Gentoo Linux 1.2

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"

Comments

Cutting edge?

[gazbo]

What exactly is cutting edge about this distribution? What does this have that no other distribution has, that is light-years ahead?

Re:Cutting edge?

[alfaiomega]

It's cutting edge because it uses the latest sources of the software, but are those versions well tested?

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

see gentoo as a linking between completely source based "distributions" like linux-from-scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org) and a distribution with package management which handles dependencies (f.ex. debian). in gentoo all "packages" are downloaded from their server, patched and installed (with a ./configure [some switches], make [some switches], make install).

Re:Cutting edge?

[RAMMS EIN]

What's cutting edge about it is that it uses the BSD-concept of ports-trees instead of the likes of RPM and Debian packages. This has all the advantages of compiling from source (tailored for your system, latest-and-greatest), but also does dependency-checking and (if desired) -installing. It fits in nicely with the earlier discussion about binary packages: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/16/123252 &tid=106 .

From the website :
``Note that the i686 CD will allow a build from scratch for *all* systems, but also has pre-built stuff for i686+ CPUs.''
IMHO they would have done better by creating a i386+ binary CD, because compiling everything from source on a 386 is hardly feasible, whereas on a 686 it's almost a breeze. Still, I love this distro, and will probably continue to use it for quite some time. Drink one from me, guys (and girls)!

Re:Cutting edge?

[moZer]

Recent packages. Also, quite a lot of experimental performance-enhancing patches in their kernel tree (preemptible, low-latency scheduler and probably more that I don't know about). And yes, you may install the vanilla kernel if you like. It's just a matter of "emerge gentoo-sources" or "emerge vanilla-sources".

Re:Cutting edge?

[Graymalkin]

The 386 designation isn't the processor, it is the instruction set revision. A 686 binary isn't necessarily 100% backwards compatible with older processors. Also any 686 family optimizations could totally hamburger the performance of an older processor due to scheduling and instruction arrangement problems. The reason the primary ISO image (the 16MB one) doesn't have any optimizations is you need to be able to run it on any system. The 686 ISO exists so you don't need to take the time to compile the entire distro from scratch if you've got a Pentium Pro or better processor.

Re:Cutting edge?

[JPriest]

They should package i386 binaries instead of i686 just for the small handful of people who refuse to shell out $35 for a used duron box? If you are using the 386 as a router there are multiple other distros, if you are using it for a server you could probably use the additional disk space, and if you are using it for a desktop you need a job.

Re:Cutting edge?

[RAMMS EIN]

``The 686 ISO exists so you don't need to take the time to compile the entire distro from scratch if you've got a Pentium Pro or better processor.''
Yes, I figured that, but compiling on a 686 is much less painful than on a 386. Providing precompiled 386-binaries would allow people with older machines a quick-start, while people with newer machines can get their fully-optimized stuff in a matter of hours. The way they do it now, people who cannot run the 686-binaries are forced to compile everything from scratch, which can take weeks. People with the latest-and-greatest are still likely to recompile, as I suspect that the precompiled binaries will not be fully-optimized for their systems, and as it only takes a few hours anyway...

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes? And you read slashdot for the pictures of naked penguins do you?

Re:Cutting edge?

[MADCOWbeserk]

While I agree with everyone above. I think it would be neat to have a "compile as go" dist. for PDA/embedded systems. This might give better performance with things like the Zaurus, with could use all the extra performance they can get:) No Sig today. Not feeling very smart.

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

i say drop 386 support and FINALLY MOVE ON
to 686+. masochists with 386 machines just
want the pain.

Re:Cutting edge?

[42forty-two42]

In addition to what everyone else said, it has an excellent way of upgrading/removing packages. All files installed by a package are md5ed and the md5sums stored with the package. In removal, a file is only removed if:

1. Its md5sum matches
2. Its modification time matches
3. It is not in a directory protected from configuration file upgrades

Upgrading is done by installing a new version, then afterwards uninstalling the old.

Re:Cutting edge?

[bblueibm]

I have a stage3 tarball for the i386 built on a/an Intel 200MMX. If there is interest I can post a download link.

G

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, where can I get a Duron box for $35, even used? Seriously, I'd like to know.

Re:Cutting edge?

[JebusIsLord]

Actually you need a 486 to run gentoo, they don't support anything below that. 486 images are available.

Re:Cutting edge?

[Enahs]

To understand what's so cutting edge about Gentoo, one has to use it.

First of all, thanks to its Ports-like Portage tree, most the software is up-to-date.

Secondly, well, it's just about the highest-performance distribution I've ever used. You name a feature that can improve the performance of a modern Linux system; you'll find it here.

Thirdly, the init scripts are light-years ahead of what you'll find on most Linux systems.

Re:Cutting edge?

[motardo]

where the hell could I get a Duron box that cheap?

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just bootstrap a i386 optimized build and package it up as a stageN tarball and then install it on your 386. You'd probably want to keep this secondary image around for compiling most things, but then you'll soon be asking yourself why are you using a compile-based ports distribution o na machine obviously too crappy to host this?

Re:Cutting edge?

[Graymalkin]

A new P4 can run the 386 binaries, I don't know where the hell you're getting crap about compiling the system on a 386. Gentoo is not really designed to be run on a 386 but it has a base ISO compiled in 386 instructions so it can be run by any x86 compatible processor. Using the 386 binary base ISO is so you can load up that base on a K6-2 or some shit like that and then install an optimized version (K6-2 optimized) of the Gentoo distro. See the point of the 386 base distro now?

Re:Cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

> First of all, thanks to its Ports-like Portage tree, most the software is up-to-date.

Yes, but it that software reasonably stable, or are Gentoo users in a perpetual state of beta testing?

Re:Cutting edge?

[Icemaann]

Its of topic, but id like to know too :)

Re:Cutting edge?

[JPriest]

I didn't mean online, many of the people I work with collect computers, allot of times you see deals like that because people just want to get rid of them to make space. Usually if I need a random computer part I can just ask and someone usually has one lying around that they will just give me. I've given away brand new $140 mother boards before to people just because I don't feel like selling them on eBay and they were just collecting dust. I gave away a 500Mhz/128M/5G Compaq w/ USB CDRW (first computer) to someone a few months ago to make room for a new system. I realize not everyone trades off computers and parts like pirated copies of windows and AutoCAD, but I just can't picture using a 386 for anything. I think it would be worth the extra money just to avoid having to look at it. A 386 on my network would be likes pray painting my car with cans of Wal-Mart spray paint or putting $15 plastic hub caps on a Mercedes CLK

Gentoo rocks!

[Per Wigren]

After being a fanatical Debian-user for four years, Gentoo was a "love at first sight".. :) I've been running Gentoo for about a year now and always when I find out about a new detail about it, I think to myself "Yes, this is how it SHOULD have been in the other distros also"..
The only thing I'm missing is a way to make "recursive" library updates.. For example, if I upgrade libSDL to a new version, all apps that depends on SDL should be recompiled automatically.. There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[mojo-raisin]

Do Gentoo packages place the contents of the compile in the correct directory even if the upstream source does not?

For example, debian packages move all documentation to /usr/share/doc even though many upstream sources try to install to /usr/doc

A great deal of the work of debian is deciding policy of where files get installed. I'm just wondering if gentoo is following debian's lead.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

This appears to be done currently with a symbolic link from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc

Having policies for standard installation directories would be great.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[JPriest]

This appears to be done currently with a symbolic link from /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc

Having policies for standard installation directories would be great. I agree, the FHS(?) standard only covers mostly where to place servers or databases. So, even though mostly all distros are near 99% FHS compliant or better the standard does little to specify where to place things like documentation, apps, or a window manager. It is my opinion there should also be another FHS compliant standard that covers these additional files. Even if it were not followed 100% to spec it would still do a deal for making Linux more user-friendly.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Per Wigren]

Yes, all ebuilds do that. If you find an ebuild that doesn't, it should be reported as a bug.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Psiren]

The only thing I'm missing is a way to make "recursive" library updates.. For example, if I upgrade libSDL to a new version, all apps that depends on SDL should be recompiled automatically.. There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...

Wouldn't that mean that upgrading something like libc would require *everything* to be recompiled? And what would be the point anyway? If they are shared libraries, your programs will use the new versions immediately. I fail to see what recompiling will do, unless there are new features in the libraries. But in that case the apps themselves would need to be modified to use them.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people who use Gentoo are "compile freaks". They think everything must be compiled by themselves, and compiled often, to get the best performance...

haha, waste your time...

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[42forty-two42]

The prefix is /usr be default. Info is in /usr/share/info, docs are in /usr/share/doc, man in /usr/share/man. This is what the /usr/share directory is intended for.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[sfraggle]

> For example, if I upgrade libSDL to a new version,
> all apps that depends on SDL should be recompiled
> automatically..

Why should you need to? Unless you're upgrading to a new major version which breaks binary compatibility with the previous, you shouldnt need to. This is kind of the point of shared libraries...

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Clue4All]

That's a shame, FreeBSD's ports have done this for a long time. It's very nice to know that I can run 'portupgrade -rRi packagename' and update all forward and reverse dependencies quickly and easily. That's definitely a feature to look forward to.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[Per Wigren]

That's what I meant.. But I agree I was a bit unclear about it..
They should only be recompiled automatically if it is *required*...

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[FreeUser]

There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...

When this is implimented Gentoo will really, really rock!

That is exceptionally good news. The one thing I really miss from using Source Mage (well, actually I miss several things about Source Mage, but my employer opted for Gentoo, so Gentoo is what I must use for now[1]) is Source Mage's 'auto-healing' feature, which uses the recursive approach you describe. Actually, IIRC it recursively determines what needs to be recompiled, then flattens the recursion to a list, ordered based on dependency, then recompiles the necessary software in order.

Very nice, and the one really important feature Gentoo has been missing up until now.

I'm delighted to see some cross-polination between Gentoo and Source Mage. Both are incredibly excellent distributions (though both are very different from one another), and seeing them take the best features from one another and impliment them is marvelous.

[1]Looking at this it sounds a little like I regret using Gentoo instead of Source Mage, which isn't really the case. What regret I feel is mostly nostalgia, and very mild ... Source Mage is really fun to work with too, and I enjoyed it a lot. Technically they are both very good distros, with different strengths and weaknesses, and very different approaches to how source packages are managed. I'd be hard pressed to say one is better than the other, in all fairness (though I always enjoyed the 'sorcery' motif of Source Mage ... casting spells to install apps, etc.). I just want to make clear that I really like Gentoo also. Both are fantastic distros, and which one a person uses is largely a question of personal taste.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[joib]

Well why don't you go read the FHS instead of spreading false info. For example in section 4.11.3 mentions /usr/share/doc as the place for documentation. You can also find the rationale explaining where apps and windowmanagers should be (binaries in one of /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/u sr/local/sbin, libraries etc.).

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[JebusIsLord]

Short answer is yes. In the ebuild scripts, you can just do a "make install" and use package defaults, or the packager can specify for instance "maninst,etcinst etc." to do for instance a manpage install with correct directory and permission structures. Very cool actually.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[dadragon]

If they are shared libraries, your programs will use the new versions immediately.

For minor upgrades (from 2.4 to 2.5), this is true. However, for major upgrades (ie 2.5 to 3.0) the linker won't work.

I think that's how it works, in OpenBSD, when you upgrade the system, and you had libc.28.4 and you now have libc.29.2, the old binaries will link with 28.4 while the new binaries will link with 29.2.

But also, I agree with you that it shouldn't be a necessity to recompile everything which depends on the library you're updating. It should be a ebuild or emerge switch.

Re:Gentoo rocks!

[clone304]

I'm not at home, so I can't be sure, but I think G2 solves this by linking /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc, or the other way around. But, like I said: I can't check now. Just thought I remembered seeing that while poking around on my system.

Lates..

Hmm

[josh crawley]

Wonder if they'll support the possible new kernel modules when they come out?

Side note: Like this isn't a direct note to BillG.

Re:Hmm

[Verizon Guy]

A simple WHOIS shows that it's registered to some Belgian dude. Why should we think anything on there is even credible (I mean did you even read it???)

Re:Hmm

[josh crawley]

I never said it was credible. What I'm amazed at is that MS hasn't taken it away from him/her. If I was MS, I'd take that domain and put a blank html doc in its place.

And I do think it's rhetorically funny.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

> If I was MS, I'd take that domain and put a blank html doc in its place.

A blank HTML document? No you wouldn't. You would take it, and erease the DNS entries.

Buying the domain name and binding it to an IP-address is, more or less, an invitation to new conspiracy slash anti trust flamewars. What would you do think if, say, host -tns microsoftlinux.com returned DNS1.DC.MSFT.NET and so on? You'd go berserk, especially if you're into UNIX and other none-gaming-platforms.

-$|{

Standard complaint-

[prizzznecious]

Gentoo 1.2 was released on June 10. This is one of the top 10 Linux distributions, and one of the few Linux distributions that generates any excitement anymore. Does Slashdot care at all about being current? My understanding is that this is a Linux website (I have come to this understanding from reading postings about minor kernel patches etc.). Perhaps it would be well to keep up on Linux news.

Re:Standard complaint-

[prizzznecious]

I don't care about the karma, but I must protest--why was it a troll? Does the moderator of this post deny that Gentoo 1.2 was released a week ago?

Gentoo is extremely important in the Linux community, and Slashdot is supposedly the most important Linux website. Why does it then take a week for an announcement of a major release of Gentoo to get here?

Re:Standard complaint-

[funkhauser]

Slashdot is not strictly a linux website, though. It's much more general. News for nerds, if you will. You know, stuff that matters. Not just linux. BSD, too. :)

Re:Standard complaint-

[byran lei]

>Gentoo 1.2 was released on June 10. This is one of the top 10 Linux
>distributions, and one of the few Linux distributions that generates
>any excitement anymore. Does Slashdot care at all about being current?
>My understanding is that this is a Linux website (I have come to this
>understanding from reading postings about minor kernel patches etc.).
>Perhaps it would be well to keep up on Linux news.
>
>
One of the top 10 Linux distributions? According to who? A bunch of worthless Script Kiddies like you that are too dumb to bother reading the man page for something like RPM and then claim to know how RPM works? Morons please do all us of a favor and run back to the Amiga fanbase where losers like you came from. You're not wanted here.

Re:Standard complaint-

[chuzwuzza]

Okay, list what you think the top 10 distributions are.

Re:Standard complaint-

[Bimble]

Popularity. When looking at visits to the Gentoo page, distrowatch.com ranks it at number 6, and linuxiso.org has it in the top 15 (and considering how quickly it got there after adding a page for it, I'm sure it's in the top ten from there - no specific rankings there beyond top 15).

As far as how current Slashdot's news is, I doubt they can stay more current than their submissions here - Gentoo doesn't mail out an announcement list that I can tell. Gentoo's popular, but I doubt as many people are breathlessly awaiting the next update to Gentoo as they might for the kernel or Red Hat (most Gentoo users would just use emerge).

Re:Standard complaint-

[asv108]

Yes, but any news of a debian update is up within the hour ;)

Re:Standard complaint-

[rafelbev]

If many nerds follow debian then it IS news for nerds. I don't see the problem. Funny to be a minority amond nerds ha ?

Re:Standard complaint-

[chrisd]

Distrowatch, while a fun site, is even less useful than the slashdot polling system. That gentoo keeps on citing it as a measure of popularity is a little pitiful.

This isn't to deny gentoos install base is enthusiastic, but quoting and pushign the distrowatch number is a bit dishonest as a true measure of growth.

chrisd

Re:Standard complaint-

[friedmud]

"but I doubt as many people are breathlessly awaiting the next update to Gentoo"

ACTUALLY.....

