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"In this column, he talks about what to do when the worst happens."

This one's too easy: switch to Linux

I don't get the same impressions from Daniel Robbins of Gentoo, who wrote Advanced filesystem implementor's guide for IBM's developerWorks.

So here's some obligatory Gentoo links for you zoologoy freaks:

Gentoo penguin : "The Gentoo penguin is a member of the genus Pygoscelis, which contains two other members, the Adelie and the Chinstrap. When inspecting the three, the Adelie looks more like the odd one in the group of three. Chinstraps and Gentoos share more morphological features, but the Gentoo is the most colorful of the three with its orangish beak and pinkish-orange feet. They can also be positively identified by an interorbit band of plumage that runs superiorly over the head."

Pete & Barbara's Page : "Males have their maximum weight of about 8 kg just before moulting and their minimum weight of about 5.5kg just before mating. For females the maximum weight is 7.5kg just before moulting but their weight drops to below 5 kg when guarding the chicks in the nest."

Gentoo Penguin: 10 Facts : "Adults can be found throughout the year on breeding islands indicating that they are relatively sedentary. They feed on Rock cod, amphipods and cephalopods (mainly squid). Females tend to eat more krill than the males, while the males tend to eat more fish than the females. It is thought that gentoo penguins are gregarious at sea."

Penguin Chicks : Come on... everyone loves baby animals! :)

quote from: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html

"15.Final steps: install additional packages

You may need to install some additional packages in the Portage tree if you are using any optional features like XFS or LVM. If you're using XFS, you should emerge the xfsprogs ebuild:

Code listing 27

# emerge sys-apps/xfsprogs

If you're using LVM, you should emerge the lvm-user ebuild:

Code listing 28

# emerge --usepkg sys-apps/lvm-user

"

Their website has a great look!

Gentoo is great if you want to stay on top of new releases. To install the latest KDE you just type "emerge kde". It takes a while since everything is compiled from source, so you'll want to do this right before bedtime. :-)

there is.
emerge kde

Bah!

Slack is a lost cause.

Go see what what tons of Slackers (including myself) are moving to: www.gentoo.org
Derek

Which do you want running on your mission critical server?
Gentoo of course.....

Why don't you try another distro like Gentoo?

The KDE3 maintainer already said that the ebuild for kde3 will be out tomorrow.

ebuilds are source++ you just do an "emerge kde3" and it downloads the source and compiles (with options perfect for your machine) it and installs it. It will also automatically download anything it depends on and do the same - ALL FROM SOURCE. So with one command you get a perfect build of KDE3 with no hassles.

Also note that we have had a kde3cvs ebuild for a while - where you just do "emerge kde3cvs" and it grabs the source from CVS and compiles/installs it - so if you want to live on the BLEEDING edge you can.

Gentoo really is amazing - you should check it out.

Derek

The big reason that I want a small Linux distribution instead of a 15-CD RedHat set is so I can run Linux on wimpy machines. I've got a number of antiques hanging around my lab doing nothing, and few of the Pentium60s and none of the 486s have CDROMs, and all of them have wimpy disk drives. Netbooting is important - it makes it possible to install the basic operating system on a small machine and get it up and running, with the disks partitioned enough to install any other software.

It's also important to have distributions that can install the basic system from one CD! (Or alternatively, at least to be able to install it from separate CDs that aren't all merged into one ftp directory.) Even most of my server machines don't have enough space to copy multiple CDs to one filesystem for FTP, so it's also really important to be able to work with separate CD images - ideally to mount the CDROM and publish it with FTP, or at least to have the different CD images stashed in different directories (which also makes it possible to do two-CD sets by storing one in ~ftp/pub/linux/cd1/ and symlinking or mounting the CDROM for the other disk.)

