Slashdot Mirror

From About Gentoo:

Gentoo Linux in a paragraph

We produce Gentoo Linux, a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

...

Thus, Enoch was born. Daniel wanted Enoch to be a blazingly fast distro with capabilities to completely automate the package creation and upgrading process. ... Over a period of time, as Enoch started improving, they felt that it needed a new name. They called it Gentoo Linux.

They seem to have removed this, but the name "Gentoo" comes from the factoid that Gentoo penguins are the fastest swimming penguins.

They seem to have revised history, but originally, Gentoo was "all about performance."

You've got a great point. For production use, Gentoo is significantly more work than some of the alternatives (as a result, for a server that doesn't need to be terribly up-to-date, I'd likely choose Debian, and for a desktop, probably something like Fedora or SuSE).

But if you run a server farm (or even just one machine), you can avoid a lot of these issues. If you run a server farm, you already have a test machine for installing updates on prior to rolling them out to the critical infrastructure (or you should), so with Gentoo, you can use that machine in the same capacity, and distribute binary packages. This is admittedly more work than debs or rpms, but not a whole lot more.

Overlooked in this entire thread, though (as far as I saw), is Gentoo Hardened. The only other major distro to offer anything comparable is Debian, and since nobody provides binary packages with propolice, etc (as far as I know), you'll end up using debsrc or srpms anyway, if you want this on a Debian or RedHat system (in other words, the flexibility of Gentoo is the reason that these hardened features are so easily available).

Finally, while Gentoo may not guarantee stability in the way Debian does, Debian also takes a long time to backport fixes. I remember waiting for quite a few days over the summer for a patched Debian PHP (after there was a RCE vuln published for it). Gentoo, by not backporting fixes, was able to have a fixed version out as soon as the PHP team released it (with a small delay for it to be committed, marked stable, and sent out to the mirrors). A recent study (by Secunia, if I remember right) showed Gentoo releasing by far the most security advisories of any major distro. This wasn't because we issue needless advisories, but because we do our best to track every one of the thousands of packages in Portage.

So there are real advantages in areas that you probably care about more than a ``0.1% speed boost''. I don't use Gentoo because of any hyped performance gain. But I do still prefer it over much of the alternatives.

I've never seen a touch of the inferred elitismm, and their accomplisments are amazing.

LMAO!!!!!! Obviously you need to join us at Off the Wall. That'll change and swing that perception of yours mighty quick!

#1 rule of OTW: Slyde is convinced of always being right.

#2 rule: take caution in rule #1.

You might want to try the Forums then, same helpful people and attitude, but things don't just scroll by. :)

And who can let a link to that site go by without linking to The Best Bug Report Ever (tm)?

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

Microsoft is doing nothing different than any other software developer. There is always a customer behind a product, either it be the programming company itself or people on the outside. The customer ALWAYS gives their ideas and contributions in hope that the developer will put them into their product. They are the customer, the ones buying the product. You want to keep the ones providing your paycheck happy right? We shouldn't be getting all bent out of shape towards M$ based on this idea that they are stealing our contributions and ideas - its how the software process works. I just wish that M$ would listen to their users when they ask for security and stability. It has taken them how many years to keep their OS from crashing every 4 hours?

Just so you know, I am definitely not a Windows lover, I have more Linux boxes (Gentoo) than Windows boxes at home. I am a software developer professionally and have been on the recieving end of those ideas and contributions, some of which are definitely laughable.

Gentoo Portage lists both Blackdown (1.3.1-r9) and IBM (1.4.1-r1 and 1.4.2) Java Runtime Environments as being available for PowerPC.

http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=jre

There's a thread on the Gentoo forums about this. Apparently it is to do with TCP/IP window resizing. There's also a LWN article.

we need a Linux Users Anonymous

That already exists.

Doug

emerge -uD world

Another reason to use gentoo linux

Bah... you're totally side stepping the issue. My point was really that given a choice, you'd prefer not to reboot... especially since from a design standpoint, there's no real reason why a reboot should be required.

It's really the little things that show how much care and attention have gone into design. With OS X there's no "Apply" buttons... everything happens in real time... which is a very nice and appealing feeling. With Linux you can completely restart the entire networking core if you so desire, including fully unloading the drivers and reloading them... all without a reboot. I was shocked when I first discovered this, and then it dawned on me "Yeah... why shouldn't I be able to do that."