Since the next iteration of Gentoo (1.3) will be a complete rehaul in order to use GCC3 - there are MANY people waiting breathlessly (myself included). Actually I think Gentoo development is a LOT more interesting that kernel development. My kernel already does most everything I need it to do - while my OS is lacking (slightly).

$0.02

Derek

Re:Standard complaint-

[Requiem]

1. RedHat
2. Mandrake
3. SuSE
4. Slackware
5-9. errrrrm
10. Gentoo!

Re:Standard complaint-

[Bimble]

Gentoo only cites Distrowatch once on their page that I've seen. I cited it because it's one of the few means I have to gauge popularity. The other is Linuxiso.org - both have their "popularity" ranking based on the number of visitors to the distribution's page within the site.

Granted, it's not much of a measurement of how many people have installed and regularly use a distro, but to be honest there aren't any reliable ways of measuring that now anyway. You can check sales figures for Red Hat and SuSE, but not for free distros like Debian and Gentoo.

I wouldn't put Gentoo in the top five (Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, and SuSE would definitely be more popular, and I wouldn't be surprised if Yellow Dog were as well). But considering the buzz around it, top ten, as the original poster suggested, isn't unlikely.

Be careful with the cutting edge...

[bc90021]

While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes. While that's a given for the most part, the ease with which Gentoo allows you to install new and tempting things may make it harder for some to resist. (Emerge just rules.)

Installing Gnome2 and then Evolution left me with no X/Window Manager (or, rather, Gnome 1.4 and Gnome2 at the same time). The machine I did this on is one I use to fool around with, but in a production environment, I suggest avoiding the temptations Gentoo puts before you and sticking with the tried and true (ie, Gnome 1.4 if you like Gnome, and whatever the stable version of KDE is ;) ).

Re:Be careful with the cutting edge...

[JordanH]

• While Gentoo does rock...

If Gentoo rocks, does Rock Gentoo?

3:34 AM? Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone is working late.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[alfaiomega]

I would suggest using Debian 3.0 Woody (it's currently Testing and soon the new Stable version), the software is much more recent than in 2.2. Potato and everything is easier to install. You may even try Sid the Unstable version if you want the latest and the greatest software and you don't mind having some bugs in some software. I don't know much about Gentoo but it has newer software than Debian, however Debian (especially Stable and Testing) is more stable. I wish you good luck with Debian!

Gentoo is great!!

[Mnemia]

I've been using Gentoo for the last couple months and I have to say that Gentoo has really restored the sense of wonder I had when I set up my first install of Slackware years ago. I was skeptical at first but Gentoo has so totally won me over that I can't imagine going back to anything else. I think if Gentoo ever failed I would probably go to something like BSD now.

Gentoo probably isn't really a newbie distro since it has no automatic installation or setup, but then again I know some people have been able to manage it on only some limited experience from Redhat or Mandrake. It really makes you understand how your system is set up and works to a degree that most of the package based distros don't but also feels far "cleaner" than Slack (my previous favorite) or LFS. I've learned more about Linux in a couple months of Gentoo than in a year of Redhat, and I'm happier with my setup and customization than I ever have been before.

Also, Gentoo is FAST. I run it on a somewhat older laptop (Celery 500, 128 MB) and though the compiles do take quite some time for large packages like KDE and X, the system really does have a much faster "feel" to it than in other distros. I don't have any hard data on it but the speed increase was enough to be quite noticable going from Redhat.

Anyway, I've been 99% satisfied with Gentoo and I'd recommend it to anyone with a little Linux experience (though definitely not as a server distro) who wants to have fun with a desktop Linux setup. Now if I could only tear myself away from tinkering with my Gentoo and find time to work ;)

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[nathanh]

Anyway, I've been 99% satisfied with Gentoo and I'd recommend it to anyone with a little Linux experience (though definitely not as a server distro) who wants to have fun with a desktop Linux setup.

If you think installing and compiling software is fun, sure. Gentoo fills a specific niche for people who (like yourself) want to learn more about their systems, and also the rare breed of people who want everything compiled from source. It's not for everyone. Some people don't like their desktops to break. And I personally don't care how my desktop works just as long as it does! That's why I stick with Debian: it may not have all the latest stuff but I can install software with 99% certainty that it will work because the maintainers have built and tested the packages.

And when I say that you're a niche user I don't mean to belittle you. Nor do I intend to put you on a pedestal. Gentoo is attractive to you. Debian is attractive to me. RedHat is attractive to other people. They all fit a particular niche. Gentoo offers features that you find attractive and this makes Gentoo a worthwhile distribution. But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you find Gentoo fun that everybody "with a little Linux experience" will find it fun too. I've tried Gentoo and RedHat and I think RedHat is more "fun" as a desktop. But that's because I think compiling software is boring and pointless.

The diversity in Linux distributions is an incredible strength. If there was only one Linux distribution then I strongly believe there would be fewer Linux users.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[Mnemia]

I totally agree, 100%. I'm quite enthusiastic about Gentoo and it shows in my praise of it. But yeah, I totally agree that it isn't for everyone and it isn't for all applications.

Linux offers so many choices and I think that it's great that there are so many distros out there, even if it sometimes is a hassle. The different distros have lots of different strengths:

Support/Documentation: Debian, Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake

Stability: Debian, Slack

Desktop use (normal users, newbies): Redhat, Mandrake, Debian etc.

Desktop use/Bleeding edge (tinkerers, experimenters): Gentoo, Source Mage, Slack, LFS

Obviously, this is far from a complete list and just represents some ideas of mine. I'm 100% with ya on the diversity thing; the best part of Linux is indeed that you have so many option for making it just right for you.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[blafasel]

But that's because I think compiling software is boring and pointless.

... ever worked on non-i386? that's when you start appreciating a transparent build process.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[nathanm]

The diversity in Linux distributions is an incredible strength.

That's not entirely true. There's strength in unity: software runs on Linux across an incredible variety of distributions and platforms. Diversity gives Linux an advantage for survival, but it's not a strength.

If there was only one Linux distribution then I strongly believe there would be fewer Linux users.

I agree wholeheartedly!

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[Clue4All]

If you like Debian, I would heartily recommend Gentoo. It doesn't sound like you've given it a try, and you probably should. I used to use Debian, but the ridiculous politics and crippled-on-ideology packages really got to me, and Gentoo was a huge relief after moving to it. The packaging system is truly excellent.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[JordanH]

• Diversity gives Linux an advantage for survival, but it's not a strength.

In some sense, anything that confers an advantage for survival is a strength.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[nathanm]

In one sense yes, but if the various Linux distributions weren't compatible, nobody would use Linux. This is why it's great that lots of free/open source software runs on Linux, the BSDs, and commercial Unix with little more than a recompile in many cases.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[fault0]

Well, I ran Debian/Unstable for nearly 3 years before ditching it for Gentoo several months ago. I update all new versions of all installed packages almost every night. I've found that fewer breakages happen in Gentoo than in SID, while being more up-to-date.

I was really happy with Debian until release freezes and packagers waiting for obscure platforms like hppa.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[netsharc]

I see you've tried LFS, what's your opinion of it? I'm in the process of building my LFS system (I guess I'll be waiting to see if Gnome 2 really gets out on June 21), while it's fun and teaches me a lot, it does need a lot of time to see what other programs I need installed on it, I still don't have SSH, finger and all those small programs one just has to have..

I managed to build Xfree86 4.2 without DRI (I have a non-DRI GeForce card) which was good because it kept looking for non-existant things out of the kernel DRM files and I installed devfs which made /dev a lot cleaner (though I noticed later Mandrake 8.2 also uses devfs) and these 2 makes me feel my system is a lot leaner than usual systems, but as I asked, what's your opinion of LFS in comparison to Gentoo?

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[Afrosheen]

It's no wonder or great revelation that Gentoo is faster than Redhat. Redhat comes with i386 compiles and doesn't take advantage of special extensions on Pentium-and-higher class chips. Having a distro built with 100% Pentium-class optimizations makes a big difference..that's why I like Mandrake and, to a lesser extent, Gentoo.

Re:Gentoo is great!!

[Mnemia]

I think that LFS is a good idea in that it allows you to customize everything to the nth degree and gives you total control over the build processes.

However, I think Gentoo is almost like a better LFS...you still get the control when you need it (You can pass custom compiler options and parameters with a simple syntax, for instance) but you don't have to deal with all the aggravating dependency issues just to get the more basic elements of the system up and running.

Plus, Gentoo can do things that would be a nightmare with LFS...like rebuild the entire system using new optimizations or even a new compiler version with a single command.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[ObviousGuy]

Is there a direct upgrade path from 2.2 to 3.0? Will it require burning another set of CDs or will apt-get be able to handle the upgrade?

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[shani]

I found the full information by going to the Debian site, clicking on "search" and typing in "upgrading". I found the Upgrading a distribution page which details it.

Short answer: apt-get is your friend.

Gentoo is bad for penguins

[oever]

Gentoo Linux or for that matter all source derived distributions cost a lot of time waiting for a compile and a lot of energy hours of CPU usage for compilation.

This will increase the greenhouse effect and melt the icecaps. Then the only gentoo surviving will be those in zoos and those on harddisks.

Re:Gentoo is bad for penguins

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth do gentoo's servers provide that amount of source?

Re:Gentoo is bad for penguins

[klieber]

They run gentoo linux. Natch.

Re:Gentoo is bad for penguins

[Anonymous Coward]

No silly! The bandwidth! How do they afford the bandwidth?

Re:Gentoo is bad for penguins

[GrenDel Fuego]

Mirrors. Their main server is ibiblio, and there are a number of other mirror sites already in DNS, so you don't have to have users choose a mirror.

Also, a large number of the source packages can be downloaded automatically from the main site for that package.

Re:Gentoo is bad for penguins

[fault0]

> How on earth do gentoo's servers provide that amount of source?

The package lists are rsync'd (very efficient) from a round robin DNS server that serves from many mirrors.

Ebuilds typically download sources from ibiblio (formerly unsite.unc.edu, and metalab.unc.edu), which has gobs and gobs of free bandwidth or one of it's many mirrors, OR falling back on the download site of the package (i.e, sourceforge.net, ftp.gnu.org, ftp.kde.org, ).

just curious....

[Moosifer]

Doesn't naming a Linux distro after a religion violate some sort of public license?

(it could be that I really am that stupid)

Re:just curious....

[JPriest]

Gentoo is named after a small fast breed of penguin.

Re:just curious....

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is the contraction of "Girlfriend orthogonality"

Re:just curious....

[p00ya]

Um although it _is_ named after a penguin species
Plenty of people protest about names that mean more than one thing and can be offensive.

However, the the legitimate meaning (ie that of the breed of penguin) would be dominant so there is really no problem here.

Re:just curious....

[funkhauser]

Small, fast penguins certainly do offend me.

Re:just curious....

[Bimble]

What religion? I've never heard of a "Gentoo" religion.

Unless you mean "Linux"...

Re:just curious....

[sfraggle]

> Doesn't naming a Linux distro after a religion violate some sort of public license?

Fortunately, this would only have been a problem if they had named it "Scientology Linux"..

Re:just curious....

[wallsaroundme]

a gentoo is a penguin, but i also believe it means gentile in plural, ive never heard of it as a specific religion though

Re:just curious....

[King of the World]

Starwars?

Install from floppy.

[MartinG]

One of the attractive features to me is that everything is built from source and optimised for the machine it is running on. The reason this is attractive is because I have a number of older machines which I want to "squeeze" as much as I can from.

However, being older machines some do not have cdrom drives, only floppy drives and network connections. Given that most of the gentoo install is done on the network anyway, it's a shame the install discs provided are only cdroms.

If anyone has a "HOWTO install gentoo from floppy" I would be happy to know about it.

Re:Install from floppy.

[Mnemia]

Well, it's possible, though not easy. You would have to boot from floppy and then get SSH or NFS or some such thing running to allow you to mount the install files over a network. From what I've heard it's not possible to install Gentoo from a floppy alone without the assistance of another machine on the network.

Also, though using Gentoo to speed up those old machines does hold some appeal, it may not really be feasible to do since the compile time would be prohibitive. The best option if you really want Gentoo on those machines would probably be to install Gentoo on a faster machine, compile all the packages you want on that machine with "fake" installs, and then move the binaries over. IMHO it would be less trouble to just use a binary distro for machines that are old enough to not have a CD-ROM drive.

Re:Install from floppy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed Gentoo over the network, installing from a floppy should be quite possible.

Boot from a Linux-on-a-floppy distro that has partitioning and network tools, supports iso9660 and loopback filesystems.

Create a system partition and a temportary partition (to hold the iso image).

Download the iso, mount it on a loopback device.

Read the README, skip down to past the boot from CD section to the I've mounted my filesystems section.

untar the appropriate archive to your partition of choice.

Follow the rest of the directions.

Enjoy your new Gentoo system.

Re:Install from floppy.

[RAMMS EIN]

"HOWTO install gentoo from floppy"
That might be problematic...the ports tree could take up quite some space, and Linux bootdisks are already very tight. Also, compiling from source on an older box takes forever. I recommend compiling everything on a modern machine, then using your network to transfer it to your older machines. As I recall, you only need to change the cflags, which are in one file, mentioned in the README. However, I cannot verify this right now, as my Gentoo box is at my brother's place and they cut his connection.

Re:Install from floppy.

[richie2000]

I have installed Gentoo on a bunch of old boxen (P75-P166, 32-64MB, 1-3GB) to use as routing firewalls (throw in a few PCI NICs and they rock with iptables) and although a kernel compile takes forever and a day, you can easily do all that stuff on ANOTHER machine. My main workstation is an Athlon 1800+ with one of those removable IDE disk drive bays so when I need a new firewall I stick its drive into the workstation, boot the Gentoo CD, bootstrap and emerge what I need and then move the disk back to the P75 or whatever. Since you can tell Gentoo what CPU to compile for (i586) and what to stick in the kernel (iptables, NIC), it is not a problem to cross-install like this.

As an added bonus, the GRSecurity stuff is great and you just know that if you didn't do an emerge telnet, it's not going to be there, waiting to be exploited. The thing doesn't even have -traceroute- in the basic setup. I love it. :-)

And, the simplicity of the ebuild format (no need to re-package the entire program) makes new releases (close to 2000 supported programs last time I checked) show up much quicker here than in RPM format.

Yesterday, I installed it on my workstation (to stay, this time) and the last thing I did before leaving for home was 'emerge kde'. When I came in this morning, it was all done - not a problem.

Re:Install from floppy.

[Anna Merikin]

If anyone has a "HOWTO install gentoo from floppy" I would be happy to know about it.

No howto, but why not use a floppy-based linux like 2-disk xwindows or baslinux or even tomsrtbt from here to connect to ftp.gentoo.org, download the ISO, mount it as a loopback device and install from the laptop's HD?

Re:Install from floppy.

[Mr.Ned]

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=21311#213 11

If you've got another (faster) computer and some extra hard drive space, that's the ticket. Substitute vmware for a nice fat directory on your box and you'll be rocking.

Alternatively, you can hook your cd-rom-less's computer's hard drive up to one with a cdrom and compile with the appropriate flags.

Re:Install from floppy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone PLEASE show me any benchmark that shows compiling everything yourself makes it faster.

While I believe tweaking the settings may offer a slight advantage I don't think it is worth it. The effects are minimal and pointless.

Re:Install from floppy.

[Strog]

Several of the Linux distros and the BSD ones can boot off a floppy and pull it down ftp/http/nfs/etc. Just give them a little time and I'm sure someone will make one for Gentoo also.

