Slashdot Mirror

Yep. Gentoo has used it for as long as I can remember.

--
Mando

Although to be fair, Gentoo does require you to do some configuration for your kernel, to select the network card drivers and such. It isn't effortless with the kernel.

Try Gentoo You'll have to compile the 2.5-kernel yourself, but the distro will prep the system for you, among other things ;)

Stop asking, start coding (or maybe betting?)

So who'll be the first to make a Gentoo ebuild for it?

Other guys are mentioning many projects, but I want to emphsize on three project, IMHO the most important to illustrate the power of Python:

• Zope - IMHO the best ever written application server, thanks to laziness and OOP of Python;
• Plone - this portal is the best software written for Zope's CMF; Zope would stay popular only among hackers if there would be no Plone;
• Portage - the best ever written package management system; I doubt ebuilds and eclasses would be that flexible and power without Python;

The Gentoo Forum has a post that shows a way to burn encrypted CDs under Linux. I'm going to have to test this out one of these days.

The Gentoo Linux Install Script is looking pretty slick.. perhaps it will be distributed with Gentoo 1.4 as an alternative.

But I am glad I installed manually first. It was very educational.

There's lot more in debian than stability and apt-get.

Social-contract,

extensive multiplatform support and compatibility,

serious full-disclosure security policy ...

But FSF has a point when they refer to the Linux vs GNU/Linux distinction in their response to SCO vs IBM. Their response is directed at SCO's public comments, many of which are unclear about whether they are complaining about the Linux kernel or something else. SCO needs to hide information to protect itself and successfully take revenge on IBM for the code that IBM has stolen in disregard of SCO's rights, assuming IBM is guilty. If IBM is not guilty, then SCO is just being dumb, and we should expect it to do things like spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Go here, scroll down and read my (ThreeFarthingStone's) message to the Gentoo users, if you want.

I don't like the name 'GNU system' by itself. The GNU system includes TeX and X Window System, according to the FSF. But they imply that Linux (the kernel) is not a part. Even though GNU has components that are not GNU software, apparently Linux can't be a component. The FSF insists that GNU/Linux is useful, but they will finish their own kernel Hurd, and Hurd will be GNU's kernel. If this actually happens, I'll probably call it GNU/Hurd instead of just GNU. (The Debian distro is already called Debian GNU/Hurd.) Sometimes I will just call it a Hurd system, maybe to emphasize that it isn't Linux. Example: "I installed a Hurd distro." Sometimes I might even call it a Mach system (or L4 or whatever microkernel ends up being used).

There is one other thing to mention, something on which my opinion approaches that of jmorris42. The FSF likes to complain about the "Open Source movement" which they think is distinct from the "Free Software movement". But the "Open Source movement" that the FSF refers to doesn't really exist in that manner. In fact, some "open source" software ends up under a GNU GPL license, making it effectively the same as "free software". I just use the term "free software" when I want to emphasize my ability to copy and distribute the software; I say "open source" to emphasize my ability to modify or compile the software.

Actually, Gentoo supports about 25 different kernels, some with multiple options, including unmodified official sources straight from www.kernel.org.

If you look at Gentoos screenshots, you will notice one, with a flag of israel (one of the main developper is from there).

I wrote an email to drobbins saying, that it probably is unwise to show any political signs on his webpage.

The answer was something like, it represents the linux comunity of israel and therefore is not political.

(Weeks later I told my brother about this conversation, and he as well had (independently) sent an email to drobbins having quite a long discussion afterwards.)

When I read their emails, I wanted to remove my Gentoo from my computer, but finally decided not to let _one_ person be the reason to remove a working system.

For the record, I would have written the same email if it was _any_ other flag!

Personally, I'm going to wait before there's something fundamentally wrong with Gentoo before I switch.

I lean towards agreement with this statement. It's not as if Gentoo does not have a Social Contract and is closed in any way. Sure, a few private mail lists may exist, as they do in other projects, and there may be business motives behind key Gentoo developers. But at the end of the day the project is GPL, top to bottom, (hence it is forkable) and it will not go in a direction that disatisfies the non-core developers and user community, otherwise it will lose those two precious commodities and cease to exist.

And at the end of the day, people have to put bread on the table. If they find a way to do that through a GPL project, good luck to them. I say good luck to both Gentoo and Zynot, and given my excellent experiences in using Gentoo (never will I go back to something rpm based) I'll be using the best one of the two for the forseeable future.

Who knows, maybe the fork will be good and any co-operation - intentional or through GPL'd code swapping - will probably benefit both distros. (Yes, projects can co-operate in when the leads hate each other, that's the GPL for you.)

Ah well.. I was seriously looking at gentoo for my next distro to thrash about in. I think it's time to bite the bullet and find my link to Debian.

floam, the hardened-gentoo project is still alive and has its own channel on freenode, #gentoo-hardened. It mainly consists of a kernel with only stable patches, IPSec, grsecurity or selinux (not both) and (if using IPSec) a profile to go with it. It's not a fork, just an enhancement upon Gentoo itself, hence the added profile and kernel sources. I've been using it on my router and it seems to be doing great, even with Gentoo's default SELinux policy.

