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It just makes us look like Mad Zealots.

Sorry, wrong room. The mad zealots are down the hall by the coke machine, waiting for KDE 3.2 to compile.

/ot
At some point, names are appropriate. They are engaged in a three front, billion dollar legal war, with their chosen weapon being PR. They have demonstrated a disdain for the truth, and have stated that this goal was established before a method to achieve it was found. They wanted Linux, and tried to steal it. They have been dishonest in their SEC filings. That dishonesty alone is probably worth jail time to someone, due to the manipulative impact it has had on their stock value.

I can think of a lot worse names than "litigious bastards".

-Ted

I was a long time Debian user, and I've "switched" to Gentoo. The primary reason I feel the ports/portage system is better is that I am not forced to install packages that have dependencies on other packages I don't need. For example, take gaim. In Debian, gaim has a dependency on NAS (Network Audio System), so I'm forced to install it. I don't need NAS. I don't want to install NAS. Gentoo has a USE flag that allows me to declare that I don't want anything to use NAS.

Also, it is pretty easy to make a custom "ebuild" file (which is a shell script) in Gentoo, and relatively difficult to create a new .deb. Say a new release of your favorite software comes out, but the package maintainer hasn't gotten around to packaging it. In Gentoo, in most cases, you simply copy the old ebuild file, and possibly tweak the version number. You don't have to download, compile, and package it seperately, as you'd have to do in Debian.

There is also a lot less political activity in Gentoo, and they seem to Get Things Done.

I was a long time Debian user, and I've "switched" to Gentoo. The primary reason I feel the ports/portage system is better is that I am not forced to install packages that have dependencies on other packages I don't need. For example, take gaim. In Debian, gaim has a dependency on NAS (Network Audio System), so I'm forced to install it. I don't need NAS. I don't want to install NAS. Gentoo has a USE flag that allows me to declare that I don't want anything to use NAS.

Also, it is pretty easy to make a custom "ebuild" file (which is a shell script) in Gentoo, and relatively difficult to create a new .deb. Say a new release of your favorite software comes out, but the package maintainer hasn't gotten around to packaging it. In Gentoo, in most cases, you simply copy the old ebuild file, and possibly tweak the version number. You don't have to download, compile, and package it seperately, as you'd have to do in Debian.

There is also a lot less political activity in Gentoo, and they seem to Get Things Done.

As usual I'll come out with my Gentoo Zealotry but I'd like to deflect some of the problems I'm seeing mentioned here.

Gentoo is a Linux distribution largely centric to the Portage package manager (there are other features of Gentoo, but Portage is by far the most conspicuous)

Portage is a package manager loosely inspired by FreeBSD's ports system. Portage maintains a global software configuration file called make.conf. Make.conf holds meta-configuration settings about your system. As Portage builds all programs from source for your machine, make.conf is the place where you describe your machine to Portage. make.conf also holds a collection of use flags. Use flags are global binary switches. They have a default value if they are unspecified, and if you include a Use flag (ie USE="java") then it turns that flag on, and if you include -flag, (ie USE="-java") then it explicitly will not use that feature which is globally recognized by Gentoo.

I see complaints that emerge VI tried to build X and thus portage is "smarter" than you as a sysadmin. This is patently false and ignorant. Portage lets you do your job as a sysadmin once and then never have to worry about doing it again. If you do not want X on a machine then you need merely put "-X" in your use flags.

It puts control in your hands. If you want an application built to support certain things you can have it. If you do not want to support other things explicitly it will do that. It defaults tod doing what's sensible for most people who use Linux casually. If you aren't a casual user, spend a week or so getting familiar with portage and it's configuration. emerge is an incredibly potent tool. All of my systems are patched automatically every day, from source, with the configuration I have specified for that system. My binaries are all built with -march for the CPU, and -Os. And I've never once had any of my systems have a failure caused by misconfigured dependencies. They stay up to date and I don't have to worry about it.

If you want to do all your dependency checking yourself, you're welcome to. However there's a good solution that takes care of all of the issues revolving around this available, freely, to the world. Click here to find out more about it.

Which is why I'm working on getting gentoo portage going for Solaris. Portaris!

If you feel you habe some ideas that could help with this mini project, feel free to join in!

The meeting held on the 26th was opened with Kurt Lieber announcing a plan to develop an enterprise-friendly version of Gentoo. Gentoo Enterprise would be extremely stable, with quarterly sets of release ebuilds guaranteed to persist for at least a year. There was then some discussion on whether to have a separate Gentoo Enterprise tree or to have a Portage keyword; Kurt will be writing a GLEP to tackle these and other issues soon. Once the floor was opened, developers brouhgt up several ideas. First, Brian Jackson suggested "server metapackages" - these would be like the KDE and GNOME metapackages - "emerge vmail", for example, would create an already-configured virtual mail system. Next, more discussion about a separate tree for Gentoo Server, including ideas about using webrsync to get past paranoid corporate firewalls, using xdelta, and implementing a kickstart-like installation tool, took place.

it's being worked on under solaris as well...