I just did a FreeBSD samba box last week and a Mandrake netatalk box without a CD and all I needed was a couple floppies and a network connection. Hopefully someone will see the value of it for Gentoo and will put it together soon.

Re:Install from floppy.

[global_diffusion]

Check the forums or the mail archives.

I'd be scared to run this distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Its basically a beta that will always be beta.

Re:I'd be scared to run this distro

[JebusIsLord]

Well, thats a troll, but I'll bite. I am running it on production boxes and it runs perfectly. When portage updates are released I always test them out first on a test box though before blindly doing an "emerge --update world", but I would do that with Redhat if i was updating RPMs as well.

An alternative to Gentoo...

[pongo000]

Gentoo's great, if you have a Pentium-or-better machine (for the partially-built distro) and a bootable CD-ROM. Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD, and good luck if you try to do a "live" install from an existing Linux installation. A good alternative is LFS, which accomplishes much of what Gentoo has set out to accomplish but without all of the superfluous extras. More importantly, LFS is meant to be built using an existing (if possibly broken) Linux platform. If building a Linux system from scratch is what you're looking for, LFS certainly delivers.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, seriously, if you can't afford a 'Pentium-or-better machine' you need to re-evaulate your life. Go outside, get a job, have a bath, move out of home.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[jrfonseca]

Although the Pentium-or-better machine requirement is quite true, there is no need of a bootable CD-ROM.

The first time I installed Gentoo, I did it without ever leaving the comfort of my existing RedHat system. It took several days to build everything I needed in Gentoo (such as GNOME, mozilla, and all other common apps), but all this time I kept working as before. In the end it was just necessary to add a new entry to grub and boot Gentoo! My personal home dir remained the same so everything was configured as I had it before! (You have to love linux for this!) I also did this a 2nd time between two Gentoo versions, to recompile Gentoo for using gcc-3.1.

Gentoo really saves you alot of time when installing upgrading packages, but for old machines that is no longer true. I attempted to install Gentoo on a AMD K6 350 and it took a day to build X and in the end, because I was also trying to use gcc-3.1 it failed! Since I just wanted any Linux running on that machine for testing purposes I installed RH. But I would never leave Gentoo on my personal system! It was the best medicine for my update fever!

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice trolling.
I installed gentoo without a bootable cdrom less than a day ago, it was verry simple.. the basic procedure is:
dd if=/dev/zero of=gentooroot bs=1024k count=500 #make a 500meg disk image
mke2fs gentooroot #throw an ext2 filesystem on it
mount gentooroot /mnt/gentoo -o loop #mount it loopback

and then just follow the install instructions on the site
then when you're done (at the part in the install guide where it talks about installing grub), use some boot and root disks and mount both the disk image and the root partition
rm -rf anything you dont want to keep (meaning, save /home and /root, maybe backup /etc), then cp -af the contents of the gentoo disk image onto the new / partition
i suggest a grub disk for your first booting, but you could just as easily chroot to the gentoo install (chroot /mnt/gentoo) and run "env-update;grub"
easily done in a day. hard part is finding boot and root disks that include loop.o, i used debians install disks(heh). maybe if i get enough interest i'll roll my own gentoo install floppys (semi@__spamsucks__evolnet.org)
disclaimer: i'm in no way associated with gentoo, my install less than a week ago was my first.
--semi

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Zapper]

Dude, seriously, maybe everyone doesn't have mummy and daddy buy them a shiny new pc every 6 months.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[amarodeeps]

I've used both LFS and Gentoo. The basic fact is, LFS is wonderful for learning about Linux but doesn't have anything comparable to Portage. Indeed, LFS doesn't have any kind of package management system except one you set up yourself. That's one example of a major difference which might have you choosing a Gentoo install over "doing" LFS.

Now, I loved doing LFS, it was great to learn more about Linux, see what depended on what and compile things "by hand," but when I was looking for an upgrade, I didn't want to spend the time, so I picked Gentoo: it's very low-level in some nice ways, but doesn't make me doing every single little thing to get it running. They are two different distributions (if you can call LFS a distribution) with different positive points. So why compare them like this? You're just trolling and spreading confusion. Please explain what you mean when you say "LFS...accomplishes much of what Gentoo has set out to accomplish but without all of the superfluous extras." Is a BSD-style ports system superfluous? Superfluous is what is superfluous to you depending on your needs. This is why we have different distributions. So what are you talking about, what is your point?

BTW, Gentoo does also have a PPC version, please check your facts or make sure you are saying what you mean to say before posting: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/gentooppc-quickstart.htm l.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... and what about those of us who work 40 hours a week, have a home to take care of (laundry, dishes, painting, etc) and don't have the money?

Not all of us have your ideal job, paying the ideal salery. Not all of us have the elitest attitude you have either.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[iamplasma]

You can't spare the $50 for the most meagre of upgrades? Given that you're on the internet right now, you probably spend that much on your internet connection every one or two months. Honestly, it's not like a pentium is a big ask. Heck, a pentium 2 isn't a big ask either.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[GrenDel Fuego]

6 months? When did the pentium first come out, 94? 95?

I've seen people giving away low end pentium machines. Purchasing one would probably cost you $50 tops.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[austad]

Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD

This is total BS. I installed it on two machines that only had floppy drives. There's no "official" way to do it, but all you need is a boot disk like Tom's root boot. Just boot, and follow all the instructions like you normally would with the cd, when it gets to the part where you copy the 16mb tarball to the hard drive, just ftp it down from somewhere. I've done it twice.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Strog]

So maybe mummy and duddy don't buy a new computer every six YEARS then.

I've given away 8 or 10 pentium 200+ in the last 2 or 3 years and know of several people who have done the same. Flea markets, garage sales, etc. have lots of use pentium machines for under $50. I really think the comlaint about i686 compiled distro/whatever is really getting stupid. If you really want to use your sub-pentium then compile for a week and go on with life, find an older distro and update the parts you need or just hunt down a slightly better machine. How reliable is that old 386/486 going to be anyway and how long will it last?

Here's the pentium ebay page. Happy hunt for all you out there in need of a cheap upgrade.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[HavokDevNull]

What do you mean "Pentium-or-better machine (for the partially-built distro) and a bootable CD-ROM"

pffft I'm running a AMD duron 900 and no I did not have the bootable cd. I have installed gentoo many a time with out any problems all across a network.

It can be done, has been done. You just have to have a little common sense and a little linux knowledge.

My main computing platform right now is Gentoo and in no way is my KDE3, Gnome2, or GCC3 are broken. Sure some packages will not compile right on my box but thats because I'm using GCC3.

I'm not sure were you are pulling the "partially-built distro" comment from. But I'm going to assume that you know do not know what packages need to be installed or what a base linux install consists of. Here is an example on how to get a nice fully customized KDE3 desktop; Type "emerge kde" Portage (the package manager) will download and compile not only the latest KDE3 base but its dependices as well. You want office software??? Type "emerge openoffice" Ok maybe you want a web server instead? Type "emerge apache php mysql" Yes it is that easy. The only thing partially about Gentoo is a persons knowledge.

I also have 4 SUN IPX boxes w/ no cdroms all with Gentoo in a cluster. Guess I was lucky to get Gentoo on them according to you. Actually it was easy you just got to know what your doing.

Again this is not a newbie distro, and dose take some time to compile everything. The average user will be asking for help and questions in the Gentoo forums which all the answers are there and everybody is friendly. I have also seen people with no *nix experience what so ever install Gentoo. The advantages outweight the time it takes to bootstrap and compile a base linux install and have it fully customized to your cpu and chipset.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[HavokDevNull]

What gets me is he got moded to a 5....

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, you can probably find Pentium 2s and Celerys in dumpsters. Good luck finding Pentium 1s in dumpsters. Most places have already upgraded them years ago, and are upgrading their Pentium 2s.

If you're on a 486 and can't afford to spend a couple of bucks (literally) to upgrade, well, that's pretty pathetic. It's really not that hard to save a buck or two a week. Complaining about time? Well, skip reading Slashdot for one day and go to Ebay or something and get a PC that won't take five minutes to render a Slashdot comments page.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[cwebster]

did you even bother trying to install gentoo?

the "boot-cd" and "install from current linux" options are really the same process. The only difference is that with the boot-cd, your "current linux" is a very minimal environment on the cd. The process is the same. The boot-cd just gives you (in my case) a stage1 tarball and a README, the same things i would have downloaded if i wanted to install from a current linux partition.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[garett_spencley]

One word: family.

Man, I have a good job and before I moved out of my mother's I always had my box up to date. But the last couple years I haven't been able to do much with my machine because I have kids.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm just trying to state that not everyone has a disposable income that they can throw at luxury items like the latest from Nvidia and AMD.

--
Garett

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Arker]

Gentoo's great, if you have a Pentium-or-better machine (for the partially-built distro) and a bootable CD-ROM. Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD, and good luck if you try to do a "live" install from an existing Linux installation.

False. You can install it on anything that has a bootable floppy, a network connection and enough storage. See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=34318&cid=3714 118 for instructions.

LFS is a good project, but spreading FUD about Gentoo is not.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[pongo000]

The comment you linked to talks about installing Gentoo from a "clean" boot. I still maintain that it's extremely difficult to install Gentoo from an existing Linux installation (especially an older installation). Many of the packages simply refuse to compile under gcc-2.7.x and glibc-2.0.x.

I'm wasn't trying to flame Gentoo, nor was I trolling. I was simply pointing out my personal experiences with Gentoo, and providing an alternative to those who might be trying to upgrade an older system. Given that the parent post was modded up to a +5 (I'm long past my karma whoring days), I imagine others have encountered similar difficulties with Gentoo.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've upgraded quite a few times, but if you expect me to just toss out a perfectly good computer (be it a little slow), you're out of your mind. These old computers make great firewalls and static web servers.

Re:An alternative to Gentoo...

[jhoffoss]

Yeah, you may be right, but would you give up your internet to upgrade to a pentium? Do you feel that is worth it? Also, don't forget that some people use a spare machine to play with Linux while they're still learning (Yes, maybe total immersion is a better way to learn, but not everyone can do that, or wants to do that). I have a spare pentium laptop that I am going to install Gentoo on tonight, after reading a bit about it.

MORE BUGS

[Anonymous Coward]

And since you compiled it all yourself, they're sort of your fault, too! You can send a bug report to yourself!

Re:Who is michael

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow...I didn't know they were one and the same. And I thought he was a sorry SOB because of the lame shit he posts on /...but he's actually a sorry SOB twice over!

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[alfaiomega]

You don't have to burn new CDs, you just have to add some Debian mirror to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run "apt-get dist-upgrade". See Release Notes for Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (`woody'), Intel x86 Chapter 3 - Upgrades from Previous Releases for details about some important changes between 2.2 and 3.0 Debian versions but if you're just playing with Debian, you can just go to APT HOWTO 3.5 Upgrading to a new release and see short text about it. Generally, you have to add new APT sources, here's my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ woody main
deb-src ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ woody main
deb ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian-non-US/ woody/non-US main
deb-src ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian-non-US/ woody/non-US main
deb ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ woody non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.pl.debian.org/debian/ woody non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ woody/updates main
deb http://security.debian.org/ woody/updates non-free

Use something like this, but with some mirror near you instead of ftp.pl.debian.org. See the mirrors list or just change the ".pl." to ".your-country-code." and it should work. Next you have to run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and that's it. You can first try "apt-get -s dist-upgrade" to see a simulation what would be done but without changing anything, to make sure the mirrors are working. Hope it helps.

Gentoo is great!

[big_hairy_mama]

I've been using Gentoo since Slashdot's last story on them, and I have had nothing but good experiences. The portage system has made my system noticeably faster, since my binaries finally are not optimized for a 386. The ease of applying my own patches on top of the normal package source is also a major selling point. The nice people at Gentoo even added the driver for my printer to Ghostscript's source, something I used to have to do by hand.

But the coolest feature (besides portage) is the beautiful init script infrastructure. The init scripts are the prettiest of any I've seen so far, and also the easiest to modify. Having all the configuration files in plain-text is a very nice thing.

Sorry if this is redunant, because I'm sure everyone already knows that GENTOO IS GREAT!

HOW-TO Install Gentoo Linux from a floppy

[KFK2]

Actually it's not that hard.. You just need to have a boot disk that will allow you network support and some file transfer protocol. tomsrtbt and mulinux come to mind.
Instructions:
Mount the CD on some computer with a cd-rom and network support.
Follow boot disk instructions to get the computer that Gentoo Linux is going to be installed on running and the network up.
Look at Normal Instructions and Skip steps 1 - 5; Follow step 6 (partitions) and 7 (mounting); skip 8; and for step 9, instead of copying from cd-rom, copy stages from the network (using whatever protocol meets your fancy); then continue on with the rest of the instructions.

looks to be pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

However, I've really gotten attached to RedHat's "up2date" utility that I can use to manage my system. I just queue my rpms and up2date gets them for me. Package dependencies are taken care of and my system "profile" lets me know what security issues I need to be aware of.

I wonder how well Gentoo's security is. Since this distro isn't really a distro in the sense that we are used to, do the install scripts automatically run everything setuid or what?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:looks to be pretty cool

[Mnemia]

I think that Gentoo is reasonably secure "out of the box" because it doesn't automatically setup ANY network programs or daemons. Nothing is activated until you explicitly set it up. The problem comes when you start to set things up...Gentoo will not be secure for long if you don't do a good job of configuring everything. But then again that's going to be a problem with any Linux distro and at least Gentoo probably isn't quite as easy to root right after install as some other distros.

Re:looks to be pretty cool

[riotrick]

In gentoo you can do an emerge --update system and emerge --update world, to update your system to the latest version. It uses emerge to install new packages (+dependencies) as well. In effect it kind of works like apt-get in debian, with the addition that it compiles the packages from source. All in all a much more flexible tool than up2date.

Source based vs. Binary based: Possible compromise

[egghat]

This isn't meant to be trolling ...

With the previous discussion whether source based distros or binary distros are better I wonder, why you can't simply download a binary distro and recompile all important packages from the Source RPMS. So you can get the comfort from e.g. Mandrake with the efficiency of e.g. Gentoo.

Is it a possible way to enhance a binary based distibution with a recompilation feature?

Bye egghat.

Big problem with Gentoo

[raahul_da_man]

I can't get it to update packages. My proxy(SOCKS 5)
just doesn't play well. Anyone got a socks proxy working with gentoo?

Re:Big problem with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

Re:Big problem with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Use tsocks to tunnel through the proxy. Use it at work fine.

Re:Big problem with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of using emerge rsync, you can also grab the daily snapshot of the portage tree from http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gen too/snapshots/
in .tar.bz2 form. Just unpack it over /usr/portage, run emerge --pretend system and emerge --pretend world and you'll see the new packages.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[10Ghz]

"You may even try Sid the Unstable version if you want the latest and the greatest software"

Yeah, like KDE3 and Xfree 4.2. No, wait...

It's been over 2 months since KDE3 was released. How about having it FINALLY in Debian as well?

Gentoo really is excellent...

[g1n3tix2k]

I saw Gentoo a while ago and thought i would giving it a try, boasting an excellent portage system and a tiny initial download. The portage system is the best i have found, even compared to the FBSD Ports its is, i think, by far superior, giving you an interface very similar to apt-get and dpkg to install the ports. The install, even though time-consuming, is actually very straight forwards, whter beginner, experienced admin, or hardened guru, you will get along with it just fine. Everything is compiled from source, so true enough, its not really suited to a slow machine. Unless your a very patient person, or its designed to be a server. However even though i think binary packages might be a good idea for those who dont want to compile, the system becomes extremely fast due to optimizations in the compile process. The website is comprehensive and the people at Gentoo exceptionally happy to help you out. if you find it hard to get an answer then let me know! ill help you! The bleeding edge software that theyre happy to supply, and the very latest in everything is an extreme advantage when coming form a debian backgroud. finally you dont have things breaking, and you dont have to trapes around looking for latest updates or debs. just emerge rsync, and get the latest one! Gnome2 is exceptionally nice! :) But i guess you guys should try it out for yourself. im sure you wont be dissapointed

Re:Gentoo really is excellent...

