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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 :)"
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What exactly is cutting edge about this distribution? What does this have that no other distribution has, that is light-years ahead?
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...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
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.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
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
libertarianswag.com
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 ;)
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.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Doesn't naming a Linux distro after a religion violate some sort of public license?
(it could be that I really am that stupid)
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.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
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.
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.
"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?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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
Given that the penguin has a latin name, should the full name of this distro be:
Connochaetes taurinus/Pygoscelis papua Linus ?
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.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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.
hmmm the article said I love Emerge ?
I tried Emerging love but nothing happend.
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.. /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0-gcc3 /etc/ma ke.profile
# ln -sf
Using profiles, you can also make company-specific distros and other specialized versions of Gentoo...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The article doesn't mention Gentoo/Linux is now available also on Sparc, PPC and a MIPS port is also underway.
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.
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: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
-brain
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.
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.
;o)"
From the changelog:
"The 1.3 series is meant to get Gentoo ready for total world domination with Gentoo 1.4
I haven't had many compile issues with it yet - this is a distro to watch out for.
"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
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)
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.
Bush Lies Watch
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.
-... ---
While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes.
... 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.
... 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.
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
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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!
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
> 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.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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!