Gentoo Linux Reloaded

nitro322 writes "Daniel Robbins, the leading developer for Gentoo Linux, has written an excellent O'Reilly Network article covering many of the various features of Gentoo, what's coming in version 1.4 (due out SOON), and why you should give it a try. If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"

Comments

All these weird names

[Anonymous Coward]

What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?

Re:All these weird names

[thelexx]

Gentoo is better than Pygoscelis papua, the scientific name for the species of penguin that it is.

And yes I finally had to look it up. Before, I thought it was some lame reference to a planet in Star Wars or something. (What's with Lucas and the 'oo' words anyway? They sound stoopid!)

Re:All these weird names

[Subcarrier]

What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?

Cunning Linux users prefer Debian or SUSE.

Re:All these weird names

[mickwd]

Yes, but no-one would by a Linux distribution if it kept going down.

Re:All these weird names

[Monkelectric]

Hey, I named Gentoo, (seriously). I got invovled with the project when it was called Enoch because I was having some trouble compiling GTK because we'd stumbled onto some weird gcc bug (IIRC). I ended up working on some compiler tools and writing packages ...

Anyways, one day drobbins decided to change the name to something less secular, and so we sat around thinking up names ... We started thinking along the lines, what did we want to say about our linux? ... we bandied around lots of names, eventually I found some zoo site that said the Gentoo Penguin was the fastest pengiun there was ... and the name stuck

Re:All these weird names

[Monkelectric]

Yea it had some biblical conection ... There is the Book of Enoch in the old testament (I believe?) but I dont really understand how that related to linux if it did at all. Probably one of the reasons the name was changed :)

Re:All these weird names

[fireboy1919]

Enoch was one of the first men - great great great great great grandson of Adam, the first man. He holds the superlative of being the only man that didn't die - instead God took him - to heaven, or paradise, or something like that.

What does that have to do with Gentoo? Gentoo is bleeding edge. It dies a lot (and I know, because I use it and am willing to pay that price). I guess it could have something to do with purity? Enoch was such a good man that God took him. Could they have been saying that Gentoo is a very pure, noble distribution that will one day be embraced by the masters of Linux as the One True Distro?

Seems like a name change was in order.

Re:All these weird names

[Afrosheen]

I thought it had some connection to Cryptonomicon and Enoch Root.

Re:All these weird names

[LinuxHam]

Hey, if you're still involved with the project, maybe you can fix the x86 install docs. Found this little gem:

Important: If you are a stage2 or stage3 tarball, then we've already bootstrapped for you.

Re:All these weird names

[LinuxGeek]

Silly me, I was thinking it was the Enoch/Seventh Heaven, Enoch/Linux connection. :)

Defuse

[ViceClown]

Lets defuse this bomb before it happens.

Gentoo is a really nice distro. I wouldn't say it's for newbies and it's definitely geared for developers. The install isn't a cinch but it's very thorough. Before we get into a holy war with sides saying Sorcerer is better or Slackware this or Redhat that - lets try and keep the discussion about Gentoo itself... what is good or bad about it - and maybe help out Dan Robbins with useful constructive suggestions. Now... have at it :-)

Re:Defuse

[Bishop]

I like gentoo. I am using it right now. The ports system has some advantages. Being able to apply your own patches and still have the software integreate nicely with the rest of the distro is nice. Compiling with better optimizations can't hurt. Gentoo is usually on the cutting edge in terms of features.

There are some rough spots. There are broken ports in 1.2. Emerge is tediously slow. The ports systems found in FreeBSD and OpenBSD are much better. But Gentoo should catch up as it matures.

The init files are stupid half perl. It looks like a sysV init. It should be a sysV init with real shell scripts. I can understand why the developers would want to do something different. But then they should have made the init system different.

The init system is part of a larger problem. The developers seem to change some little things for changes sake. Unfortunately I can't think of an example off hand. This should tell you that most of the changes are minor. However there have been times when a config file or command didn't behave the way one would expect.

The stupid ._cfg000 prefix! Those files are a pain in the ass to work with! Why not a ._cfg0000 postfix??

I will give 1.4 a whirl when it comes out. There are enough little bugs with 1.2 that it is time for an upgrade anyway. If Gentoo 1.4 has worked out most the rough edges I will stick with Gentoo.

Re:Defuse

[warrax_666]

The init files are stupid half perl. It looks like a sysV init. It should be a sysV init with real shell scripts.

