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Blah... Just change your init to /bin/bash in your boot loader then download and install portage from http://www.gentoo.org/ then all you need to do is type "emerge system kde gnome" and you will be set to go

Portage.

For those not in the know, that's the package repository used by Gentoo. If I know what I'm looking, I search there first. (It's based off of the *BSD port trees.) If I know the genre, I can also search there by category.

For those packages that I have no clue for, I generally search the gentoo forums at forums.gentoo.org. Even for non-gentoo linux issues, this forum is very helpful, especially for scratching an itch.

This may seem a bit like zealotry, but portage is the main reason I've abandoned all other linuxes. Almost every time I've wanted software, it's been in the portage tree. The very few exceptions have meant I looked in gentoo's bugzilla for a package that hadn't made it into the public tree yet, and the only time all of this had failed, I wrote my own ebuild and posted it to bugzilla for others to use.

Gentoo: came because I was intrigued by the flexibility, stayed because I don't like installing software, or re-installing OS's, and portage and the rolling upgrades have been fantastic.

I've been using the latest 2.6 kernel, patched with Gentoo and Suspend2 patches. I started with 2.6.9, and it had some ACPI problems, but once I upgraded my BIOS to the latest version and upgraded the kernel to 2.6.10, everything worked well. Other than those specific ACPI issues, I've had no general stability problems. Everything works well.

I used to run Slackware, and I have to say that when I upgraded it from a 2.4 kernel to 2.6, the system did perform better. I think that if people just upgrade cautiously, it's fine to have the current kernel in development. Frankly, I appreciate the increases in responsiveness that the newer kernels have, and I like seeing cool new features appear in each kernel version. Why, just this version, they added support for my laptop's temperature sensor chip, which gave me access to the motherboard sensor in addition to the CPU one which is accessible via ACPI.

I don't know what all the fuss is about, but 2.6 has been great for me.

You can already run X as non-root. Just don't start X at boot-up time. Then when you're computer finishes booting, login at the console, then type 'startx' and then inside of an xterm window, start up your favorite window manager. You now have X running under your username instead of root.

There is however a security risk (to you, not the system) of running X as yourself, which is described here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/fluxbox-config.xml
Read the section entitled 'Preparing X11'

not that many people is going to notice it - devfs wasn't really used in most of mainstream distros except 2 or 3. In some cases like Mandrake, they used it and then switched back.

not that many people is going to notice it - devfs wasn't really used in most of mainstream distros except 2 or 3. In some cases like Mandrake, they used it and then switched back.

I think there's a kernel option to change this. Take a look at the Gentoo forums where there have been various threads on the matter. (I don't know much about this; my PC doesn't support cpufreq, so it's not a problem for me.)

They seem to have a good relation with both debian and gentoo. I wonder what kind of an imbecile you have to be to get a company to owe you 26860 euro. Even if you make 5000/month you'd still have to work half a year to get to that amount.

The Linux kernel has had driver support for Trusted Platform Modules chips since 2.6.12.

Gentoo appears to be the distro leading the charge.

-

Can anybody show me that Python is a realistic contender for CGI - or for that matter - any programming? I used to subject myself to a Linux distribution called Gentoo whose package mismanagement system, Portage, is mostly if not entirely done in Python. I found that for compiles of many small packages, we spent about as many CPU seconds on 'emerge' itself than we did building. Running 'emerge' on something old and spluttery like a sparc32 is just not the done thing. You've got probably 30 seconds before you've got any indication that the program has validated your input and started processing at which point you find something else to do.

At one time, what you say was true. But, with the 1.5.1 patch, several issues appeared ONLY on linux using wine or cedega:

You can't target anything. One of the workarounds for targeting NPCs, PCs, is to hit the 'v' key which will turn on a clickable bar. It is also not possible to loot corpses or treasure chests, unless you do some weird angling with the cancel (some have mentioned it's like there's a huge transparent square across the screen except on the very edge of it, which blocks clicks).

That's the only in-game workarounds I know of (that I've found on the Gentoo forums). There are currently 2 known wine/cedega workarounds, but they don't work for everyone. See: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-246098-postda ys-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html and http://transgaming.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3149& sid=478fe7a988c378ded481441f54c5ce7a for more information.

The truth of the matter is, it's not as easy as you think until you try it yourself (and believe me I've tried, I had it working fine before 1.5.1 patch). If Blizzard were to make a native client -- say, like Epic did with UT2003/2004 (used to play UT2004 on Linux some), Id did Doom 3 -- then these headaches would probably be almost non-existent.

