Whoa, didn't mean to start a mini flame war!
I think the portage system does wonders with the dependencies, and as I
understand it portage is very BSD-like (I don't have any experience with
BSD yet) with their package system.
OK, one box boots up in 24 seconds (from GRUB menu to XDM login), and the
other in 16 seconds (GRUB to CLI login). Now, thats a lot faster than
default Red Hat installs, which can take minutes on a similarly capable
machine. A good part of the faster bootup is that my Gentoo installation
is, at least for now, much leaner than Red Hat and doesn't have to load
as many daemons.
But major distros like Red Hat, for compatibility sake, compile their code
(or at least used to) as i386 for compatibility. Some have moved to i586.
But my gentoo box is specifically compiled for the P4 with O3 compile
flag. So that does speed things up a bit.
Also, I run seti@home 24/7 on my personal boxes, so I never have any idle
CPU percentages. On Red Hat seti@home would slow me down when I was
really working the computer's resources. Haven't seen that happen yet in
Gentoo.
So, maybe its not the compiles that make it faster. But the capability to
customize it, its inherent leanness (do I really want to install this if
it takes 4 hours to compile)?, and its package system make it my linux
distro of choice.
Ryan Caron
ACM Secretary