WTF are you talking about? They are regular shell scripts. Have you not noticed the #!... line at the top?!? Change that to #!/bin/sh and off you go. The current system eliminates redundancy, as in: why does each and every init script need to parse the command line explicitly? Why not do have a bit of common code which does the parsing for you? Also, it enables all the init scripts to automatically source /etc/conf.d files which IMHO is a very neat solution to the problem of setting options for daemons in a central location instead of messing about editing the init scripts themselves.

I can understand why the developers would want to do something different. But then they should have made the init system different.

Actually I'm wondering why more distros don't use the system of dependencies in their startup scripts instead of assigning arbitrary (priority) numbers to their init scripts. The dependency system also neatly avoids problems when e.g. a service won't start, and several other services depend on it. Personally I love the dependency system for the init scripts. It's actually one of the things (along with portage) that made me choose Gentoo, but of course there's no accounting for personal taste.

As with...

[ekrout]

As with most groundbreaking papers in academia, Robbins' piece starts off with "Hi there."

What am I waiting for?

[philovivero]

I'm waiting for Mandrake as my desktop and Debian as my server to fail spectacularly to live up to my expectations of a desktop or server OS.

When they do so fail, I'll try Gentoo, among other things.

It's been a few years. I'm not predicting spectacular failure anytime in the next few months.

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Wildcat J]

I agree, but in the spirit of /. pedantry, I think you mean something like spartan (2b), not draconian. We usually reserve the use of draconian for talking about Microsoft's licensing or DRM proposals ;)

-J

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Jonny Ringo]

Word, we talk like everyone has the time and the extra machine and/or is willing to reinstall the one they have, like it aint no thing. I think for the majority of people trying different linux distributions like picking ice cream at 31 flavors aint going to happen.

It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Entropy_ah]

oh, come on. you can still dual boot it with gentoo PPC
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/gentoo-ppc-install. html

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Mr. Quick]

i'm kind of in the same boat. my install of 1.2 gentoo is doing just fine, and with all my school work, including my thesis on the line, i'm not willing to risk the upgrade to 1.4.
so, i can see exactly where your coming from, but with a bit of added experience of about 5 failed install attempts.

that being said, if you do get a new machine, or maybe just another hard drive, i'd recommend install gentoo, it's quite nice.

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Spazholio]

I KNEW something seemed off when I wrote it. But, in true /. fashion, I wrote it anyway, knowing someone else would correct me. =)

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Yeah, but why would I WANT to? :)

I like linux well enough, but I'm tired of it. I'm tired of working with it, fighting with it, and trying to coerce it into doing exactly what I want. I want to be lazy for a while. I work hard enough at work. :)

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Zapman]

One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:

1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
2) mount my home directory (though it might be in /mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)

And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)

Re:What am I waiting for?

[MyHair]

Word, we talk like everyone has the time and the extra machine and/or is willing to reinstall the one they have, like it aint no thing.

Quite a few Slashdotters are like that. I have 5 or 6 usable PCs and try different things on them for experience and learning and goofing off.

I've used a couple of different versions of RedHat and Debian, Turbolinux (it came on a CD with my NIC), and started off with Slackware in 1994. I've been using Debian lately but have fond memories of Slackware, and from what I've heard Gentoo sounds right up my alley.

Of course this is not in a production environment.

And it does sound to me like Gentoo is for the people like me who goof around. (Bleeding edge source-based distros don't sound like what I'd want to administer at work, though.)

Oh, and by the way: Word!

Re:What am I waiting for?

[DennisZeMenace]

It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.

One word: VMWare

-DZM

Re:What am I waiting for?

[zorander]

the "spartan" install procedure is more than anything a rite of passage to keep total idiots away from the distribution.

Think how much less annoying their lives got. Sure you've got the idiots who couldn't cut it, but you can tell them to get Mandrake and they'll be off on their merry way. What you don't have is a bunch of people with working systems screwing them up in different ways.

Tech support people know that if you have a finite problem set then it's much easier--what can go wrong during installation is finite, what can go wrong later on is not.

It's by design. And if you can't type commands off of their *very* detailed install guide then there really is something wrong with you.

you need an imac.

Brian

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Dunkirk]

Yeah, but you can't *really* try it out except to *live* in it for a few weeks, and see what hassles you have to put up with and what surprises are in store.

Re:What am I waiting for?