You're right... rebooting one or twice a week isn't really a big deal. But suggesting that not wanting to have to reboot your computer is some form of psychological disorder is a little frightening. I have to admit to being a computer scientist, so I care about design more on principal than most people... but I think if more people were exposed to a better designed system (even if it was just a version of windows that didn't require rebooting) they would certainly like it much better.

And just to address your troubles with linux drivers:

If you used a decent distribution you wouldn't have such configuration issues, or compilation issues. On Gentoo installing ALSA is as simple as selecting a sound card driver and typing "emerge alsa-driver" followed by "/etc/init.d/alsasound start" all of which is covered in great detail in the Gentoo ALSA tutorial. Not that you need it, but it's nice to have such resources available. Maybe if you knew where to look you wouldn't need to spend so much time mucking around with stuff.

Bah... you're totally side stepping the issue. My point was really that given a choice, you'd prefer not to reboot... especially since from a design standpoint, there's no real reason why a reboot should be required.

It's really the little things that show how much care and attention have gone into design. With OS X there's no "Apply" buttons... everything happens in real time... which is a very nice and appealing feeling. With Linux you can completely restart the entire networking core if you so desire, including fully unloading the drivers and reloading them... all without a reboot. I was shocked when I first discovered this, and then it dawned on me "Yeah... why shouldn't I be able to do that."

You're right... rebooting one or twice a week isn't really a big deal. But suggesting that not wanting to have to reboot your computer is some form of psychological disorder is a little frightening. I have to admit to being a computer scientist, so I care about design more on principal than most people... but I think if more people were exposed to a better designed system (even if it was just a version of windows that didn't require rebooting) they would certainly like it much better.

And just to address your troubles with linux drivers:

If you used a decent distribution you wouldn't have such configuration issues, or compilation issues. On Gentoo installing ALSA is as simple as selecting a sound card driver and typing "emerge alsa-driver" followed by "/etc/init.d/alsasound start" all of which is covered in great detail in the Gentoo ALSA tutorial. Not that you need it, but it's nice to have such resources available. Maybe if you knew where to look you wouldn't need to spend so much time mucking around with stuff.

LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1"

Big ass discussion here.

I tried it on zsh myself and didn't notice too much of a difference (perhaps a little faster), so take it all with a grain of salt. It's quite likely that people will 'see' speedups because they expect to see them instead of actual improvements.

But, it can't hurt (as long as you don't mind slower compilation), so you might as well give it a try.

Mac users not really utilizing their macs from a horsepower perspective...

Slackware was a very nice distro in 1994, not now. And no, swaret doesn't cut it. If you want a good Linux distro use Gentoo. Or Debina if you don't mind using packages made in 1975.

Either way, both make a much better desktop than FreeBSD ever will.

Furlong Smoorgroff

Not necessarily, but it is a nice reason to move away from Microsoft Windows.

Linux Anyone?
SuSE (Novell)
Red Hat
Mandrake
GenToo
Slackware
And get others from Distrowatch

Well, how Gentoo installs Gnome packages into a DESTDIR is like this:

make DESTDIR=${D} scrollkeeper_localstate_dir=${D}/var/lib/scrollkee per install

or alternatively

make prefix=${D}/usr datadir=${D}/usr/share infodir=${D}/usr/share/info localstatedir=${D}/var/lib mandir=${D}/usr/share/man sysconfdir=${D}/etc scrollkeeper_localstate_dir=${D}/var/lib/scrollkee per install

Also, you need to

mkdir -p ${D}/var/lib/scrollkeeper
export GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL="1"

to keep scrollkeeper and gconf happy.

Then after it's installed into the DESTDIR, remove /var/lib/scrollkeeper and /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache; they aren't needed.

To compensate for removing those from the package, though, you need to install the schemas with gconftool-2, run scrollkeeper-update and run update-desktop-database and update-mime-database.

Maybe 'easy' is a relative term - but I've been using Gentoo for two years now and never had a problem with the installation of Gnome 2 packages, which are all installed with the same bash script (http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/eclass/ gnome2.eclass)

If you're determined to roll your own packages, you could do worse than to follow what Gentoo does, both in preparing tarballs (Gentoo binary packages are just a tarball with a bash script appended) and in dependencies; you can see the dependencies of any package in Portage at e.g. http://www.gentoo-portage.com/gnome-base/libgnomeu i/dep for the dependencies of libgnomeui.

I know what you mean. I'm 15, I took a while to work it all out.