Also, try their demo machine here. It's been mentioned as an article here before. It lets you log in as root and do almost nothing, which is pretty cool.

If you don't know how to do it than read the latest Gentoo Weekly News, the section about "LiveCD on USB/CF". With Gentoo it's already clear how to it.

We use it for workstations, kiosks, firewalls, and servers. I get around the constant compile hell by distrubuting the build process across our rackmount's using distcc, and caching the binaries. Build once, install many.

It's really only used internally (and for my network at home ;). Its a convience factor, the elaborate mechanisms provided by the portage system allow me to knit together some really exotic combinations of hardware and software.

It's not for everybody, but my computers have to run for a few years between installs. By the time I had finished retrofitting and customizing RedHat, I practically had my own distro anyway.

One advantage of Seanix for my situation are my spellbook of network management scripts I call PREEN. Preen maintains RSA keys between the nodes, allows them to SSH back and forth, updates configurations for the entire network at once, and coordinates system shutdowns, among other things. It also handles all the handshaking that must go on when someone changes his or her password.

It also synthesizes a custom passwd,shadow,and group file for every computer. Some machines running samba need the machine accounts. The new mail server runs everyone as a virtual mailbox, so I have no local accounts (for users) at all. Still others are workstation, and they download the user accounts for the expected population of users.

Stallman wasn't kidding when he said 90% of software is used internally and never published,

To be fair, I'm young as well (I'm 20). Minus a year for college, I've been working as a programmer at my company since the summer of 2000 (with a lot of recreational programming before that).

For the last year, I've been working as a "Software Analyst". I get bug reports that our setup folks can't solve and I solve them. This often requires a lot of code hunting. We've got everything from extremely junky Fortran 77 (no whitespace, no variable names over 6 characters -- and Fortran at that) for our legacy app, and some CGI programs written in spaghetti-code C (with a good mix of HTML templating and javascript thrown in)! Even better, this all runs on HP-UX. Needless to say, I get plenty of practice fielding bad code and weird issues. =)

Our development team is comprised of 12 developers total, and only in the last 4 years has it grown past a four man team. The company is now around 50 heads total, and a QA department is in sight (the Software Analysts will eventually be QA).

Anyway, our newer products are all based on open source tools. PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, Perl, Mason, ORBit, etc. The source code, mailing lists, IRC, etc. and the open attitude have made things a breeze, not to mention these tools have saved us a very large sum of money in licensing costs.

This is quite possibly the exception to the rule, I have no problem admitting that. Somehow, though, from what I hear of other companies, this isn't all too uncommon.

Cheers

No No.. I wasnt even implying that was possible... Redmond hasn't even come to know and love publically selected mirrors... We are stuck with becoming psuedo world citizens in the sense that we are limited by the fact that everyone else in the world is using windows update... I hated that about windows... now, when I want to update anything - I emerge sync and emerge -u world in Gentoo Linux, and the world rejoices.

That's a prime example of survival of the fittest, and the true formula for the best software. Competition is the key, and not just inter-OS competition like Outlook->Evolution, but things like different ftpd variants, different crons, syslogs, etc - Gentoo Linux has most openly encouraged this variety from what I can see..

ReiserFS is the filesystem we recommend by default for all non-boot partitions.

I've been playing it with no problems. I think the likely cause of the excessively long delay to release is due to some good QA people at Bioware.
So far everything in the game has worked flawlessly. With this and ut2003 native linux clients, Tux finally can be a gamer.
I recommend downloading Gentoo's Unreal Tournament bootable CD if you want to demo native Linux gaming for some non-believers... Sorry, can't find a direct link... It's in their livecd folder...
Also I recommend transgaming for Windows games on Linux. Warcraft 3, Ghost Recon, Max Payne to name a few games that run under Winex3...
I hope more game development companies want my money, cuz from now on the only way their getting it is if the game has a native Linux client... Unless it's a ps2 game of course..

go ahead, emerge

gentoo..

failing that try here

I run mandrake with a 2.5 kernel.

The ROI on $200 is pretty easy to swallow, and frankly I've run these applications on a 486.

Granted, I did napalm the Lindows off the drive and reinstalled a more customizable distro, but at least I knew all the parts have Linux drivers.

Of course, I formatted my laptop when I got it at my current job and installed Gentoo on it, even though everyone else in the company is using Windows 2k/XP... Gotta love rdesktop for those apps (and) you just have to use.

Actually, you can run Linux on a Mac. There's Gentoo and Yellow Dog Linux available. BTW, Gentoo runs quite well on Macs.

Yes it is.

I'm the systems administrator at my company, and after a catastophic meltdown of our RAID array recently, I've had the opportunity to choose what distro to run. Needless to say, I dropped Redhat like a bad habit. We are now running Gentoo Linux (No Masked Packages) on our production server, and seeing a nice little performance boost.

