gentoo

This is a great article by Neal Stephenson about the evolution of the Operation System as a marketable product. His roots in computing go all the way back to punch card mainframe systems, and moved to Mac’s and then to BeOS (which I’m actually not at all familiar with). Its really a fascinating insight into how the current OS market evolved and where its possibly going. While you don’t need much computer background to grasp his points, they are firmly rooted in computing examples....

KDE ended up taking 30 hours to compile. Which I guess on a 600MHz laptop isn’t that bad. Modern systems should be much better. But the more and more I’ve played with it, the better it is. The Portage system is the way to install software. It is slower, because often you have to compile the software on your machine (but this is better anyway, because then its specifically tailored to your architecture and optomizations)....

Well the Gentoo 2.6.3 kernel finished compiling sometime around midday. I’m now installing xfree, and then onto kde. I’m told this is the longest part (20 hours of compilation time?) I can see why its more convenient to have someone else compile it (ie the package system, RPM, DEB, etc). But I always ran into trouble… either I couldn’t install the package because of invalid dependancies, or the package wasn’t available for my distribution....