I've been using Gentoo for the last 6 months or so and I've been very impressed. The speed is simply amazing - no other distro is this fast and clean. Gentoo is also very well documented! Daniel Robbins, the main man behind Gentoo has written some excellent tutorials which can be found here. I suggest you go and have a look. I have learned a lot by reading his tutorials. BTW, do you know where that name "Gentoo" comes from? Gentoo is a species of a small and fast penguins ;)

I've been using Gentoo for the last 6 months or so and I've been very impressed. The speed is simply amazing - no other distro is this fast and clean. Gentoo is also very well documented! Daniel Robbins, the main man behind Gentoo has written some excellent tutorials which can be found here. I suggest you go and have a look. I have learned a lot by reading his tutorials. BTW, do you know where that name "Gentoo" comes from? Gentoo is a species of a small and fast penguins ;)

The number of ports available doesn't compete with FreeBSD (or, I imagine, the other BSDs) at this point, but that could change quickly.

On the minus side, some of the author's tuning instructions are dubious, or downright silly. He recommends using "noatime" in the filesystem everywhere -- now that may be ok for /home, or for /usr, say, but for /var, which holds mailboxes, it's not a good idea -- the atime is used to tell whether you have new mail. (In fact, the default partitioning doesn't even create a separate /var or /tmp, and the install guide doesn't suggest you do it. This is not unique to Gentoo, it's a common attitude in the linux world, but it looks like a bad idea to me.)

Also, the global CFLAGS sets -O3, which looks overambitious to me -- the only change -O3 has over -O2 is function inlining, which sometimes helps and sometimes hurts, you definitely don't want to build your system with it. (The FreeBSD project doesn't support anything beyond -O, though I generally have no problem with -O2.)

Anyway, it's easy to fix these small caveats. (Another good thing is Gentoo doesn't clobber your config files when you upgrade; however, something like FreeBSD's "mergemaster" for upgrading /etc would certainly be welcome.) That apart, Gentoo looks like a nice system and I'm happy with it.

Gentoo also has a picture of the new iMac

:)

What the hell is that thing anyway?!

For those who already have gentoo running and you just want to upgrade, you can find the instructions here

Don't go up to an Athlon XP board! If you already have an A7V under the hood then you have enough power to wait until next christmas to get a ClawHammer.

That's what I'm doing. I bought a 1.2Ghz Athlon with an Abit KT7A last summer (system is ROCK solid) - and I'm going to hold onto it until the ClawHammer comes out - then it is just a recompile of Gentoo and I will be running a 64-bit OS.

This chip is going to rock.

Derek

Hmmm for people who wont pay there are warez and open source alternatives, you could also just stick with the version you already have. Fucking hell its not like Mandrake are trying to fuck you up, they need money aswell and if this gives them a few extra pennies just pay for the software. Mandrake are not the cunts, sun are. 1 simple reason fo that is Mandrake was the OS that removed me from m$ windoze. (I have now moved on to a more up-to-date OS).

This is my OS

If that link didn't work you can see the url so check it out yourself!!

~AC~

Mind you I have a number of higher end systems on which I like to play around with the newer desktop systems, but the beauty of linux, freeBSD, et al. is the ability to tailor the system the way you want it.

Personally, I am going to ignore the silly bloat arguments being thrown about. IMHO featureful desktop systems have a place, as do lightweight wm's with efficient filemanagers (I still love mc). It just comes down to what's practical and of course, what floats yer boat.

• http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/
  
• http://ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/
  
• http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
  
• http://www.xandros.net/
  
• http://www.gentoo.org/
  
• Smoothwall ...
  
• http://www.ipcop.org/
  
• http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/snf
  
• http://www.freesco.org/
  
• http://www.coyotelinux.com/
  
• http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
  
• http://www.gnatbox.com/Pages/gblight.html
  (this ones based on BSD IIRC)
  
• http://www.bbiagent.com/
  
• http://www.clarkconnect.org/"
  
• http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/
  

Then you should check out Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo Linux is an excellent distro that is very similar to Sorceror in the fact that you compile everything from scratch. It uses a Free-BSD style ports system, and it has a command-line driven package tool that's similar to debian's apt-get. The portage tree is huge and contains thousands of apps. One major advantage over Sorceror is that Gentoo has a very active development community, and it isn't in any danger of dissappearing anytime soon. If you want a distro where everything is compiled explicitly for your hardware for blistering fast speed, you should check out Gentoo. It's my favorite distro, and I've tried virtually all of them.

