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I read a guide on the Gentoo forums a while ago about copying different directories into ram to "preload" them.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-296892.html

I never actually tried it, but I might now that I have 4gb ram! A daemon to help automate this process would be welcome, though.

Say hello to Gentoo or even Linux From Scratch

I'm a Debian developer, who is interested in kink.

If you like to be collared and chained and given untold amounts of pain in the name of pleasure, I think I have just the site for you. ;)

See, you're on a crusade for the cause of Linux, and I very much respect that cause.

The VIA C7 processor has hardware crypto acceleration (AES and some helper functions) that's supported by OpenSSL out of the box. Applications still require some patching, for example OpenSSH. The reason seems to be that the application has to choose the encryption engine used by OpenSSL.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162967

There's also a gentoo-sources-2.6.24-r1 ebuild already.

There is a patch available now. See the Gentoo bugzilla for more: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209460 Also, you can try this if you don't want to recompile (it will disable vmsplice): http://omploader.org/vY2w5

Patch is here.

Yet another reason I prefer to use a distro that doesn't use a scheduled release cycle, and doesn't need to. Or this for those of you with more free time on your hands than is strictly healthy :P

Hahaha, I just noticed... you're this retard? "No, I expect that devs listen to [the users], and respect their opinion as as much worth as their own." LMAO!!!! Seriously, kill yourself now, you worthless, pathetic, sociopathic, authoritarian control freak sick of shit.

that's eloquently stated.

as ever, the amount of tangents in the slashdot discussion is both interesting and distressing. for the subject at hand, it would be interesting to hear about some authoritative responses from the gentoo officials, but i see nary a trace of that - no official responses in gentoo-devel or gentoo-user, and the single focused response included on planet gentoo makes no claim to authority (and would be more compelling if the logic or even grammar were more polished).

maybe it's too soon - but i sure am curious about how this is going to shape up. i'm not unhappy with gentoo - the bottom line, for me, is that it's presented fewer maintenance roadblocks than any of the distributions i've tried, over the years, including slackware, redhat, fedora, a little ubuntu, and a little less plain debian. turbulence and churn upgrading has felt difficult in the last year, however. i would be sad to lose gentoo - and i think that lack of effective, constructive response to the challenge that robbins has identified would mean losing it.

Hopefully someone else can clarify further.

There's a sticky post in the gentoo forums dealing with this. So far Daniel got a pretty positive response and frankly... as a user that has seen gentoo slowly falling apart over the past few years, I'm glad he's motivated to bring it back on track: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-644321.html

No. You, sir, are full of crap. When you look at what's actually used and widely recognized in the world of Linux (especially for desktops), you'll plainly see that there are several "mainstream" distros that garner the lion's share of attention and represent the vast majority of the installed base:

In no particular order:

(1) Red Hat Linux

(2) Fedora Linux (community bleeding-edge source for Red Hat)

(2) Mandriva Linux (used to be Mandrake)

(3) Ubuntu Linux (plus variants, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc)

(4) SUSE Linux (owned by Novell these days)

(5) Gentoo Linux

Yes, we also have Debian, Slackware and many others that don't necessarily have huge commercial ties, but they're also the base for many commercial distros. You might be using Linux From Scratch, or one of several dozen other random distros with has an installed base of 100 users, but if that's the case you're pretty far from the average desktop or server Linux user.

My Apache logs tell the story pretty well. As Captial One might say, what's in your logfiles?

