# I've almost given up

## Dud3!

I'm pretty miserable and sick right now, so I normally wouldn't have this attitude.  I've been using Linux since 2001 and Gentoo since whatever date I joined this forum so I'm very familiar with the many and frequent frustrations of using gentoo.  I've always used development, I've only tried stable once and it was even more trouble, I always went too long between updates and had to figure out how to fix every broken thing for two days before I could use my computer again.  I know it's hard being on the cutting edge, but this time I think I've had it.

I quit using my desktop (1.4GHz athlon xp running at 2.2GHz, 1GB ram, geforce 6x videocard, waaay outdated) at the beginning of the year when I was given a laptop.  It's an HP DV9310 (turion 64 dual core, 1GB, nvidia, sata) still outdated but hey, it was free and it's has a 17" display.

Anyway, it had Vista on it and was constantly plagued by crashing due to a "hardware problem", so when I got it, I threw debian on it to make sure it was working before I invested all the time in setting up gentoo.  It worked perfectly, only thing I had to do was tell debian yes, I really do want to use non-free stuff so I could get my wireless firmware and all was well, until two weeks ago when I decided I need to move back home to gentoo.

I posted a thread asking about getting the thermal stuff and backlight working earlier, but, now that I have that resolved, I have a serious problem that apparently everyone else has as well.  Any time I try to do anything besides look at a couple webpages, my computer becomes unusable.  Compiling brings the computer to its knees, k3b can't rip an audio CD without freezing every few seconds, then completely freezing at the last track, grip works but takes forever, encoding audio, any kind of cpu/disk intensive operations make this computer seem like a 300MHz celeron.

Everything works beautifully in Debian, in fact, I reinstalled Debian to see if I could learn anything from it to help me set up gentoo.  I have tried the things mentioned on the forums about amd64 responsiveness, tried zen-sources, tried cfs, bfs, cfq, bfq, lkml patches, gentoo-sources, gentoo-sources with patches, tweaking this and tweaking that, I've compiled kernels about 25 times and I really can't take it any more.

Can anyone convince me not to leave gentoo after all these years and take the easy way out with Debian?  Sorry to be so negative, but I can't seem to find a solution to this.  I don't have new hardware that just came out last week, it's not a linux issue or Debian would have issues as well, its just gentoo and it really sucks because I don't want to use another distro.  

Any help is greatly appreciated, I'm going to give it a week before I give up and go back to Debian.

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## NeddySeagoon

Dud3!,

I guess your system is hit by the IOwait issue?

Look in top when its busy ... if most of the CPU time is used for waiting, thats your issue.

There is a very new kernel patch that address that, at least partially. There was a link posted on the forums a few days ago.

Can you run the Debian kernel under gentoo?

I guess that udev won't like that.

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## krinn

why aren't you running x86 version ? To my knowledge the x86 doesn't suffer from high IO plague.

and if you are still thinking x86-64 > x86 speed, this is just myths, and, specially if you have the IO trouble

It's also, how to say that, kinda looking weird when you compare a debian that made its name on stability (and people rant them because they never update if the new stuff isn't test a long time) vs a gentoo running a zen kernel.

All i see in zen kernel is crazy people patching a kernel to have the most of anything without taking in count stability, as long as it speed up, yeah baby ! burn !

I'm not saying zen sucks, just zen isn't my taste, and i understand zen fill some people needs, it's just that i really don't get people using zen & complaining about it.

You have the right for example to use the latest "top-next-high" FS like brtfs, you don't really have right to complain if that FS kill your datas considering its state.

So your gentoo is nearly what you want it to be (it's not linuxfromscratch, but you have so much power in altering it), if your gentoo sucks, sorry dude, your fault and if you can't keep up, try any other distro that will do the work for you (it's not always bad to have a distro that fix limits for you if you can't fix it yourself).

