Gentoo binary packages
For the longest time I resisted any of the -bin packages provided in Gentoo. There were two reasons for this: Gentoo is a source-based distribution and with -bin packages I felt you didn’t get the best optimization for your hardware. I’ve now decided that I’m going to give in and use the binary packages on a select few applications that typically take way too long to build from sources.
The initial trial was done with OpenOffice. I did this for two reasons: the latest OpenOffice 2 Beta wasn’t available to build from source and last December when I build OpenOffice 1.1.4 it took my machine (2GHz P4) 9 hours and 36 seconds. Yup, nine hours. Overnight. When nothing else was running on my laptop. Did I mention it was nine hours? I decided that the slight optimization benefit, if any, that I was getting out of building OpenOffice from source was outweighed by the wear and tear of my processor and the hassles around trying to build the program when nothing else needs to be run. Not to mention the benefit of getting the latest beta of OpenOffice to use. It’s a good trade-off. And the new Beta 2 (known as 1.9.128) is really slick.
Mon, 12 Sep 2005 16:07 Posted in Linux