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=113387

This reminds me of something I read the other day in the gentoo forums: Installing Portage on Other Distros

Yes, and it's called Portage. Written in Python, and uses wget to retieve AND install ANY dependants. On the fly.

I hope they will include Ebuilds as they are a great way to install software, and are becoming more and more popular as Gentoo does.

(No, this isn't a troll, I'd really like to see that. :) )

Try the Gentoo PPC LiveCD. It requires a bit of configuration (e.g. picking what WM you want), but it's not that hard. Grab it from the Gentoo site.

RedHat's 'trial by fire' approach for their new security policy is a good one, and is something all distro makers should try. Nothing beats having your default security config probed and tested by the world's best crackers in a real life environment.

Gentoo did this a while back when they first were implementing the Hardened project. The guys in the project setup a SELinux hardened Gentoo box and put it live on the 'net. They then gave out the IP address and the root password on the main Gentoo page.

What the Linux community needs, I feel, is a type of central signing authority or cryptographically sealed DRM-compatible package management system. This could eliminate potential threats associated with trojaned Linux packages.

There is currently development in place with Gentoo's portage to allow for developers to digitally sign packages. There will also be a central signing authority for the entire distribution. It is still in the planning and discussion phase, but we are shooting for inclusion in portage-ng, the next major upgrade of the portage code-base. You can find more information about portage-ng here.

I suppose non-root users can't send e-mail? And I suppose non-root users can't listen on a port for incomming instructions to execute? Or run a proxy server on a non-privleged port?

Not with SELinux or other ACL systems such as grsecurity and LIDS if they're given the right settings, revoke net capabilities from all users and only grant them to the ones that need it.

And will it stop a trojan which asks 'Root password needed to continue:' and then proceeds to use it to screw your system?

SELinux will yea, thats kinda the point of it. They're assuming your box is going to get rooted, and letting you protect it from what root can do to it.

Theres a couple of SELinux demo systems online that let you login as root, one here. Yep, anyone, anywhere, given free root, only you can't do anything with it. Normal linux, yep all your arguments stand, bung ACL's on there and its rock solid. Unfortunately its also a royal PITA to run a desktop machine on.

I've not got around to trying selinux yet but was thinking of the posibility of a perl script parsing its error log while its running in non-enforce mode and generating ACL's from that, anyone know if this would be possible? Would certainly make it a lot easier to setup a desktop workstation running SELinux.

Gentoo has their own experimental install routine to use SELinux as well. The link is here.

Indeed, this is why we have projects like Hardened Gentoo where SELinux is just one part of it. Other technologies that attempt to make buffer overflows (among other things) very difficult/impossible to exploit is not included in SELinux, nor in Redhat.

If they try hard enough, I'm sure they'll be able to find some way to screw it up. I think I'll stick with something a little more minimalist.

The first thing is pick a kernel; development-sources or mm-sources are the vanilla 2.6 kernel and one of the more expermental patch-sets respectively. Love sources ebuilds are also in the forums, and some people swear by them. Initially, I'd go for development-sources.

Without repeating everything in the forums guide, you'll need to emerge module-init-tools, and re-emerge the nvidia-kernel ebuild. You shouldn't need to recompile much else. You also can unmerge the alsa-drivers ebuild, as the drivers are built into the 2.6 kernel.

I upgraded to the 2.6 kernel back when it hit release candidate status, and it really is worth the upgrade for a desktop, the scheduler improvements mean my CPU is at 100% compiling right now, and has no visible impact to posting this, or to xmms in the background!

Not running any heavy cpu load servers, i've been in no rush to migrate them yet, but the couple I've migrated so far have been as stable as the 2.4 series.

Hmm, I dunno about Gentoo, actually. It is available, but most developers will advise against using it I think. I just did a little search for NPTL on bugs.gentoo.org, it looks like there are still a few outstanding issues. Some appear to be show-stopping. If someone has successfully got it working though, I'd be interested to hear it.

Grab any game off the shelf and play it.

Stop spreading lies about Linux gaming support because it is just as good as Windows for games, in fact better because you can optimize your software for the hardware for more speed

Gentoo forums thread titled "Booting Linux from a USB Pendrive"

---
Ever been in the situation where you wanted to flash your BIOS only to find out you ran all out of (working) floppy's, or you didn't have a windows bootdisk at hand, or even worse, you didn't have a (working) floppy drive?
---
At least it's a start.

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!

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?! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat!

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!

My Anti-spyware software ;)

Why are you STILL using Windows filled with spyware crap! Get linux today. With KDE 3.2 just released there is really NO excuse!

Install Linux on your computer today!