I read "Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours", which worked fairly well for me, and directed me towards the appropriate *nix utilities, as well as Windows.

If you haven't already tried it, have a go with Linux. Maybe start with Knoppix and then move to Mandrake or Fedora. And then, if you're feeling adventurous, try Gentoo.

Setting up with Linux taught me more about working with computers than anything else.

Experience is better than any book that I've read.

bash-2.05b# netstat -p
Aktive Internetverbindungen (ohne Server)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 1 0 <my-hostname>:2752 <my-hostname>:www CLOSE_WAIT 18852/server_linux

Oct 4 20:37:16 [kernel] IPT New not syn:IN=lo OUT= MAC=00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:08:00 SRC=192.168.1.99 DST=192.168.1.99 LEN=52 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=626 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=2752 DPT=80 WINDOW=32767 RES=0x00 ACK FIN URGP=0

Sir, you are absolutely out of line. BSD is a thriving operating system. Have you never heard of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD? These operating systems are maintained by at least 7 different people. Why even here on Slashdot you'll see there is a seperate section dedicate entirely to BSD. This forum and these operating systems are used by at least 107 people.

Not only is BSD the world's most secure and open operating system in the world, it is extremely easy to use. Before I started using BSD I was using Linux for about 6 years, and Solaris and HP-UX before that. Once I switched to BSD, unencumbered by GUI interfaces, web servers, TCP/IP, and all the other "inventions" so frequently touted as progess I was able to easily produce text files in almost six weeks. I had to port vim from the source, edit it for my Amiga OS, and strip out most of the featurs so it would run in the free memory I have, but man it was awesome. I felt so free. Security and portability are integrated into BSD. You can configure a firewall, router, security, and a VpN in less than 3 days using the very friendly command line interfaces, man files, and well... you don't need any gui help interfaces. It even has lynx.

Anyways. BSD is definitely not dead. Me and 106 other people prove you wrong. If you're looking for a dead or dying OS try these on for size: option #1 and option #2.

Oh yeah, one of the best thing about BSD is that it's not encumbered by the viral GNU license or misappropriated intellectual property. Ditch Linux, ditch Windows, ditch VMS, get yourself BSD.

DRI lets X communicate with the hardware faster. X acceleration works without it, but not as well.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (dri.sourceforge.net), also known as the DRI, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. It includes changes to the X server, to several client libraries and to the kernel. The first major use for the DRI is to create fast OpenGL implementations.

from Gentoo Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide.

Gentoo has a LiveCD or pick a closer mirror.

I can't vouch for it though, I had their 1.4 LiveCD, but one of the Apple updates broke it and I haven't bothered to try again.

-- Sex Toys...

No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.

1. Different distributions have different goals. Debian by itself would probably never have developed automatic hardware detection.
2. Different distributions have different development and testing methodologies. This diversity of methods leads to stabler and more diverse software.
3. Experimentation. Do I want to compile all my software from source? Hell, no! Do I want someone else to try it, fix the problems that arise, and note where it gives real improvements? Hell, yes!
4. Security through diversity. Exploits written for Red Hat systems frequently don't work out-of-the-box on Debian. It buys me a little more time to get them patched.
5. Suckage insurance. Even the best projects sometime become teh suck. Should Debian take a detour down that well-trodden path, I know there are other cool alternatives I could switch to.
6. In the case of commercial distributions, you also get insurance against your vendor going insane (cf. Caldera)

I'm not fully involved in that project for the moment since I'm already bogged down by other work. I've had some e-mail coversations with Lorenzo in order to first know _what_ would the project mean as I (like others) wouldn't like to see another fork (just what happened with Adamantix) but would like to see the work done at Adamantix be brought up into Debian proper and this could be a good opportunity. Notice that some of this work (such as their kernel patches and PaX utilities) is already available in Debian.