I just installed Gentoo last night--or started it, rather; the compile process takes quite a bit of time. What I'd like to know is how these two distributions compare, especially in the package management department. Considering that both compile the software on demand, it would seem to be a question of dependency resolution. Has anyone got experience with both of them? does one have any advantages over the other (aside from sorcerors cool nomenclature? :)

or emerge update --world
(Though I am not sure if Galeon has been done yet)

Gentoo Linux is aiming to create a much enhanced collection system.

Isn't this another reason why source-based distros like Gentoo or Sorcerer should be given more consideration?

Surely a distro that compiles to your specific hardware during installation would solve this problem.

Or am I missing something extremely important?

I run an AMD Athlon with an AGP4x video card on 2.4.17 with no issues whatsoever. I also compiled the kernel as an Athlon which is not affected by the issue. Gentoo describes the bug in kernels running on Athlons that were compiled for Pentiums. Pentiums builds enable 'extended paging', where the issue resides. In short: compile your kernel as an Athlon (which you should do anyway) and you will not have issues.

Yesterday, information became widely available that described possible stability issues (system crashes, hangs, etc.) when using an AGP video card under Linux in conjunction with an AMD Athlon processor. It was generally called a "bug" in the Athlon CPU.

More information is now available at http://www.gentoo.org, including an analysis of AMD's response. AMD's official response was posted to LKML, and is available at http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/762 6960/.

There is apparently some kind of bad interaction between the AGP GART ("Graphics Address Remapping Table", I think?), speculative memory operations performed by the Athlon processor, the memory mappings used by the kernel, and cache coherency. The details are beyond me, but the practical upshot appears to be that the wrong data ends up being written back to main memory at some point.

I recommend reading the above LKML thread if you suspect you are affected by this issue. Information is still being uncovered, and it is not immediately clear how this occurs, what causes it, who is affected by it, and how to work around it.

In particular, there is some uncertainty as to whether the "mem=nopentium" option actually prevents the problem, or merely makes it less likely to occur.

And, for convenience, a rundown by the players involved (both for the Linux kernel and AMD) is here.

In short, for the reading-impaired, it's not an Athlon bug.

Apparently, if you'd believe the Linux community, you'd be hard-pressed upon where to place the blame. You see, the Linuxist Manifesto's number one rule is to lie to protect the best interests of Linux. No self-respectable Linux zealot would insult or place blame upon AMD, because AMD's philosophy centers around tackling American Corporations with their Asian sweatshops, selling their chips at bargain-basement prices like the Red Menace Commies do with their Wal-Mart shit.

So, right about now, you're probably thinking that the zealots are clearly in a dilemma. Who are they going to blame? If you have a prediction before I tell you, the poll is on the right. Or maybe the left. Either way, take your pick.

You'd think that the parasitic community would place blame upon Microsoft, right? Alas, Microsoft has had the bug patched since September 2000. Not only that, Windows XP , the latest in the suite of high-powered, stable operating systems from Microsoft Corp., has this patch built in. That's right, built in. Keep in mind that Windows XP was released in October 2001, over three months ago. Meanwhile, no one knows what the hell Alan Cocks has been doing since then, since he hides under the cloak of secrecy. nVidia has been informing users via tech support, even to the Linux community, how to fix the problem for months now. Clearly the blame is upon Alan Cocks's shoulder, but to place the blame where it is rightfully justified is inexcusable in the Linux community. The drones are in disarray.

