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Gentoo 1.0 Released
Spider[DAC] writes: "Gentoo Linux 1.0 is finally released. see their homepage for more details, or skip directly to the installation instructions. Gentoo is a up-to-date distribution that uses 'portage' (a system similar to the BSD ports) to download, compile and configure the installation process."
"Gentoo is a up-to-date distribution that uses 'portage'...to download compile and configure the installation process."
From lookin at the changes to 1.0, I still like Sorcerer GNU Linux better ... Its just cleaner and easier to use in my opinion.
But don't get me wrong, a source based distro is a great thing, and I really hope that one day in the near future (rather than trying to maintain this binary package management hell) all the major distros will wake up and realize that source management is *much* cleaner and nicer to the user. I'm really hoping for the death of RPM, but I'm sure I'm not so lucky...
jdW
You're almost good enough to be a slashdot editor!
The ISO is only 103 MB. Tres coolito. However, I'm watching my download get slower, slower, slower....... --The Rev
Cool now that I spent the last 2 days installing Visual Studio 7 Enterprise Architect on my Win XP box, I can unload the Rh 7.192 Advanced server test platform I had setup and Was going to upgrade to the current redhat 7.3 beta, and instead spend the next week downloading and installing, compiling and playing with Gentoo , until that is RH 7.4 (or 8 whatever) is released since Solaris 9 isnt going to offer an Intel version I can wipe my solaris 8 intel box and try to load......
Holy shit no wonder I dont ever get any actual work done anymore, between loading new systems to playing with new distros, trying to figure iout this whole ungodly dot.diaster and typing stuff like this on slashdot.....
Time to get back to chasing my tail in circles.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
User-mode Linux is somewhat interesting but doesn't seem compelling enough to change from slack\SuSE\debian, etc.
User mode linux is part of Debian unstable anyway, and there are RPMs for download at the UML web site.
And it is a great toy / tool.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
For those who already have gentoo running and you just want to upgrade, you can find the instructions here
The underlying concepts for this distribution seem fantastic. Browsing through the Gentoo site, I noticed verbiage to this effect in multiple places:
"Gentoo Linux is a versatile and fast, completely free x86-based Linux distribution geared towards developers and network professionals
Are there any similar projects in the works for other computing architectures (Mac, Sun, etc)? Not trying to open another can of worms, just thought I'd ask...
I really really DON'T think that it's wise to the base distro so small. The ISO is just 103 MB and offers only the very basic system. If you want most of the apps provided by the distros like RedHat / Mandrake / Debian, you will have to download them. This is pretty much like a net-install. Sure, it's great for those with broadband, but what about those who don't have broadband ?
Make it 1CD, make it have X, Gnome and some nice apps come with the distro itself and I might reconsider trying this.
You're right - apparently I'm channeling an idiot this morning and for some reason when I saw it on the Gentoo page associated the two more strongly. It definitly does seem like a reasonably neat tool to allow testing of some of the dev stuff that's still to unstable to put on a business machine...
Gentoo also has a picture of the new iMac
:)
What the hell is that thing anyway?!
I've dabbled in every possible Linux distribtution imaginable and have been using Gentoo exclusively for about 6 months now. I must say that I'm pretty sure I've settled on using Gentoo Linux as my sole distribution from now on. I've even gone ahead and put them on some production servers as well. Between portage and the ability to have a system that's totally optimized for your particular hardware is beyond perfection. This may not be a newbie distribution but for most hardcore Linux users and even those with some serious servers on hand, Gentoo takes the cake. The first time I tried Gentoo I was blown away at the clean file system, powerful portage system, and shear increase in speed that I had gained. If you give it a shot, you'll be hard pressed going back to another ditribution. I HIGHLY recommend giving it a shot. For those you go ahead and try it, don't be set back by the time it takes to install. It will take a while (I mean youre basically building the whole system from scratch) but it will be worth the wait. If for the speed alone.... it's great. Ok... I'm done plugging Gentoo (just a user, not part of the Gentoo team or anything). So give it a shot some weekend... if nothing else.... you'll learn a lot!
Cheers!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Is this somewhat like Sorcerer Linux? The mention of automagical scripts and optimized installs made me think of it right away... Since I'm no Linux guru, anyone care to shed some light?
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.
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 became interested in Gentoo when a source distribution sounded like an interesting challenge, and just different from the usual binary distros. I chose it over Sorceror because at that point the Sorceror world was falling apart (some ex-Sorcerors have found their homes with Gentoo, btw). I found the Gentoo documentation to be right on course, and the install was comfortable and informative if you're used to Linux/BSD (it's not for the newbies, but it would make a good learning experience). The portage system is wonderful, it has all the graces of APT and more, is amazingly current, and can do "fake" installs ala OpenBSD (one my favorite *nixices). Getting your system going may take a few hours while stuff compiles, but everything runs smoothly.