Recompiling the whole distribution with a gcc-enabled SPP (with the Debian packages developed by Steve Kemp for example) is a complex issue and needs some deep internal changes that we have yet to discuss. Doing so in source-based distributions (like with Hardened Gentoo) is easier, after all, AFAIK they don't provide binaries for 11 architectures like Debian does.

~~~

Darn, I wish I had known this was going to happen, I'd have asked him why they're such asshats (especially Sean) to Gentoo devs and users.

This mainly stems from this bug.

I just finished compiling Gentoo on my rx2600 cluster. Now what do I do with 'em, serve pr0n?

I'm a geek too, and I'm looking for long life. Last summer I finally upgraded my dual PII400 desktop (the MB died) to an Athlon XP2500. Runs Mepis Linux. My file server is still a P233mmx with 512mb and 4 drives in mirrored pairs. It runs Novell NetWare 4.12 and is stable as a rock. The firewall/webserver? An old Compaq P90 that in which upgraded the HD to 8GB. It runs Gentoo. Really.

The IBM AT (8mhz, 256MB) has finally been relegated to the attic - the CGA monitor died.

net-p2p/

emerge -suave net-p2p/<package>

emerge mail-filter/spamassassin-ruledujour

[AG] It is not rocket science and if one has the know-how, one could tweak their Gentoo, LFS, or even Debian system to be like Yoper. You would probably spend weeks/months doing it, but after this long, possibly frustrating road, you would get something like Yoper. But instead of a week-long struggle, you can have Yoper ready within 10 to 15 minutes,which to many people is more important than a steep, frustrating learning curve. Some of the "secrets" of turning your distro into Your Operating System are:

yeah...this kinda did it for me. Weeks and months? has he ever tried prelinking..was pretty quick and painless for me. thanks to the nice guide

Silly IT departments.

If you "upgrade" a piece of software, then discover it requires a complete manual system restart to remain stable, the prudent thing to do in any other circumstance would be a rollback.

Unfortunately, since this is an IT department, it must run Windows; after all, where could you ever find support for Linux?

No, the point of Gentoo is not optimization, although it is certainly possible to use the distribution in this fashion. The main point is that Gentoo is a meta-distribution that lets you customize the setup every which way. Other distributions make package configuration decisions for you, whereas Gentoo allows you to make them yourself.

Want ALSA support in everything? No problem. Want to disable KDE or Gnome for every package? No problem. Want to add IMAP and LDAP support to everything? No problem. All that is necessary is to set the USE flags.

Since Gentoo is more or less a bleeding-edge distribution, packages get updated frequently. Under these circumstances, compiler speed is far more important than every last bit of optimization, unless you are one of those power-user-masochists. :)

No, the point of Gentoo is not optimization, although it is certainly possible to use the distribution in this fashion. The main point is that Gentoo is a meta-distribution that lets you customize the setup every which way. Other distributions make package configuration decisions for you, whereas Gentoo allows you to make them yourself.

Want ALSA support in everything? No problem. Want to disable KDE or Gnome for every package? No problem. Want to add IMAP and LDAP support to everything? No problem. All that is necessary is to set the USE flags.

Since Gentoo is more or less a bleeding-edge distribution, packages get updated frequently. Under these circumstances, compiler speed is far more important than every last bit of optimization, unless you are one of those power-user-masochists. :)

Well, I followed the instructions from this page, and from the looks of it, it *should* be supported. It explains how to use distcc during the bootstrap, too.

Why?

Nobody cares about stack smashing protection anymore these days.

OpenBSD

Hardened Gentoo

GCC 4.0 has libmudflap and -fmudflap for C and C++. While this isn't exactly the same as stack smashing protection, it is still very effective and much more efficient.

Last time I checked GCC 4.0 wasn't stable.

It's not entirely without reason that IBM still hasn't posted ProPolice for inclusion in the FSF GCC mainline. The patch against SUSE's hammer branch has been floating around literally for years, but they know really only very few people truely believe it makes a difference.

That's crap. Propolice does exaclty what it is supposed to do. It doesn't protect against all stack smashing attacks but no one ever claimed that it did.

Solution: Take your business (and your balls) away from Microsoft.

Yes, compiling with optimizations will make it run faster, but not the fastest. A prelinked system will outrun a non-prelinked system. This is why Mandrake would boot faster than normal Gentoo install, and KDE was faster in launching applications, etc.

So...

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml

There are lots of speed tweaks, someone should start a webpage.

I really wonder if MS would so have such a lax attitude towards piracy if GNU/Linux wasn't around? I'm guessing no. To many, an easily obtained, free pirated copy of XP is better than a truly free copy of GNU/Linux. Something MS is banking on since they are better off keeping eveyone possible away from GNU/Linux even if it digs into the short term bottom line.

Looks like the Gentoo folks put up a survey intended for current users asking for feedback. I hope posting that link here doesn't result in flames or bogus responses.. they have enough work to do without trolls so please answer responsibly.