You mean something like catalyst?

it decided that /var/lib/portage was a read only filesystem.
You probably mean /var/tmp/portage.
Now, ls, vi, top, df, mount etc etc etc all return I/O errors.
It always good to keep the emergency binaries around on a critical server: http://dev.gentoo.org/~avenj/bins/
Any ideas why that would happen?
Not really. Esp. since portage doesnt write to the live system until the compile is complete (only in the merging step).
I only had problems with that when I ran out of disc space on /var, but even then portage aborted before merging.

Yes, http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml select a mirror, go to releases and select ppc.... you can figure out the rest.

Generally you don't need to update your profile until it gets pretty old (like a 1.2 or 1.4 version) as portage handles the dependencies and upgrades once the system is installed. If you're on a 2004 or 2005 profile, you're fine as you are, even the 1.4 profiles were only warned about to push forward adaption of stacked profiles.

However, there is a page on changing your profile here

It'll likely be updated to include the 2005.1 profile in the next couple of days.

Okej, we know, everyone knows that it takes some time to compile a whole system, but that doesn't make the install complicated. If you're not sure about how to do the install, just follow the installation guide (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinst all.xml). Why does everyone keep talking about compiling the system when you boot the liveCD, that doesn't even make sense. We're talking about a graphical installer here, the CD boots an installer not automaticly starts a compilation to a ramdisk. When you INSTALL Gentoo, THEN it will compile.

LOL, I guess the saying that GUIs aren't always newbie friendly really does have some truth to it.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/scr eenshots/gtk_makedotconf.png

http://funroll-loops.org/

It does now. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/

There was a bug discovered in the Stage 3 release of Gentoo 2005.1 for the Athlon XP at about 3:30 AM last night. I filed a bug report about it and there is a new release winding its way through the mirrors and should be out soon.

Please file a bug about the screensaver, if there isnt one already. http://bugs.gentoo.org/

I agree with most people here that a LiveCD is generally for speed and convenience with test-running a distro to see if it's something you'd enjoy. However, I don't think the Gentoo LiveCD project was aiming to do that, it was aiming to do exactly what you do with Gentoo -- End up with a system optimized (Very simply, I would imagine, in this case) for your own computer. If you want any other sort of LiveCD, you can always try the ones the members of the community regularly release. My favorite right now is ahorn's, but your mileage may vary. And no, these LiveCDs released by people are not officially sanctioned by Gentoo, but they tend to be constructed with Gentoo as a base utilizing the catalyst tool.

Look at it this way -- what would be gained by showing people a default GNOME desktop with a minimal set of apps as a trial of Gentoo? What about a default KDE desktop? The main thing you get out of Gentoo is optimization and customizability (that you must perform!), and that's what the LiveCD shows/enables you to accomplish. If you want a quick Gentoo system, there's always been stage3, and VidaLinux has been around for a while now.

PS -- Be glad it's only 3 hours in a ramdisk, it takes me a little while longer to get the system setup on my A64, but once it's there, minimal maintainence is required, especially if you stick with the stable branch where updates are much more planned.

I agree with most people here that a LiveCD is generally for speed and convenience with test-running a distro to see if it's something you'd enjoy. However, I don't think the Gentoo LiveCD project was aiming to do that, it was aiming to do exactly what you do with Gentoo -- End up with a system optimized (Very simply, I would imagine, in this case) for your own computer. If you want any other sort of LiveCD, you can always try the ones the members of the community regularly release. My favorite right now is ahorn's, but your mileage may vary. And no, these LiveCDs released by people are not officially sanctioned by Gentoo, but they tend to be constructed with Gentoo as a base utilizing the catalyst tool.

Look at it this way -- what would be gained by showing people a default GNOME desktop with a minimal set of apps as a trial of Gentoo? What about a default KDE desktop? The main thing you get out of Gentoo is optimization and customizability (that you must perform!), and that's what the LiveCD shows/enables you to accomplish. If you want a quick Gentoo system, there's always been stage3, and VidaLinux has been around for a while now.

PS -- Be glad it's only 3 hours in a ramdisk, it takes me a little while longer to get the system setup on my A64, but once it's there, minimal maintainence is required, especially if you stick with the stable branch where updates are much more planned.

Code Listing 2: etc-update options

Please select a file to edit by entering the corresponding number.
(-1 to exit) (-3 to auto merge all remaining files)
(-5 to auto-merge AND not use 'mv -i'):

Gentoo's "default filesystem" (the one that's recommended for the root partition in the installation manual) is not supported. No ReiserFS with the graphical installer.