If I didn't have to use a wireless card, I'd be writing this from inside a Gentoo install right now. However, getting my 802.11b card operable proved to be a trial, though the kind folks on the Gentoo mailing lists were beyond helpful. Ultimately I went back to RedHat, as I had lost too much time trying to get wireless support, but this wasn't a fault of the distro, just my crunch for time (note to kernel and pcmcia-cs folks: standardize your functions and modules together!).
If you're looking for a distro that's very active and, above all, enjoyable, I reccomend Gentoo. It does take some work, and the performance benefits of source vs binary are debatable, but what matters is the pleasantness and effectiveness of the Gentoo community. Daniel Robbins, the project's architect, is really a neat, smart guy, and the other folks involved are helpful and motivated. Using a Gentoo system is great for experienced folks who want serious control while retaining more community than a "Linux from Scratch" build. It's also a great way for a less experienced user to get familiar with Linux, or a good bridge from Linux to *BSD (if you need one). I don't think the folks out there saying "yet another distro?" understand that the beauty of the open community is choice. If you don't like it , ignore it, but good things are happening around Gentoo.
The main benefit of Gentoo is that you get the latest versions of every package when you're installing.
.rpms and .debs where you're at the mercy of whoever built the package.
You also get to choose to some extent what dependencies you want your programs to have. If you don't care about KDE, you can set it up so no programs with optional KDE support have it compiled in. This is unlike
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
As a Gentoo-user since, hmmm, early november I think (when rc6 was just released anyway), I can testify that it *ROCKS*. Thinking back to the time when I had to bother with the dirty RPM's of Mandrake, I don't think I could ever go back. In this way, all I have to do to keep my system updated with the latest versions and the latest security patches is type 'emerge update' or if I'm not gonna touch the computer for a while, 'emerge update --world'. The entire dependency nightmare from using RPM's is also gone. If you emerge something that needs a lib or whatever, the program neatly emerges all dependencies first. /etc for customisation, you should definitely give this distro a try. ;)
Also, the guys behind the distribution definitely seems to know what their doing. In conclusion, if you are not afraid of compiling your own kernel and you can live with having to edit a few of the files in
Mmmm.... I can feel myself growing into a zealot
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
use Google to look for Penguins and skip over all that Linux stuff. You'll get to things like Pete and Barbara's Penguin Pages
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Anyways, one day the boss decided to change the name, and we had a meeting ... and the patron saint of linux is obviosuly the penguin... So I found some sites about penguins that said that the "Gentoo" penguin was the fastest and best swimmer ... and it stuck ;)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
You were trying to make a joke by comparing the costs of hardware to the costs of network infrastructure. Your joke doesn't add up. For some users in the United States, initially setting up broadband Internet access can cost a hundred times more than the price of a relatively high-end computer system. In some cases, adding broadband Internet access to a family's telecommunications package may cost upwards of $200,000.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Since User-mode linux can be used with any distribution, you're right, it's not a very good reason to switch. Of course since UML has basically nothing to do with Gentoo other then a tutorial on the site, I can't imagine why someone would even think about switching to Gentoo for it. Had you done even 5 minutes worth of research before posting you would have known this, so maybe next time you should actually read the site before posting?
You probably could install Gentoo on this system, but you wouldn't want to. The compile process on such a slow machine would likely take weeks. Sorceror requires 1GB of virtual memory for the install, so that's probaly out also. Stick with Red Hat or the like & you'll probably be much happier.
On the otherhand, it is possible to compile on a fast machine & install to the solwer machine. There are some documents detailing this process, and people on the mailing list have done it, so it is possible, but I'm not sure how easy it is. Might be worth looking into if you want to setup several slow machines.
(Note, though, that I tend to agree with the previous poster. With the price of hardware nowadays, it's not going to be worth the hassle for most people)
I'd just install what you have. aller will automagically download the newest versions of the packages, so there is no real advantage to download the latest ISO.
...have. aller...
Oops. That should say "...have. The installer..."
You bring up good points. I'll work on a "New to Sorcerer" FAQ section for the site. We've just reorganized after the leader of the project went awall. He just took off without helping to ensure continued development. So we have reorganized a new team and have been trying to get the website together with some better documentation. This FAQ is from the old Sorcerer site, which is back up after being taken down by Kyle, the former leader of the project. We'll probably have more on the new site soon.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
I've been on the lookout for a decent distribution I can customize heavily. I have a P133 laptop with a 1.2Gb HD, and I really like the machine (excellent footprint, good screen, best laptop keyboard I've ever used). To get the most out of it, I really need something that is easily customized. Right now I run RedHat 6.2 on it, but it's time to move forward.