[shadow303]

Actually, I think that Gentoo is quite useful for older machines. Sure, the compiles take forever, but you can just let it run overnight. Compare to other distros, you spend much more time on installation of stuff, but all of your stuff runs faster, so a slow machine isn't quite so painful. After running Gentoo on my old laptop, I couldn't possibly put up with the sluggishness of my old distro (Mandrake).

Re:Gentoo really is excellent...

[praedor]

You all make me SICK! I WISH I could try it but those, like myself, stuck with a lowly 56k dialup would be insane to try it. What would it be, a week before everything was downloaded and built into a useful system?

I miss my broadband. Oh yeah, my dialup (Purdue) limits dial-ins to 90 minutes at a time so not only is there a 56k bottleneck, there is also the 90 minute disconnect and redial to deal with (and a busy signal for anyone trying to call me or the wife).

Yup, you Gentoo or Lunar users make me wanna puke.

Re:Gentoo rocks! (ummm)...

[Anonymous Coward]

"After being a fanatical Debian-user for four years, Gentoo was a "love at first sight".. :) I've been running Gentoo for about a year now and always when I find out about a new detail about it, I think to myself "Yes, this is how it SHOULD have been in the other distros also"..
The only thing I'm missing is a way to make "recursive" library updates.. For example, if I upgrade libSDL to a new version, all apps that depends on SDL should be recompiled automatically.. There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2..."

What kind of shit is this? Yeah, this is a real convenience oriented distribution, just following in the likes of apt-get and such ...
it's amazing how people jump onto the stupidest fucking bandwagons these days.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[alfaiomega]

It's been over 2 months since KDE3 was released. How about having it FINALLY in Debian as well?

Great idea, why won't you help Debian folks if you need it so much?

10 facts about Gentoo

[ukryule]

Can be found here. For example:

Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) breed on subantarctic islands and on the Antarctic Peninsula in small to large colonies. Larger populations of gentoo penguins are found at South Georgia, the Falkland Islands and the Iles Kerguelen.

Gentoo penguins are the least abundant of the penguins found on the subantarctic islands, with a total breeding population of approximately 314 000 pairs.

Unlike other penguin species, gentoo penguins may breed as early as two years of age.

The gentoo penguin is a medium sized penguin, standing 75-90cm tall and the females are smaller than the male birds.

Given that the penguin has a latin name, should the full name of this distro be:
Connochaetes taurinus/Pygoscelis papua Linus ?

Pee

[Anonymous Coward]

How many years behind XP is this distro?

What much of the discussion is missing ...

[twilight30]

Is the fact that the issue is one of control, not source-v-binary. In this case you suggest, the question would be, 'Which packages are important?'

If you want a desktop, you will have different needs to desiring a server. You will want eye-candy. So who decides what the important packages are?

Policy dictates, if you use Debian. Something or other, if you use Red Hat or Mandrake. Gentoo and LFS put the control in your hands.

Doing what you suggest can be done, but the question of control then comes up. Either you trust others to know their Linux (binary), or you dig yourself and come up with the goods (source).

For me, it's Debian unstable. I don't have time to look at recompiling all the source for any machine at the moment, though I won't rule it out. And I have no problem whatsoever following what the Debian Project recommends as the results have been nearly perfect thus far.

It really depends on what you want to do.

Gentoo Euphemism

[darkewolf]

It seems that Gentoo was a south african word, used as an international term for a 'prostitute'. I just wonder whether it is an appropriate word-relationship for a linux distribution. I mean, you get linux for free rather than pay for it.

Re:Gentoo Euphemism

[Mistah Blue]

IIRC the Gentoo website points out that this is a species of penguin.

Re:Gentoo Euphemism

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG UR DUMB

GENTOO IS NAMED AFTER A PENGUIN SPECIES U FUCK

GO EAT SHIT YOU MOTHER FUQING BUNGHOLE DOOD

I WILL PERSONALLY COME AND KICK YOU IN THE NUTZ

SO YOU BETTER RUN AND HIDE MOTHERF FUCKER!

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Gentoo Euphemism
Gentoo Euphemism (Score:1)
by darkewolf on Monday June 17, @02:31AM (#3714204) Alter Relationship
(User #24563 Info | http://users.indigo.net.au/darke/)
It seems that Gentoo was a south african word, used as an international term for a 'prostitute'. I just wonder whether it is an appropriate word-relationship for a linux distribution. I mean, you get linux for free rather than pay for it.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Gentoo Euphemism

[darkewolf]

Ay, I know its related to a penquin species. Its just interesting usuage of language. Now, which was named first, the species of penguin or the euphemism.. Probably someone comparing protitutes (the example I can find, involves shipwrecked 'soon to be house servants' becoming prostitutes, which were named 'gentoos'..)

And to the ACer that offered to kick my 'nutz' inm thank you very much, I enjoy them not kicked in, and frankly, if you dont understand the interest one can have with linguistics, I am not suprised, you seem to have issues with the CAPSLOCK key.

slainte leibh.

Re:Gentoo Euphemism

[Afrosheen]

It seems that Gentoo was a south african word, used as an international term for a 'prostitute'.

I wouldn't call it 'international' if it's only used in South Africa. I live in the US and have never, ever heard this term from anyone, native english speaker or otherwise.

Re:Source based vs. Binary based: Possible comprom

[dattaway]

rpm --rebuild

heh, I did this with redhat over the years and while it can be done, it just doesn't seem natural. Tarballs are easy to work with if a person likes to have the source as a quick reference to why things work. Having a source tree available is like having the most comprehensive man pages if I want to know the most obscure details.

With a source based distribution, the temptation to tinker and try interesting hacks out is overwhelming. Gentoo provides an environment that is friendly for making changes if one wants control how far across the system modifications will reach. I don't see how it would be possible for rpm --rebuild to recompile just the system or selected parts of the world, while emerge makes this easy.

Re:3:34 AM? Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone is working late.

slashdot never sleeps, its CPU cycles keep on ticking.

(whispering...) we have secretly replaced slashdot with a computer and internet connection. Let's see if anyone notices...

GCC 3+ & Other Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a way to install stuff like gcc 3.1 with gentoo? An unstable package tree or something? emerge doesn't find that kind stuff

Re:GCC 3+ & Other Software

[Per Wigren]

Gentoo has a thing called "profiles". If you change the profile from "default-1.0" to "default-1.0-gcc3", everything will be built with GCC 3.1. The ebuilds will install gcc3-specific patches if they are needed..
# ln -sf /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0-gcc3 /etc/ma ke.profile

Using profiles, you can also make company-specific distros and other specialized versions of Gentoo...

Re:GCC 3+ & Other Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you have several versions of gcc at once?

Gentoo Linux

[mqduck]

The real question, in my little mind, is why they're too mean to call it "Gentoo GNU/Linux." It makes me sad.

*Sniff*,
Jeff

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling it GNU/Linux doesn't reflect the work of many many other volunteers. Maybe it should be calle d AlanCox/KDEteam/xmms/Mozilla/GNU/Linux? Why should GNU get so much credit for writing a compiler and few other tools.. if I wrote a w32 compatible OS using VC++ am I obliged to call it Microsoft/MyOS?? Of course not.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[thunderbee]

> Why should GNU get so much credit for writing a compiler and few other tools.

Because if you were to remove the compiler and "few other tools" like glib you'd be left with a pile of neat source code. But hey, I guess you just like to translate the C into Asm, and then asm into machine opcodes. I for one do lack the time and appreciate the help.
And then there are all those other tools that you surely can live without but do happen to be useful to the vast majority of us poor GNU tool users.
Now maybe you do edit your files with a magnet ;-)

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, going back to my point:

if I wrote a w32 compatible OS using VC++ am I obliged to call it Microsoft/MyOS?? Of course not.

Also, why shouldn't anal cox, kde team, mozilla team, etc, get credit too?

Re:Gentoo Linux

[smash]

So if I write an application for Windows with Borland Delphi, I must call it "Borland/XXX"?

I don't quite think so ;p

This is another reason I prefer the BSDs. If the GNU people were truly in support of freedom to use software as you please, they'd follow a similar license.

So what if someone forks their own version and closes the source? The open version is still out there, and if the closed version is so much better then maybe the people in question deserve the right to charge money for it if thats what they want.

smash (just my 2c)

Re:Gentoo Linux

[ZxCv]

> Why should GNU get so much credit for writing a compiler and few other tools.

Because if you were to remove the compiler and "few other tools" like glib you'd be left with a pile of neat source code.

That's like saying that because my car requires gas to function, that it should be called a Nissan Texaco/Altima, or a Nissan Chevron/Altima. If I were to remove that precious gas, I'd be left with a pile of metal. I do lack the time to make my car go without gas, so I guess I won't be ditching it anytime soon. But I won't be prepending Texaco/ or Chevron/ or anything else in order to show my appreciation.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

except that you don't fill your machine up with GNU every few cpu-hours. instead, you have a GNOME dashboard, a GNU shifter, X11 windows..

Re:Gentoo Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

> So what if someone forks their own version and closes the source? The open version is still out there, and if the closed version is so much better then maybe the people in question deserve the right to charge money for it if thats what they want.

...and if that "someone"'s fork were to be deliberately incompatible with the mainline code, and said fork were protected by patents, lawyers, etc such that it couldn't be practically reverse-engineered w/o Severe consequences? If the mainline code were rendered irrelevant due to the overwhelming marketshare/marketing/etc of that "someone", such that in time your code didn't work with a majority of servers due to said changes, this wouldn't generally piss you off and make you regret the day "someone" was able to do that?

Re:Gentoo Linux

[smash]

For that to "work" they would have to offer some sort of compelling feature(s) to pursuade users to give up the compatability of the open source version.

If the company/person in question has spent the time/effort required to implement said features, then the have a right to charge for their work. Whether or not people are willing to pay for it or not is dependent on what they offer. If they don't offer anything useful, people won't bother.

The BSD license is about giving people the freedom to use code as they see fit. Trying to control derivitive works (the GNU way) is akin to your university lecturer (or even your primay school teacher) claiming credit for any future works that you may publish.

smash

Huh?

[mnordstr]

This is one week old "news"!?

Emerge Love ?

[Quazion]

hmmm the article said I love Emerge ?

I tried Emerging love but nothing happend.

Re:Emerge Love ?

[IQ]

Why don't you try emerging emerge?

Re:Emerge Love ?

[Jerf]

The exact error message is "Calculating dependencies !!! Couldn't find match for love; aborting."

Interpret that as you will. Sounds violent and possible pedophiliac to me... ;-)

Re:Emerge Love ?

[ddilling]

At least it didn't say "Emerging love: couldn't find package." ;-)

Re:Emerge Love ?

[Quazion]

My excuse, you are right ofcourse,
but i wasnt at home behind my gentoo box,
instead i was at work behind a redhat box
and normaly i dont emerge things that dont
exist so i had to make this one up :)

But i needed the karma anyways ;P

make.profile

[bunungs]

just symlink /etc/make.profile
to the gcc make profile in /usr/portage/profiles

CD Available

[peterdaly]

I've never heard of this, I must have missed the last slashdot article on it.

On their web site they suggest buying a cd from:
http://www.tuxcds.com/

-Pete

Re:CD Available

[Anonymous Coward]

karma whore

New Gentoo ports

[Charlotte]

The article doesn't mention Gentoo/Linux is now available also on Sparc, PPC and a MIPS port is also underway.

Re:New Gentoo ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Which MIPS?

When will someone get a working version of Linux/BSD on an SGI O2?

Re:New Gentoo ports

[vicviper]

Maybe Playstation2? *hope*

Re:New Gentoo ports

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact Gentoo is already available for PPC (is merged into main tree now) and sparc is soon to follow.

Power Users

[peterdaly]

They say their distribution is geared at power users. That being the case, most of their user base will be installing on higher end machines, IMO. If you are looking to install on a lower than Pentium Pro, this may not be the best distribution for you anyway. Plenty of other distributions are compiled for i386.

-Pete

Real speed improvement?

[peterdaly]

I have a question for anyone who uses this.

Is there measurable speed increase by using this distribution, or do you really just save a couple microseconds here and there?

I would like to consider myself a fairly experienced linux user. I have done my fair share of deep digging into my first pre kernel2.0 slackware system through my curent one. May it be worth my time to attempt to convert my RedHat 7.2 Dell lAttitude C800 to this? I use it for java development (IDEA rocks!), and related web work.

-Pete

Re:Real speed improvement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. a *REAL* speed improvement. You can notice it immediately!

Re:Real speed improvement?

[mjprobst]

I think much of the speed improvement comes from the distribution's infrastructure--servers aren't started by default unless you installed something that needs them, the appropriate libraries are compiled shared for all apps that need them if you put them in USE, overall the memory usage is less because of this. I feel Slackware is faster than Redhat for this reason; it doesn't load the kitchen sink by default.

A 5% to 30% increase in speed is not a big deal for a single program but if you can get it for the entire system without much inconvenience it really starts to add up. So whatever server processes are left run efficiently.

Also, if you use X Gentoo makes it very easy to install the preemptive and realtime kernel patches, and at least KDE works well with that. It does make a big difference in interactive speed. No, you won't see some number-crunching program working miracles once you install Gentoo, but it is much more pleasant to me.

I find the system as a whole so clean that even if it were a binary-only system I'd prefer it to Debian and RedHat derivatives. Very easy base to expand upon _without_ branching from the original, which is a new thing to me. I'd expect central storage of binary packages, keyed to the specific processors and optimizations used, to be integrated into Portage in the future without breaking anything.

Re:Real speed improvement?

[The Evil Troll King]

"Is there measurable speed increase by using this distribution, or do you really just save a couple microseconds here and there?"

I don't have benchmarks or anything, but I think my workstation runs a good bit faster as a result of switching from Red Hat 7.2 to Gentoo 1.2. Things like Mozilla and KDE, which were fairly slow in Red Hat, run surprisingly fast now. I don't know if this is because Gentoo optimizes them for my machine or if it's just because I have the latest versions now, but the speed increase is real.

I've been extremely happy with Gentoo (though I haven't been at it for that long). I switched because I was tired of a lot of the bloat that comes with recent versions of Red Hat. They have you install a lot of stuff by default, and I'm scared that I'll break something if I go in and start removing things. Gentoo gives you what you need, then you use the ports system (Portage) to install what you want on top of that. So far, this has resulted in less bloat.

Portage is great. If you decide that you want to install the LyX word processor, you just type:

$ emerge app-office/lyx

No RPM dependencies, no screwing around on rpmfind.net, no trouble at all.

Another cool thing about Portage is that, if you want, you can set global compile options. For example, you tell it to "use SSL", and then, every time you build something that has optional SSL support, it compiles that in automatically.

The biggest problem with Gentoo is that, when you install something, you have to wait for Portage to download it and any dependencies onto your machine and compile everything. It took my machine an entire afternoon to do emerge kde-base/kde on a 1GHz Athlon with 256 MB of RAM. I didn't mind this so much, because I had plenty of time to wait for it, but a Gentoo install requires a lot of patience (or Playstation games, which the installation guide recommends). You've been warned. Also, configuring the system involves manually editing text files -- I haven't found any graphical wizards yet. Again, that's fine by me, but you may have better things to do with your time.

