Compiling…
September 4th 2003
I’ve been installing Gentoo Linux since about 2 today. I had been meaning to reinstall Linux, and I was looking around for what people thought was the best distribution, and I found that Gentoo had quite a following, and is “highly customizable,” so the web site says. Well, it turns out that it’s more than highly customizable — it compiles everything from source directly on your system, starting with the compiler itself. That means that absolutely everything is optimized for your computer specifically. This may sound complex, but with Gentoo, it’s really as simple as typing “emerge package” which results in the latest version of the package and all its dependencies (things it needs to run) being downloaded and compiled and installed. It’s also that easy to update/patch/restore every single package ever installed on your computer. This package maintenance program is called “Portage,” and from what I’ve seen, it’s very very cool.
I’m beginning to learn that the worst thing you can possibly do while your computer is compiling is to watch. It is best to do other things — watching water boil, for example. At the water gives you coherent evidence that it will finish in some finite amount of time. (Compiling just gives you about a million pages of cryptic compile commands and messages that flash by at about 20 lines per second with no light at the end of the tunnel– and no tunnel, either, come to think of it).
So I think I’ll go do something more interesting. But I can’t wait until this thing finishes compiling; hopefully before midnight… ::