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First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

That is what I did. That is what happened to me. In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Ultimately, I tried Gentoo Linux and found the best of both worlds (intelligent source-based install, centralized compiler flag config files, easy application and system upgrade...) though FreeBSD is still preferable for boring servers that absolutely must not crash, ever.

Just to add to your "INFORMATIVE" message - Gentoo Linux's portage is more advanced version of FreeBSD's ports. If you didn't know this already, I suggest you and all the other ignorant people go to gentoo website and do your studies.

Daniel Robbins, the main developer of Gentoo Linux is an ex-FreeBSD user who abandoned FreeBSD because "all the fun is happening in Linux" - his exact words (can be found on gentoo website also).

I currently have 2 Linux and 2 FreeBSD -boxes and I have to admit FreeBSD's ports system does not work as it is supposed to work. "pkg_add" fails more than too often. I am not satisfied. It has made me think they (FreeBSD's developers) just don't care.

You might want to have a look at oeone. It's not a distro, but a user environment specifically designed to be simple and foolproof, with a limited set of functionality. Couple it with some kind of LiveCD such as Gentoo's and you're set.

You might want to take a look at how Gentoo Linux puts together their "LiveCD" for installation purposes...

Since you don't want these people to be able to change any configurations, just have a web browser and word processor, getting them to where their setup boots off of a read-only CD that has the tools they need may be the solution.

Of course, this is a large amount of work, but perhaps the time you save putting it together will outweigh the time you might loose if they mess with and break their configurations. ;)

If you have the time and will to compile everything, Gentoo is an excellent distribution where everything goes fast :)

Why not just use Gentoo? You get all of the benefits of a fully customized and compiled distribution when you want it. Yet it's completely automated for when you don't want to be bothered with every little package that goes into a fully functional system.

i started using linux a little over two years ago. i went to linuxworld 2000 in nyc and came home with free copies of several distrobution's cds. i went cold turkey off of windows and into redhat. after about a month, i realized that i wasn't really learning much from redhat.
that night i decided i was going to find a distro that i liked. i installed everything (suse, turbolinux, debian, conectiva). finally, i installed slackware an was amazed at its simplicity. it was remarkably voodoo-free. there were no crazy scripts to confuse me, everything made sense.
now i use debian. i forget when or why i made the switch. i still love slack, but i'm hooked on debian's package management and software availability. slackware is the best distro to *learn* linux on. it forces you to do things yourself, and that's important. it's not quite as hardcore as linux from scratch, and i've heard crux and gentoo are similar, but slack will always hold a special place in my heart.

Thanks Pat.

Well, I have had, or had access to, burners since 1996 and although T1 or equivalents probably was available back then, not many people had the use for them. At the time, we were 50 employees sharing a 256k leased line, recently upgraded from a 64k...

All dialup ISPs I know about charge a flat monthly fee for unmetered access.

Cool. Where I live (Sweden), the 'unmetered access' concept does not exist except for ADSL or leased lines. Dialups cost per minute, be it POTS, ISDN or mobile.

Anyway - in that case, I can see the reason for doing a Gentoo install over the phone - there are some howtos, anecdotes, methods and metoos at the Gentoo forums if you want some more input before starting your dialup adventure.

What version of Linux should I be programming to? Should I go with The Standard, Redhat? The Pure, Debian? The Cool, SuSE? or The Esoteric, Sorcerer?

To install LFS you must use an existing Linux install on the machine to create your LFS system, using the existing system's compiler and the 'chroot' command.

With Gentoo, I believe you can install it off an existing system as well, just by downloading the system tarball, untarring it on a new partition, and again using the 'chroot' command to then compile and install the system.

If you don't have an existing system, you can just use a Linux boot floppy such as tomsrtbt, boot with that, set up the network/internet connection, and then download/chroot from there, which is what I did on a laptop with no bootable CDROM drive.

Try it!
Mark.

I would say try one of the more newbie-friendly distros like Red Hat or Mandrake first, and then once you've used it a little while (days or weeks), and feel you want to learn a bit more of how Linux actually works, where certain files are kept, and command-line syntax, try Gentoo.

The Gentoo install is, these days, reasonably easy, but I wouldn't recommend trying it before you even try/use any other distro.

That's IMHO anyway...
Mark.

Whenever I need a boot floppy, I use tomsrtbt. It helped me install Gentoo on my old p120 laptop, which doesn't have a bootable CDROM drive.

Cheers, Mark.

But if you already know about the other source-baseds and just want specific information about Lunar, than yes, it does seem to be practicaly non existant.