[srussell]

Mandrake (and other RPM-based distributions) are fine, as long as you never upgrade them. RPM-based systems can quickly become unmanageable, as I recently discovered with my laptop :-/

Have you truly never wasted a day screwing around with RPM? I spend half my time trying to resolve stupid dependancies that make no sense -- like starting with a PHP install for a headless web server and ending up needing to install X. That's not an actual example, BTW, but it is fairly typical.

RPM suffers from a (not insignificant) number of basic flaws, and most of these are not present in Gentoo's Portage (or Debian's dpkg, AFAIK).

I've been running Gentoo on a server for several months now (replaced Redhat), and it has been a pleasure to maintain. I'm not keen on some of the ways in which Gentoo lays out its file structure, but I can live with that. My laptop, which has been running Mandrake for about 18 months since I bought it, finally got to the point where I couldn't install anything anymore because of RPM. I was building and installing everything by hand, so I installed Gentoo over it. This was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Replacing Mandrake was painless; getting Gentoo configured, getting X running, and so on, was unneccessarily difficult. Gentoo has an extremely primative configuration system, which is to say, it doesn't have one. It uses the base package's configuration tools; for X, this is still xf86config. I mean, come on... when was the last time anybody on a modern operating system had to enter scan rates by hand? That is more XF86's fault than Gentoo's, but it does make Gentoo a pain to get running.

Basically, what I'm saying is that when a package manager is so bad that people have to avoid it to install software, as is the case with RPM, something else is needed.

Gentoo is relatively difficult to install, compared with other modern Linux distributions. However, once it is installed, it is fast and easy to maintain.

Re:What am I waiting for?

[be-fan]

I think the install system is just peachy. None of that user-interface BS. Seriously, though, I've installed Gentoo at least a dozen times, and each time I'm pleasently surprised by how much less crappy it is than those fancy GUI installers. It takes less time, too. Take the (wonderfully written, btw) instructions, print them out, and type exactly the commands as they're shown in the pretty stand-out boxes, replacing /dev/hda3 with /dev/hdaX as needed. No waiting several minutes for a GUI installer to load from CD, no waiting for the Mandrake installer to read the package DB, etc. Maybe 10 minutes of setup, and then a couple of hours of compile and you're done.

heres to free

[gr3g]

Gentoo needs to make a version that will still compile the software on the system without having to download. Some of us don't have room mates that understand having a dial-up for 5 days straight.

Re:heres to free

[broody]

I installed it on a 56K dailup. No worries.

If you simply want to download the packages overnight...

emerge -f world

Or...
Download with a fat pipe. Burn it on a CDR and mount the CD as: /usr/portage/distfiles

or just copy the files...

Re:heres to free

[srussell]

Read the article. The 1.4+ releases provide optional binary distributions, no compilation necessary. Personally, I don't think that this defeats Gentoo's purpose at all. What I like about it is that, in most cases, it lets you get Gentoo up and running fast. Then you can selectively "upgrade" -- compile ON your machine, optimized FOR your machine -- individual packages overnight. You'll probably do that over time anyway, with system upgrades.

Binary packages are even more necessary than Gentoo will admit, though. KDE can take a day to compile, Mozilla takes about the same, and I've heard horror stories about OpenOffice. On a laptop, compiling these packages can also present other problems; I've had some packages consume over 300MB of RAM during the compiling, which means that my laptop with its puny 256MB of RAM spends most of its time swapping. Mozilla during a build will happily eat 500MB of hard drive space. For massive applications like these, I'd rather take the tiny performance hit of having them compiled on another computer, and just download the binaries.

What am I waiting for?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?

I'm waiting for it to finish compiling!

Great... now fix the documentation

[LowAmmoWarning]

I tried installing gentoo linux in a time not so far away and it seemed like the install was going fine and that the documentation was fairly good until I got to the end.... I installed gentoo linux with ReiserFS support and at the end when I went to compile my kernel I learned a nasty little detail.... ReiserFS support was pulled from the gentoo modified kernel... go figure. If you're going to update your distro then you need to update your documentation as well. Documentation makes the user experience better by providing them with instructions and reference to quickly answer questions without hours of banging head against keyboard.

Re:Great... now fix the documentation

[drobbins]

Um, we've always had ReiserFS. You forgot to enable "experimental features" in your kernel config... and, um, this was actually covered in the documentation :)

Re:Great... now fix the documentation

[bram]

Actually, gentoo made us switch from reiserFS to ext3.