For a large portion of Gentoo users this makes the graphical installer USELESS.

And why is there no ReiserFS support?

According to the, presumably 12 year old, FAQ writer for the project:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/faq .xml#reiser
"Because reiserfs == teh suck...and libparted doesn't support it very well."

Based on past experience, I suspect behind this decision a juvenile programmer with personal dislike for Hans Reiser due to some flamewars.

Urgh... what a pity. I hope eventually work will be taken over by people with some sense. In the meantime I'll continue being very happy with my manual gentoo installation and recommend any GUI-installation-dependent users to head on to SuSE.

Screenshots are here

You're thinking CFLAGS. See http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309752.html

No problem, heck the support listed there is better than what I've gotten for a lot of products I've paid for.

This interview was everything I was expecting it to be. It made the Microsoft OSS research department sound like an OS multicultural utopia. I was hoping there would be some mention of drobbins http://www.gentoo.org/news/20050613-drobbins.xml

How is Daniel Robbins fitting in at Microsoft? Is he respected or ridiculed? These are the questions I wanted to see asked.

He moved mountains in the Open Source community, and he did it all from his own pocket book. I imagine he is getting all the respect he deserves there, but I would like to hear a little bit about it.


jownz

think of it as having the option of fixing a computer with a full history of what has been done to it or fixing a computer with no knowledge of who has used it or what has been installed on it.

Yes, but the fix is the same in both cases.

Here's a few you might have heard of:

1. Mac OS X (duh)
2. FreeBSD
3. NetBSD
4. OpenBSD
5. Yellow Dog
6. Fedora (RHL)
7. Debian
8. Gentoo

9. MS Windows

Now there's a clever question to ask the founder of the Gentoo distribution. I guess the other guy can give an interesting answer, but I am quite willing to bet that at least Daniel does indeed use Gentoo :)

Here are the ones I use...

The best ... http://www.linuxsoft.cz/en/
An older one, but still useful http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-lin-soft-en/tab le.shtml
Even the gentoo package listing is useful http://packages.gentoo.org/categories/

Linux.org, Mandrake, and sourceforge have listings as well. But there should be a really kick ass one that all the linux fans could link to from their homepages.

erm...he didn't say "all distros." Also - Gentoo GUI installer Exists. Available now for testing.

There are several projects doing stuff like this. This is a listing of different kernel sources and patchsets that gentoo provides, for example: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml

Nope. Gentoo has its own system of mirrors. As a test, I started to emerge Firefox (and cancelled it as soon as it started downloading), and it started downloading from this URL: http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/firefox-1.0. 6-source.tar.bz2

Portage usually only goes to the maker's site if the tarball's not on one of Gentoo's own mirrors.

Portage seems to handle commercial software just fine. Check out the available software, especially the games. Plenty of commercial software. Want to add your commercial software? Just write a quick ebuild file and upload it to Gentoo

It shouldn't be hard to maintain with proper automation. Indeed, glancing at a couple of KDE ebuilds (scripts which build packages in Gentoo's portage package manager), they are very short; barely more than stubs. Much seems to be factored out and inherited by all of the ebuilds.

Gentoo's FAQ says that the maintainers are committed to doing it this way, though there have been some complaints about the large number of packages.

I'm still waiting for them to make Kmail compile in 3.4.1 - it barfs on the Outlook Express import filter at the moment, of all things. http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99643
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106274
Tell you the truth, I've actually moved to Thunderbird + Enigmail now - it rocks.

Who cares about that... Will it run on my Gentoo and Ubuntu systems??? ;)

How many people do you think would like to run Windows or Linux on a cool looking mac?

These already all run on current (ie PPC) Macs:

http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
http://debian.org/
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/ ...and probably more, with even more distros likely working once the move to Intel is completed.

I also seem to recall that Apple mentioned that Windows would run on the Intel-based Macs.

...if you can have both: FreeBSD's obscure userland tools AND Gentoo's compile time:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~citizen428/doc/gentoo-freeb sd.html

That is certainly true, I guess I meant Linux distros like Redhat, Debian, etc.

You mean, Redhat, Debian, Gentoo , etc.?

You can always get Trusted Gentoo if you're that desperate ;o)

The trouble begins when you want to add things to it..."

Like every Windows server I've worked with? Not to mention the expectation with Windows clients that one must wipe and reload the OS annually because of how it falls apart and becomes increasingly unreliable?