The actual bug occurs when Linux users contract the Tux Racer virus via KEmail. When first run, Tux Racer enables a feature in your third-world sweatshop AMD processor called "extended paging." Now, I know you're probably thinking that this sounds like some sort of Nokia feature. Well, you're wrong. It's yet another feature that AMD illegally hacked from Intel. It allows your browser to seamlessly view pages up to 4Mb in size. Before its introduction in the early days of the Intel Pentium processor, web pages were broken up into 4K segments, because any pages larger would freeze the computer. That's why Microsoft didn't invent Javascript until after the Pentium, every time they went to use it, their pages exceeded 4K, and henceforth froze the computer. Intel came to the rescue with the Pentium line of chips, and, as usual, AMD got out their super high tech Asian hacking tools and "reverse-engineered" (code-name for 'illegally hacked') Intel's technology. Thus, users of the inferior AMD Cyrix Kx86-2 Now! processor could also view large web pages without crashing. So why did no one notice that pages larger than 4K would crash AMD processors? Well, Microsoft has had a fix for 16 months, like we mentioned earlier. But why did no one from the Linux community notice? Well, apparently, there does not exist a page devoted to Linux that is more than 4K in size. Since most of the Linux installations out there denounce color as 'feature bloat,' all Linux pages follow an unwritten oath to suck. Believe me, they all do.

So, for the good of Linux, you may now disperse. Head off to various tech sites and continue blaming Microsoft for not telling you sooner. Your community will thank you.

Apparently, if you'd believe the Linux community, you'd be hard-pressed upon where to place the blame. You see, the Linuxist Manifesto's number one rule is to lie to protect the best interests of Linux. No self-respectable Linux zealot would insult or place blame upon AMD, because AMD's philosophy centers around tackling American Corporations with their Asian sweatshops, selling their chips at bargain-basement prices like the Red Menace Commies do with their Wal-Mart shit.

So, right about now, you're probably thinking that the zealots are clearly in a dilemma. Who are they going to blame? If you have a prediction before I tell you, the poll is on the right. Or maybe the left. Either way, take your pick.

You'd think that the parasitic community would place blame upon Microsoft, right? Alas, Microsoft has had the bug patched since September 2000. Not only that, Windows XP , the latest in the suite of high-powered, stable operating systems from Microsoft Corp., has this patch built in. That's right, built in. Keep in mind that Windows XP was released in October 2001, over three months ago. Meanwhile, no one knows what the hell Alan Cocks has been doing since then, since he hides under the cloak of secrecy. nVidia has been informing users via tech support, even to the Linux community, how to fix the problem for months now. Clearly the blame is upon Alan Cocks's shoulder, but to place the blame where it is rightfully justified is inexcusable in the Linux community. The drones are in disarray.

The actual bug occurs when Linux users contract the Tux Racer virus via KEmail. When first run, Tux Racer enables a feature in your third-world sweatshop AMD processor called "extended paging." Now, I know you're probably thinking that this sounds like some sort of Nokia feature. Well, you're wrong. It's yet another feature that AMD illegally hacked from Intel. It allows your browser to seamlessly view pages up to 4Mb in size. Before its introduction in the early days of the Intel Pentium processor, web pages were broken up into 4K segments, because any pages larger would freeze the computer. That's why Microsoft didn't invent Javascript until after the Pentium, every time they went to use it, their pages exceeded 4K, and henceforth froze the computer. Intel came to the rescue with the Pentium line of chips, and, as usual, AMD got out their super high tech Asian hacking tools and "reverse-engineered" (code-name for 'illegally hacked') Intel's technology. Thus, users of the inferior AMD Cyrix Kx86-2 Now! processor could also view large web pages without crashing. So why did no one notice that pages larger than 4K would crash AMD processors? Well, Microsoft has had a fix for 16 months, like we mentioned earlier. But why did no one from the Linux community notice? Well, apparently, there does not exist a page devoted to Linux that is more than 4K in size. Since most of the Linux installations out there denounce color as 'feature bloat,' all Linux pages follow an unwritten oath to suck. Believe me, they all do.

So, for the good of Linux, you may now disperse. Head off to various tech sites and continue blaming Microsoft for not telling you sooner. Your community will thank you.