The install of our latest servers was a bit delayed by the decision of what distro to install.
Our previous servers where running mostly Debian but gentoo bit the bullet with the good interface to compiling and optimizing all binaries while still giving people a packaging system.

On my laptop I still run Suse PPC, but that was lack of time when I installed it two years ago.
Next HD is laying around, so is Gentoo.
Finally I will get the ease of use of Slackware and Mandrake while being able to compile everything I need without libc probs.

Good job!

Re:Great... now fix the documentation

[Mnemia]

I agree, the dependency hell was definitely the main reason I switched from Redhat to Gentoo. The *fact* that it runs much faster on my laptop as well is a nice bonus, but that's not what keeps me there. What keeps me using Gentoo is this:

1. Package versions are updated very promptly. If you're running a server, Gentoo has a nice mailing list with GLSA's (Gentoo Linux Security Announcements) that easily keep you up to date with what needs to be upgraded. When you do upgrade, it's basically a one-line command and I can let it build in the background (and I don't agree that the "compile time" makes the security upgrades less timely: for one, most server apps are pretty small and can be built in 5 minutes, and for another, Gentoo will come out with a new ebuild script much much sooner, in my experience, than Redhat, et al. So I can build the new one before Redhat even rolls a new RPM.)
2. I know exactly what I'm getting when I install something in Gentoo. Gentoo uses the official versions of everything rather than their own hacked up editions (reference the GCC 2.96 issue, etc). An exception is their custom kernel sources, but it is well documented what that contains.
3. Even though compile time exists, user hassle is reduced. Most installs require very little interaction from the user to complete. I got sick of going out and finding the RPM I needed, making sure it was the right kind of RPM (Mandrake, Redhat, Suse...), having RPM reject it, and having to go out and find dependencies...
4. I can enforce compile options system-wide or even rebuild the entire system with new options using a single command.
5. Compile time and setup issues decrease as the system matures. Once you've built up a sizable collection of libraries, etc. compile times tend to be greatly reduced since the dependencies are not updated as frequently as main apps. Also, if you know what you're doing, it's very easy to get Gentoo setup exactly how you want it. I never figured out how to achieve this level of customization in Redhat and now that I have it I can work VERY efficiently.

So, contrary to belief of those who haven't tried it, Gentoo really does save you maintenance time if you know what you're doing enough to get it set up correctly. No more fighting conflicting sets of RPMs from Ximian, Redhat, and the Mozilla site everytime I upgrade Mozilla. That alone was enough to convince me of its superiority.

Dependancies

[Rick the Red]

Use Gentoo with caution. I tried Gentoo 1.0 and it didn't support my network card so I couldn't install it. A few months ago I tried 1.2 and now my network card is supported! Yippie! So I start the install and half-way through a several-hour process one of the builds breaks because some file is missing because some server is down and the install script can get the file. I tried again and again over the next few days and had the same problem. I looked at the support forums and saw I wasn't the only person with this problem, and I gave up. It's a great idea, but unlike Linux from Scratch (or almost any other distro) you are totally dependent on Gentoo and their servers.

Re:Dependancies

[AgentGray]

ibiblio seems to be very dependable for me, and I don't remember seeing things like this on the support forum. (Of course, I wasn't looking for stuff like this either).

Re:Dependancies

[uhmmmm]

if their main mirror is down, they do have others - you just have to set the appropriate variable in /etc/make.conf

Re:Dependancies

[wallsaroundme]

Do an 'emerge rsync'. This will update your mirrors, etc.. Then retry. It's good practice to emerge rsync daily.

Re:Dependancies

[Zapman]

One of my quibbles with gentoo is that it expects a lan connection. It pulls things down (by default) as you need them.

# emerge gnome
pull down gnome panel
compile gnome panel
pull down gnome games
compile gnome games

etc. However, you can do a 'emerge -f gnome'. The '-f' is 'fetchonly'. It will pull down everything you need. Then you 'emerge gnome' and you're off to the compiling races.

Re:Dependancies

[zorander]

Guess what?

The debian package system sucks if the only mirror in your sources.list file goes down too.

There are a multitude of rsync servers and fileservers too. Also, if it can't find a file, try telling it to build one version back as sometimes the file mirrors don't get updated as fast as rsync.

If you set up your configuration right (as you have to for other distros such as debian), you are not dependent on any one server.

Read the docs before making stupid assumptions.