(due to) the brittle nature of the platform, when you do that, other things break.'

I've never thought of Hardened Linux (PaX & Grsecurity, or SELinux) or OpenBSD that way. I'd have to believe most other hardened systems administrators do as well. The solution for "hardening" a Windows server is to front it with as much protection as possible, given the understanding you cannot lock it down enough for public IP exposure.

Just looking at Network World will show one there's an entire industry in making appliances to help keep the bad guys out of a fragile Windows server. Realistically, many Apache advocates would probably acknowledge that the strength of hardened Linux and BSd is why Apache is so popular - you can inexpensively deploy your webserver without all the defenses.

Try this taste test:

1. Take a small DMZ segment and insert an up-to-date sniffer in passive mode (with the sniffer having its active IP on a completely separate segment isolated from this segment, and also isolated from any internal LAN as this test will have risk). Get it configured to alert you 24x7 when bad things happen; e.g. email to text messaging script.

2. Take a current production Windows server load, apply all the available service patches and packs to be fair, add Microsoft DNS and run it on a public IP on the DMZ segment, with no third party host, firewall, ACL-enabled filtering router.

3. Take a second server and load OpenBSD or hardened Linux (hardened Gentoo, with PaX/GrSecurity is easy to do and well documented and supported.)

4. Run until you get compromised.

If you're on a well travelled public subnet, you'll start seeing scans almost immediately. It took me six days to have someone return to the windows box and start attacking it. I killed the project at that point by dropping the subnet altogether. The hardened Linux host was repeatedly scanned by numerous hosts and ignored. Granted, it's not a scientific approach in that the bad guys just were not interested in the hardened host, but the real world value is the knowledge of which system they feel is easy enough to break. The black hats know which OS is the brittle one...

How about AIDE?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/security/security-han dbook.xml?style=printable&full=1#book_part1_chap13
Is pretty good...

Hey, you made my day. I am the father of Slicker -- it started as an attempt to write something for KDE along the lines of (classic) Mac OS's tabbed finder windows. See my posts in the Gentoo forum where I posted about its development: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-29746-highlig ht-.html

So, basically what happened was simple. I really was only interested in using it as a way to access Konq, as panels which would slide out based on mouse-to-screen edge movements. I made it relatively plugin-extendable and people whipped up all sorts of nice extensions, like terminal access, K-Menu access, etc etc. People also wanted it to become a sourceforge project and more public, which I was fine with. So, I handed it off, and it promptly died since the people who took it on bickered day and night about website design and themability, and never bothered to write any code.

I then moved on to OS X, where I continued the work that matters to me ( robotics & AI ).

But anyway, it had potential!

This is going OT, but multi day compiles of KDE are actually a thing of the past.

Nowadays Gentoo encourages the use of split ebuilds that make for a much more efficient and less bloated desktop, not to mention faster compile times, since only explicitly requested stuff gets compiled and installed.

Gentoo KDE Split EBuilds HOWTO

Look at something like GNUStep. To get that you need the 4 core libraries installed, then you install the parts of it that you want.

Compare this to
#emerge --deep OpenOffice.org
on Gentoo. While this downloads, compiles and installs source, Portage and Porthole (on VidaLinux, NavynOS and a few others) offer a GUI which make it quite similar in function and how it's used compared to Ximian's RedCarpet, and at a stretch (no downloading) to KPackage, or

rpm -i ~/FooPackage.rpm

If Porthole were adopted (although it isn't popular, and would put a nasty strain on packages.gentoo.org ), or instead if whatever the most popular package management system is (apt-get/*.deb? Fedora & others/*.rpm? Slackware & others/*.tgz?) then at least all new users would be in exactly the same boat with a standardized system. And old dogs wouldn't have to learn completely new tricks, just modify how they do their current ones.

With a common interface there are a lot of projects that have done great work that would have to be abandoned, but there's an element of Darwinism in there too which could be helpful.

/*Don't know enough about this, probably talking out of my arse as usual.*/

Linux standards base addresses compatiblity between distributions. I've never not been able to install software when running various distributions. The package management systems are different for several distributions, but since the source code for various free software projects is in a constant state of improving and if you want to stay on the cutting edge of best code available, it makes sense to use gentoo's portage sytsem for installing software. They tell you on http://packages.gentoo.org/
which source code is stable on various platforms. Linux doesn't need to consolidate, may the best distribution win and if not, cherry pick the best of each distriubtion and start a new one.

"A dominant distribution could emerge"
<facetious>The dominant distribution does emerge .</facetious>