For other Gentoo geeks out there, we're running the Vanilla kernel, not the Gentoo-Sources kernel. Our reasons for this are primarily stability. While I've had no obvious problems with the Gentoo-Sources kernel on my desktop machine, a production ecommerce server isn't something you mess around with.

As a warning, they do not recommend it for servers, simply because of the way portage behaves by default, but with a little hands on effort, you can easily establish a consistent software footprint throughout your enterprise. Its worked great for us in anycase.

For what it's worth, Gentoo Linux suggests ResierFS as there prefered FileSystem.

Oops, you have a typo: patch.

Here's my entry

no questions means you can type 'emerge kde' and come back later after it has installed possibly dozens of packages with no more input from you.

no questions means you can type 'emerge kde' and come back later after it has installed possibly dozens of packages with no more input from you.

I think the Gentoo guys would love it if you submitted a bug.

Gentoo Icon

I completely understand that this is a joke, but in fair defense directed towards the folks who don't know any different:

1) Many new Gentoo users take up to a week to install it for the first time. That said, many of the kernel sources Gentoo offers (such as Red Hat sources) are patched to the point that ramming your CPU to 100% doesn't slow your box down. The only thing that can make my system lag is heavy disk/swap access.

2) In regards to testing packages, Red Hat, Debian, etc. have been proven to be quite stable. However, in fairness, I'm on the "unstable" tree on Gentoo and I can't remember the last time I had an app crash.

In short, if you're a geek, don't mind a few days downtime for installation and can deal with hand configuring your box, you might give Gentoo a try. The installation process is very well documented, but can be difficult if you run into problems. Once installed, though, Gentoo is the easiest distro I've seen in regards to maintenance and administration.

It's not for everyone, but some will love it.

Ignore the zealots, most of them are just excited, they'll grow out of it in time (I'm speaking from personal experience here ;) ).

I used to use apsfilter w/ lpd for all my printing needs. Which worked, once it was setup. Though I never did get samba printing exactly correct. It was a bear. It was eaiser to setup sendmail than getting printing working in linux.

Well, a short while ago we picked up a new printer. I was dreading going into apsfilter setup again and wrestling with lpd and all that. I looked around cups' site looking for a decent howto. Nothing for a simple "just do it" documentation. I decided to try out gentoo's site for documentation, which is awsome. Here is an awesome howto for getting cups setup in gentoo. You could probably glean the information for doing it in other distributions also from this howto.

I know a lot of folks get sick of gentoo folks pushing it all the time. But documentation and howto's are one of gentoo's biggest strengths. I really reccomend folks look at the gentoo docs when they are trying to figure something out.

Nope, I don't have any affiliation with gentoo other than a user and the occasional bug reporter.

Gentoo users can download a source ebuild for Mozilla Firebird 0.6 from here. I've built it on a couple of machines so far with no problems.

I only wish some kind gent would role the ebuild for the source so I can emerge it into Gentoo from portage.

These days I have a salary and can afford to have nice pretty computers:

In my primary work area I have a powerbook (With OSX) and a Gentoo Linux PC (Strictly KDE not Gnome). Looking at those screenshots reminds me how much the Linux community has advanced since those 'hobbyist' days. I think we owe it to ourselves to have desktops that are both functional AND pretty.

Anyway Gentoo Linux includes FVWM even though that distro is less than 2 years old!

Fvwm is what Microsoft THINK all UNIX(y) computers still look like!

Gentoo has a PPC Live CD that will boot on any G3 or G4 Mac... the purpose of their live cd is more for installation purposes though than anything else, there's no X.

The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.

If there is something wrong with it, why reinstall it when you could just install something that works?

I'm not sure if this has everything you are looking for but, Gentoo has live CD's for PPC.

Here is some info

Here are the ISO's

I'm not sure if this has everything you are looking for but, Gentoo has live CD's for PPC.

Here is some info

Here are the ISO's

It would be great if more people designed sites properly, using CSS to keep formatting separate from content, keeping page size to a minimum, using URLs that won't change, etc... I'd like to think that a web-based document-management system I designed would fit into this category - although it's far from perfect, I'd like to think I was making one step towards a better World Wide Web. I think the Gentoo Linux site is also a very well-designed site, and another great example to the rest of the Net - I'm never lost there, despite the huge amount of info on the site.

There have been a number of threads on that particular issue in the last few months on the gentoo forums. I'm a bit lazy right now to go search the forums for it, but go to The Gentoo Forums and do some searching. A few options were proposed.

It looks like people use a combination of "emerge inject category/package" and the "DO_NOT_COMPILE" flag to customize their KDE installations.

For example, say you don't want kdeedu when you go to install KDE 3.1.1:

emerge inject kdebase/kdeedu-3.1.1

Then Portage thinks "kdeedu" is already installed, so it won't compile/install it when you "emerge kde."

For further "granularity" within the different KDE groups, you can do something like:

DO_NOT_COMPILE="knode ksirc kppp korn" emerge kdenetwork. Then, as you might expect, it will build kdenetwork without the specified programs.

This was all ripped off from this thread from the ever-helpful Gentoo forums. ;-)