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i happened to come across these fantastic spyware removal sites. if you download their software you are guaranteed 100 per cent no more spyware
Debian
Mandrake
Linspire
Fedora
Mepis
Xandros
Suse
Slackware
Gentoo

I hadn't heard that Sierra had made any official statement releasing the Linux version for free distribution, but it's in Gentoo's packages.

I have dual-boot, so I can compare a bit:

Games:
XP: Lots, some older 98 games broken
Linux: Less, some windows games work via Wine, increasing support (Doom3, HL2) expected

Internet:
XP: Firefox/IE
Linux: Firefox

Email:
XP: Thunderbird
Linux: Thunderbird

Media:
XP: Winamp, WMP
Linux: XMMS/MPlayer (DVD's sometimes an issue)

P2P:
XP: KazaaLite, Emule
Linux: Emule

IM:
XP: MSN 6.1, GAIM
Linux: GAIM

Office:
XP: MS/OpenOffice
Linux: OpenOffice

CD Burning:
XP: Nero, lots of others
Linux: MKCD, lots of others

DVD Burning:
XP: Many suck, currently testing ULead DVD Workshop 2 (awesome)
Linux: Experimenting (suggestions welcome)


Those are my regular activities. Some of the other stuff may or may not work in linux

Upgrade your mission critical systems. Morons. ;)

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 7.0 2004/01/01 11:32:04 ceren_rocks Exp $

Mini-itx Motherboard (Fanless, Very Small) ~$115
80GB HardDrive $70
Gigabit NIC* $25
Pretty Case $100
Linux Free*
Total ~280-305
*Optional
^Requires Initial Work (Maybe there is a handy Distro for this type of thing I don't know?)
BTW Newegg.com says they will carry mini-itx soon so prices may get much better in the US.

And you can download a free prevention tool right here

Morphix is good, but maybe Gentoo's catalyst is better? I haven't actually used it myself, but it's apparently a pretty good tool to build your own LiveCDs.

Now, about the PPC versions for us Mac crowd...?

It's time consuming to install. Time is money. Companies don't like spending money if they don't have to.

uhh yeah ok, if you would look here you would see that one can easily make a "stage 4" install cd, which is basically a snapshot of ones installation, which can easilly be used to mirror instillations accross machines. also if you use a stage 3 install its drastically faster, especially if you use the quick reference guide.

It's time consuming to install. Time is money. Companies don't like spending money if they don't have to.

uhh yeah ok, if you would look here you would see that one can easily make a "stage 4" install cd, which is basically a snapshot of ones installation, which can easilly be used to mirror instillations accross machines. also if you use a stage 3 install its drastically faster, especially if you use the quick reference guide.

The Gentoo Handbook discusses all the choices involved in installing and explains exactly what to do every step of the way so you don't have to rely on (m)any automated installation programs. (There does exist a program to configure and build the kernel for you, but why use it?)

http://fedora.redhat.com
http://www.gentoo.org
http://www.debian.org
http://www.linux-mandrake.com
http://www.slackware.com

Some distributions have already tweaked (or in this case designed) package management to make it easier to manage multiple parallel versions :)

The virtual memory subsystem is probably one of the culprits. It seems to love checking on the disk every few seconds.

I once tried building a Linux PVR (will try again sometime) and wanted the HDD to sleep most of the day and wake up on command (for example, for timed VCR-style TV recordings. I experienced the frustrations you did :) -- I started by turning off all the daemons that could possibly hit disk. IIRC, I eventually got the time between the disk wakeups to be a few minutes when I turned off swap (swapon/swapoff commands). However, the computer (a Via passively cooled MB with brick power supply) would _still_ hit disk after a few minutes.

I eventually gave up and bought a USB flash memory key (the BIOS lets the computer boot off a USB disk). I hope to try that with one of the distros mentioned in this thread. Got some nice tips from it:
- mount with noatime option (UNIX acceess times not updated)
- mount /var/ as a ram disk
(important since flash has a limit on the number of writes per sector)

It does.

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

Also note that I was refering to the number of packages/programs, the ebuilds also span versions, eg kde has several ebuilds, each for a different version. I don't think anyone really counts multiple versions as different packages. If they do, shame on them!