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/ (other ways to harden your system are available)
wor
stack smashing
Transparent implementation of PaX address space layout randomizations and stack smashing protections using ELF shared objects as executables.

also regading acl
RSBAC is Mandatory Access Control security system based on the GFAC framework logic. It includes standard models, like the Role Compatibility, Access Control Lists and Mandatory Access Control. RSBAC enforces access control rules on your operating system.

however AFAIK this stuff is only used by super admins because its the oposite of the 10% rule its 90% of the work to get 10% of the protection.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos/

remote code execution flaw in linux KDE with KPDF Impact ====== A remote attacker could entice a user to open a specially crafted PDF file in KWord or KPDF that would exploit the integer overflow to cause a stack-based buffer overflow in the StreamPredictor::getNextLine() function, possibly resulting in the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the application. KOffice is an integrated office suite for KDE. KWord is the KOffice word processor. KPDF is a KDE-based PDF viewer included in the kdegraphics package. http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/glsa-200710-08.xml

RPM is a *terrible* package manager. It suffers from dependency hell like nothing else I've ever seen...and unless you know enough to grab source tarballs and packages, and make your own RPM's with them, forget installing any RPM's but the ones the distribution manufacturer provides you. Sure there are GUI frontends and automated tools that can help with some of the dependency hell issues, but those are a royal pain...I shouldn't have to use a GUI to install programs. I'm not always in a situation where I can be at the terminal or VNC in, and in fact one of my boxes doesn't even have X installed on it. The Slackware way of ./configure ; make ; make install isn't TOO bad, but then you don't have anything that tracks what versions of packages you have installed. If you want real actual package management that doesn't suffer from these issues, there's only one choice: Portage. There isn't anything else right now that even comes close to where Portaeg was in 1999. I know the Gentoo way is usually compiling from source, and there are a lot of situations where that won't work, but it is very possible to use Portage to delivery binary packages. There are many binary packages available. Of course, if you use those they won't be optimized for your system, but then neither are RPM's or Debian packages unless you compile them yourself.

I have to update Redhat, SuSE, and Debian boxes where I work now, and it is absolute hell...so much so that automated tools are created to do it for you. On Gentoo, completely updating your box is very easy: emerge --sync ; emerge -uDNva world

http://www.gentoo.org/

I have a similar problem. When I built a new PC earlier this year, of course I went with the best [that my wallet could handle]. All of the equipment is compatible to Linux... except the sound card, a Creative X-Fi. It has no support on linux whatsoever and probably won't until at least next year.

Wait, let me stop myself there. I had to check the Creative open source page to confirm, and there are beta drivers now! But, a Gentoo forum thread shows that these are really just alpha drivers. Still, some progress is better than none. Maybe we can get nVidia to release specs for their video cards...

There are some interesting points about the 2.20 release at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-584813-start-0-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-.html

You might want to try Gentoo then. They have a FreeBSD branch. Chances are, you won't get a production system, but it's surely worth a try.

If my craptop's hardware was supported by FreeBSD, I would certainly give it a try. My server's vanilla FreeBSD for obvious reasons...

And by the way: I was a spoiled whiny apt-user myself - until I tried portage! Really a nice system, though apt is not that bad either.

Screw the CPU scheduler at this point. The kernel folks are missing the obvious and utter brokenness of the IO scheduling. These bugs have been outstanding about a year now!! And it's not just AMD64 anymore either. Quoth the kernel bug report:

"Now, as far as this bug being AMD64 only. We develop a portable data analysis
tool and we run it on Intel Core Mobile systems (Sony UX series, Panasonic
Toughbook series) and see this bug or one almost exactly like it on those
platforms as well.
"

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8636
http://www.nabble.com/IO-activity-brings-my-deskto p-to-its-knees-(2.6.22.1-ck1)-t4192136.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 500.html

At first, deadline IO was touted as an answer, but that doesn't completely fix things.
Some say Native Command Queueing is broken. One person claims deadline + NCQ disabled helps.
Some say the kernel's vfs_cache_pressure settings help, while others refute it (compare kernel bug report versus page 21 of the gentoo forum thread). But no one understands what's really broken in the kernel.

Can we please get Ingo working on IO scheduling? PLEASE?

The complaints seem fairly legitimate to me.

Dear troll,

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml

Regards,

I know you are being funny. But their is just so much FUD from people who haven't tried Gentoo in years. Here is how you do it:

1) Download the latest LiveCD
2) Click on the GTK+ based Install button (if you mess it up, you will end up clicking CLI based. Good if you can go, if not, you WILL click on the other one: GTK+ based Install button)
3) Follow the instructions with sane defaults already setup (Yeah! CPUTYPE already setup)

If you are having trouble deciding if your CPU is x86 is or not, you ARE using x86. My dumbest friends know it if they have x86_64 that it is 64.