My friends, I know we all want Open Source to succeed. However, it has come to my attention that the amount of attention being lavished on Linux by the community at the expense of BSD ignores one key advantage that the vernerable OS from Berkeley has over everyone's favourite from Finland.

How can people say BSD is dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!

How can you take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these?! Would you buy software from them? Would you even walk on the same side of the street as them?! I don't think so! You Linux groupies need to find some 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?!

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? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! 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!

Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Gentoo AMD64

Whoa, a Live-CD :)

Trouble, though:

... Silicon Image 3112 driver [..], this does work on some boxes, but NO SUCCESSFUL REPORTS on AMD64!

Damn...

Also I do like X and KDE (or Gnome for that matter) - being dropped to a raw shell is not tops. With the SI 3112 issues, I guess I'll have to add patience :)

Mandrakesoft have a version of 9.2 for Athlon 64 systems.

Fedora, Gentoo, and Debian also have A64 ports in development.

So dont wait for Windows, Join the 64-bit revoloution today, with Linux! Ported faster because the source is open!

1. I actually am waiting for portage to calculate dependencies on my P4 3G. The reason is that I first check what would be emerged, before I actually have it done. I don't mind the build taking a long time because I'm not waiting for it to complete, I just run it during the night.

   And as far as language choices are concerned, somebody I know has made an alternative to portage in perl and already it was a *LOT* faster in calculating dependencies. I'm not saying I know why, I'm just stating a fact.

2. There are times when I have to do a reinstall and I would like to do an automated one. The Gentoo Linux Install Script is hopefully going to fill that void.

>Of course, all these claims of gentoo's speed have never been backed up.

Gentoo performance benchmarks

that link is there in the left menu on gentoo.org in RED COLOR.

Gentoo already has this, but it's masked.

Go to /usr/portage/kde-base/kdebase, and there is an ebuild for it:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7922 Jan 18 23:35 kdebase-3.0.5b.ebuild
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3971 Jan 13 12:40 kdebase-3.1.4.ebuild
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3630 Jan 29 08:42 kdebase-3.1.5.ebuild
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3084 Feb 2 07:26 kdebase-3.2.0.ebuild

You'll have to unmask it, so see The Masked Packages FAQ at Gentoo.org.

good for you! what does that have to do with my hardware?

It means your incapable of following simple instructions for your particular chipset.

i mean, am i missing something?

Obviously.. If you wanna run bloated binaries on your own hardware that you don't even seem to know very well, that's your own laziness. But you can always count on smart people telling you that's not optimal, and that a better way exists. A little extra time invested in the beginning goes a hell of a long way in performance gains down the road.

i waited for over a year before i went ahead in installing gentoo

The docs are right there.. so aside from someone doing the install for you, I don't see taking a year to prepare for a simple install. I think you needed the year to get up off your lazy ass and do it.

allow linux users to make an informed decision based on all the positives and negatives.

What negatives? I see none. All I see is a lazy wanna-be linux user who thinks average is good enough. Maybe you should try politics Anonymous Coward.

It wouldnt take much to offer "up an running in 10 minutes" iso's to people with a default set of apps, portage & tree etc

What, you mean like the 2-disk Live CD option offered by, erm, what's its name, Gentoo Linux? Sure, there's a bit of tweaking to do, but almost everything is precompiled. Too much for you? Then perhaps Gentoo's not for you.

It wouldnt take much to offer "up an running in 10 minutes" iso's to people with a default set of apps, portage & tree etc

What, you mean like the 2-disk Live CD option offered by, erm, what's its name, Gentoo Linux? Sure, there's a bit of tweaking to do, but almost everything is precompiled. Too much for you? Then perhaps Gentoo's not for you.

your "less than a day" is still longer than the 30-60 minutes it takes to install/upgrade mandrake with all the trimmings.

Yeah, multiply that by how many times you will reinstall Mandrake over the next 5-7 years because of the distro's end of life and new releases. Then add all your rpm dependancy troubleshooting time you will go through for each install. Then add your time of turning un-needed services off, securing the system, etc. If you think all that is less effort than a one-time Gentoo install you're nuts.

but i had to repeately configure and recompile the kernel until i had the options just right.

That's true of any distro until you get to know your hardware. I suspect if you want a bloated kernel with everything compiled in then you're golden using Mandrake. I'd rather have a smaller, faster kernel myself so I always compile my own. Then I backup my .config files so I never have to do them again for a given machine. make oldconfig works great on old kernel .config files.

alsa is just nuts

I suppose some people are incapable of following simple instructions. I've never once had an issue getting alsa working with Gentoo.

everyone is not like you, so give your ego a rest. recognize that different people have different needs. and, thus, more than one distro is good for all linux users.

It's not about ego, it's about doing the job right. Running binarys that are not optimized for the hardware they run on is just lazy on the part of the system administrator.

