laptop on Gentoo Linux. Other two boxes run Arch Linux. :)

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#280
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when you want speed and precision. the area of touchpad is far greater and it shows when you want to draw something, or move cursor between edges of the screen. that's the same as playing first person shooter on console controller vs the mouse.

Not even talking about the haptic feedback, pressure sensitivity (fun for drawing, handy for quicklook and dozens of other things). Precision? Oh yes. Moving per pixel is bliss. It might sound elitist, but if someone tells me they have a better input interface than one of apple's trackpad, my mind goes somewhere else. I even replaced the mouse at my work with their trackpad. I remember when I was big at CSGO and want…

> It might sound elitist, but if someone tells me they have a better input interface than one of apple's trackpad, my mind goes somewhere else.

I don't think it sounds elitist, but just presumptuous. I don't actually think a TrackPoint is superior in every case, and I think Apple has done a great job for a trackpad, but at the same time I'd hate to go back to a trackpad for general use.

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