If you have problems, head off to Gentoo's documentation. I personally use opensuse these days at work, but when I have problem I head off to Gentoo forums, read Gentoo-wiki etc. They are the best out there!

So there you go. At the end, Gentoo is for those who are interested in it. It will not bring world peace, nor it will magically edit your configration files. It is for those who want to tweak. I got into it because I wanted to play Quake3A on linux, so that I can say good-bye to my Windows installation. For that I needed Unichrome drivers for my crappy video card, for that I needed to compile X... and I am more than happy that I chose Gentoo.

>So you're the kind of person that would hate http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ Gentoo/FreeBSD then?

Actually I was reading a little (nothing in great detail) about the alternate platforms for gentoo the other day, so you're not presenting something new to me.

BSD -Unix- is a system, developed and planned as a whole unit. Linux -and 'meta' operating systems such as Debian and Gentoo all suffer from a lack of co-ordination. Microsoft gets many things wrong, but their ad in '99 with the illustration of Linux as being an animal made out of the parts of different animals is actually pretty spot-on. The file utilities come from one developer, your archiving programs come from several different projects and your bootstrap utility is made by someone else entirely -and none of these people are on the same page.

In other words, most Linux distributions are comprised of random, seperately developed programs as opposed to whole systems where the person developing a new kernel api communicates back and forth with the people who are working on the corresponding userland code (whatever that may be in that instance, file utilities, disk utilities, whatever).

Then you have Gentoo -which, along with Linux from scratch- adds even more randomness to the mix with its' update mechanism. Update when the latest diskutilities fuck up X (or whatever) and your system is hosed.

The strength of Unix (BSD, Solaris) is that it is _designed_ -and by replacing the userland designed to work with the kernel with the usual disparate array of GNU/utilities you detract from the strenth of using a designed system, and are probably better off sticking to Linux.

Unless you're simply talking about splicing gentoo in the place of the usual third party delivery mechanism (gentoo instead of ports, gentoo instead of pkgsrc). That would actually be interesting, but I don't think that's what you're talking about.

>Suck it down my friend - Gentoo is the meta distro.

First, a correction is in order - Debian is "the" meta distro, and has been since 2000, if not before (they have had ports to the Freebsd, Netbsd and Hurd kernels in development since then -hell I've heard unconfirmed rumors of a cygwin port of Debian).

That said, this statement is why I think that you're not talking about replacing package delivery mechanisms but are instead talking about ripping apart stable, designed systems and replacing them with randomly bits and pieces of cobbled-together pieces from GNU.

Lastly, the claim that Gentoo is a development platform "for developers by developers" is rather amusing considering that no one touts it as a superior programming enviroment (at least, not outside of the gentoo forums, I wouldn't know about there -that's not someplace I have any reason to hang out at).

Instead you hear two claims from most Gentoobies:

1)"I feel like I understand my system so much better by compiling it myself"
2)"It takes a long time to compile a system, but it runs sooo much faster once you do".

You never hear people talk about how great the documented gentoo is (they say that, instead, about BSD), you never hear about what a great environment Gentoo is to develop in -whereas people frequently comment about how much cleaner, elegant and easier to understand the code from -say- Net or OpenBSD is.

Now, as far as things to suck down -you might consider swallowing the fact that pkgsrc has existed longer -and does better- as a cross-OS packaging system and that Debian pretty much invented the concept of the Meta OS.

While Joe User may end up a developer after using Gentoo (though I've seen no evidence of that happening) I think that's much more likely to happen if Joe User either uses and follows the Linux From Scratch book or downloads one of the BSDs and gets his hands dirty experimenting with and seeing what breaks in /usr/src. :)

So you're the kind of person that would hate http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/fbsd/ Gentoo/FreeBSD then?

