If that weren’t enough, Gentoo has native ports of most Ruby gems, so
emerge
rmagick for example works nicely too. When you emerge rubygems, and then
run something like emerge rmagick, it will put a gem entry in the gem list
–local command, unlike Debian. In other words, Gentoo’s emerge and Ruby’s
gems don’t fight each other like they do on most other distros.
Yeah … and when a new release comes out, assuming they haven’t already
done so, you can go into their Bugzilla and say “time to do a version
bump on …” and they usually get to it if it’s got a maintainer. And if
it doesn’t have a maintainer, you probably want to be looking for
alternatives.
Also, Gentoo’s install procedure teaches you quite a bit about Linux.
You’ll know more about your system after doing it, and have a leg up on
knowing how to use Linux right from the start.
One caution with that is that Gentoo administration knowledge doesn’t
translate immediately into Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu
administration knowledge. The Gentoo people have gone out of their way
to make things easy, as have the Red Hat and Debian people, but all the
config files are in different places on the three variants. I haven’t
the foggiest idea, for example, how to configure vsftpd on a Red Hat or
Debian box, but I can do it in my sleep on Gentoo.
blasted). Your numbers look suspicious to me, but I’m also not doing any
137.658000 0.060000 137.718000 (137.719000)
Matrix of dimension 256 times its inverse = identity? true
to the hardware! Somebody (please repost – I’ve forgotten the details)
required and rebuild your Ruby interpreter from source using
willing to force other precipitous decisions.
Especially since we’re mostly volunteers here … I wouldn’t expect, for
example, Curt to start building chip-specific One-Click Installers or
Instant Rails.
My tests (looking for the benchmark code now… without much luck thus
far…) stressed file read and object allocation ops, rather than
aiming for a ‘pure CPU’ test of Ruby. I did this because I feel it
best reflects running test suites, and that’s the slowest thing I do
with Ruby. Heh.
In that kind of environment, the gap between Linux and Win32 was much,
much wider. This makes me believe it is a platform problem, not
(mostly) a compiler issue. I get 0% speedup on this test by switching
from VC6 to VC7.1, and I tried twenty or thirty different combinations
of compiler flags.
Yeah … PC Linux is easy to make LiveCDs with. Almost any LiveCD Linux
will allow you to access a USB drive – just mount it the way you’d
mount any other partition. Unfortunately, there are a couple of gotchas
with USB drives. They are almost always formatted FAT32, so almost any
OS can read them. You’re better off formatting them with a Windows
machine – sometimes when you format them on Linux, Windows has a
problem reading and writing them.
Absolutely! In fact, the Gentoo LiveCD is Gnome only because of space
considerations, but the LiveDVD has both. I think your only reasonable
options are Kubuntu (the KDE flavor of Ubuntu) and Gentoo if you want to
stay close to the upstream releases of KDE, Ruby and Rails.
For the sake of completeness, the only difference between Ubuntu,
Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or Whichevertheheckubuntu is what will show up when
you boot the Live CD, and what the installer will set up by default.
Once running off the repositories, there’s no practical difference
between the flavours, and you can swap between flavours by replacing the
*ubuntu-desktop metapackage.
of compiler flags.
In a related development, it took some doing, but I managed to get the
CygWin compiler to build Ruby today. On a P4 compiled with O2 and
“march=pentium4” it was still a dead heat between the recompiled Cygwin
Ruby and the One-Click Ruby on my matrix benchmark. I managed to get a very small improvement by going to O3. Not enough to claim success, in
other words.
I’m probably going to load the Beta Windows Vista Ani B so graciously
handed out at RubyConf on my Athlon T-Bird, since I just stuffed a new
hard drive in it. Once that’s done, I’ll grab Visual Studio Express and
SQL Server 2005 express and see what sort of magic I can make happen
with NTFS.