There have been little hitches with gentoo, but then again that's part of the fun of running it. Not only the raw speed, but the making everything work. This is why the more savvy people like it. I've never not been able to get something to work and I've been running it for half a year now.

It's not like I'm a pro either. It really isn't that bad to maintain, but as another poster said, until your comfortable with debian or slack, use a twelve foot pole.

Brian

Is Gentoo the new Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I started Linux around '97 or '98, Slackware was the "in" distro. People who started using Slackware back then did so because they thought they were 7337 and at every opportunity they would espouse its benefits. I started with Slackware too and am happy I did and probably was an annoying Slackware prophet from time to time. But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness. Yet, if everyone started using Gentoo like droves of users use RedHat or Mandrake, I'm sure Gentoo would lose a great deal of its appeal for some of these users. I suppose the torch has been passed from the "Slackware is for hardcore users", to "Gentoo is for hardcore users" mantra.

Re:Is Gentoo the new Slackware

[G27 Radio]

But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness.

I'm sure that there are some gentoo users as you describe, but I'd like to state for the record that all the members of the Gentoo community that I've dealt with have been both helpful and pleasant in their responses to questions. Don't let a couple kiddies give you a bad impression of the average gentoo user.

Gentoo certainly isn't the easiest distro to set up, but if you know what you're doing the benefits are worth the time/work getting it started. If you compile everything from stage 1 you're looking at at least a day of compile time--but the actual time you need to spend in front of the computer is most likely going to be less than an hour. The amount of compile time really depends on what packages you install. You can use precompiled packages for a lot of stuff, but the point of compiling it from stage 1 is that you have a system that is fully optimized for your specific processor. This made a huge difference on my Athlon--I can actually watch DVD's smoothly now--something that Windows and Mandrake couldn't do for me.

What worked best for me as far as installation was to create a partition in Mandrake, chroot into that, and do the installation in there. Basically you can do pretty much the entire installation in a shell window without having to stop whatever else you're doing. I'm not sure this is well documented though. If you know your stuff linux-wise you can figure it out. It's not for the linux newbie though.

Re:Is Gentoo the new Slackware

[NicolaiBSD]

they thought they were 7337

Is that the new Boeing?

Oooh, you mean 1337.

Re:Is Gentoo the new Slackware

[WowTIP]

I suppose the torch has been passed from the "Slackware is for hardcore users", to "Gentoo is for hardcore users" mantra.

As a happy Gentoo user, I must say that Slackware is still more "hardcore" than Gentoo. I am not sure that is a good thing (for Slackware) though. ;)

Re:Is Gentoo the new Slackware

[Anonymous DWord]

Watching too much pr0n, more likely, with all this talk about teets.

some helpful links

[Corporate Gadfly]

First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Here are the promised helpful links.
Gentoo Home Page
Gentoo x86 install instructions
Gentoo FAQ
Gentoo Desktop Guide
Gentoo Forums
Gentoo Bugzilla

That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)

Re:some helpful links

[ctid]

What you say is true, but Daniel Robbins does state in his article that with Gentoo 1.4 you can be up and running in under one hour, including OpenOffice, KDE and some other stuff I forgot.

Re:some helpful links

[teslatug]

What kind of sliced bread do you buy? I thought the whole point of sliced bread was to make the process as simple as possible. If Gentoo was similar to sliced bread, then sliced bread would mean, selecting the type of flour to use in the bread, using a breadmaker for a while, and then slicing it yourself.

I've never tried Gentoo, but I sure do love the convenience of sliced bread.

Re:some helpful links

[Bios_Hakr]

Methinks you were trying to be funny, but I'd like to respond.

My wife and I make our own bread. We have several bags of different flour. We purchace yeast like it's a fine wine. We spend hours getting everything together. After it bakes, we run it through a meat slicer set to extra thick.

I don't mean to gloat, but GODDAMN that's some good bread. We'd take the Pepsi Challenge agianst that Wonderbread shit any day.

In the next year, we will probably get our own flour mill and purchace bags of wheat to lessen our dependency on choosing prepackaged flours.

Gentoo is, IMHO, the best Linux distro out there. I'm sure there are some people, let's call them "Linux Gourmets", who could put together an awesome distro to beat Gentoo. I haven't seen it yet.

Gentoo needs an install cd. A full Gentoo system already ready to go. After install, you could recompile packages as you see fit. Emerge kicks ass. I've never used the BSD ports, but with emerge, it just works. The dependencies seem reasonable. The ebuild files are well laid out and easily modifyable.

