ICC? Is that Intel''s C Compiler?

In that case, that would make sense why it would run that much faster, since P4s can blow anything else out of the water provided that code is opitimized for it.

<img src=http://webspace.utexas.edu/~mvdepala/random/resist-ignorance.png

Wow... I just can''t get away from hearing about Gentoo no matter where I go

About the speed comments... There are advantages to Gentoo besides any speed increases. Through things such as USE flags you can have a lot of control over your system (and what is installed) while also having extremely easy "emerge " installs with dependecy checking...

The one reason I use it is the ease of keeping things updated and current versions of everything I want to keep current.

Agreed. Honestly, emerge is why I like Gentoo, not the fact that emerge (generally) builds everything from source.

<img src=http://webspace.utexas.edu/~mvdepala/random/resist-ignorance.png

Well, it could be because I''ve switched from a bloated distribution like Mandrake to Gentoo, but I most certainly noticed a major speed -increase in most apps. For example : the Evolution mail client now takes about 4 seconds to start. Under mandrake that was most times 10 seconds or more...

I''m going to give gentoo another whack once 1.4 final comes out. Hmm, maybe I should now, since the computer I''m on now used to have Gentoo 1.2 working with it (and then I experimented with Red Hat 8 and Mandrake 9 and 9.1). My other computer though just didn''t like any of the Gentoo''s after 1.2rc2. It''s weird, on that system, mandrake would list the NIC card as a Natsemi when I did a modprobe and would use that driver just fine. However, after gentoo 1.2, the natsemi driver wouldn''t work, even if I did an insmod with it to load it manually.

I suppose I could just buy a supported NIC card, but that feels like cheating. But I agree that Gentoo did feel faster than Mandrake or Red Hat in some apps and noticeably so...while in others, I couldn''t tell the difference.

Now that I''m starting to learn Python, I think I''m going to take a crack at peeking underneath the hood of the emerge system, and see if I can figure out how it works. When you build from source tarballs, sometimes you can look at the makefile (not that I''m great with makefiles since I''m only so-so with bash scripting) to see what might be going wrong if the program didn''t install....but currently, I''d have no idea what do if it didn''t work with emerge. My one run-in with Debian was a disappointment, but I''m willing to give it another try once I get a new CPU to play with ( since I cracked the core on my third system awhile back)