I recommend Gentoo for people who want to be closer to the internals of their systems but don't want the "gasoline poured into gaping head wound" pain of Linux From Scratch. LFS is great for doing once for the experience, but since it pretty much lacks a packaging system (back when I tried it), it's not for me. I'm willing to do some babysitting of my system, but not at the level that LFS requires.

Gentoo promises a close working relationship with your system, access to the very latest packages, and a growing and generally helpful community.

Try it out: Gentoo home

See my other post in this thread for why I had problems with it initially.

Gentoo would suit you very well...when I was first introduced to FreeBSD I just loved the ports system. Then I tried Gentoo and realized how much better the Gentoo scheme (known as "portage") is...not to mention the way they handle runlevels/init scripts, config files in /etc, and just about everything else. Hands down the most coherent, logical system I've ever seen.

Never had to worry about PPPoE, but perhaps a search on the gentoo forums could help? I see one, a more detailed, but German one, and another here.

After that, I suppose I see the charm of other source based distros. Gentoo really isn't that intuitive on the installation for those unfamiliar with the guts of the software...

Never had to worry about PPPoE, but perhaps a search on the gentoo forums could help? I see one, a more detailed, but German one, and another here.

After that, I suppose I see the charm of other source based distros. Gentoo really isn't that intuitive on the installation for those unfamiliar with the guts of the software...

Never had to worry about PPPoE, but perhaps a search on the gentoo forums could help? I see one, a more detailed, but German one, and another here.

After that, I suppose I see the charm of other source based distros. Gentoo really isn't that intuitive on the installation for those unfamiliar with the guts of the software...

I'm currently running Gentoo/i386 1.4 RC 1. Now, I was quite happy with 1.2. Nice and quick, latest bells and whistles. 1.4 is nice and quick. And as unstable as you like.
I keep up to date with my emerges, avoid masked packages and the like. It still breaks. kdebase has problems. Mozilla 1.0 is still in the main tree and the default seems to be to compile it against gtk2. Snort was broken for a while.

They seem to want to avoid standard ways of doing things. Where are the rc?.d directories. Do I really want to spend time trying to understand a new system?. The --help for the gentoo tools is pages long. The speil you get when Linux boot has gone in favour of a black screen.

Flexibility is one thing, but I do have things I want to do with my systems. I don't want to have to build huge swathes of system again to fix a niggling bug.

I admire the philosophy behind gentoo, and I admire the skill with which the portage system has been crafted, but at the moment they're only good for geeks with, as the initial poster said, clock cycles to burn.

Having said all that, I've just been running RH 8.0 on my laptop and getting used to RPMs after have the flexibility is a bit of a slap in the face.

I would say that source based distributions are the way to go, sort of, but only when they're properly QA'd, meaning the time it takes for the latest packages to get to stable takes a long time (but heh, not Debian long!). And can they ever really be QA'd when you do what Gentoo does - heavy optimisations for a wide range of processors, building with the options you want?

What I'd like to see is a hybrid system. RH/Mandrake/Suse + a portage a like. Stuff compiled using portage can go to /usr/local, the rest is in the main /usr tree. Stability for the bulk with the flexibility you need without going trawling freshmeat/google for the program.

God damn, I've gone way off topic. I'll stop now.

Mainly because Lunar Linux and Sorcerer GNU/Linux aren't quite as difficult as Gentoo. More of the installation chores are automated. For example, while Gentoo expects the user to manually chroot and copy the system over from the CD to the root partition, Lunar and Sorcerer do this automatically. Also, optimisation is broken down into a series of easy-to-grasp choices (the optimisation setting for really fucking fast code is labelled clearly) rather than expecting the user to muck around with CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.

Best of all, IMHO, it's feasible (though almost time-consuming as installing software through FreeBSD's ports system) to install Lunar on a machine using a dialup. As far as difficulty is concerned, I'd class Lunar between Slackware and Gentoo. Hope this helps a bit.

--
St. Matthew, Patron Saint of Cheeky Programmers

Get a source distro! Nothing beats a compile-yourself distribution optimized for your system in every ELF:

lunar linux
Gentoo
Rock linux
Sorcerer linux
SourceMage

In the end... binary distro's are just like windoze

Then what OS would you recommend that *does* have a standard software installation mechanism?

All together now... FreeBSD!

500 MB? Really? Virtually every disc I burn has 100MB or less on it. They're so cheap you can waste the space, and what better way to waste a bit of space than with a cute picture.

The primary reason I've only gone halfway through my first (and only) spindle is because I force myself to justify the creation of a CD before I burn it. I bought a 5-pack of high speed CD-RWs for the times when I want to throw a couple hundred MBs or less of data onto a disc - because that, IMHO, is expendable.

Heck, I'm even ashamed of myself for burning two Gentoo ISOs when I could have done perfectly well extracting them to my HDD and using a Linux boot disk instead.