Suck it down my friend - Gentoo is the meta distro.
Don't like the Linux? Swap it with FreeBSD + libc + userland.

Only x86 atm.
Sparc64 is almost there - FreeBSD 7 should solve the last issues with with Gentoo Toolchain - namely loading kernel modules.
Actually FreeBSD-7 should also enable Gentoo/FreeBSD on all our arches to be viable as FreeBSD-7 is moving to gcc-4.2 as its base compiler.
We also have a few people working on integrating DragonFly, NetBSD and OpenBSD into the Gentoo fold as well.

Gentoo is NOT about CFLAGS
Gentoo is NOT about speed.
Gentoo is just a platform for developers by developers.
At least, that's my take as a Gentoo dev.

If Joe User wants to use Gentoo then more power to him! He may end up a developer :)

Well, if the ability to parse XLM files >2GiB is a good enough excuse to break everything, surely a few new filesystem features are ample

Please stop perpetuating the myth that Gentoo == Linux From Scratch

Are you serious? Gentoo "Quick" Install Guide

I am no Linux genius. I've installed Debian, RedHat, Fedora, and Ubuntu without much pain. Ubuntu happens to be my favorite right now, though I am not a heavy Linux user (MS developer by trade). I tried this disaster of a guide a few years ago without any luck on two different machines, both of which have no problem with the other distros mentioned. Networking won't start, RAID controller not found, compiler error, whatever... Flame on, but I thought it was a nightmare. People here that say that it's as easy to use as Debian are out of their minds.

"It's a hacker's dream and programmer's nightmare," said Eric Schultze, chief security architect with Shavlik Technologies LLC. "I think over the next six to nine months, hackers are going to find lots of ways to exploit standard applications to do non-standard functions."

That's not news. That's old. Actually it's nothing but a change in the ancient URL/URI trick where you trick the user into believing a link sends him somewhere else (akin to something like this: http://www.microsoft.com).

The new part is that the URL/URI contains malformed links. Links, that don't just take you somewhere or offer you a torrent, but links that exploit a bug in your application. But it will hit the same group of people: Clickmonkeys who don't know what they're doing in the first place.

http://www.gentoo.org/

Pile of stuff down at gentoo.org due to a possible command injection vulnerability in their webapp. This doesn't seem to have made any waves.

This isn't the only Linux distro security breach being disclosed recently. One of Gentoo's web applications was compromised and they are investigating it:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=187971

There's also Gentoo/Prefix. Portage is much nicer than either fink or macports.

Sorry, I understood it a bit wrong. I suppose you are talking about complete distro upgrades, which are required from time to time. In that case, if you decide to stick to the older version and thus not to update the apps, you will have to compile the newest kernels yourself because there will be no updated distribution packages. However, possible security holes in application software will stay unpatched.

Kernel fixes, especially vulnerabilities, are usually in the repositories within 24 hours.

I recommend you have a look at Gentoo if you need full control over the versions of software installed on your computer.

Dude, you haven't read the links have you?

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 450.html
"... And of course all along I've been experiencing the slowdowns with the SATA (now back to IDE) disk access mentioned at the beginning of this thread."

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372
"... The only thing related to libata I can think of is NCQ interacting badly with io scheduler..."
"...Yes, and this means that the problem is getting worse with TCQ/NCQ enabled, but
it is not the root cause."

This issue really is about disk IO performance in general, not specifically CD burning! Please don't make light of what is a very serious problem. It was at a point today where I had a hard time even starting "top" today during some DV video playback. Unacceptable.

For anyone in the dark, disk IO has been broken sometime after 2.6.17 on amd64.
I thought I was going crazy, being on 2.6.18 and discovering that any disk activity slows down the whole system, let alone accesses to any other disk.

Then I found a 19-page thread on the gentoo forums that says I'm not alone and it's not unique to a particular chipset:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-482731-start- 450.html
(with evidence that the deadline scheduler may alleviate _some_ of the problem but not the root cause)

And more importantly the kernel bug report here:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7372

So I'm happy people aren't ignoring the problem. ...Or should I be worried that something so utterly fundamental has been lost in the shuffle across so many kernels in the past year? Amid all the eagerness to add new features since then (virtualization for example, and now complete rewrites of firewire?!?!).