If you decide to switch, make sure you hang on to your XF86Config-4 file. I had trouble getting X installed and was glad that I had a copy to refer to. However, if you were using Slackware before the 2.0 kernel came out, you're tougher than I am, so you'll probably have better luck than me.

I hope this helps -- good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Steve

Re:Real speed improvement?

[_Knots]

Yes, Gentoo has really sped up my system. I just switched yesterday (I kid you not) from Debian. For example, lbreakout2, a SDL game, would lag considerably on my debian box even with all "features" turned off. It screams with all the eyecandy *on* in Gentoo.

It's possible it was a misconfiguration, but I really doubt it since I looked long and hard for one and the lagging would scale roughly with load from "just barely acceptable" to "unbelievably bad for a 900Mhz box."

And even if it *was* a misconfiguration, I'm glad I switched. Emerge is my new favorite application.

--Knots

Re:Real speed improvement?

[fault0]

Well, it depends on what you do.

Optimizing doesn't help in commands like ls, but I've seen a modest boost in things like compiling, and programs like KDE/GNOME/Mozilla/XFree86)

Re:Real speed improvement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it also increase my physical memory and my internet connection speed? These are the two main performance bottlenecks on most machines I know (unless you actually plan on compiling the software yourself, which you only need to do with Gentoo anyway).

Re:Gentoo Penguins are dying!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL I'd stamp you off as a troll but this one is just so funny

Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a former FreeBSD user who installed Gentoo Linux after reading about it on Slashdot a couple of months ago. I am still amazed how well it is designed and documented! If you don't believe me, just go to here and have a look. I now have a fully operational (sound, video - everything works!) desktop system which is far better than any *BSD system could deliver. I have learned to enjoy the sheer speed and performace I get when I use Gentoo Linux. Native NVidia video drivers and ALSA sound makes my desktop experience enjoyable. Perhaps the most coolest thing about Gentoo is the portage system, which is a nail in FreeBSD's coffin. It is the most advanced ports system you will find in the whole world.

Re:Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you, brother. I switched from FreeBSD also. FreeBSD is too much work for too little return. I never did get my soundcard working right in FreeBSD - anytime there was more than minimal disk i/o the sound in FreeBSD became scratchy and garbled. Gentoo is a good choice for former FreeBSD users. It is everything that FreeBSD should have been but isn't.

Re:Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Daeron]

> It is everything that FreeBSD should have been but isn't.

You mean it uses the FreeBSD kernel too ?

Re:Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Daeron]

And yes ... that was SARCASM

Re:Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ofcourse, but you have to remember that BSD has had this for a decade!
It needs update, so? We'll get there in november...

Re:Portage is a *BSD ports killer

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not forget: with BSD you get a STABLE system, that is, no VM updates to the left and right, and no glibc crap! WOHOoo!

yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived on a slow P100 running linux for quite a long time (bought an Athlon last year, now waiting for the 10GHz) and optimized everything I were running,

The pentium compiler group (based on optimization changes done by intel back in -96) faq http://www.goof.com/pcg/pgcc-faq.html#SEC0119 says you can generally expect a 5% speed (and sometimes up to 30%, but thats rare) increase by using pentium specific switches - which of some I suspect has found it's way into gcc 3.0

on mpg123 on my P100 I actually got 5-7% lowering of cpu usage by using pgcs =)

The real speed benifit though is not Pentium / Athlon specific optimizations, they're mainly in -fomit-frame-pointer (an optimization which mainly isn't performed on base system binaries since it makes your system UNDEBUGGABLE) I noticed that -funroll-loops actually did some wonders to my binaries too..

Also, the new Gnome2RC1 has some great optimizations for speed...

These days my system is so fast an snappy anyways so I don't optimize anything but very CPU intensive applications

-mcpu=pentiumpro -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops

Now, I'm going to keep backin' up my system in order to try gentoo!

Re:Gentoo rocks! (ummm)...

[Anonymous Coward]

Convenience oriented as opposed to what? pain in the ass oriented? Computers are supposed to be a solution not a problem. If you're thinking compiling everything by hand makes you "eleet" or something, it doesn't, it just shows the world you have way to much time on your hands. And that you like to be a human dependency resolver, heh.

However, recompiling every app becuase a library got updated doesn't sound convenient at all. That sounds like a fucking huge waste of resources. Gee, instead of having someone at the distro that specializes (ya this is basic adam smith shit here) in making packages for the distro and then everyone just downloads that and uses it (debian) everyone using the distro has to download the source and compile it all. Oh yes for the 10% boost you might get between 386 and 686 that's really worth the waste! *sigh*

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[martinde]

I'm running KDE 3.0 on Debian, I grabbed binary packages with apt. Add these lines to your sources.list:


deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian /
deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde3 ./


Also, check out the debian-kde mailing list at lists.debian.org for the latest and greatest. Once woody is released (and it's SOOO close) you'll get KDE 3.0.1 and XFree 4.2 in unstable.

Linux

[makapuf]

A simple WHOIS shows that it's registered to some finnish dude. Why should we think anything on there is even credible (I mean did you even read it???)

Gentoo Baby

[bdowne01]

Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion. I've installed it on every machine in my house, and on a CVS server at work.

Quite possibly the best feature is the ability to update critical packages with a single command. When the latest OpenSSH hole was discovered, the Gentoo developers had a new ebuild package up on their rsync mirrors within a few hours . All it took on my Gentoo boxes was a simple:

emerge -u openssh

And it was done. My collegues on their HP-UX boxes were spending their day looking for patches from HP's site while I was back relaxing a reading /. :)

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Drives me nuts, every time...
penultimate does not mean "the very best." It means "next to last."

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Bronster]

All it took on my Gentoo boxes was a simple:
emerge -u openssh

Whereas on my Debian boxes at work it was a simple:

% apt-get update
% apt-get upgrade

and I didn't have to wait while it re-built.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[hymie3]

Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion.

Okay, I'll bite. If Gentoo is the penultimate distro, what's the ultimate distro?

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

>Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro

So what's the ultimate one then, if Gentoo's only second best?

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Emil Brink]

Please go read this definition of the word "penultimate". Or, did you in fact want to install some other distro, but settled for Gentoo for some reason? ;^) English sure is a big and complex language...

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Clue4All]

You realize all Debian packages are built for i386's, right? Using packages optimized for Pentium and higher class CPUs yield up to 50% increase in speed, and this is very noticeable in a distro that compiles all their packages in such a manner. It's a shame Debian doesn't get with the times, if you want speed you're left to rebuild the source package, which doesn't put Debian far above Gentoo at all in this case.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Fjord]

However we did have to wait until they added the patch into openssh, compiled it, built the package, ran tests on it, and added some extra time to release in there (I remember the Gentoo people rubbing this fact in our face at the time :).

Still, I prefer Debian. If I want to build from source, then I'll install a source package instead of the binary package. If the package maintainers are too slow to patch what I have on a critical system, then I'll patch it myself. There are just too many times I'll pull a package because I want to use it immediately for what I'm doing, as well as too many times that I pull a pacakge and realize it's not what I want, to build everything from source.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[aussersterne]

And of course Slackware remains the ultimate...

Re:Gentoo Baby

[purplebear]

And the only thing worth "bragging" about here is that the Gentoo developers were slightly faster at releasing a patch, new ebuild, faster than developers of other distributions.
That really has nothing to do with the design of the system at all. It has to do with the dedication of the developers. Well, and it has to do with the fact that the Gentoo developers don't really have to test things as extensively as other distro maintainers.
I have tried Gentoo. I admit I did like it. I now use SuSE though. I like it a lot more. I won't go into why, because I grow very weary of the "My Distro Rocks; Your Distro Sucks mines balls" arguements that seem to permeat the Linux community.
We all need to stop advocating one distribution over another and just say "Linux rocks". Of course that leaves out our BSD usin' cousins, so let's make even simpler and say "UNIX-like systems rock!".

Re:Gentoo Baby

[FreeUser]

Whereas on my Debian boxes at work it was a simple [two commands] and I didn't have to wait while it re-built.

No, but you did have to wait for debian to release the binary. In the case of ssh it was done quickly (and, if you are running 2-year old software in debian Stable it will always be quick to get security fixes, but at the very high price of running archaic software).

Even security releated fixes don't make it into unstable as quickly as they do stable, and testing is generally a couple of weeks later still. And if you want to run software that is anything approaching modern under Debian, you have to either run unstable or testing, or compile the software yourself. If you're doing the latter, you may as well be using a source-based distro that will manage the compilation process and handle dependencies for you.

Then there are all those packages that aren't security related per se, but still contain signficant bug fixes or enhancements people may really need. Have you tried to apt-get X 4.2 under Debian lately? You can't, because even in unstable it still isn't supported yet, despite it being months since its release to the community. On the other hand, I've been using X 4.2 since January.

The thing that makes distros like Gentoo so powerful isn't just the performance improvement of having everything compiled optimized for your hardware (which is significant, naysayers notwithstanding), but that it makes installing from source as easy as other distros make installing precompiled binaries. This is a huge deal, as installing from source has all kinds of performance and stability advantages, not to mention less complex dependency issues, over precompiled binaries. And on a reasonably modern CPU the wait for something to compile really isn't a big deal for most packages, a few very large ones (KDE, X) excepted.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[torndorff]

% apt-get update
% apt-get upgrade

...and on my Gentoo box I did:

% emerge update
-or-
% emerge world

Emerge world will make every package installed current, while update does system packages only (at least thats my understanding).

Re:Gentoo Baby

[fault0]

> and I didn't have to wait while it re-built.

Yes, but us gentoo users didn't have to wait for it to get into the distro.

From my experience, ebuilds are made much, much, much faster than debian packages are.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I see an average of 10 people switch from slackware to gentoo everyday on #gentoo on irc.o.net.

(including myself, a slackware diehard since 1996).

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why we should never have stopped teaching latin in our schools.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[anno1a]

What would I use XFree 4.2 for? AFAIK it's only new drivers, and I download those seperately. The reason why the new XFree is delayed is one: 4.1 is being prepared for stable (I get a more stable X... YAY!) and 4.2 is being ported to 11 (eleven!!) platforms! This is debian! Not the XFree team, but the debian package maintainers!

I tried installing Gentoo linux on my laptop (previously running debian) and I experienced no significant speed-boost! Why is that? What I DID experience was that it took forever to build mozilla and other packages, and that my entire system had become way more unstable (I configured the stable kernel myself, that one _was_ stable) than my debian. Even debian unstable is pretty damned stable, and I like it that way. Gentoo seems to be nothing but cvs in a package.

I DO like gentoo, and I was probably running it, if I didn't have debian, but I DO have debian, and everything considered, I believe I'm better off.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[athakur999]

And even if there is no ebuild available yet, making one is trivial for small changes. Ie. you have widget-3.0.0 installed and they just released widget-3.0.1, a simple "cp widget-3.0.0.ebuild widget-3.0.1.ebuild" is usually all you need.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[jcostom]

Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion.

Methinks you have no idea what penultimate means.

It means "next to last". And you get +4 for that? Yeesh.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[yoel]

Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion.

Whereas Debian is the ultimate Linux distro? Seriously, I think penultimate doesn't mean what you think it does.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[swillden]

You realize all Debian packages are built for i386's, right? Using packages optimized for Pentium and higher class CPUs yield up to 50% increase in speed, and this is very noticeable in a distro that compiles all their packages in such a manner.

While this is true, nearly all of the improved performance comes from machine-specific optimizations of a few key packages, like the kernel, glibc and XFree86.

With Debian, it is very simple to rebuild individual packages with machine-specific optimizations. I rebuilt the above three and I do notice substantial performance improvement. I've been thinking about rebuilding the KDE libs as well.

But there's tons of stuff out there, and most of it doesn't gain significantly from platform-specific optimization. Most software spends all of its time waiting for the user anyway, and even if you could speed it up a factor of 10 you couldn't tell. And all of that irrelevant optimization has a large cost in compile times and an even larger cost in inconvenience.

With Debian, whenever I need a tool to do something, "apt-cache search" finds me list of candidates and "apt-get install" gets each of them up and running in very little time, which allows me to try them out quickly and determine which one is appropriate. If I find a good one that could use a performance boost from machine-specific optimization, "apt-get source -b" will rebuild it.

I prefer the convenience of a binary distribution that allows me to selectively rebuild the stuff that really benefits.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[FreeUser]

Gentoo seems to be nothing but cvs in a package.

That makes no sense at all. One of the recent feature requests on the mailing list was support for CVS, so that daring, bleeding-edgers could use portage to install CVS versions of their software.

To my knowledge portage does not support downloading sources from CVS at all, so your comment makes no sense to me.

As for stability, I have found Gentoo to be at least as stable as Debian Unstable/Testing, and Source Mage to be even more stable than that. And I say this as a former Debian user and fan (Debian is IMHO the best binary-based distro around), one who, having tried source-based distros, will never go back.

OTOH if you happened to try Gentoo out during the week when their server got overloaded and they had to roll out their round-robin dns mirrors prematurely because of the load, I can understand your impression (things broke for a day or two, and required hand-edits to /etc/make.conf to point to the new round-robin DNS alias before 'emerge rsync' would work again). That however was a very unusual circumstance that resulted from a very sudden spike in Gentoo's popularity for which their infrastructure was unprepared.

And that wouldn't have been instability in the system, just a broken 'upgrade' capability that required one small hand-edit to fix. You are the only person I've ever seen claim that Debian Unstable is more stable than Gentoo ... and there are a whole bunch of us ex-debian users using Gentoo these days. Indeed, this sounds a little more like Debian advocacy than anything else ... which is fine, as those of us who prefer Gentoo (and/or Source Mage) advocate our favorite distros as well. But your accusations of instability sure don't fit the usual experience most of us are having.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[CoughDropAddict]

Using packages optimized for Pentium and higher class CPUs yield up to 50% increase in speed

Prove it. It's that simple. Debian could create a k7 or i686 version of the distribution if it was shown to be compelling, but no one has ever offered anything more than vague and unsubstantiated claims of wild performance improvements.

So prove it. You could be famous. Find several real-world programs that run 50% (or even 30%) faster when targetting i686. If not, shut up and stop blowing hot air.

Re:Gentoo Baby

[anno1a]

One of the recent feature requests on the mailing list was support for CVS, so that daring, bleeding-edgers could use portage to install CVS versions of their software.
What I meant was that they the packages distributed so fast, that there's hardly any time for testing if it's stable enough. I hope that clarifies my (misunderstood) comment.

I used gentoo about a month ago (still have it on a computer I never use), and I didn't have problems with the mirrors. I only had to choose a local one, and I was up and running again.

I DID have the problem that the gentoo-XFS-kernel was broken, so I couldn't use modules. Fixed this by getting my own kernel and patching it, but it was annoying.

My reason for trying out gentoo was, initially, curiosity. I would have liked the speed boost people keeps goind on about, but I got nothing. So it takes a longer time to install packages and I gain nothing except more control of my programs, which I don't have the time to use (the control).

About the stability. Debian patch a lot of their programs to gain stability and security. I may have excagerated on the way, sorry about that, but my debian STILL is more stable.

Bottom line must be, that you can get a stable, yet a bit old distribution, which does a couple of things for you (I like the menugeneration), or you can get a do-it-yourself distribution, which is faster and has newer packages, but is a bit more unstable.

That's my experience, anyway, maybe a bit less biased this time...

Re:Gentoo Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, certainly not Mandrake or Storm Linux. Fucktard.

Re:Gentoo is great!! - yeah right !

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right. I have used gentoo for a month now. One thing I can recommend is "RTFgF" or "Read The Fuck'n gentoo Forum" before you get all exited!
If you have time (days) to get everything installed and you really like to spend time on getting your sound working and lets say u like to use USB mouse... rrrr

just read the gentoo forum and be ready to spend your weekend indoors ;).