Compiler flags exist, use them!

If you guys would just shutup and install Gentoo you wouldn't be having these stupid distro discussions.

Gentoo is simple, one install per machine for life.

Put this in your daily cron to keep the whole system up to date:
emerge sync
emerge -pvu world
Then every morning you can see what new stuff you may want to update that day.

Look for new software with:
emerge -s whatever

Remove software with:
emerge -pvC whatever

Unless you have and run exactly what chipset and compiler flags your "distro" based binarys are compiled for, your system will never be as fast as it can be.

And thanks RedHat for making me a Gentoo user!

A 13 year old kid put this together...impressive reading...

I haven't had (spy|ad)ware for years either. My solution is a bit more comprehensive than a browser, however. ;)

No trolling intended. :-)

I'm defining a professional as someone whose priorities are stability and security, and it's *easy* to install debian-stable and add security.debian.org to /etc/apt/sources.list.

To get the speed benefits of Gentoo, you have to devote considerable time to compiling it once for every machine configuration you run, and last time I checked (and the Gentoo website says that this is still the case), "emerge --security" was still a pipedream. See http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/index.xml

by the default it comes with nano...
you cant use a KNOPPIX CD for the install or generate your own Live CD without nano using catalyst if you are a real zealot for vi....
It would probably be the only distro shipping only with vi ;-) After all the Live cd just boots the system ...
there is no magic on it, so you could even install gentoo from an existing Linux installation using your loved vi....

BTW, I use vi too ...

Gentoo, every package update must be recompiled.
not true.
There are preompiled packages available now optimized for most archs and packages.
See here Also in a production enviroment with multiple gentoo boxes you can compile once, test and then run anywhere - with the support of distcc compiling is very fast ... and that is easy to setup.
Note that gentoo is evolving pretty fast and not compareable with the gentoo from a year ago ...
Greetz,Bjorn

atacontrol detach 1
---pull out drive---
atacontrol attach 1
---see how devfs/GEOM creates nodes automatically, than mount away---

Fedora has a testversion for 64bit AMD. The future versions will support AMD 64bit. My dad runs Fedora. Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 test1

Gentoo has been supporting 64bit AMD for a while. But Gentoo is not yet for ordinary endusers. Gentoo Linux AMD64 Development

For example:

• SuSE 9.0 Pro for amd64.
• SuSE Enterprise Server 8 for amd64.
• Mandrake 9.2rc1 for amd64.
• Fedora Core1 test1 for amd64.
• Gentoo's amd64 info
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & WS are available for amd64.

I've been using Gentoo's amd64 stuff for a little while on my new Shuttle Box. Things are generally good although there are still a lot of packages that are masked. KDE is also problematic which may be a turn-off for some people.

A colleague just got a new dual-opteron Workstation from Pogo and is running SuSE 9.0 pro for amd64 and is rather happy -- just about everything plays nicely.

Multimedia has significant problems on both systems. No flash player for 64-bit, mplayer and related multimedia requiring 32-bit codecs. Nvidia amd 64 drivers require some patching if they work at all, at least as of last wednesday.

Otherwise quite happy with all of these. Mandrake claims to have multimedia stuff working properly (see above link for info) but wants to eat my partition table so I haven't checked it out yet.

--
"Now you'll see why they call me the Velour Fog" --Zapp Brannigan, 25-star General & Cpt.

If I do recall there is a gentoo live CD out right now.. In fact the gentoo page has a Athlon 64 faq out here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-note s. html
Now, like all new technologies, there maybe certains apps that don't work, compilations errors, and other problems... But how will they be fixed unless people try it, and send back bug reports?

gentoo had a nice lot (maybe the goth chick had some to do with that...), and so did suse, sun and amd.

As the official gentoo booth "goth chick", I take that as a compliment.

Want to make your local goth chick happy? Install gentoo today!

Has anyone had luck getting a Live CD for PPC to work? I've tried Gentoo's, and it didn't boot properly on my PowerBook--but oddly enough booted up in my roommate's CD drive just fine... which is really odd considering we both have the exact same model PowerBook!

XP has to emulate about half the stuff since they moved over to the NT lineage after ME. So yeah an emulator will usually run slower than the real thing. As far as GPL having too many features try Gentoo from stage 1, you can customize what you do and do not want every step of the way. Linus works on the kernel which just handles hardware, memory management, etc. So the kernel hackers aren't responsible for monsters like xfree86.

http://www.gentoo.org

I have a real sparc 5 (not an ultra 5), and a sparcstation 20, an ultra1 and an ultra10 as well. All running a bleeding edge Linux distro. What's the point of this article? These boxes are common as mud and very well supported...

After all the work that our IT department has done to try and inform people, the student population is still ignorant of simple virus-protection techniques.

;) With the exception of myself, of course: I run Gentoo Linux. ;)