Help me choose a distro - requirements inside!

J

jmahler

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 21, 2003
Messages
348
please? :)


Here's the deal - I don't care how packages are handled. I would PREFER but NOT REQUIRE a source based distro. My main concern is hardware support... as in, OUT OF THE BOX WORKING. I don't care if i have to go back and update some of the drivers for 3d or whatever, but i don't want to have X crashing on me immediately or whatnot.


Here's my specs:
Chaintech Zenith 7NJS (nforce 2)
AMD Barton 2500 (well, at 3200, but shh....)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
512 MB RAM
4x IDE drives
1x SATA drive
1x DVD-ROM
1x CD-RW


That's about it, really, what's important anyway.

I have had good experience with Mandrake in the past, but their support for ATI has blown chunks in the past - don't know if that's changed or not yet tho.

Any thoughts?
 
ATI supports sucks anyway, but that isn't the distro's fault. They are getting better, but I am a Linux noob and only have experimented with 2 different driver versions. Anyway, Gentoo might be a good choice to try. I have an Abit NF7-S w/ 2400+ and doing a Stage3 install detected all of my hardware from the get go.
 
Well, if you think you can handle a source-based distro, go for Gentoo.

If you want to make sure everything works 100% out of the box, go with LFS.
Just beware: if something doesn't work, you can't complain because there will be no one to blame except yourself. :p
 
I'll third that gentoo recommendation.

And yeah, Ati support in Linux isn't the greatest. You'll be able to set up most of the things in your comp, but might have some trouble with the ATi card.

Of course, I don't game in Linux, so I don't really care that my Radeon card doesn't have Direct Rendering enabled.
 
right then...
never used gentoo before (tho i like the idea of the source distro), how long will it take to compile a working x system? is this a weekend thing?
 
uh, that really depends on whether you go for a stage1 or 3 install, and what window manager you use, and whether or not you use grp (i did a stage 3 ...it's just easier and not that much of a performance hit - atleast i can't see the difference between 1 and 3)
For me, at default speed (see sig), using a stage3 install, xfree86.org xserver (i really like the freedesktop.org server - no 3d support tho), openbox3 + gnome-panel 2.5.2 (www.breakmygentoo.net), abiword, xmms, mplayer, mldonkey, gaim, mozilla firebird took about 4-5 hours (including configuration). do note firebird can be binary, which saves some time.

i recommend that immediatly after you do your emerge sync and update portage, you run "emerge -puD system" so you can see what needs to be updated in the base. then repeat the command without the p and let it update all your system shit (mainly gcc and glibc). in another terminal, install the kernel while the update is going.

my CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O2 -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -ffast-math -mfpmath=sse,387 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"

openoffice.org compiled took sometime over night - i'm not sure how long. my guess would be about 8 hours though. kde takes about 8, maybe less, and gnome takes maybe 5. those are damn rough estimates.
for openoffice: i used CFLAGS="-mcpu=athlon-xp -O2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -pipe" (it will automatically filter out sse floating point calculations, but whatever. do note it's very easy for this build to fail because of agressive flags and/or a hot processor. i underclocked mine before it would successfully build (and it was at stock before, with pretty decent cooling))

just post back if you need help with hardware support (or whatever) - i also fully recommend the gentoo forums (and their search works! heh)

notes: use mm-sources (i'm running 2.6.1-mm4), it contains a lot of improvements for nforce2 (i've found)
 
Gentoo is an awesome learning experience and stuff if you really wanna get into it. Its compiled, and its a great distro, but a stage1 will take forever. If you need it fast, do a stage 3 then enable everything about your drivers in the kernel and you should be good to go. They also have certain ATI-specific drivers on portage you can look into.
 
Originally posted by MTB2Live,Live4Comps
my CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O2 -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -ffast-math -mfpmath=sse,387 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"
Click to expand...

A couple notes. Sometimes you can end up with faster code using -march=i686 because GCC can better optimize it. However, this may have changed recently--though I doubt it--I haven't really looked into it in the past 6 months.
Another thing to consider is -Os instead of -O2. Os has all the same optimizations as O2 with the addition of making some optimizations to keep the size of the binary down. This will speed up load times on large applications.
Another thing... don't get too crazy with CFLAGS. The flags MTB2Live listed are as far as I'd recommend going, and there are probably at least a couple packages which may break with these flags.

just post back if you need help with hardware support (or whatever) - i also fully recommend the gentoo forums (and their search works! heh)
Click to expand...

Agreed. The gentoo community is generally extremely helpful when you run into problems. Although there were a few times I had to find the solution on my own, they're always willing to try their best to help you. You don't often see "RTFM n00b"-type responses.

notes: use mm-sources (i'm running 2.6.1-mm4), it contains a lot of improvements for nforce2 (i've found)
Click to expand...

Agree here too. The -mm patchset has some nice improvements to the 2.6 kernel.
 
Originally posted by RazeDS
A couple notes. Sometimes you can end up with faster code using -march=i686 because GCC can better optimize it. However, this may have changed recently--though I doubt it--I haven't really looked into it in the past 6 months.
Another thing to consider is -Os instead of -O2. Os has all the same optimizations as O2 with the addition of making some optimizations to keep the size of the binary down. This will speed up load times on large applications.
Another thing... don't get too crazy with CFLAGS. The flags MTB2Live listed are as far as I'd recommend going, and there are probably at least a couple packages which may break with these flags.
Click to expand...
hmm i didn't know that about -march=i686. but as for stability, openoffice.org is the only package that's caused me problems - ofcourse, that's a known picky one. all the others usually filter out those flags which don't work (-fomit-frame-pointer seems to be the most common, along side -funroll-loops which i don't use)
 
Yeah, I wouldn't get fancy with the CFlags either. I've seen programs... not work properly because of this. Here's what mine look like:

Code: 
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
 
k, thanks for the good thoughts here. going to really think about this.


the cflags thing... how do i set this?
 
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