(I rather spend my weekends at the beach with naked girls and warm surf (summer in europe rules)

1.3b_test

[Mr.Ned]

The 1.3b_test just went online for download yesterday morning. It blows 1.2 away - completely based on gcc3.1 for a sweet performance increase. 1.2 is based on gcc2.95.

From the changelog:

"The 1.3 series is meant to get Gentoo ready for total world domination with Gentoo 1.4 ;o)"

I haven't had many compile issues with it yet - this is a distro to watch out for.

Re:1.3b_test

[GrenDel Fuego]

So 1.3 is basically testing then?

I'm curious about their versioning schemes. I got started with 1.1a. 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 were not testing. 1.3 is, and 1.4 won't be.

I guess the numbering dosen't hold any pattern?

Re:1.3b_test

[fault0]

No, 1.3 is not testing. The next version of Gentoo will likely be 1.3, which has not been released yet.

What has come out is 1.3b_test. Notice the b_test yet? ;)

Re:1.3b_test

[mrscorpio]

I see where they're confused...the article talks about 1.3 preparing for 1.4 to take over the world, so it sounds like 1.3 won't ever "come out" per se.

Chris

Re:1.3b_test

[Mr.Ned]

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gen too/releases/build/

That's the download directory. Right now it has 1.0, 1.1a, 1.2, 1.3a_test, and 1.3b_test. The testing distributions are appended with _test. The main reason that there are now testing distributions is gcc 3.1 - usually, there isn't much difference between the versions and they're just updated build utilities and/or different versions of portage. GCC 3.1 will not build everything that 2.95 will - it's not quite up to "reliable" quality that won't choke up. I'm writing this from a fluxbox'd galeon on 1.3b_test that works perfectly - faster than 2.95 was.

The release numbers don't mean anything because of the portage system - you download an up-to-date copy of the portage tree when you install (if you use a stage1 tarball that's just tools for bootstrapping, as opposed to a bootstrapped stage2 or a base system stage3). For example, there was no test (that I was aware of) from 1.0 to 1.1a, 1.1a to 1.2, and a few release candidates before 1.0 to 1.0.

Re:1.3b_test

[Flagran]

If you compile Mozilla with g++ from 3.1 then you will be incompatible with plugins compiled by other copmilers... Does Gentoo 1.3 make the older compilers available?

Re:1.3b_test

[Mr.Ned]

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=5272

The thread deals with making gcc-2.95 libraries avalible even when using gcc-3.1. It's a way of slowly easing into gcc3.

Although Gentoo doesn't make the older compiler avalible, you can make it avalible :)

Shinto?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what you meant?

Shinto, possibly with another spelling, is a Japanese religion AFAIK.

As I'm right at the opposite side of the globe, it took me several minutes to figure this -- mainly because I pronounce "gentoo" very differently from "shinto".

Nevertheless, that must be funny for English-speaking dudes.

Re:Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

> I mean did you even read it???

Better yet: Did you ?

-$|{

Re:Gentoo is great!! - Please Mod UP

[xsbellx]

... ever worked on non-i386? that's when you start appreciating a transparent build process.

Quite right. Thankfully, the Linux/Unix world is not limited x86!

Re:Gentoo rocks! (ummm)...

[xtremex]

Well, I'm a FreeBSD user, and the ports system lives by that method. portupgrade -raP recompiles every updated port on your system. True, recompiling mAY be slower, but with a cronjob it's done automatically. Stripped binaries and tuned to my exact specifications is a dream

Re:Gentoo Penguins are dying!

[MatthewDunbar]

I don't think, then, that you understand what a troll is. The post was informative, not inflammatory...

Please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider a job as a professional reviewer.

I read Linux sites *a lot* everyday and yours is one of the best answers in the last times. Don't know if you can continuously come up with things like this... if so, someone should really hire you.

Congrats and thanks for the tips!

PS: Change your nick, dude, it's lame! :^P

Important note!

[42forty-two42]

If you already have gentoo installed, there's no need to reinstall. Just do (as root) emerge rsync; emerge --update world Then you'll be on the cutting edge(again)

Re:Important note!

[42forty-two42]

It upgrades every package to the latest version, including portage, etc.

Re:Important note!

[42forty-two42]

It's a source-based distro. The version numbers mainly reflect the installer :\

to each their own

[Anonymous Coward]

like flavors in an icecream store, this will not appeal to everyone. However, the detractors (while failing to understand personal choice and freedom to manifest it) will also fail to understand that their favorite distro has many of the same problems. The entertaining aspect is listening/reading people bitch about things while praising another, and knowing that simple reasoning skills would let even chimpanzees understand that there is no mutual exclusivity between what they claim is bad and what they praise as good. Red is Bad! I love my new red ball!

Still, many are wondering if Debian will ever be able to release a 'stable' (as classified by them officially) 2.4 Kernel and all the things that depend on it.

Re:to each their own

[daveman_1]

mutual exclusivity? I know you didn't just tell someone they are dumber than a chimpanzee and then use the phrase 'mutual exclusivity'. sheesh!

Re:to each their own

[Anonymous Coward]

> Still, many are wondering if Debian will ever be able to release a 'stable' (as classified by them officially) 2.4 Kernel and all the things that depend on it.

Still, many who actually use Debian are tired of pointing out that you can install a 2.4.18 kernel, today, via apt-get. Sources, too, if you're interested. The fact that 2.4.x isn't the ""official"" kernel is next-to-meaningless; it's there for the using.

Network install

[42forty-two42]

Instrustions for network install of gentoo.

Re:A demonstration of how money corrupts the syste

[Mark Bainter]

Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD

Odd. I just installed on a box here a few days ago on a system that can't boot from a CD. It's only a 500mhz pentium machine. I just booted using grub and tftp and mounted the cd and went from there. Took me a couple days to build everything but it works great.

Re:A demonstration of how money corrupts the syste

[Anonymous Coward]

Good grief. Sorry about the title distraction. Mozilla must've grabbed that title from a previous post and filled it in.

10 top distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need to list them here. Go to distrowatch and have a look! There is the top 10 list on the right side of that page.

Re:10 top distributions

[Strog]

That page keeps coming up as the answer on how popular Gentoo is. That is just based on page hits on distrowatch's website. The current count is 180 and that really doesn't prove much to me. My infant son's website has more page views but that doesn't mean Gabriel is more popular than Gentoo.

Gentoo looks like it has promise. It needs to watch out for the pitfalls Mandrake fell into for a while. Mandrake was bleeding edge for the longest time and gathered a reputation for being a little less than stable. They finally started figuring ou the difference between bleeding edge and cutting edge around the 7.1-7.2 release.

Gentoo looks good to me from what I can tell so far but whether or not it is the #6 distro is going to need a little more checking on.

Re:10 top distributions

[GrenDel Fuego]

That's 180 hits per day, not total.

Re:10 top distributions

[Strog]

That definitely is better. :)

As often as it is mentioned on /., I'm surprised more people aren't clicking the link just to see what it is about. I still think that distrowatch really can't determine how popular a distro is outside of their scope. I'm not really saying Gentoo isn't popular or doing well. I'm just saying one website's rating doesn't prove much in the overall scheme.

Ignore my last comment...

[MatthewDunbar]

That's what I get for reading with my filter on...

Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[Ivan Raikov]

I've been using RPM-based distributions for a long time, and while I like having the ability to build everything from source, I miss a couple of features that RPM has:

• Ability to check what package a certain file is in (like `rpm -q -f file').
• Ability to list all installed packages (well, you can do that with portage and grep, I guess).

Oh, yeah, I also couldn't get KDE to compile with `-O3 -mcpu=i686' on a fairly new Dell Xeon machine. I'd get all sorts of random errors like 'Illegal instruction', so I had to build all KDE packages with "-mcpu=i486", then I tried i686 again and the kdebase package compiled successfully this time! The mailing lists just advise to play with the compile options in order to get KDE working. Weird.

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[Anonymous Coward]

emerge gentoolkit
qpkg -f file
qpkg -I

^ That does what you wanted.

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[cjpez]

If you "emerge gentoolkit" it'll give you a utility "qpkg" which will at least give you a list of all installed packages. It probably does other things, too, but I haven't played around with it much. I think that should probably be part of the default install, but whatever . . .

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[byronius]

As for listing all packages and showing files installed by each one, gentoo does provide some nice tools.

emerge gentoolkit

List all packages installed:
qpkg

List files installed by a ceratain package:
qpkg -l

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[zojas]

have you tried:
-march=i686 -O3 -pipe
that's the standard set of flags. it will use the i686 instruction set in such a way that the binary will only run on an i686. the -mcpu=i686 will result in a binary that will still run on an i386.

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[GrenDel Fuego]

Try epm. It works just like rpm.

gboyce@necronomicon gboyce $ epm -q evolution
evolution-1.0.7

gboyce@necronomicon gboyce $ epm -ql evolution
/usr/share/man/man1/evolution.1.gz
/us r/ share/gnome/apps/Applications/evolution.desktop
/ u sr/share/gnome/help/cal/C
/usr/share/gnome/help/e v olution/C/index.html
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolut i on/C/stylesheet-images/caution.gif
/usr/share/gno m e/help/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/home.gif
/us r / hare/gnome/help/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/impo rtant.gif
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolution/C/style s heet-images/next.gif
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolut i on/C/stylesheet-images/note.gif
/usr/share/gnome/ h elp/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/prev.gif
/usr/s h are/gnome/help/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/tip.g if
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolution/C/stylesheet-i m ages/toc-blank.gif
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolutio n / /stylesheet-images/toc-minus.gif
/usr/share/gnome / help/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/toc-plus.gif
/ u sr/share/gnome/help/evolution/C/stylesheet-images/ up.gif
/usr/share/gnome/help/evolution/C/styleshe e t-images/warning.gif
<snip>

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[richajoh]

You need to emerge gentoolkit. This will add a utility called 'qpkg'.

qpkg will list all installed packages, same as 'rpm -qa'.

qpkg -f /usr/bin/cdrecord will tell you what package cdrecord belongs too. Same as 'rpm -qf'.

Not sure about your KDE errors, I have mine set to i686 on a Pentium 4 1.7GHz and didn't run into any problems.

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[Ivan Raikov]

have you tried: -march=i686 -O3 -pipe

My standard compilation flags were "-mcpu=i686 -O3 -pipe". I guess I feel too lazy to try march now that KDE is working.

Re:Two Things I don't like about Portage...

[Anonymous Coward]

of course, if you just want a list of installed packages, /usr/lib/portage/bin/pkglist is much faster..

X configuration

[42forty-two42]

Make sure you turn on the glx module - it's near the top. XF86Config dosen't turn it on automatically.

Re:X configuration

[iamplasma]

Yes, but that's because it's the Nvidia Open GL extentions module. Of course it won't be turned on, since you have to install the Nvidia closed-source drivers first. By default I would guess it is designed to expect the Mesa drivers.
So while you are right, it's not a broken XF86Config causing it, and indeed glx shouldn't be turned on automatically, and is only relevant at all if you have an Nvidia card.

Re:X configuration

[42forty-two42]

How do I install mesa, then?

Re:X configuration

[iamplasma]

It's normally installed by default by most distros.

They're rather poor open gl libraries, I'm not sure if they're software only or what, but they seem slow as hell for me. (but I am using an nvidia card, so perhaps it's just nvidia that's not properly supported, on the grounds they have their own drivers)

Re:X configuration

[42forty-two42]

No, how do I intall it in Gentoo?

Re:X configuration

[iamplasma]

No freaking idea, I'm still using Mandrake, and because of my stupid Australian ISP my usage limits on the net won't allow me to ever go up to Gentoo, despite my great desire to do so.

Have you considered looking around on the Gentoo site for help? In all likelyhood it's something they have added to portage.

Be carefull

[swagr]

I've been a Gentoo user for 7 months now, and I do like the "cutting edge" aspect of it, but this "up to dateness" comes at a cost. Because the distro is actually one that you build with the tools that Gentoo provides, it's possible that no one is using it with the same versions of x, y and z that you have.

This makes stability a huge issue, and on several occasions I've had to rebuild programs because they got borked by an update of something else. Also, I've had emerge f#*k my system so badly that no one on the forums could help me, and I required a "from scratch" install.

I've been using Linux (Slackware, Debian, SuSE, etc..) for 5 or 6 years in an academic and work environment, and at this point I often feel Gentoo is more trouble than it's worth.

Having said that, Gentoo is the distro I'm running right now...

JUST BE CAREFULL.

Re:Be carefull

[Anonymous Coward]

sure its no "lazy"-distro .. i` am too sick of playing with distros
on my laptop .. just running Mandrake , cuz i need to work .. less play .. Gentoo may be really intreresting from 3.0 .. it will surly rock .. hope it lasts till then ..

Testing is the key, not software age

[FreeUser]

While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes.

One should always do significant testing before rolling something out for production use. This is true whether or not the software in question is "cutting edge."

That having been said, there can be real advantages to using up-to-date software in a production environment. You may need the new features (e.g. X support of a new touchscreen the tablets you want to deploy require) or bugfixes (KDE 3.0.1 v. KDE 2.2.1 is a good example here), so cutting edge software, while it should be treated with caution, can be very beneficial.

The key is rigorous testing prior to deployment, so while this means the software your using will likely be at least a month or two old, it can still be pretty cutting edge if that is what is required, and it holds up in testing. In our case, X 4.2 was deployed very quickly (within 6 weeks of its release), as was KDE 3.x, while other "cutting edge" stuff, like gcc 3.x, probably won't be deployed for another 6 months because it didn't hold up in testing.

You are right, though, Gentoo (and Source Mage, for those who like trying out a pallate of different source based distros) can lead one into temptation. I've installed and backed out more than one bleeding edge app on my home machine for just this reason ... but again, I was able to back out stuff quite easilly, and the benefits of having current stuff that does work makes this added burden very worthwhile IMHO.

At the other extreme, Debian's 2-year-old plus 'stable' distro isn't the answer. With the speed with which free software evolves, running 2 year-old free software is analogous to running 10-year old proprietary software ... something that in many cases simply isn't acceptable (though in some cases it can be ... I do have an old GNU/Linux 2.0.x box that hasn't been upgraded in years, because it is behind a much more current firewall and does its one simple task just fine). Gentoo (and Source Mage, to be fair) solves this problem by giving you pretty good stability while allowing you to run very up-to-date software.

What about Sources on a CD or HD?

[nurb432]

Getting pristine sources from the net everytime you build is nice, unless you are trapped on a 56k line, or off-line totally.

Is there anyway to download all the pacakges locally then install from that to the off-line/slow machine?

Didnt see it in their docs... course i could be blind too.

Re:What about Sources on a CD or HD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can do an emerege --download package (at least i think that's the right syntax) *OR* you can just go download the package and copy it to the right folder in /usr/portage me thinks, but I know you can do it, go look at the docs again.

Re:What about Sources on a CD or HD?

[daveman_1]

emerge -f 'package' will download only as well.

Re:What about Sources on a CD or HD?

[nurb432]

But doenst this assume you already have a working install?

Re:Source based vs. Binary based: Possible comprom

[defile]

Pulling it out of my ass, I'm willing to bet most of the perceived speedup probably comes from custom compilation of glibc and XFree86.

Is it just me...

[Alakaboo]

...or does Gentoo sound like something I stepped in?

Re:Is it just me...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just you, failing to be up on your penguinology, and sounding like a Jackass Penguin as a result.

For a good cause

[iamplasma]

How in the world did you get modded down, especially twice? That's just wrong, and I'm willing to lay my karma on the line for it.