As well as the bsd ports style gentoo linux. With this distro you actually have to do more work then Freebsd and is much more unix-like.

Part of the freedom of Linux is that you can choose what you like by the distro. If you just want to use a linux system and not have to configure it or do not have time to do so then mandrake is the one. IF you want great corporate support for work, then redhat is the proper one. If you want stability then debian. The point is that you choices based on your needs.

I also hate to say it, but sysVr4 is the defacto standard today. All of the big unix apps are designed for sysV systems and linux is compliant with it. Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, SCo openserver, sco unixware, and Linux are in the sysV camp. Any unix book today assumes you use solaris or linux. The argument to use *BSD because all the docs are written for it is a very outdated and 80's-ish argument. Go to any bookstore and look in the unix section. Gnu has not only caught up with posix but has succeded it.

I was just looking at the Gentoo Linux page when this thought hit me:

What about AOL sending out a bootable CD that runs a basic Linux distro and AOL on top. It might be a bit slow and have trouble recognizing all the different modems, but it be cool when it worked.

Just an idea. Discuss amongst yourselves.

He might also need to tinker with AGP strength, like going from 4x to 2x. The Gentoo page linked to earlier has some suggestions on improving stability.

Gentoo has a good page filled with information about NvAGP vs. AGPGart here.

The page isn't Gentoo specific (I use debian personally)

* SuSE once earned a bright yellow star in my book for funding so much research and Linux development projects, but nowadays the only such project they have left is ReiserFS and that is so unstable that even Gentoo (!) recommends against its use.

The x86 Gentoo install guide no longer has such a recommendation.

P.S. I've been using reiserfs for about a year and a half, no major problems. But i've had major problems with ext2, ext3, xfs...

This is kind of weird. I was going to post a comment about how linux is nice & all, but usually I find myself using WinXP, and that I was in XP right now. And then I took a good hard look -- and it turns out I'm in gentoo linux right now and have been most of the day & didn't even notice. I'm totally serious. Maybe linux has come a long way!

(mozilla looks the same on both platforms)

That's what we have distros and configurations for.

"What type of user are you?"
"Advanced."
"Ok! All wizards and easy-screens set to non-default."

Get Gentoo and stay ahead of the game. =P

To be specific, you probably want to read:

http://lists.gentoo.org/pipermail/gentoo-user/20 02 -September/031224.html

This is where Daniel Robbins (Chief Architect, Gentoo Linux) says:

I don't know of anyone on our development team that has a high opinion of XFS. We were all really excited about it at first, but our opinion soured over time as quite a few developers got bitten by the data loss issue.

The filesystem wars continue! Personally, I've been using ext3 on Red Hat production servers and XFS on my Gentoo desktop and haven't had issue with either. Perhaps now that Linus has merged XFS into his kernel, the data loss issues some report with XFS will finally get resolved. The fact that XFS is extent based and filesystems can be arbitrarily grown and shrunk is what attracts me to it. Great for extending a filesystem as you pop more drives into your RAID array..

Your drifting into FUD with that one. It is not any more legitimate to blame the XFS developers for stabillity problems caused by VFS code they might not have even seen than when people blamed ReiserFS or Ext3 for the same issue. If you look closely r7 versus r8 or r9 are different beasties.

Many people are quite happy with the stabillity of XFS on linux. That said Daniel Robbins (surely a big name at Gentoo) is not one of them. His issue with XFS is focused on problems with XFS if your system reboots while completely overwriting files. On the whole, he thinks ReiserFS is more stable but obviously YMMV.

Wake me up when you've found the perfect file system.

Your drifting into FUD with that one. It is not any more legitimate to blame the XFS developers for stabillity problems caused by VFS code they might not have even seen than when people blamed ReiserFS or Ext3 for the same issue. If you look closely r7 versus r8 or r9 are different beasties.

Many people are quite happy with the stabillity of XFS on linux. That said Daniel Robbins (surely a big name at Gentoo) is not one of them. His issue with XFS is focused on problems with XFS if your system reboots while completely overwriting files. On the whole, he thinks ReiserFS is more stable but obviously YMMV.

Wake me up when you've found the perfect file system.

Gentoo supports this out-of-the-box...

No, Gentoo used to support this in the kernel... until 2.4.19-r7. It's been pulled out as of this update. When I asked about this on alt.os.linux.gentoo, I was pointed to this thread on the gentoo-user mailing list. In a nutshell, concerns of data loss when a system powerfails or bad interactions with preempt (which is also included in the Gentoo kernel) are the primary reasons. Luckily, the emerge --update did not toast my old kernel dist folder so i still have it... but you may want to wait.