But, in end, you may see as we said in france (not sure the translation will be good, but i'm sure you might get the point): "grass looks always greener elsewhere"

But linux distro have something windows doesn't have: they are free, so installing gentoo+debian+any other free linux distro and play with them ! You may find one that you really love, it will coast you time only, and the experience might saved you time later.

Why should we convince you to keep using a distro you don't like ? Because we use it and like it ? Even if the distro doesn't fill your needs ? This might save our distro if users doesn't leave it, but this won't be the first time a good thing die because nobody have a need for it.

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## Dud3!

Would running gentoo x86 be as fast as debian amd64 (what I have installed).  What's the point of having a 64 bit dual core system if I'm just going to be running all 32 bit stuff like I would be if I had windows?

I don't mind redoing gentoo as non-64, I just need to know if this is a good solution.  

I'm not comparing debian's stability with gentoo, I don't really care about stability, I've never had any problems with stability and gentoo, just getting everything to work at the same time.  When gentoo works, it works, no problems.  I just can't seem to get it to that point on an AMD64 platform.  

Also, I'm currently using the latest plain, boring, gentoo kernel and it's no different from all the other kernels I've tried in desperation.  I quit using zen since it didn't do anything for performance.

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## Amity88

 *Dud3! wrote:*   

> Would running gentoo x86 be as fast as debian amd64 (what I have installed).  What's the point of having a 64 bit dual core system if I'm just going to be running all 32 bit stuff like I would be if I had windows?
> 
> 

 

Dude, if you believe that 64bit means 'twice' the speed, I'm pretty sure you would be disappointed. I use a 64bit version of Gentoo myself, it doesn't have any problems and the speed improvements are minor(if they are present). Maybe, programs need to be rewritten to specifically utilize all the extra registers etc etc more efficiently.... as of now the most noticeable difference from an x86 system would be higher memory access.

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## DaggyStyle

 *Dud3! wrote:*   

> I'm pretty miserable and sick right now, so I normally wouldn't have this attitude.  I've been using Linux since 2001 and Gentoo since whatever date I joined this forum so I'm very familiar with the many and frequent frustrations of using gentoo.  I've always used development, I've only tried stable once and it was even more trouble, I always went too long between updates and had to figure out how to fix every broken thing for two days before I could use my computer again.  I know it's hard being on the cutting edge, but this time I think I've had it.
> 
> I quit using my desktop (1.4GHz athlon xp running at 2.2GHz, 1GB ram, geforce 6x videocard, waaay outdated) at the beginning of the year when I was given a laptop.  It's an HP DV9310 (turion 64 dual core, 1GB, nvidia, sata) still outdated but hey, it was free and it's has a 17" display.
> 
> Anyway, it had Vista on it and was constantly plagued by crashing due to a "hardware problem", so when I got it, I threw debian on it to make sure it was working before I invested all the time in setting up gentoo.  It worked perfectly, only thing I had to do was tell debian yes, I really do want to use non-free stuff so I could get my wireless firmware and all was well, until two weeks ago when I decided I need to move back home to gentoo.
> ...

 

take a look at this post

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-503131-highlight-dv9000z.html

and my site.

I had similar computer and had solved most of the problems.

it sounds strange you have no problems in amd64 debian, check versions of kernel.

it is not logical that you have problems on gentoo but not on other os.

 *krinn wrote:*   

> why aren't you running x86 version ? To my knowledge the x86 doesn't suffer from high IO plague.
> 
> and if you are still thinking x86-64 > x86 speed, this is just myths, and, specially if you have the IO trouble
> 
> 

 

then disprove the facts on heavy calculation softwares such as boinc, 64 bit out speeds 32 bit software.

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## John R. Graham

Here's my opinion on this topic.    :Wink: 

- John

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## Dud3!

I wonder if Debian has some sort of hybrid thing going on where the stuff they know wont work right is 32bit and the stuff that will is 64.  Is this feasible?

Well anyway, I have a 100% working, very fast Debian testing install and I switched it over to using my main home partition last night, so I'm going to use it for now.