Will some moderator please mod back up the above two, especially the second one, there's no possible justification for their modding down. Really, that's just wrong.

Re:For a good cause

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll!? Come on! Offtopic maybe, but troll? Who the hell is getting given these mod points?

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been over 2 months since KDE3 was released. How about having it FINALLY in Debian as well?

Hmmm, maybe it's not /ready/ to be in Debian yet? The reason why Debian enjoys its high reputation is precisely because it doesn't put packages into its archives until they're ready... and maybe this has something to do with its proven rock-solid stability and that it actually /works/.

Gentoo slow install option

[pappajazz]

One thing I liked about FreeBSD is the option for a ppp modem dialup install. This would be a neat feature for computers without broadband or for those of us that want to play with a semi-worthless option.

Gentoo does gcc 3.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been looking for a gcc3.1 based distro and last week I grabbed the gentoo 1.3a. I have 2 systems now running it (both duallies). A few headaches, esp with getting kde to run, but after fiddling with a few make flags for certain packages I got everything to run, and kde went stably for the time I ran it (my normal window manager is WindowMaker). The problems I've seen on the recent stuff has been kernel stability, but the answer to that is to NOT run xfs and to grab the vanilla 2.4.18 sources and build those (both machines are duallies). I've been able to play Urban Terror (quake3 based) with no crashes whatsoever.

After running redhat and mandrake for years now I'm happy to be back in a grass roots distro where I can easily grab new stuff and optimize the snot out of it!

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[MrHanky]

And the first official pre-release of XFree86 4.2.0 was released yesterday. A couple of unofficial package-collections done by non-maintainers have been out for a while.

Re:Gentoo rocks! (ummm)...

[fault0]

Yes, but BSD ports and portage are *far* more elegant than apt or rpm has ever been.

Definitely the best distro IMHO...

[rprata]

I've used the latest versions of Mandrake, RedHat, Debian, Slackware, and FreeBSD. I'll stick with Gentoo, as it gives me everything I want, and nothing that I don't want. I can be on the 'cutting edge' of software, and still be stable. Paired up with PartImage I can back up my system with a few clicks, update the packages with 'emerge --update world' and in the (VERY) RARE instance I have a problem, I can restore my system from a set of CDs, or another disk in my system. I'm not a newbie, but not a super-duper-l337-advanced user either, but Gentoo's allowed me to learn a ton more than the RH-based distros ever would have. And, it's friggin lightning fast on my VIA C3 900MHz system w/ 512MB RAM.

My Gentoo 1.2 Experience

[omnirealm]

I finally deleted my Windows partition. I figured that, as long as I'm messing with my partitions, I may as well ditch Mandrake 8.2 for a ``real'' distribution in the process.

I set apart all of Saturday to scrounge through my system to find and backup all my data files, and then to download and install Gentoo 1.2. So far, I have been mildly impressed. I have run into the following problems though:

I live on-campus, and my school blocks port 80 and makes everyone go through The Great Proxy Server. This does not jive well with emerge. The installation instructions, which I printed out before starting, say something about setting the HTTP_PROXY variable in the /etc/make.conf file, which I tried setting, to no avail. I then set the environment variables. That didn't work either. I looked for Lynx, or something to browse the Web with, and nothing was available (please no smart comments about telnet, thank you very much).

My school maps my network account to the hardware address of my network card, so I couldn't just plug in my laptop to get net access to get more documentation. I was about to run out to a computer lab, when I realized that the Gentoo 1.2 installation environment included iptables (I have 2 network cards in my system)! After a little bit of NAT magic, I had my laptop on-line, and I checked the FAQ, which mentioned, ``Oh, and if setting the PROXY environment variables in make.conf doesn't work, set it in wget's configuration files.'' So it uses wget. Nice to know. Setting the proxy there worked, and I was on my way!

I set the USE variable in make.conf, and then started emerge'ing. I was a little worried about how the compile settings really would be (i.e., would X, qt, and KDE be compiled with the necessary flags to enable anti-aliased fonts? It turns out that they were.) Compiling KDE took the better half of the afternoon, since it had to compile X and qt first. It worked like a charm!

So far, the only problem has been trying to emerge openoffice. The first time I tried, it complained about gcc 2.95.3 (it wanted 3.0.4). After ebuild'ing gcc 3.0.4, it started up. A couple of hours later, it bombed on something about not finding javac. There's a line in openoffice-1.0.0-r1.ebuild that reads ``COMMONDEPEND='... >=virtual/jdk-1.3.1''', but it prompted me for my java directory, and I wasn't sure what to type in there. And javac isn't on my system now, although that dependency should have prompted emerge to install it.

Well, these kinds of problems can be easily resolved by hand, but it goes to show that it can be difficult to get everything right the first time around in something like Gentoo. mozilla compiled without a hitch, and as soon as I fired it up this morning, I found this story, and thought I'd post my experience for all to enjoy. Oh... and my mozilla compiled with anti-aliased fonts, by default!

Re:My Gentoo 1.2 Experience

[dsb3]

try setting $http_proxy (lowercase) instead.

Re:My Gentoo 1.2 Experience

[BrookHarty]

...I may as well ditch Mandrake 8.2 for a ``real'' distribution in the process.

I sure hope you mean windows, Mandrake is one of the best linux distributions out there. Suse and Mandrake are the standard of ease of install and setup. I use Suse 7.3 on my sun boxes, and Mandrake on my Intel/AMD boxes. Even thou I like Gentoo, I didnt want to wait a day for build and download of gcc3.1 and kde3.0.1.

Comparing a source based distro vs a package distro isnt the same. You trade install time for compile optimizations.

I made the mistake of trying gentoo 1.3a, and having portage problems, too many compile problems, but it is a test release. On mandrake, I installed cooker rpms for both kde/gcc and they worked flawlessly.

Re:My Gentoo 1.2 Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

lol...

Penultimate?

[Redline]

Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion.

Yeah, in mine too. Penultimate means "next to the last."
Debian is the ultimate Linux distro.

RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

emerge gentoolkit
qpkg -f `which ls`
qpkg -I

Re:RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely, the security documentation is excellent. But security is a complex enough subject that just one guide alone will not meet everyone's needs

RTFM

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/gentoo-security.html

How many distros have this quality of documentation?

Gentoo Just New, Baby

[Redline]

I won't go into why, because I grow very weary of the "My Distro Rocks; Your Distro Sucks mines balls" arguements that seem to permeat the Linux community.

I think the whole Gentoo phenomenon is not the "my distro is better" arguement. It is the "my distro is newer" arguement. The same way Sawfish gets replaced with Metacity in GNOME2, or the way the KDE theme users go "ooh-ooh Liquid!, no wait - Keramic!, no - Crystal!

None is better than the other, people just like the newer one. It is not as cool to keep saying "Debian r0x0r my b0x0r!" for five years. (But it does.)

Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[watchmaker1]

My primary "desktop" at home is an IBM Thinkpad 600 with a p2/266 and 288megs of ram with a 5gig drive.

I can't give you hard benchmark figures, but I can give you personal experience. Redhat 7.2 in X on the machine was very slow. Switching VC's lagged, compiling the kernel in a Konsole would make the cursor lag around the screen and trying to load too many things really bogged the system down.

But, with a Stage1 Gentoo 1.1a install (Stage 1 compiles everything, Stage 2 and three use increasingly larger lists of precompiled binaries.) with CCFLAGS and CCXFLAGS set to '-O3 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4' in make.conf, the system is decidedly faster in KDE3. I run XChat without gnome, Konsole, Konqueror, and the KDE desktop all compiled locally with the above optimizations. It's incredibly responsive and very very usable.

Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff. The only snag there is that my laptop was done with XFS as it's sole filesystem, and pre-empt and XFS don't play well, at all.

Is it perfect? No. OpenOffice takes forever to load. Mozilla takes less time but it's still a while, but it runs very well once it's going. (This is binary OO and Moz, not compiled locally.)

The system just plain doesnt have the balls to run something like CrossoverPlugin with QT5, and compiling a kernel still bogs the system down a bit, but not as much as with redhat. It's still a very usable machine.

And, the biggie, "emerge KDE" took 12 hours. X took a bit less than that. A recent "emerge --update world" which updates every package on the system that's been updated on the main rsync/cvs tree took 24 hours. I have other machines that I use in the interim, so it's not a huge problem for me.

Let me agree with one thing alot of Gentoo fans here have said. This is not a dist for everyone. It's not something I'd use for my parents, for example. But it's not a hardcore experts only dist either.

Many here have made a big deal about "I don't want to have to compile everything." The thing is, you don't compile a thing. You never type make. Want XChat? type "emerge xchat" and portage will go out to the fast repository at ibiblio and download the tar.bz2, compile and install. You do nothing but the one command.

Want ImageMagick? type "emerge ImageMagick" and it'll do the same. Whoops, it wants libjpeg and libpng which you don't have installed? It'll go grab those too and install them first. You've typed exactly one command.

Sure, it takes longer to compile something than it does to install it from a binary rpm. That's a fact of life. But is it worth taking that time for binaries that run 5-10% faster because of the local optimizations? It is for me. I'm currently laying plans for a new desktop that's a dual AthlonMP 2100, with a make.conf flag to make with -j3 it'll compile pretty damn fast. And when the next Gentoo is released with gcc3, there will be athlon optimizations which will make the apps just that much faster.

I've turned several friends of mine on to Gentoo. Hardcore dist bigots who have all been incredibly impressed. I can't say enough nice things about it.

Every revision of redhat frustrated me more and more from the severe bloat. I had all but given up on Linux for OpenBSD. Gentoo has been impressive enough to pull me back from that brink. I've got a dual processor machine on the way (And OpenBSD has no SMP) and Gentoo got the nod. (Which, of course, the trolls will love, since, you know, BSD is dead)

Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[Thomas A. Anderson]

Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff. The only snag there is that my laptop was done with XFS as it's sole filesystem, and pre-empt and XFS don't play well, at all.

This comes as a surprise to me as the latest gentoo install I did uses both the pre-empta and xfs. It's only been 4 days, but no problem so far (in fact, I'm *very* happy with my decision to switch from ext3 to xfs). Where does this info about pre-empt and xfs come from?

Thanks!

Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[watchmaker1]

Do a dmesg.

If it's full of lines such as...

foo ended with preempt_count=7

Then what's happening is that XFS code is preventing the system from preempting. The system will still work, it just won't be preempting, and you'll be getting loads of errors in dmesg.

You'll end up getting one of the above lines in dmesg for every single process that runs on the system.

Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[ghum]

Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff.

watchmaker1, could you please give some more words about the way kernel patches are handled? It sounds to promising.

This sounds as if Gentoos portage-system handles patches automagically. Could that be true?

Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[watchmaker1]

It can, if you want. Since the whole theory behind Gentoo is "Compile everything locally and optimize as much as possible" It makes sense to have a way to put in the kernel patches that all the cool kids are playing with.

By Default, the kernel sources that you emerge are stock. But there is a package available called "gentoo-sources" which contains all sorts of fun stuff, like the preempt patch, O(1), net enhancements, etc.

So, typing "emerge gentoo-sources" will go get that package and apply it to your kernel source tree.

Gentoo does NOT automatically compile the kernel for you, there's no way it could. You still have to make menuconfig, make dep, etc. and put the resulting bzImage in place.

But, just as I can get the latest version of, say, lynx by typing one command, I can get the latest kernel sources with another, and patch them with all the fun stuff with another.

Re:Gentoo extends the live of slow hardware.

[OvErRiDeX]

just to let you guys know, this does not happen with the jp kernel tree from http://infolinux.de - i'm using XFS and preempt/rmap/1(O)/grsec and get none of those messages in dmesg or anything -Dan

Gentoo stole my name!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi I am Manuel Portage. I am the sue against Gentoo enterprizes cuz they stole my fooking name. I have had portage name since 200 years since my familiy came from Spanish to Flordia. If the gentoo fookers will want to fuq with me i will fuc wit them MOTHERfukkers.

FUQ DANIEL FUKKING ROBBINZ FOR FUQING STEELING MY FUQING NAME MOTHERFUCCER

Re:Source based vs. Binary based: Possible comprom

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, it's not the custom compliation that helps, it is the optimization.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we are talking about Sid. That is, Debian Unstable. Why the fuck does it have to wait for some god damn Potato freeze? This is all the politics and red tape that surrounds the Debian project.

Anyways, Gentoo let me see the light. Debian actually /works/, but then again, so does Gentoo.

Everyone Loves Gentoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I too have tried my hand at Gentoo and came away with a couple of impressions on it.

1. It's a great idea. The next evolutionary step in OS development and distribution.
2. It's an immature structure in it's handling of the Tree and needs to make some real work on that one.

What I mean by item two is this:

I like the idea of using something like this. But not when a trivial install/update causes a broken library system ... and now I'm stuck. Specifically I was installing qmail and it barfed on a libc3.0 requirement that GenToo can't provide me, even with updates to the tree structure.

The one thing that Gentoo could really use, and it would come at a price is something similar to the Debian Development cycle of having unstable, testing, stable. This would allow me to tune the balance between Cutting Edge and Cutting Throat technology.

If Gentoo could put something like this into place, then they would have a system that is really capable of going someplace and it can serve the variety of philosophies between the stability requirements and the cool software requirements.

After the major problems I ran into on gentoo, I have since dropped it for the time being and will reconsider its use once this development cycle tree is modified to provide a better assurance of meeting the basic requirement of it just works. Until they [gentoo] is able to accomplish this goal, they will always be a distribution for playing with and never attain any level of serious consideration as a distribution. People simply cannot afford to have something suddenly break on them when they need it most.

The notion of providing a level of product performance equal to it just works must be made a requirement upon the developing community of any distribution that hopes to acheive any level of useage. The risk of upgrading something only to be met with countless hours of fiddling and tweaking trying to get a system to work again is not going to be suitable for anyone who is using Linux seriously. The dependency failures were enough for me to shelf the PC and resort to my Debian installation as the core because it just works. Forget that need of the user, and you will never be invited to the play with the Big Dogs.

Re:Everyone Loves Gentoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run Gentoo for over a year (when it was still small), and I've never experience a big breakage as you say. Before that, For several months I used Debian/Woody upon the suggestion of my roommate that "Debian r0XoRz j00R boX0Rz!!11!". Every few weeks, important packages like pam and XFree86 were broken.

One time, after apt-get update; apt-get upgrade'ing, I noticed that my /usr/local/bin had been zapped and symlinked to /usr/bin. Needless to say, I was extremely angry and certain Debian developers as my custom built builds of Mozilla and OpenOffice were gone. I even submitted bug reports with the severity being "critical". but the offending base packages took nearly a month to fix. Meanwhile, I tried several distros, including Progeny, Sorcersor(sp) Linux, before stumbling up Gentoo.

So, all in all, I think that Gentoo is a much better distro than Debian. If you are looking for another not-so-cutting-edge distro, I would recommend slackware. Debian really needs to get it's act together in order to play with the big boys.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[spunkykuma]

KDE3 is already available for Debian as contributed packages, reason being that they aren't in Debian officially because the maintainer has had more important things in his way than to maintain the packages DebianPlanet had the article over a month ago.
Stability is the main key for Debian, for Gentoo it seems cutting edge whether stable or not is the key, I've used Gento 1.1a for a week and it became very easy for me and somewhat different. It is a nice distro, but too time consuming for someone like me when it comes to maintaining packages via emerge (downloading, compiling, etc.), Debian is still my way with apt-get which saves alot of time and when I want to do something from src, I apt-get source package.