I'm not a linux developer, but I have a freaky feeling that a lot of RPM and APT gurus are looking at emerge and thinking of ways to make their systems more like it. Maybe a system like apt-compile or urpmi.compile is already in development. If not, it will be soon.

In short, Gentoo is a serious player in the distro wars. I forsee a lot of people moving to Gentoo in the next year. Especially on the developer front.

Re:some helpful links

[nitehorse]

How about an installation CD that also plays Unreal Tournament 2003?

Re:download 10 times or more

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a parameter to emerge, --pkgsrc I think that tells you to use the given binary. You can also configure it in your /etc/make.conf file I think.

-Andrew

It is all about time ...

[mustangdavis]

If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"

Because I just finished installing and configuring all of my Linux boxes with either RH 7.3 or RH 8.0 ... :)

Besides, I like the guy with the red brim a little better than the backwards, purple pac-man. :)

What am I waiting for?

[dzym]

I'm waiting for a new computer to fall out of the sky.

Frankly, I've got several computers, Linux or otherwise, all performing their tasks and they're Working Just Fine(tm). Why risk them?

Gentoo

[bogie]

I find it interesting how many people like having to compile everything and use a distro with such a archaic(not bad, just outdated compared to todays distros) install routine.

What's even more interesting is how many people have left Debian for Gentoo. Debian users are some of the most loyal I know, and yet many of them have simply moved on. I'm guessing Debian blew it with the long delay's between releases.

I also have to say after using linux for a while now, I just have no desire or need to get down and dirty with my distro, am I surprised as many people still are. Keep in mind I'm talking about desktop use where I just want to get my work done, not server use, where I do end up compiling some of my apps.

Personally I just don't have any interest in Gentoo or that style of distro, but obviously not everyone feels that way, since it does seem to be one of the up and coming distros.

Re:Gentoo

[Zapman]

In general, I'm with you. The distribution should get out of my way, and let me get things done. I'll update it with security stuff, and have done.

However, the flip side of the coin is that it keeps your mind sharp. Learning how someone else solves the problem is a great exercise, especially for those of us who sysadmin for a living (or want to).

And I was never sold on the 'compile optimizes things greatly' point. I'm still not totally, but I have to admit that my gentoo laptop smoked my debian desktop with LAME (went from 2-2.5x to 4-5x MP3 encodes) even though the cpu is pretty close (800mhz P3 vs AMD 700mhz), much slower disk, and a quarter the ram.

Re:Gentoo

[fsmunoz]

What's even more interesting is how many people have left Debian for Gentoo. Debian users are some of the most loyal I know, and yet many of them have simply moved on. I'm guessing Debian blew it with the long delay's between releases.

Don't think so; you see, I do believe that Gentoo is probably very nice, but most ppl I know that use it (disclaimer: most != all) and used to run Debian were either ppl that never really settled in any distibution because they wipped they're systems clean when they heard that a *new* version of LinuxSomething was released or ppl that used Debian because it was perceived as more hardcore. It's almost the same reason why many of them after 3 months of Gentoo wipe their systems to install FreeBSD and became FreeBSD zealots, only to install OpenBSD on it later because it's da bomb, except that latter on NetBSD catches their attention because in some weird movie they saw a über elite hacker used it. In the end they either begin to run Plan9 or simply go back to Windows, in which they will fondly remenber they're wild days while reading mail in Outlook.

Debian release cycles are indeed an issue, and an issue that it's trying to be fixed, but interestingly enough the uses that are drawn to Gentto are the ones that knew and used the unstable Debian branch, so the release delay was not really an issue. Some people just prefer to move to other things that for one reason or another they prefer... taking from other comments in this discussion one would gather that from some ppl Debian stable is the reason they don't change their OS, since stability is what works for them. For others a BSD-like ports systems is crucial, thus Gentto, Sorcerer, etc.

cheers,

fsmunoz

Re:Gentoo

[Shelled]

The Bad: Compiling from source means installation isn't a boot-a-CD/walk-away operation, a down side for general desktop use. You really pay up front when installing Gentoo.

The Good: If you got through the install, you've payed up front. Maintaining your system afterwards is a breeze for experienced linux users. Much easier than my experiences with Mandrake or edHat. Gentoo really is about package management so don't expect custom GUI management utilities a la YAST, etc., but dependancies are handled invisibly. Nor do I have to compile everything with KDE, Gnome or Alsa support, three things I never use.

