Oops... You are of course 100% correct! You see, I forgot that detail becuase with cable modem on my dual-Athlon and -j 3 compile option, I can churn through serious amounts of code, accomplishing most updates without much of that tedious delay....(suppose I should have indicated gloat mode?;-) Now, when I had dial-up, the downloads were always the bottlenecks! And yes, I initially used dial-up for all my installs...many hundreds of megabytes...Xdownloader was my friend then! and that's what the second line was for anyway, right ;^0 on-demand dialing and a few other tricks lets you kick off week-long download/builds in the background, but is frustrating if you are in need of a particular update! Hehe... Seriously though, occasionally when nearly full rebuilds are needed/desired, I let it run overnight(never bothered to measure total build times), unattended unlike other systems that shall remain nameless.... Ahhhh....it's nice to not have a 5-year old system! My previous system was a PII350 only about 14 months ago....so I'm sure I'll be with this machine for many years, well into it's obsolecense. And the thing that made me give up my PII 350 was not the 800-Mhz system at work, it was a dual-Zeon running Microsoft OS. The 800Mhz system's GUI environment was "stickier" than my old 350 but with the Xeon system it was too much of a disparity for me to bear. The GUI was snappy and with the help of GNU tools on WinNT at work, I was not having as much fun on the 350 as I used to. Now I have plenty of CPU time for the forseable future....more than enough to keep "mprime" running cintinuously in the background searching for mersenne primes ( www.mersenne.org) taking occasional time-outs to compile my code and do "emerge --update world" every once in a while. It is late and I'm sure I'm rambling and mispelling like crazy, hope you get a chuckle out of this. Cheers dave wrote: >Bill wrote: > > >>Ok....I'll inject my 2 cents (with interest!) >> >>I started with SLS many years ago, switched to Slackware when, well, SLS >>became defunct and Slackware took off...played with Stampede for a while >>till it's second stall...then moved to Source-mage...really liked the >>idea of casting spells and all, but the in-house bickering took it >>offline for a while and wasn't quite what I was looking for so I finally >>landed on.... >> >>www.gentoo.org >> >> >> > >ooh man, i loved gentoo! but alas, my impatience got the better of me in >the end. > >I first installed it two years ago, and it took something like a day and >a half to get from first boot to full KDE plus Mozilla, hehehe. Once >done, I loved it, the BSD flavor, the package management (emerge) and >the whole system-specific optimization. This was its downfall for me >though. I couldn't wait for the long compilations, especially large >packages, which would take hours. Also, I found the Gentoo community to >be *very* helpful, with alot less "RTFM" than you find elsewhere. After >about 6 months, I went back to Debian with my tail between my legs. Man, >if you can wait those compiles out, you're a better man than I am. :) > > > > >>...though >>apparently there are now binary-only ways of installing and ways of >>cleaning out some of the "uneeded" cruft. >> >> > >In August I decided to check out the Gentoo Reference Platform method of >installation, which is what you're referring to here. I got Gentoo up >and running (Gnome desktop, Mozilla, OpenOffice) in a couple hours, much >improved from my initial Gentoo installation. However, one thing to keep >in mind, once those CD images are more than a couple weeks old, as soon >as you do an 'emerge --update' you'll be compiling everything from >scratch anyway, which is exactly what happened to me. So, it doesn't >really get around my issue of long compilation times. Sigh.....oh, well.... > >dave > >_______________________________________________ >CCOSS mailing list >ccoss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >CCOSS mailing list page: //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=3594 >CCOSS Web page: http://www.ccoss.org > > > _______________________________________________ CCOSS mailing list ccoss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx CCOSS mailing list page: //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=3594 CCOSS Web page: http://www.ccoss.org