I did X by myself (having a bit of Unix experience) so I never bothered to look for a doc on configuring that, but here it is.

Gentoo already has an installer project. It seems to still be in the pretty early design stages, but it's something for the point and click crowd (and it sounds like a decent automation system too).

If they came out with an "enterprise" version I think I would give it a whirl

You mean this?

If it did, Gentoo could instantly be turned into the single most user-friendly distro on the planet. The primary problem with Linux (besides game support, etc.) is the ease of program installation. Imagine how easy it would be to code a pretty GUI to allow you to browse the Gentoo Portage Tree (which is already split up into intuitive categories) and install whatever you need.

That's a very interesting idea. Strangely enough, I never even considered a GUI for portage because the the emerge commands are so simple, and Gentoo's package page provides a sufficient method for me to find packages. However, a GUI will probably be helpful, especially for those intimidated by the CLI or those who hate mucking with switches.

A textmode GUI would also be helpful, since I don't have X installed on my server Gentoo box, although I just realized that I don't install packages that often anyway.

If you are, my best advice is to read the install guide. You might not understand it depending on your level of knowledge, but it should at least read like English.

Or Danish, German, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish, or Traditional Chinese ;-)

It has been pointed out over and over again that if you dont want to compile your pacakages from source, then Gentoo is not for you. There is no need to bash Gentoo and call it an unserious distribution just because it doesnt suit your taste.

To summarize the heart of Gentoo, imagine a user sitting in front of a Linux system. What does he or she want do to? The Gentoo philosophy is to allow this user to do what he or she wants to do, without getting in the way.

At around the time Gentoo was born, the thing that got in the way was the lack of an easy way to build packages from source, to a user's specifications. Currently, we've done that very well, but what we haven't done very well is support pre-built packages, even though Portage has supported building binary packages almost since its inception. So we are doing that now.

It's important that our tools support binary packages, because binary packages are widely used and widely in demand in the Linux community. If our tools don't support binary packages, then we can't claim that our tools are designed to allow a user to do anything he or she might want to do. If we purposely choose to exclude binary support, then we are attempting to interfere with how users might choose to approach particular problems, by instead imposing our own will or view of how they should approach a problem. And if we do not build binary packages, then we are not taking any steps to ensure that our tools actually work well with binary packages, nor are we taking steps to ensure that others can build binary packages, nor are we able to *demonstrate* that our tools work well with binary packages. Besides these philosophical reasons, there are many practical reasons to create binary packages.

It has been pointed out over and over again that if you dont want to compile your pacakages from source, then Gentoo is not for you. There is no need to bash Gentoo and call it an unserious distribution just because it doesnt suit your taste.

To summarize the heart of Gentoo, imagine a user sitting in front of a Linux system. What does he or she want do to? The Gentoo philosophy is to allow this user to do what he or she wants to do, without getting in the way.

At around the time Gentoo was born, the thing that got in the way was the lack of an easy way to build packages from source, to a user's specifications. Currently, we've done that very well, but what we haven't done very well is support pre-built packages, even though Portage has supported building binary packages almost since its inception. So we are doing that now.

It's important that our tools support binary packages, because binary packages are widely used and widely in demand in the Linux community. If our tools don't support binary packages, then we can't claim that our tools are designed to allow a user to do anything he or she might want to do. If we purposely choose to exclude binary support, then we are attempting to interfere with how users might choose to approach particular problems, by instead imposing our own will or view of how they should approach a problem. And if we do not build binary packages, then we are not taking any steps to ensure that our tools actually work well with binary packages, nor are we taking steps to ensure that others can build binary packages, nor are we able to *demonstrate* that our tools work well with binary packages. Besides these philosophical reasons, there are many practical reasons to create binary packages.

"I see now there are binary packages. ... Can I install and use binary packages all the time?"

Binaries are solely for speeding up installation; you install Stage 3 + GRP (that is, the binaries) and then it acts like a normal source-installed Gentoo system. You can either leave it for a while doing emerge -e world after you finish the install to put your own USE/CFLAGS settings into effect, or just let things get replaced naturally when you update things.

rac argues for this to continue here; I'm not aware of any other information.

Incredibly short release cycle obsoletes software too quickly

So only update when there is a security or stability fix that effects you.