No, they shouldn't

[eean]

There is a reason that source based Linux distributions havn't gained popularity until recently, and that is now the computers are getting fast enough to compile a complete Desktop computer. Moore's law is faster then the growth of the amount of code to be compiled, so it was bound to happen eventually.

I just shake my heads when I hear people using some 5, 8 year old computers with Gentoo. There are plenty of good distributions for those kinds of computers (like Debian, which steadfastly refuses to compile for any x86 other then 386. They say the speed benefit is not big enough, which may be the case.)

Did Linus develop Linux to work for computers that were several years old? No, you either had a 386 or you were screwed.

Re:No, they shouldn't

[SK-null]

like Debian, which steadfastly refuses to compile for any x86 other then 386. They say the speed benefit is not big enough, which may be the case.

Debian provides a few optimized packages (libc and kernel) but until they start to use GCC 3.x as the official compiler, the speed gain isn't really worth the trouble.
Also, the package system doesn't support the coexistence of multiple architecture revisions _yet_ -- and there isn't much point in having stuff like "ls" optimized is there?.
But, hopefully, it shouldn't take long before we see it.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Lunar Linux

[beernutz]

For anyone that likes the GenToo way of doing things, i would recomend you check out
Lunar Linux
Lunar linux is the old sourcerer linux that has been talked about and praised a LOT in the past on /. It DOES have the ability to do recursive builds, and seems to be QUITE stable and fast.

Re:Lunar Linux

[kylegordon]

The old Sorcerer Linux is now actually Sourcemage Linux

Re:Lunar Linux

[beernutz]

I stand corrected. Thank you for the link!

Re:Lunar Linux

[kylegordon]

No worries. They're both fantastic distributions though! :-)

Gentoo really that cutting edge?

[dwatts]

By the screenshots of i and most importantly the comments here on ./ Gentoo looks to me kick ass, so I figure hey lets download it and play around with it. But from what I found its not freewear, its Linux based on profit, isnt that in a way agiant the the standards Linus, et at, establised. I really cant belive you people would really buy this and support thier hungry pockets and boosted egos

Re:Gentoo really that cutting edge?

[reverius]

I'm sorry, but you're completely mistaken. Not only is it freeware, but they make it quite easy to download and use for free.

Check out Gentoo's web site or the x86 Installation Instructions, which tell you where to download ISO images and how to install them. :)

Re:Gentoo really that cutting edge?

[GutBomb]

gentoo is free. and since when is profitting off of open source software against the rules? linus doesn't live in a college dorm room anymore, he profits off of it every day. (albeit indirectly) so redhat is against the rules? or mandrake? they sell it.

Re:Gentoo really that cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

where did u even get the idea that it is "linux for profit"?? gentoo dosent even have a version u can buy like many distros do. the only way to pay for it is to order a third party cd, which usually covers the cost of the cd, and not much more. and is in no way endorsed by gentoo

Re:Gentoo really that cutting edge?

[Anonymous Coward]

> and since when is profitting off of open source software against the rules?

So some of the folks around here, money doesn't grow on trees - it floats in cesspools. Any attempt to get more money, especially from their pure open source softeware, splashes filth on the One True Way.

developer using warez??

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gen too/images/shots/desktop-mjc.html.

Live Install? Easy!!

[fxncnu]

Really ;-) I live installed Gentoo from Mandrake 8.1, as follows: (1) I got the stage3 file, unzipped it into another partation (2) I "chroot"ed into the partation, compiled a kernel ON THAT PARTATION, w/ext3 & my network card support (3) I booted ONTO that partation, and did the standard "emerge" stuff .. piece of cake. (4) Later, I removed my old linux and copied the respective parts of gentoo (/usr /var) into the previous partations. It's much easier that it seems :-)

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[mrscorpio]

Is it such a hard concept to grasp that some of us Linux zealots are NOT programmers?

Chris

Gentoo for Sparc: Needs work!

[doorbot.com]

I decided to do an install of Gentoo 1.1 on my Ultra 30 in order to replace my Debian install (which I was testing and hadn't actually got around to using just yet).

Compiling stage 2 took hours. Granted, the UltraSparc was only at 300 Mhz. But you better have a lot of time to do your compiles. Anyways, I built GCC 2.95 but I'm guessing it was built as a 32-bit binary. I didn't want to spend the time compiling everything else as 32-bit considering how long stage 2 took, especially when I got some sort of OpenSSL error.

So I decided to re-install, this time choosing to compile GCC 3.1 first. Again, this took hours but did succeed. So I fired off the bootstrap script and GCC 3.1 tried to compile again. Unfortunately, this failed, and I was again left with a non-working Gentoo install.

I thought I'd give Gentoo another try and decided to cheat using the Stage 3 tarball. I was able to compile the kernel with egcs64 and was able to boot. However, I ended up having some sort of problem with my keyboard map. At that point, I'd had enough and decided to wipe it clean and reinstall Debian unstable.

Just a few days ago I wiped the system clean once again and did a bit of the install of SuSE 7.3 and I was definitely impressed by the installer. It was the first time I'd used SuSE, so it made a good impression.

Next I think I'll try Splack.

Gentoo definitely looks like a cool distro, but it needs a bit more polish on Sparc before it will see widespread use. I'm definitely looking forward to it's next revision. However, I was really hoping to do some testing of the latest open source goodness on UltraSparc... kernel 2.5, XFree 4.2 and Gnome 2/KDE 3.

I guess I'll have to wait a few months...

Discord evident among developers...

[Oswald]

I wouldn't bet a lot on Gentoo's future. A quick look at the developers list shows that, while no few than three people have overlapping responsibility for foo, not a soul is looking out for bar. This is symptomatic of internal strife. Look for the rifts to widen over time, with dire consequences.

Re:Discord evident among developers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Make that four developers working on foo.

I have never had problems with death

[Anonymous Coward]

therefore I will never die!

Really now... when people write these fanboy posts it really only makes them look like ignorant fools. While it does add your own experience to the statistical pool, it is not more or less relevant or valid than a post about it NOT working. Also, you must understand the nature of reality. In most systems like these, they are only as strong as their weakest link. So when someone says that they have had problems, and especially if they specify what exactly they were and give suggestions (although the original poster was not necessarily 'specific') then it only hurts the situation (and makes you a moronic twit) to belittle or contradict them. Fine you have had no problems... perhaps you would share the WHY's of your solution? Or is it that you just happened to have the 'correct' HW/SW configuration?

Another thing is that Debian's mistakes are being made with Gentoo. Denial will not help that. Ego will not help that. Logical acceptance of problems with a determined approach at fixing them will help.

Missing the point!

[Thomas A. Anderson]

This isn't really news because the only change between Gentoo 1.1a and 1.2 is that the make.conf file points to the round-robin dns for downloads of the portage in 1.2. *Any* version of gentoo has support for kde 3 because of the ability to "emerge -u kde" when kde3 is released (regardless of what version of gentoo you're using) and *any* version of gentoo can use the round-robin dns by changing just one line in the make.conf file.

It's a very different way of looking at things compared to other distros which use binaries (which means that new releases add new features).

However, in spite of this, Gentoo 1.3 *will* be worth announcing because it will mark the moment when one can easly build a system using gcc3.1 exclusivly (1.3 is in testing now and works for many people).

nah not for me

[rocket97]

I would rather install Linux.

Gentoo and the Wave/Particle Duality of Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, perhaps it is so, but the gloriousness of Gentoo made me realize that our universe is quite very perfect. But then I beckoned to see the imperfections of several Linux distrobuttions, such as Debian.

Having an unnatural curiousity since childhood, I proceeded to read the works of Albert P. Einstein.

The following are notes from my research.

Particles are discrete, their energy is concentrated into what appears to be a finite space, which has definite boundaries and its contents we consider to be homogenous (the same at any point within the particle)

Particles exist at a specific location. If they are shown on 3D graph, they have x, y, and z coordinates. They can never exist in more than one place at once, and to travel to a different place in space, a particle must move to it under the laws of kinematics, acceleration, velocity and so forth.

Interactions between particles have been studied for many centuries, and a few simple laws underpin how particles behave in collisions and interactions.

The most primary of these are the conservation of energy and momentum which allow us to simplify calculations between particle interactions on scales of magnitude which vary between planets and quarks.

Waves unlike particles cannot be considered a finite entity. Their energy cannot be considered to exist in a single place since a wave by definition varies in both displacement and in time.

For example, a sound wave is a deformation in air pressure, and water waves a deformation of the water surface.

In an area of space, unlike a particle, a wave can propagate until it exists in all locations and at all times, mathematically we can use a pure sine wave as an example, which has no beginning or end, but repeats every 2. However, like particles, we can analyse a part or phase of the wave and obtain a value for its velocity within this area.

The experiments of the nineteenth century have caused the classical definitions of particles and waves to be blurred. We can no longer assume that waves behave consistently with the theories given in the previous section and are sometimes better applied to those of particles given in the first section.

The first phenomena that caused alarm to the standard wave theory was that of thermal radiation. By analysing the radiant intensity of electro-magnetic radiation across the whole spectrum at various given temperatures two things are noticed.

The total radiant intensity across the whole spectrum is a function of T to the fourth power. This is the area under each temperature curve.

A wavelength max corresponding to a maximum radiant intensity was observed for each given temperature( This was done by turning the wavelength into a function of angle by using a prism) As the temperature of the body increases the wavelength of maximum intensity decreases. It can be shown that max multiplied by T is a constant equal to 2.898E-3 m K.

So clearly, intensity of Electromagnetic waves depend on temperature. The problem of this experiment is that we have a complex situation where many other factors influence the result. The experiment can be simplified by using a blackbody as the source of radiation. A blackbody is a chamber whereby no incident electromagnetic radiation is reflected. To humans at ordinary temperatures this appears a dull black. From this experiment we know that:-

X-Compile!

[Steveftoth]

I like the idea of comiling everything for my machine, but why can't they just compile it for my proc? I mean is there really a larger difference between my 1400+XP Athlon and your 1200+ XP Athlon? Will GCC generate code that is better for my machine if I run it on mine as opposed to someone else doing it for me? I don't really think so. If another distro started to release builds for Athlons, P4s, P3s, etc. I think that would be a much better use of time and enegry (and I would actually run it). As opposed to having to install the SRPM (or tar.gz) and compile for your arch and system.
Though that is what makes linux fun sometimes. :)

Cross-compiling Gentoo...

[dadragon]

I have an iBook and a firewire drive as well as a Celery 667. The goal is to get linux booting from the firewire drive on the iBook, so I can use Linux at home but still have all my iBook's hard drive for MacOS X while not at home. Currently I have MacOS X and Yellow Dog on the internal disk, and MacOS 9 on the firewire disk.

What I'd like is a method to cross build Gentoo on the PC for the iBook, as I like to actually use my iBook. I think it would be neat to be able to type something like "ebuild --root=/mnt/ppclinux --platform=ppc stage3" and have it build stage3 from scratch on the PC for the PPC.

The alternative is to build a custom kernel from within YellowDog which has built in (non-module) support for firewire, and initialize the installation from there starting at stage1 on the firewire disk. That could work too.

Re:Cross-compiling Gentoo...

[nusuth]

Did you try just setting PPC options in make.conf and emerging system from stage 2?

MUCH FASTER !

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything runs definitely a lot faster on Gentoo, compared to RedHat. I have two machines, one dual Athlon 1.8, one PIII. The PIII is triple boot Win98 (games for the kids), RedHat 7.2 and Gentoo. The Athlon is dual boot RedHat 7.3 and Gentoo.

And yes, Gentoo runs A LOT faster on both machines compared to RedHat. Switching to RH on the dual Athlon gives me the impression that I lost a CPU, switching to Gentoo on the PIII gives me the impression a just bought a brand new machine, as simple as that ...

linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another not-as-good-as-BSD *linux copycat wnabe Unix(tm). Just run FreeBSD and say no to copycat linux.

Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[SK-null]

KDE3 won't go into Sid until the XFree86 maintainer has XF86 4.2 up and running in all 11 archs.

Crank ON!

[vandan]

I've been using Gentoo for 3 months now (and Slackware for 3 years before that). I am VERY satisfied with Gentoo. It is very predictable, very easy to configure, and incredibly fast (curtousy of the ease of recompiling pretty much everything). Of course I will be 'emerge rsync'ing now, but I'm REALLY waiting for Gentoo 2.0 where they will move to gcc-3.1 (or maybe 3.2) as the default compiler. I have tested Gentoo 1.1a with gcc-3.1 and 99% of stuff compiled, but it was the 1% that didn't that ended up screwing things up. But anyway Gentoo is a great distro which stays very up-to-date and is maturing quite nicely.
Long live the compiler!

compiling software.

[rapidweather]

I tried it once or twice, and it didn't work, so I shy away from anything that has to be compiled. I guess that I am spoiled from installing Opera tarballs. They always work.

Re:compiling software.

[Tony Hoyle]

On an Athlon 1800 it took over 24 hours to compile a working system w/kde+gnome. It's a nice distro but I don't have that amount of time to waste - add another 8 hours to hand configure the system. Several of the compiled packages didn't work (Pan wouldn't start, kde kept falling over) and mozilla wouldn't even compile.

The dependencies are also a bit screwy - vim is dependent on XFree86?

I'll probably go back to it in 6 months or so when it's matured as a distro, but it's a bit beta at the moment. If the debian internal politics get much worse it might even be sooner...

Re:compiling software.

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't tried Gentoo, but I use LFS on an Athlon 1.1, Something's seriously wrong if it takes over 24hrs to get that far.

With automated builds (using custom scripts), it takes me maybe two hours to get the basic LFS system, another hour or so for X, a few more hours to get all the stuff that Gnome (1.4) needs, another hour or two for Mozilla... I would expect to start a build before going leaving for work, and have every single package on my disk installed by the time I got home.

Re:compiling software.

[Anonymous Coward]

The dependencies are also a bit screwy - vim is dependent on XFree86?

That dependency is the result of an incorrect setting for a USE variable. If you want vim built without X (for gvim), then simply remove X from your build parameters and it will happily compile without support for X.

Penultimate and ultimate.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Gentoo is the penultimate Linux distro in my opinion.

>Okay, I'll bite. If Gentoo is the penultimate distro, what's the ultimate distro?

I guess that the only further step in that direction is Linux From Scratch? I guess that must be the ultimate.

In case the fellow who started this thread is wondering, penultimate means ``the one before the ultimate'', or next to last. Ultimate means the very last (and thus, in vulgar speach, the best).

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[account_deleted]

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Re:I downloaded Debian two days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

For me it's hard to grasp that some of
you Linux zealots are stupid morons!

ROFL.

[blackula]

That made me chuckle.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What impact will GCC3 have?

[billstewart]

What changes will GCC3 make on the kernel? Is there something radically new going on, or is is just a bit better tuned and debugged?

Many reasons for slow machines.

[billstewart]

There are lots of reasons to have a slow machine. If you're a kid, maybe you've only got a hand-me-down machine and your parents are using the good machine for their applications (good application for removable disks.) If you're a parent, maybe you can't afford it because you've got kids, or maybe you've only got a hand-me-down machine because the kids are using the good machine for GameZ, while that old machine can do Linux just fine :-)

Or maybe you're trying to build a special-purpose machine, like something small and portable, or trying to reuse an old machine as a firewall or print server, or it's a laptop that didn't have a CDROM when you acquired it and isn't made any more.

I've got a labful of antiques at work, because procuring modern machines requires a Budget, while procuring leftover fully-depreciated boxes that the Centralized MIS Bureaucracy doesn't want any more gives me machines that are usually just fine for pinging and tracerouting to -- in a router training application, you need lots of endpoints that don't need to be very bright. Antique laptops are especially nice for this, because they don't take much space in a rack.