I like the idea of a source distro; 5% to 10% performance matters a lot more on a machine like this, than on a large, modern desktop. Unfortunately, Gentoo seems not to be the distribution I was looking for. I would not mind long installation time, but the recommended minimum specs (especially disk space) is way over this little machine, and it seems like a fairly substantial hassle to install it without a CD-ROM.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a distro that can be built small and efficient enough to for this machine, and does offer decent support for all those laptop-centric issues like no CD, networking through PCMCIA and so on? I've been considering Debian as a possibility but I feel that too seems a little heavy. Roll-your-own distros could be fun, but they generally assume you'll be able to boot and install from a CD at the end of the process. Also, this extreme form of customization means you are all on your own, with nary a mailing list archive to search through if you get into trouble.
I can't be the only one with this problem; any feedback would be welcome.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I'ma fairly die-hard redhat user, but I wanted to try out gentoo.
.src.rpms with optimizations...
What impressed me most was the speed once you installed it. It was astounding. My desktop is a 1.2 Ghz athlon with 1/2 a gig of ram, and I saw _huge_ performance gains. I am guessing about 20%, maybe more. Granted, this is not empirical, but it really did feel much faster. Compiler optimizations rock!
Anyone know of a nice system to be able to rebuild all your rpms with all optimizations? I'm looking for a script that figures out what's on your system, downloads the dev packages it needs, and then recompiles all the
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
You also get to choose to some extent what dependencies you want your programs to have. If you don't care about KDE, you can set it up so no programs with optional KDE support have it compiled in. This is unlike .rpms and .debs where you're at the mercy of whoever built the package.
.rpms and .debs, where you can download the source package and compile to your heart's content.
No, this is LIKE
But with RPM and dpkg, you have the option of easy install of binaries for systems that don't need specially-compiled versions.
This thing is smart, and it works! I am not a programmer, nor linux guru, but their documentation to get you up and running is flawless. I built up a desktop system and have installed all the applications I need and they are all working great. I've avoided KDE completely and run blackbox as a wm. I've successfully gotten my DVD player, CDR, TV Tuner card and sound card working great. Also, MPlayer (which doesn't allow binary installations like RPM) compiled and runs great. (Much better than Windows Media Player)
When I first read about Gentoo, I was afraid that if software I used wasn't in their portage list, I would be SOL. But, the list of applications available is very comprehensive...There haven't been any applications I've needed that aren't available via their Portage system. As I am not familiar with C, I have always had problems installing programs from source. If the makefile has problems, I usually can't figure out what to change in order to get it working...But, I haven't had any installations fail in Gentoo. The automatic configuration and dependencies calculation works and works well...
I can't imagine ever running Red Hat again. My Gentoo system is stable, fast and lean.
Check out the mailing lists first. The upgrade
procedure will damage your system. New installs
are ok.
Dan Robbins has posted to the Gentoo mailing lists
with the message not to upgrade until the
developers resolve the problem.
You could certainly run Gentoo on that system. But you wouldn't want to compile on it. You'd want to have another, faster machine do the compiles for it.
If you don't have the luxury of a faster machine to serve as a compile farm, I would say just get Slack instead.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
How is Debian too heavy, when you can do a basic install in 40MB of disk space? You want more stuff, you just install the (not bloated) packages with apt-get. Debian works great on a 486, so even better on a P133.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Real men use Slackware.
No RPM. Not very friendly install. You better know what you are doing.
Mod me.
I do admit I'm interested in this sort of idea, and I'm sure I'll end up trying it in a machine once I get some spare time (currently scheduled to happen on March 3, 2005 :)
To answer a few questions I've seen in the comments:
1. If you want something like this on a "wimpy" machine, then you might look at Debian. I'm sure you've all heard about the magic of apt, which is similar to this, but with binaries. This way, your machine doesn't have to do all that compiling. Leading to:
2. You can do similar things like this with Debian by using deb-src lines in sources.conf. You can just do "apt-get source " to get the source, along with the patches, rules, etc. to make an officially compliant Debian package from it. You can even add the -b option to build it automatically after downloading.
3. Debian has binaries for many platforms; they haven't abandoned SPARC, and their PPC distribution has been solid for some time now.
Anyway, I think that Gentoo is cool and a good idea, but I wanted to make sure this stuff was known. I've done all of the above (run Debian on very wimpy machines, run it on PPC, and had it compile GAIM packages for me, since GAIM isn't in potato, but the sources are available via deb-src).
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
A ppc version of gentoo linux is in the make :-) and will probably be online by the end of the week
read gentoo-dev@gentoo.org for more information
Yeah. As the author of the gentoo filemanager, I really wish the headline here would have included the phrase "Gentoo Linux", to make it clear. Not that the risk for confusion outside my own head is, er, overwhelmingly large, or anything. Incidentally, I just released 0.11.23 of gentoo-the-filemanager-for-GTK+ yesterday, if someone would like to try it out...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}