Poor package maintenance and broken builds are increasingly common

You should have very few packages on a server. (For me it's (Apache, SSHD, mod_php) or (SSHD, postgres) or (SSHD, OpenLDAP, Courier))

Compilation is stressful on hardware but performance benefits have not been proven

So maintain a local portage tree and build binary packages for distribution across your server farm. You only need to build each package once. You could even set up distcc if you expect to have spare cycles on some of your servers

USE flags have limited flexibility and are more of an annoyance than a benefit

Is there a way in Debian or commercial distros to tell Qt to compile with support for Postgres or MySQL so you can install Rekall on your desktops (without recompiling it manually)? Is there a way to tell Courier whether or not to include support for OpenLDAP, MySQL, or Postgres?

Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistakes, and so on) for a base install. Okay, it took me several days on two machines. The last (5th attempt) only took 5 hours to compile because I went from Stage 1 to Stage 3 to save lots of time. The stage 1 attempts I ran at work, went home, came back the next day, and it was done compiling in about 22 hours on a P2/Dual450/512mb RAM. KDE 3.2.1 took 44 hours to install, not including xfree86. Mozilla took 5 hours.

If you don't have a handle on the situation, it might require outside help and research to solve the problem. Which I used. Luckily, Gentoo-loving people seemingly are both educated and friendly. I had a "Gentoo buddy," and he was very helpful with good cheer once he heard I was having problems. "Oh, I know what the problem is! Nano sucks! Do this, emerge vim..."

Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones. This also includes just installing the base system. I had a problem when a package was labeled missing from the ftp mirrors (due to a misspelling. But again, Gentoo forums came to the rescue

You will be using the command line for most administration.The first thing I launch in a GUI is an xterm or something, so this wasn't a problem. What was a problem was nano saved my files only half the time, and it took an emerge vim to get an editor that worked and got my fstab fixed (actually, I used vim from a Slack-LiveCD first to get Gentoo bootable). For a hard core distro like Gentoo, I was a bit surprised vi was not part of the LiveCD, but nano was. I don't mind nano, I was used to pico because I use pine, but the random "not saving" part was irrirtating.

Community is there. Almost any problem can be found in the Gentoo Forums, and most all of them have solutions. A-men! Thank god for those comprehensive, flame-resistant forums. I got my Stage 1 attempt fixed in less than an hour.

Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices. I'd change that to "step-by-step commands for people who know what 90% of these commands mean." So when they go wrong, you can go, "Ah... all I have to do is repeat step 15a."

Because of the way you install Gentoo, you become much more familiar with the way Linux works under the hood. Ater my hassle, I may not use Gentoo. I just don't have the time for all those compiles. But you are so right on your point, and that's why I considered my install process with Gentoo, hassles and all, to be well worth my time simply because even though I knew a lot of this stuff already, I still learned a whole lot. Very educational, very forward, and support's there when you need it.

Some points I'd like to add from a newbie's POV:

• Once all the fixing was done, my 2.6.5-r1 kernel on this box ran very fast. KDE was as fast as Windows 98 was on this box. Not to rag on Linux, but the GUIs are awfully slow and overhead-intensive. I am not sure if it was Gentoo or the 2.6, but KDE "feels" faster on this old box than my P4/3.0ghz with 1GB RAM does on Fedora Core 1.
• As step-by step as this install was, it left out some things, l

Here is the thread on the Gentoo forums tracking donations to the store (and thus to Daniel):

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=166143&po stdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Pretty good showing of support so far. If you use Gentoo and are able, please contribute.

Aneurysm9 said:
Gentoo has an installer?

1) For posts like this, it's good to be a subscriber. ;)

2) It's good to see that the DR announcement has not changed anything in terms of release schedule, and the job they did setting up the hierarchy seems to be working very well.

3) At least one mirror has a file claiming to be 2005.1. While Gentoo is great, I don't think that it's being delivered from the future. (At least not yet. ;) )

4) The minimal CD is still only 82MB!

5) Slashdot, could Gentoo get its own icon? It's here. Thanks!

The maintainer, steel300 is great and tries to satisfy as many requests as possible.

