[Flamed_Chip]

I've not had a lot of experience with Linux really, a brief bit of FC2 and Mandrake, but they really didn't suit what I want. Neither of them were really helping me to learn Linux the way I want. After a bit of reading and consideration I decided to just jump in at the deep end and start with Gentoo. As I only have a spare rig, that has no monitor and my laptop with me at uni I had to do the whole thing through SSH. After typing in the first few commands to start the sshd blind, I was up and running. I decided to build from stage 1 to help learn as much as possible. I spent a lot of time researching and setting various gcc flags and USE settings and got everything configured the way I want. After a long, long time I finally have the machine up and running! I had to recompile the kernel a number of times to get my network card to be detected (ok I cheated and borrowed a monitor for this bit) but it is all good now.

I have it built without X etc. as it as no monitor so there wouldn't be much point. I am going to use this machine as my web/ftp/file server. With no extra services installed but the sshd the ram usage is only 23MB after boot! It all seems very fast. I have used the LDFLAGS options set in my make.conf. Once question I have, is it still worth pre linking even though I'm using LDFLAGS?

I am pleased I chose to start straight with Gentoo as just installing it has taught me a huge amount about Linux I could have never hoped to learn using FC2/Mandrake. Although a little difficult I'd advise anyone new to Linux who wants to learn to try it! Once it is setup the package management it brilliant aswell!

[Suicide Al]

Read through this and that should help you with what you need.

[Gnufsh]

If you'e just using it as a server, I doubt you'll see much improvement from prelinking or LDFLAGS. These only help with startup times. If it's a server, I assume all your programs are going to be running just about constantly.

[jcw122]

hmm makes me tempted to uninstall my Mandrake partition and install Gentoo...i installed mandrake but never used it, couldn't find any drivers for my wireless card. But then again, I dont know anything about linux so yeah.

[Flamed_Chip]

Cheers for the advice. Even if there is little improvement from using LDFLAGS everything seems to work fine using it so I may aswell leave it as it is. I can't believe how quick this system is in comparison to linux versions i've used before. Just recompiled the kernel again to include a couple more modules. I'm getting used to this now, it's no where near as daunting as it first seems.

@jcw122 - I'd deffinatly give Gentoo a try. As long as you have enough patience to read up on what everything does and don't rush setting up your USE flags it's not that difficult.

[jcw122]

Flamed, thanks for the advice, i might be giving it a try as soon as i get some time to do so, mabe next weekend! the whole idea of building everything and gentoo being nearly fully customizable is AWESOME! tweak tweak tweak! lol