This pertains to the current stable (1.2?) release.

Perhaps this move in the dev kernel will prompt someone in the Gentoo dist-building realm to re-add this to the kernel.

(i'd post a url to my questions in the ng but i x-no-archived the thread.. silly me)

(and this post is non-pro non-con xfs.. though I've worked with SGI systems, own an Indigo2 and think the fs is pretty solid).

Gentoo supports this out-of-the-box (is that an appropriate phrase for gentoo really, heh?.) as well as the other major distros thanks to the aforementioned sgi.com XFS 2.4 kernel patch. It is still great news to see this going into 2.5 -- 2.6 should be an excellent and well-evolved kernel.

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. Go grab it here!

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. Go grab it here!

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. Go grab it here!

Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. Go grab it here!

Gentoo Linux is the killer app the industry is waiting for. While emerging a new Mozilla i could use a 20GHZ CPU.

11 comments, and most of them are people grumbling about how Red Hat is squeezing choice out of the hands of the user. But really, is this true? What RH has done (from what I hear, I don't chase bleeding-edge distros, usually) is just change the way things look. They've provided a different default appearance. How is this worse from the default appearances provided by the GNOME and KDE teams? (RH's arguments for why it's better are in the article, you should read it :3 )

It's not like Red Hat is releasing modified versions of GNOME and KDE that don't let you customize the appearance; then, only then, would the complaints about choice be founded. The people who really care about the difference between GNOME and KDE probably do so on reasons deeper than 'the default theme looks cool'. (Personally, I don't really like either of the default appearances that much ^^; ) So, when nagora asks "If RH doesn't like this, why don't they drop the one they don't want people to use?" the answer is: they don't care what you use, but they want the defaults to look reasonably similar, because they know that people who really don't *want* their default theme either know how to change it or probably have settings that they'll import anyway.

Remember who Red Hat's intended market share is: the corporate environment. A lot of people I've talked to recently agree that RH's biggest 'ins' are (or should be) for office workstations. Lots of places implement a baseline standard that they want to look the same, but that people can customize if they want to (as long as they don't spend hours tweaking it). This is the mentality that RH seems to target. Yes, this isn't for everyone, but that's the point ... there are plenty of good distributions out there, and many more choices out there if you really really don't like it. But no-one said you have to use Red Hat. (Although I could understand concerns about RH-isms creeping into LSB, but nobody's brought that up.)

Remember, RH == vendor for corporate enviroments. Corporate environments like standard desktops, so this move makes sense in Red Hat's perspective.

I can recognise Windows by the fact that it is bland and ugly. I can recognise a GNU/Linux or FreeBSD desktop no matter what window manager is being used; I'd used just about all of 'em. Let Red Hat do what it wants with its distro; if you don't like what they do, then switch to Gentoo or FreeBSD. Red Hat is not Burger King, and "Have it your way" isn't one of Red Hat's slogans. So if you want Linux made your way, make it yourself.

If downloaders are freeloaders, doesn't that make Mandrake a freeloader, too? After all, they do have LOTS of open source software. They even built upon another distro themselves. Plus, its not really ethical to force people to lie (click here if you're a member) is it? Especially when they're obligated by the GPL to offer the software for free, and they've got lots of nonprofit orgs providing them with free mirrors.

I have a solution that would allow Mandrake to avoid what you would consider their current hipocracy.

They can post a link which says:
"We got most of our software for free and then tweaked it, mostly with the help of a large group of volunteers. However, we packaged it, and while we can't legally require you to pay for it, you should anyway. Click now here to see the list of mirrors."

I give out my code for free. Other coders give theirs out for free. That's how the system works. Mandrake is just using the system to make money. Abusing the system would mean charging money for things you're not allowed to charge for, that is, not giving out your code for free.

The little guys of open-source aren't in it for the money. They do it because they like it. I speak as one who uses one of the little distros which made it into the top 10 less than a month after it went beta, and which still doesn't make money (and doesn't plan to). And I have contributed a couple of improvements of my own to my disto.

Who really cares if they've made chips a thousand times smaller than current chips, with a thousand times the capicty? With palladium coming its not like you're going to be free to do anything worthwhile with them.

It tells me what each option does in a little help screen below.

It runs on the desktop.

It tells me what each option does in a little help screen below!!!!!

It tells me what each option does!!!

It tells me what each option does.

I want this so bad. I can't wait until there's a Gentoo ebuild!!!!!

Yea!!! Hooray!!!!!! Yea!!!!

Yes I am stupid and don't know what every option does. I don't care, I want it I want it I want it. Because: IT TELLS ME WHAT EACH OPTION DOES!!!!!!!!!

What part of "It tells me what each option does!!!" do you not understand?