Why can't we have a 2.7 kernel for this stuff?

1. APT
2. portage
3. yast
4. .tgz (slackware pseudo-package management)

I realise you're only joking, but...

Not all open source projects are Linux related, but I think some of the lowest learning curves to getting into open source development and learning the jargon are found on Linux forums such as the Gentoo Forums or the Ubuntu Forums. You don't have to deal with mailing list etiquitte and you don't have to learn how IRC works, but you can get exposed to a lot of open source projects, particularly the popular ones, which tend to have better documentation and are more newbie friendly.

For a large scale roll out this tool is ideal. It is not easy or idiot proof on the admin side, but once you make your custom ISOs, it will be painless on the user side.

From their site: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/catalyst/

The goal of the catalyst project is to provide a single multi-faceted tool that can reliably build all aspects of a Gentoo Linux release: stage tarballs, GRP package sets, and install CDs.

Our specific development goals for catalyst include the following: ensuring it provides high-quality builds of Gentoo Linux, and for the tool to be easy to use, customize, extend and maintain. The catalyst tool is intended to be used by those who wish to create their own customized versions of Gentoo Linux, or their own customized LiveCDs. Our goal is to make catalyst a powerful tool that's a pleasure to use, and to ensure that the code we write is maintainable and of high-quality.

Fink is a weird version of apt-get with extensions. MacPorts is a port of BSD ports.

Both kind of suck. (Mind you, I like apt-get, but Fink's extensions suck). Gentoo releases/d (as of two months ago) a version of Portage for OS X. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/bo otstrap-macos.xml. Very nice. There are probably 300 or so ebuilds, and more add added all the time.

It'll take some reading and combining from multiple sources. I've been doing it for a few years, combined with a handful of upgrades, plus setting it up as an iSCSI backend- all of that lent to the pool of greyness in my head.

I recommend Gentoo to do this with. Other distro's dont include the latest mdadmtools required to manage and migrate RAID5 md devices. Ubuntu is catching up, I believe.

Here are some places to start:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Sof tware_RAID
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86+raid+lvm2- quickinstall.xml
http://linas.org/linux/Software-RAID/Software-RAID .html
http://linas.org/linux/raid.html
http://evms.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

Ahhhh, no I didn't know there were problems with the German version. That does suck. Is this the problem? If not, maybe you could file a bug report? Or could tell me what the differences/problems were and I can file the bug report for you.

Good luck with your next attempt. :)

Ahhhh, no I didn't know there were problems with the German version. That does suck. Is this the problem? If not, maybe you could file a bug report? Or could tell me what the differences/problems were and I can file the bug report for you.

Good luck with your next attempt. :)

I'm using Python 2.5 and have been for a while (hard mask be damned). It broke a lot of stuff when it first came out, but they should've got it sorted by now...

I don't use emerge much for searching. I either use eix or http://packages.gentoo.org/ for searching.

I would suspect that the ever increasing size of the portage tree is the reason that emerge searching is so slow. Hopefully, this is being addressed by the portage developers (and in the meantime we'll all use 3rd party alternatives like eix).

Gentoo no longer has all of the packages I need. I've found myself having to download software from web pages more and more, which was something I wanted to avoid with Gentoo.

A few hours and some research later, I learned that the package missing is missing because the version on the installer DVD is outdated. The newer version is, of course, available, though the installer insists in using the old one.

I'm pretty sure this issue could be resolved somehow. But I kinda wanted to use the server before it's turned into a heavy paperweight. I know, I'll be flamed for being a noob and whatever, 'cause I couldn't resolve such a simple issue, and I'm pretty sure the workaround is quite easy if you're a Gentoo-wiz, but those things tend to turn people away from a distribution. The newbies, because they can't figure out how to do something, and the Linux vets because they're used to at least working installations.