Linked by Dave Scott on Mon 17th Mar 2003 17:36 UTC
I recently read Dustin Wilson's Newbie Gentoo Review and as a 'n00b' who recently installed Gentoo, I found it to be a good article about Gentoo. It is a very good overview of the installation and configuration process. After reading all the comments about how most people thought or were looking for it to be a newbie walkthrough, I thought that as a 'n00b' who has recently installed Gentoo, I would try to write a little something about installing Gentoo for the newbie.
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USE flags have very sane defaults. If in doubt, don't turn everything on, nor turn anything off. Additions are relatively safe but they will increase compile times and dependencies unnecessarily. Turning some defaults off will not break your system either, but if you later find out you needed a flag, you have to recompile everything using that flag. So it is wise to leave them alone, unless you know what you are doing.
Optimization flags aren't supposed to break your system either. ebuilds, presumably, forbid use of some flags on per-compilation basis. That is, even if you specify -O3, unless you change the ebuild itself, your -say- noatun compilation will use -O2 when -O3 is known to fail. However they are not so safe, because unlike USE flags, it is not possible to foresee the consequences of compilation flags on a new release. Someone has to fail building with their flags and file a bug report for maintainers to find out about bad the interaction. That someone may be you. -march=i686 -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer, together with overriding by ebuilds where known to be dangerous is safe %99 of the time. -march=athlon-xp -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer is probably the most heavilty tested combination. If some ebuild fails with it, you will instantly be notified by someone in the forums.
Rule of thumb, if you use gentoo, use it like everone else does as much as practically possible. Some USE and optimization flags are very well tested and you should take advantage of that. That you can tweak the hell out doesn't mean you should. Gentoo gives you flexibility, use that with caution.