Click here or next time just google.

Except that certain fuckwits have allowed the unwashed masses to install Gentoo, causing no end of pain and bug reports like this crap.

What I ended up with a system that had no vi (or similar), no inetd, no finger, no telnet - none of the many tools that make Unix systems just the fine place one wants t live at.

And worst of all it came with an editor that broke lines of /etc/fstab without mentioning - lots of fun for novice users trying to find out why their fstab is busted.

That's because mozilla source tarballs don't compile when shipped. The last three mozilla/firefox releases have all been either broken or incomplete from a compiling-from-source perspective. The current bunch doesn't compile properly with freetype+gtk2 enabled.

The GLSA is getting there, but it's kinda hard when upstream don't release working tarballs... Debian et al have it easy, they only have to make it build on one box with one set of configure options. Gentoo has to make it compile anywhere with any set of build settings.

You mean like glsa-check?

Is that why you think I responded? To get the last word?
Yes, yes I do.

I take it by your response that all DSL modems are not supported.
I cannot safely say 100% right now off the top of my head, to assure you like a safe snuggly blankie, that your particular DSL modem is popular and hence supported by the current Linux kernel. I WILL go out on a limb and say that it's very unlikely it won't support your particular modem.

When I was installing Gentoo on my system i had to struggle to learn how to compile a kernel properly in order to get my SATA harddrive working and on-board nic. I imagine if I used another more user friendly distro like Mandrake or RedHat this would not have been such a problem. I like problems though...b/c figuring out the solution is alot of laughs.

You may think that you live "in reality" when it comes to attitude and "training the sheep" but the only reality is that you'll chase more folks away than convert.
Well it's not my prerogative to change other ppl's reality. While you may observe it as "chasing off", I observe it as quality control. Most ppl are intelligent enough to see through my horseshit and find the pony anyways.

I checked knoppix.net since I don't read german and wasn't going to babel it -
There's no need. Take your time and you'll notice there's a English/US flag near the top...give her a click and der' iz da Engrish.

A few questions - When I do boot - What will be the biggest difference in navigation/usage? Will there be any major things I need to research before using it to get connectivity? What devices shouldn't be connected to the pc? I'm guessing the sidewinder, strategic commander, and the dell axim I have should be disconnected.
When you boot up Knoppix (and depending if you have a fast CD-ROM and at least some decent CPU power like a PIII and up) it'll blow your mind away! You will be surrounded by heavenly music and light and start to feel the power surging from within the universe itself...that or you'll shrug your shoulders smuggly and wonder why you listen to depressing music to begin with.

Seriously though when I boot up Knoppix at work I usually disconnect my ethernet cable just for my paranoid security reasoning. I know it's possible to get a connection going and take over a Windows machine as I've read this post before. As for your other devices...hell I'd leave them in, you'll be surprised how Knoppix will auto-detect most of it. Keep in mind Knoppix is not only to have a taste of the Linux world, it's also a kick ass rescue CD and a mighty ace to hold in hand as I've posted how to take over a Windows machine at Oatnet.ca. Alot of laughs!

How does it compare to gentoo? The theme part is neat, but isn't gentoo better underneath?

The only reason I ever need to reboot is to install things which require rebooting

Maybe i am biting a troll? but heres my response.

Why windows "requires" rebooting whenever things are installed is beyond me. Whats more annoying is when setting up a windows machine from scratch and rebooting after installing each driver for each piece of hardware. Damn annoying.

The trouble with windows is the fact that rebooting has become a defacto process for many things. Its all very well saying that clueless users go down the "if its broke, just reboot it" philosophy. But when they are taught to do it by the Vendor "Microsoft" due to the operating systems curious inability to change its software and driver configuration without requiring a reboot who can blame them?

Your comments about 18yr students running linux are odd to say the least, I dont see how they bear any relevance to the stability of one or other of the OS.Having said that, i would like to see some comparitive results taking into account of other operating systems.

I can say this though-I use a linux box as my desktop from day to day. The only time I ever "reboot" is when I power it down in the evening and/or up in the morning. In addition, (Im running our favorite Meta-Distribution) the only time I ever have to reboot my machine for any other reason is if I re-compile a new kernel. I can "emerge" and "unmerge" to my hearts content installing and removing software and I cant think of any situation where I had to reboot the machine just because I installed or upgraded a new software package. Oh , and i always find "Crossover Office" "Simulating Windows Reboot" amusing ...

Nick ...

http://packages.gentoo.org/

everything you'll need is right there.