My Acer Aspire one Laptop with Gentoo onboard is nice and snappy! The latest versions of X are always available and certainly improve the battery life. The latest kernels have more stable wifi drivers. All in all an absolute must for such a system.

There is another major advantage of source based distro\’s. You never ever have to upgrade your distro again! In Gentoo, new libs? emerge libs and revdep-rebuild. Now all the applications that used the old libraries are rebuilt with the new libraries. This system is really the beauty of Gentoo. One install for the entire lifecycle of a machine. Always the latest and greatest software. With binary distro\’s you always have some killer app after a number of months that you want to run. Get an rpm, oops requires an update of some lib. Get the latest lib, oops requires some other update of a lib. This lib now requires an update of libc!! Upgrade… Thank goodness those times are gone!

That\’s why I run Slackware on most of my systems. You start with a fast and stable binary distro and only recompile the packages you have reason to customize.

Running the bleeding-edge versions of every package might be exciting, but it doesn\’t make for a very reliable system.

I have great respect for Gentoo, but I think it\’s overkill for most practical use cases.

One of the great benefits of a distro is that someone else has resolved this complexity for you. This can mean the difference between getting something to work and not.

So what I want to know about Gentoo, is how is this dealt with? Is it possible to compile a package like ffmpeg with all the options, or will it bog down part way through? (Like I did.)

1. I\’m not running the latest hardware, so compiling for the specific processor gives me the best performance.
2. I use encryption on all my hard drives. I installed into fully encrypted partitions; most other distro\’s require installing first then moving to encrypted partitions. If I screw-up the kernel build and it doesn\’t boot, I can always boot the minimal live cd and decrypt / mount everything and try the build again.
3. The incremental updates over time, I always have a system that is as up to date as I want it to be.

Hey Typhoid; There have been some recent package blockages that seemed like circular dependencies, but what happed was a package was moved from one category to another: dev-misc to dev-lang. realizing that, the blocking package could be unmerged and then the emerge would proceed. The only other circular dependency I know of is when building some of the libraries for a package like ffmpeg, but if you follow the guide it recommends emerging a couple of the libs with restrictive use flags first, then again later with them the way you want. A lot of times this is spelled out in ewarn messages during the emerge.

My only complaint is that sometimes a package can have 100\’s of dependencies, and the scroll back on my terminal is limited, so I miss some of the ewarn messages. Then there is the case where something fails in the middle, so you have to change something and resume; I feel like I miss some important ewarn messages, so I have to go back through the emerge logs to make certain.

@typhoidmary: Gentoo\’s use flags should take care of that for you. When you emerge ffmpeg it lists all the possible flags which will provide all the features. Specifying them all should then pull in all required deps and build them in order. It should work correctly every time.

-c