Re: GENTOO
  By: Carol Shenkenberger to Angus McLeod on Sun Mar 16 2008 09:48 am

 >  > Why/how does Gentoo deliver that "tiny bit more" that
other distros can't
 > 
 > Probably something related to his specific hardware platform.  My box for ex
 > ple likes SuSe but wasnt as fast or happy with some of the other ones I've
 > tried.  Nothing wrong with those other products, just minor differences in
 > hardware support that made that one run more optimal for me.

You compile Gentoo packages from source with flags for your specific
architecture. Some binary distros set flags pretty far back to support a large
array of older archs -- for example, Slackware still compiles for i486 last I
checked. Mandrake (now Mandriva I think?) was one of the first distros to break
i386 compat and go for i586 and higher.

Anyway, there's a TON of compiler flags for CPUs. Just about every iteration of
Intel and AMD processor has it's own flag.

Beyond the architecture flags though, Gentoo has flags for packages to compile
in/out features as well. If you're building a very special purpose machine,
you can trim out all the features you'll never use. I don't know that many
people go that far. Most compile for their architecture, and then set flags for
their favorite desktop environment (if building a desktop distro).



- Ibanez

-----
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name.
     Thy programs run, thy syscalls done,
     In kernel as it is in user!



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