Can anyone help me find a good distro ?

[H_TeXMeX_H]

In my experience, no. I've compiled an entire FreeBSD system for i386, i686, and even athlon64. Synthetic benchmarks (UNIXBench, ubench) comparisons have never shown a difference to me on my system.

Ok, thanks, that's what I thought. I suppose it only makes a difference in graphics intensive programs (games included) ... this is the only place I have noticed a difference when compiling for different architectures. The difference was not really that significant either ... just 3-6 fps more or less. It might also make a difference in any program that uses a lot of CPU time ... there are not too many of those ... and if there are, just compile them yourself.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Man, FC6 is seriously fucked up ... can't detect usbs properly ... barely boots properly ... nothing works properly ! What have they done ?!?

Trying Ubuntu next, and finally Gentoo (I can feel the impending headache even now)

[toadlife]

Hey Tex, what kind of hardware do you run?  Any exotic type hardware, like usb video cams, or TV tuners?

If not, perhaps you might want to try PC-BSD. It's like FreeBSD, only super easy to install and use.  If you try it you'll have the added benefit of having someone here on the forums (ME) that can probably answer just about any post install question you have.

[mobrien_12]

Synthetic benchmarks may not be the best.  

Real world computational tests (how fast to compile something, encode to ogg vorbis, etc) do show a marginal benefit from CPU optimization, at least on all linux benchmarks I have read.  The amount depends on the type of calculation. I would be suprised if FreeBSD didn't have similar benefits.  It's really simple:  CPU architectures get newer and newer improvements to their instruction sets which you simply do not take advantage of if you don't optimize.  The improvements are obviously worthwhile since AMD and INTEL spend big bucks all the time to implement them.

Noteworthy is the 32 bit vs 64 bit optimization for x86-64.  Going to 64 bit can make some hard core calculations work faster.

If I use a program often, and it pulls significant cpu power, I will optimize it.  I've recompiled xmms so that it would minimize it's cpu impact (reduce skipping etc).  XMMS doesn't impact the cpu much, but I found optimizing it helped when I was playing music files and also pushing my cpu to 100%.



I've never bothered to optimize an entire distro before (rarely do I push my cpu to 100% utilization anyway).  I have heard anecdotal testimony that you can gain very fast systems doing so.

[mobrien_12]

If not, perhaps you might want to try PC-BSD. It's like FreeBSD, only super easy to install and use.  If you try it you'll have the added benefit of having someone here on the forums (ME) that can probably answer just about any post install question you have.

Toad, there was a freebsd-based live disk (not BSD disk 2) which was the answer to Knoppix.  I posted about it a long time ago but can't remember the name.  Do you know what it is?

[toadlife]

http://www.freesbie.org/

[pofnlice]

Man, FC6 is seriously fucked up ... can't detect usbs properly ... barely boots properly ... nothing works properly ! What have they done ?!?

Trying Ubuntu next, and finally Gentoo (I can feel the impending headache even now)

Edit out..errr...turn off SELinux. That fixed everything that was going wrong with mine.

And as far as what it's like to install Gentoo...

A pro installs Gentoo

[RaZoR1394]

If you want a fast Gentoo installation you should try using most of the things Gentoo has to offer like reiser4, package optimizations, flags etc.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-509252.html

I would really like to install this on my laptop but I just can't get it going. Nearly impossible to get the LAN running.

Personally I'm very interested in *BSD but I can't get it to run on any machine I have. I think it may be my nforce chipsets that are causing problems. It seems like a much more robust system.

[Orethrius]

You could always use ndiswrapper if you've any Win32 drivers for it...

[worker201]

Man, FC6 is seriously fucked up ... can't detect usbs properly ... barely boots properly ... nothing works properly ! What have they done ?!?

I've heard nothing but good things about it.  A pro I know set up apt repos so you can upgrade from FC5 straight through.  Maybe you should try that.  And agreed, SELinux is not for home users.

Trying Ubuntu next, and finally Gentoo (I can feel the impending headache even now)

It seems to me that Gentoo is what you want.  Meaning, you can go through and compile each package with your sse2 flags and whatnot.  Plus, if you're a rockstar, you can customize each source file to your personal needs.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

SELinux was off in FC6 and it was fucked both after updating from FC5 and also after installing from scratch.

Ubuntu failed to shutdown properly ... I attempted to fix it ... nothing, and it's too much like Window$ ... logon sound and litte popups in the taskbar ... no thanks.

I'm currently installing Gentoo ... started it 7 hrs ago .... it'll be done in the morning (it's at 50% now) ... I really hope it does work this time, I've tried to read the install instructions as carefully as possible. I also formated the root partition with JFS ... according to benchmarks it and XFS give the most performance for the things I deal with. (XFS might be better but is much more liable for patent infringement)

[pofnlice]

Plus, if you're a rockstar, you can customize each source file to your personal needs.

ROFLMFAO!!!!!

Ubuntu failed to shutdown properly ... I attempted to fix it ... nothing, and it's too much like Window$ ... logon sound and litte popups in the taskbar ... no thanks.

BOO!!!

SELinux was off in FC6 and it was fucked both after updating from FC5 and also after installing from scratch.

What? SELinux installs automatically on. "You can turn it off by setting the SELINUX variable in /etc/sysconfig/selinux to "Disabled"."---In the words of Void.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Gentoo failed to install 3x .... that's good enough an effort for now ... maybe I'll try again some other time.

Reinstalled Ubuntu ... seems the shutdown hang is due to a different version of halt (you have to use "halt -p" for it to shutdown properly ... I haven't figured out how to reboot it without it hanging (reboot -p does not work).

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, the status of Linux distros is fairly shitty if you ask me. Or maybe I haven't tried the right ones ? I've tried many so far, none have I liked completely.

Ok, I'm thinking of trying a BSD distro ... but I have no more CDs left. I have a few questions ... how many programs have been ported to BSD ? I need openoffice, hplip, xsane, madwifi, k3b, and most importantly dvorak keyboard support !

[cymon]

poweroff owns for shutdown.

[worker201]

I think you're doing something wrong.  I've gotten RedHat6, SuSE 8, Slackware 9 (20+ times, it was my learning phase), Slackware 10, FC1, FC2, FC3, FC4, FC5, and Ubuntu PPC to run with hardly any troubles whatsoever on 6 different computers.  Certainly never had one hang on shutdown.  FC4 failed on install the first time, but ran just fine the second time.

Maybe you're not setting them up right.

On Slackware, I always ran "shutdown -h now" to power down.