Gentoo-configs is a project mainly written in Shell, it's free.
common configs from my last gentoo setup
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While cleaning my digital archives, I stumpled upon the backup configs for the gentoo system that got me through my bachelors degree @ UPenn. So I decided to jot down some notes and memories of a 5 year learning experience with one of the best linux os.
My gentoo setup (the final cut as of early 2010):
Some of my favorites + frequently used admin: conky, sudo, syslog-ng editors: nano, vim emulation: wine, virtualbox misc: screen media: feh, gimp, xzgv, mpc, mpd, ncmpc, mplayer net: arping, arpwatch, iptraf, netcat, nmap, tcpdump, traceroute, wireshark sys: cpufreqd, hibernate, vixie-cron, ntfs3g, grub www: firefox, links, lighttpd wm: fluxbox wm-misc: xbindkeys, xscreensaver, slim
This file contains the settings for portage - Gentoo's package manager. Typically I'll use -O3 (which will pull in tons of additional optimizations), sse for float point arithmetics, and pipe (to avoid using tmpfiles). This seems to be a solid and consistent setting for both stable and unstable branch. Another interesting flag was unroll-loops (or unroll-all-loops) which, as the name implies, peel or unroll loops. I didn't notice any performance difference, but compile time was longer.
One of the most interesting feature of Gentoo was building the kernel from source. I know you can do that in any linux, but in Gentoo it's recommended. There's genkernal which automate this process by detecting your hardware. It will build everything as module and load them dynamically at startup. But for the more adventurous, you build it by hand. Most of modules in the kernel are well documented, you can read about what it does and choose to include it or not. The first few attempts your kernel will probably panic and fail to boot, but once you get it you'll have a really optimized kernel that will load up faster than a speeding bullet.
List of kernels I've tried: gentoo-sources, vanilla-sources, no-sources, reiser4-sources, viper-sources, mm-sources, ck-sources, (and there are more unstable ones I used briefly with custom schedulers that I don't remember right now).
Gentoo-sources is the default kernel as the name suggests, but people will often choose other branches that have new features and optimizations. My kernel choice was heavily influenced by whether the kernel branch had the features I was looking for such as the latest filesystem. Even to this day the powers that be refuse to add Reiser4 to main (claiming it broke certain linux standards). Towards the end of my gentoo journey, I settled in comfortably with gentoo-sources and just patched in anything I needed (reiser4, hibernate2, etc).
Hardware specs for my third and last gentoo laptop