After the years of RPM-Based Distros, it seems as if those "self-building" distros are the new trend. We now have 3 of them:
RockLinux
Gentoo Linux
and Sorcerer Linux...
From my experiences and what I've heard Gentoo is the by far stablest and easiest to install of them and recently got a really good review at Newsforge.

I don't really know if that is good concept, because the time/use of self-compiling every bit of software is quite low IMO. What is needed is a new Distro, that builds the Kernel itself and installs all the other application through RPM. That would maximize Speed and usability. My friend and I are working on something like this right now ;).

How about Gentoo? Your entire distro, incuding compilers, is compiled on your system, for your system.

...looks very good. Gentoo, like Sorcerer, builds an installation from source. It looks like I can create a fine-grained, very targeted installtion with Gentoo, so I'll try it out on a new box next week and see how it works.

if you find the idea of a linux-dstro optimized for your machine appealing, you should check out Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org) is building a ports-like tree called Portage, based on Python rather than a mix of Makefiles and shell scripts. It combines the features of cvsup (actually, it just calls rsync; the command to update the portage tree is "emerge rsync"), make install (emerge blah.ebuild) and portinstall (emerge blah/blah). Soon, emerge will have the equivalent up portsupdate.

The system can install source, create bzip2'd tar packages, or, as an option. RPMs.

Try gentoo [gentoo.org]. It is small, and newbs can figure it out (if they bother reading the guides)

The documentation is worth reading even if you don't plan on installing.. they've got a different, laidback approach :)

I switched to debian for the same reason. gentoo looks like a good linux distro for people who want a more bsd like system.

Instead of dragging our feet with RPM and all its drawbacks, why not just move distributions over to dpkg/apt/DEB management like Debian, or FreeBSD-style ports?

Have you checked out Gentoo lately ? Gentoo has freebsd style ports with dependency checking and fake installs etc ;)

A full Linux distro that utilizes a "BSD Ports" like software management system is already available. The Linux distro is called "Gentoo".

One use of a Linux distro like Gentoo would be to add a user-friend-idiot-proof OS installer that plug-n-play auto detects everything about your hardware, from the exact CPU type, MB type, memory type, graphics card, sound, etc... and then keep that system specific info in a local database. After this part of the installation, and for the rest of the life of the system, whenever you install ANY application on your system, the software is automatically optimized and compiled for your specific setup. Applications could be optimized for your CPU-type and the amount of RAM that you have. Maybe even your video card and sound card could be taken into consideration. If you don't have a sound card, any references to sound could be compiled out of the application. If your video card only supports 256 colors, then perhaps, the desired application could automatically be optimized for such a platform.

This would allow application developers to program with a greater assumed knowledge of the end user's system, and it would make it easier for the end user to have a totally tweaked out Linux setup, apps and all! Not to mention the fact that the Gentoo Portage system deals with dependencies automatically, furthur easing end user headaches.

Closed source simply couldn't compete with such a Linux distro because closed source software (Windows for example) is compiled for the average hardware setup, which sacrifices performance for generality, while a Gentoo based Linux Distro could automatically reconfigure itself to tighly fit your exact hardware setup, which keeps generality and great performance.

gentoo linux has a similar system called portage. You can download a 40M bootstrap iso and build your entire system using portage. This is a wonderful distro.

I don't mean to plug, but Gentoo Linux has had a system similar to ports for quite some time now. It's superior to posts (imho) and we plan on eventually porting it to other unix-like operating systems (such as OSX, IRIX, etc.)

from www.gentoo.org

"Gentoo Linux is a fast and modern, completely free x86-based Linux distribution with a clean and flexible design. Unlike other distros, Gentoo Linux has an advanced package management system called Portage. Portage is a true ports system in the tradition of BSD ports, but is Python-based and sports a number of advanced features including dependencies, fine-grained package management, "fake" (OpenBSD-style) installs, safe unmerging, system profiles, virtual packages, config file management, and more."

or else we're going to start seeing "Windows/Pentium 4", "Windows/AMD", "Windows/64-bit AMD" and "Windows/Itanium" sections in compUSA

As another user commented above, high-performance consumer applications often put their hotspots into DLLs so that a build optimized for a given microarchitecture can be used. For example, Windows could have nthotp4.dll and nthotk7.dll. And no, *hammer and Itanium would not have their own sections, as app binaries would be shipped for multiple architectures (as was done during the Macintosh computer's transition from 68K to PowerPC processors).