More information
Link to the patch and ebuild

I whipped up a quick ebuild for Gentoo if anybody feels like running this on their computer. Just grab the files and drop them in a portage overlay via the usual methods. (You can find good documentation on using the overlay on gentoo's site)

The ebuild submission can be found here: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49220

-Llarian

• gentoo linux
• FreeBSD
• bash
• vim
• perl
• ruby
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• PHP
• links www browser
• wget
• K Desktop Environment
• Mozilla Firefox
• xchat
• gimp
• Openoffice.org

Gentoo Install Guide Start

So? my apps will go 5% faster if I bother to wait 5000% more during the install?

Sure, the marginal speed increase is nice, but for me the greatest advantage of Gentoo's source based package system is definitely the USE flags.

Just some quick answers to your questions (link references posted below):

1) Does Daniel Robbins own all of the stock in Gentoo Technologies?
A: I believe so. However, that company will no longer hold the intellectual property/copyrights for Gentoo (as it currently does). Those are being transferred to the new, NFP entity, The Gentoo Foundation: From the Gentoo site:

"In the proposal, Gentoo Foundation, Inc. will hold the intellectual property of the project..."
From Daniel:
"Gentoo Technologies, Inc. will transfer the copyrights and trademarks to the Gentoo Foundation. In exchange, the Gentoo Foundation will grant Daniel Robbins & Gentoo Technologies, Inc. perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free use of the "Gentoo" trademark and "G" logo. This will allow me to continue to run the Gentoo Store if I want."

2) Why was Gentoo Technologies, Inc. initially set up as a for-profit?
A: The project was supported by donations, but was also supported by commercial offerings through the Gentoo Store and other ventures. From past postings I've read it was easier to structure the company that way (at least initially), even though there were drawbacks to the tax exemption possibilities, as you point out. It was just simpler given the many things they were doing (Gentoo Store, Gentoo Games, etc.).

For more information you can check the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter edition for April 19, 2004.
Please also see Daniel's transition plan.

If your interested in Portage or the Gentoo system running on *BSD you might want to take a look at the Gentoo-Alt project. Their getting portage and the rest of the system working under different kernels. Most of the *BSD ports aren't completly done yet but its usable and theirs always room to help out.

From this post, it looks like Daniel built up quite a hefty debt working on Gentoo.

How 'bout some support? Visit the Gentoo homepage and click the donation button in the upper left corner.

The man's got to feed his family after all.

Straight from the FAQ: 'the "g" in "gentoo" is a soft "g", as in "gentle"'. You know, as in the name of the penguin species, or as in Gen(eration) Two?

No details yet - but this
looks like it may well be part of the reason;
specifically, he cannnot (and should not) have to shoulder the financial risk necessary to shift gentoo to its full Not For Profit status.

Given that he has a young family to support, I for one can sympathise with his position.

There's going to be an official announcement once the dust settles slightly, but thisappears to be the live gentoo forum thread.

Go easy on it, the forums are pretty heavily loaded at the best of times, and the last thing the place needs is a full blown slashdotting!

Out of curiosity, has drobbins given any explanation as to why he has made this decision? Too much work? Change in priorities? It's definitely sad to see him go... Gentoo forums don't seem to have an answer yet, and they're usually the first source of any gentoo news..

On another note, is Gentoo ever gonna get it's own icon on /.? The time is now!

But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo.

But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo.

But before leaving, he has set up a non-profit foundation that will own all of the copyrights to Gentoo.

One HOWTO

Another HOWTO

So, once they turn the box off and take your drives...it is all gibberish.

One HOWTO

Another HOWTO

So, once they turn the box off and take your drives...it is all gibberish.

It would be really cool if this technology could somehow be integrated into the Gentoo project.

Of course it would be unreasonable to have the each single ebuild compile and get benchmarked several times on each user's PC, but these genetical algorithms could be used to predetermine the optimal compiler settings for each architecture/ebuild-combination, store this information in a central database and have portage automatically select the optimal compiler setting from that database, each time it compiles an ebuild.

No more figuring out what the best compiler options are: the ebuild maintainers will take on that job for you! :)

As Gentoo users are generally an annoying nusiance in my IRC channel...

Here.

The HOWTO is based on Gentoo, but the configuration principles can obviously be used on any machine.