On 11/15/06, Brad Fuller <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mark Knecht wrote:
<SNIP>
> > It's a lot of work but it's been very stable for me. Thanks Mark, I'll check it out. How long does it take to start from scratch? I have an P4 1.8 that I'd try it on. Then, how long does it take from start (from the small set you mentioned) to a full DAW?
Brad, I've done it so many times I cannot count them anymore. I can probably have a very minimal DAW up and running in about 1 day. It takes about 2-3 hours, in my experience, to get through the Gentoo basic install guide and get the machine to boot your first Gentoo kernel. You probably have root and one user account. ssh is running, etc. After the Gentoo kernel is installed I do an emerge sync / emerge system to get all the basic system up and running, and then an emerge world. If I started at 8AM I'd probably have the emerge world step running mid-afternoon. Then you just wait for a bunch of compiles to get do. At this point all you have is a text based Gentoo box that's up to date. At this point I start adding apps - X, my windowing system, etc. That stuff will run a while - maybe a couple of hours - and maybe in the evening I'd have fluxbox running. There are other issues to possibly consider. gcc has recently reved to version 4. I don't know if any of the LiveCDs are based on gcc-4 yet. If they are you will save yourself a MAJOR headache. If you have to do a full gcc upgrade after a normal install then add in another day's work. That would be a tough way to start. You don't have to upgrade to gcc-4 but there are good reasons to do so, especially for AMD64 users like myself. Again, I'm not pushing Gentoo here. Gentoo is a lot of work, but it's a constant workload. you just keep doing it over and over, building code. The machine is always very up to date, but it's a lot of work.
Also, what is your experience with full distro upgrades?
Terrible. It was my ONLY reason for leaving the PlanetCCRMA flow. I loved all the support I got from Fernando but had terribly luck with upgrades and I found it hard with my limited skill set building code from scratch. It's been a lot easier on Gentoo. One thing about a code based distro is it teaches you a lot about building code yourself.
You say you do minor upgrades while working during the day. Can you really do real-time audio work while upgrading?
Lightly loaded real-time audio is not a problem for me. I'm RME HDSP 9652 based here.
I have to admit, it sounds like a lot of crunching. What kind of problems do you run into? My biggest complaint for running from source, as anyone would attest, is the dependencies - secondary sources that I have to find and compiles. When finally found, you have to compile, and then there may be yet another problem with the dependency! This could be a continuous problem, as you probably very well know. Is this reasonably accommodated with Gentoo (like using a package manager)?
Dependencies are not much of an issue on Gentoo. The emerge package manager does a great job of that. You can pretty easily both see and control what revisions of packages you have loaded and any package you emerge has all the dependenciy requirements built in so it will upgrade dependencies if necessary.
thanks, brad (are you running MythTV on Gentoo?)
Yes - All Linux machines here, 5 total, are Gentoo. My wife's desktop is a 2 tuner server. My son and I both watch on our desktop machines. We also have two Pundit R machines that are dedicated frontend boxes hooked to our 2 TVs. Cheers, Mark