The other way to do it would be to recompile the software at installation time. For example, ALFS and Gentoo are Linux distributions that come as source; a distro based on ALFS or Gentoo would provide boot floppies for each architecture, a CD with just enough binaries to get the compiler going, and a source CD, and then build everything especially for your processor at installation time.

There's a reason for DJB software licence. What if someone takes Qmail, adds unofficial patches to it, releases it in binary form in a distro, and holes are found (due to the addition) ? People will yell "Qmail sucks, Qmail is insecure, a serious flaw was discovered !" . Qmail will loose credibility, because of something his author never comitted. DJB licence allows you to distribute the original source code, plus patches. And you can build the whole thing. It's allowed and free, so you *can* have your own improvements to DJB software. But these patches must be in a separate package, not merged in the original tarball. Everyone can check what additions are done to the software. And everyone know that there's a safe base. It also avoids bloat. If I need LDAP with Qmail, I add the patch. If I don't need LDAP, I use a vanilla Qmail package, and I know that there is no code I won't use in it. I have something that perfectly fits my needs. It improves efficiency and security. It's just like installing OpenBSD. You have a minimal audited base, and everyone adds his own bloat according to his needs. Now for Linux distributions... Can't you provide a package that will self-recompile ? That way, you can include Qmail and djbDNS in Redhat. You can fix holes and add Redhat-specific features if you want. SRPMS are done for this, aren't they ? It doesn't choke a newbie, building and installing SRPMS are just like RPMS. Nothing to configure, no 'make' to type. Debian package can also recompile themselves from source code. Also, please have a look at Gentoo Linux . A new Linux distro that relies on daemontools, djbdns, qmail, ip, reiserfs, etc.

A) There is nothing inherently wrong with "Windows characteristics." There are bad characteristics and Windows characteristics. An item in one set is not necessarily in the other.

B) What's wrong with beta builds? Linux has had beta builds ever since I can remember (except they call it a -test) RedHat beta builds have been called .0 releases, everything has beta builds. Its an essential part of a software release. The problem isn't releasing Betas, but releasing Betas and pretending they are final products.

C) Try Gentoo Linux It's nice and light, has a lot of the cool package management features of Debian, and is well-thought-out. It also has something like a ports tree. It might be a little cutting edge for many people's tastes (a comment once accompanied a package "package x.y.z merged. Did we beat freshmeat?" It's still a development product, but its manual installation isn't really any harder than installing some other Linux distros, and gives you a lot more control. When this thing reaches 1.0, RedHat watch out!

What I still dont understand is why linux keeps reinventing the wheel. Why not simply use the ports/package tree from the bsd's?

Its a solid system, ALL of the BSD's use it in some form or another, it allows source installs, it saves the install info as TEXT, its been tested and proven by years of experience.

It seems to me that ports is really the best system. I noticed that gentoo linux is using it now, although slightly modified.

I would *love* to see one package standard for all of the bsd's AND all the distro's of linux!

Openpackages all the way baby!

I was using the Mandrake packages. Plus, why do binaries all optimize for 386, with some exceptions optimized for Pentium? Given that everybody has at least a Pentium-class chip (and P6 chips have been around for five years) shouldn't -mpentiumpro be the standard optimization, with some special distros cataring to the 386 crowd? What moron runs KDE2 on a 486 anyway? Thankfully, distros like Gentoo exist (yea, my obsession of the day ;) that (will) optimize for Pentium Pro. Check them out at this site

Portage is already being used in some distros. Check Out Gentoo Linux!