Improve modem connection under heavy disk activity 3707

Actually Gentoo does have hdparm support in its rc scripts, and a config fileetc-conf.d-hdparm. The config parameters are by default -u1 I believe. It would be better if they were, as you suggest and as I have set myself, '-d1 -u1 -c1 -m16'. The hdparm rc script isn't in either the boot or default runlevel by default. I had to add it with 'rc-update add hdparm boot'. That could have documented that better.

With Gentoo you generally compile your own kernel. I'm confident that the stock kernel - as in the one that the installer uses - has support for all the PCI IDE chipsets compiled in, however the installation instructions don't instruct you on the need to compile support for your chipset into the kernel you build yourself. I would have done this only my chipset was not a 'direct match' and I wasn't aware of the importance of this option, so I chose not to configure it rather than possibly configure something that wouldn't work.

On a side note, the rc setup for Gentoo really is well designed. It neatly separates rc scripts and their config files, it deals effectively with dependencies - something no other distro that I've seen does, it keeps track of the status of a service (started or stopped), it automatically starts the dependencies of a service that you start manually and it seems to be easy to write your own script utilising default functions where appropriate - although I haven't had need to do so as yet.

Also the packaging system for Gentoo is very well designed. I've been using Debian and in the end the database of which packages I had installed got totally messed up - it was impossible to install anything without it offering to uninstall a whole lot of unrelated stuff. Apart from the extra time that it takes to compile (which I don't mind so much because you can customise it for your specific CPU rather than generic i386) I find that Gentoo's portage system is superior to Debian's otherwise leading apt- package management tools. It handles dependencies with as much skill. The only minor niggle I have is that it won't warn you of dependent packages when you attempt to uninstall a package, although it will warn if it is an important system package. This is easily solved by running a manual check first.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw in a rap for Gentoo since I've only recently swapped from Debian.