When I have time, I'll wipe out gentoo and go with the 32bit version and lose those bragging rights.   I realize most software doesnt utilize 64bit yet, but i thought since its linux and, even more so since its gentoo, there would be an advantage to running the 64bit flavor.  Oh well.  Whats another two weeks of my life for the sake of being a gentoo user?  :p

Thanks for the input guys, I'll let you  know how it goes and how the 32bit gentoo compares to the amd64 debian install.

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## John R. Graham

It's a little more complicated than that.  As an example, if a loop loops 10 times, how is it beneficial (or even possible) for the loop counter variable to utilize 64 bits?  There is less than 4 bits of significance in the loop counter; the rest is wasted.  It turns out that the vast majority of applications don't have any significant percentage of code that benefits from the extra significant bits of 64-bit registers.

- John

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## Dud3!

Well I ended up having a lot of time on my hands due to some very unfortunate events and I'm back with 32 less bits.  So far so good!  I'm compiling with no ill effects.  I'll have to wait and see what happens with my ipod and cd ripping/burning, but I think it'll be fine.

Everything seems to be instant, like I would expect.  Its faster than the AMD64 Debian as far as desktop use goes.  Thanks for the help guys!

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## Hu

For most applications, the value of amd64 is not the extra precision of the registers, but the greater quantity of registers and the alternative calling convention.  x86 is very register poor, and some applications have just the right number of live variables that an x86 build will require regularly spilling data to the stack, but an amd64 build can keep everything in registers.  Even with the L1 cache covering the stack spill area, keeping the data in registers is a better choice.

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## maltheus

Been really feeling your pain lately. Been using and loving Gentoo for as long as you have but this past year or two has been brutal. I can't remember the last time an emerge world hasn't broken something critical. Alsa dies every other kernel upgrade. Or some doofus decides to disable ext2 on one of the latest kernels making it impossible to boot. It's a crapshoot whether your mouse or keyboard will work in X after any minor upgrade. The QT/KDE mess nearly drove me mad. libgl and libpng kept coming back to haunt me like some supernatural monster. My list of post emerge steps (ex. python-update, revdep-rebuild, rebuild half of X) is growing out of control. Back in 2004, all you had to do was regularly run emerge world and you didn't have too many serious issues. And when you solved a problem, it was solved. It didn't keep coming back, requiring a different solution every time.

I love Gentoo, but maintaining 5 systems has become a full time job. Been distro hunting this morning but Gentoo has spoiled me too much. When it works, it's the best distro out there. But if it's going to continue to disintegrate like it has, then I guess I'll have no choice but to jump on the ubuntu bandwagon. Ugh.

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## NeddySeagoon

maltheus,

 *Quote:*   

> Or some doofus decides to disable ext2 on one of the latest kernels making it impossible to boot.

 The kernel never reads /boot, so the boot filesystem is not needed in the kernel to boot.  You do need it for your next kernel update but a module works for that.

 *Quote:*   

> It's a crapshoot whether your mouse or keyboard will work in X after any minor upgrade

 Thats an upstream thing, not a Gentoo issue. 

 *Quote:*   

> The QT/KDE mess ...

 No comment as I'm a GNOME user.

 *Quote:*   

> ... libpng ...

  That was a bit of an issue.

A binary distro will insulate you from these issues, in exchange you lose control/flexibility.

Its a trade off only you can make.

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## twstd3bc

I used Gentoo for nearly seven years (2002-2009), but got frustrated with emerge updates breaking CUPS functionality.  I got fed up around the same time I got a job requiring all my time.  So I installed Lenny last year (with backports), and it really is nice to go more than a year with software updates never causing problems.  After the Squeeze freeze, I decided to upgrade, and the almost daily updates remind me of Gentoo-- ironically, an update did something strange to the avahi daemon, and screwed up CUPS.  Gentoo is cool, but Debian is way cool if you don't have much spare time.  The only drawback is there is no trolling in the Debian forums-- really boring :)

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