The Best: 98% of everything I install works, including DVD, OpenGL games, WINE, all the things that were much harder or impossible for me in other distros, including Suse, RedHat, Mandrake and Caldera. If a package is broken it's usually updated relatively soon and the next 'emerge' works fine. Gentoo has, other than the occasional MOHAA, caused my W2K partition to gather dust.

Re:Gentoo

[srussell]

I find it interesting how many people like having to compile everything and use a distro with such a archaic(not bad, just outdated compared to todays distros) install routine.

Archaic compared to what? Portage is infinitely better than RPM. And I'm not exaggerating... the Goodness of RPM is a negatively increasing value, while the Goodness of Portage is a positively increasing value. Portage is, while maybe not Heaven, certainly very nice. RPM is Hell.

In any case, you have a valid point, but about the wrong aspect of Gentoo. The initial installation is very primative, compared to... well... everything else. But the basic package manager is excellent. It has a superb and intelligent dependancy resolution mechanism, that supports complex version checking; it has a package specifications that are separate from the tarball distributions; it allows multiple versions of the same software to be installed at the same time; it really is quite sophisticated.

Re:Gentoo

[richie2000]

Eventually somebody will craft a graphical installer for Gentoo and maybe its popularity will increase.

Gentoo has a graphical installer. Just print the install docs as graphics instead of truetype/postscript fonts and you're set. ;-) No, but semi-seriously, it doesn't get much more graphic than this. The install script is in plain-text, the interpreter is all done in wetware and you'll get a wonderful learning experience at a bargain price. Image what a two-day crash course in Installing Windows XP would cost at an e-learning center! With Gentoo, you get the course and get to keep the software - for free! You can't beat that.

Now, I have never actually used kemerge, but I can guess what it does. I have used Webmin's emerge front-end and it works just fine for me. I have installed Gentoo on *counts on fingers* four P133-class machines [1] (firewalls), one PIII 550 server plus two Athlon 1800+ workstations. I used to run Red Hat 7.1 on the lot (still do on the main server, I have nightmares about the Switch) but it was just too painful to keep them updated. Just the other day I tried to update sendmail on the remaining RH box so I could run a milter for SpamAssassin, but after the first smell of sulphur from RPM dependency hell I backed out and vowed to go Gentoo on that server too, ASAP.

One of the things I love about Gentoo (well, apart from the support in the forums (Hi, Kurt! ;-), portage, the init system, the docs, portage, the learning experience, emerge, the power I feel and the speed I get in some apps) is the knowledge that nothing gets added to my system that I didn't have a very good chance of reviewing and approving beforehand. emerge --pretend samba would tell me exactly what other packages samba depends upon - version numbers, the lot. A standard install does not include a telnet demon. Heck, it doesn't even have traceroute! Red Hat 7.1 bloated my servers bigtime and I still wonder if I missed killing a service somewhere...

[1] I cheated. :-) For the first two I stuck their hard drives in a cradle, booted my Athlon 1800+ workstation off the installation CD and did the compile from that, more recently I just do it in VMWare and move the drives back to the firewall box when I'm done. This is easy to do because of Gentoo's Way: I specify compiler options in one file (/etc/make.conf) and if I say i586 then my Athlon will happily compile and optimize the code for a Pentium-class processor.

Gentoo makes your computer happy. So make your computer happy today - try Gentoo. There's even an install CD with UT 2003 demo on it. Go ahead and download it, you know you want to. :-)

Stupid question

[scott1853]

Why should I use Gentoo? Really. Is there some huge feature comparison matrix for all the different distros? Is there really any major innovation between distros?

I don't run *nix that much. I have a dual boot at home for Mandrake 8.2 and W2K. Do different distros really only matter to the elite linux hackers?

Re:Stupid question

[Antipop]

Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.

No other linux distro has this. So yes, this is a major feature/innovation that makes it different.

Re:Stupid question

[FattMattP]

Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.

So is this BSD ports system like a package manager? If I want to uninstall a program which I installed this way does it makes it easy to do so? What about checking any arbitrary file and finding out what package it belongs to? What about verifying the integrity of an installed package to be sure that the files haven't been altered after installation? These are features I use now with RPM on Red Hat so I'd want something similar in a new system.

Re:Stupid question

[asteinberg]

No other linux distro has this.

I was very close to using my last mod point to mod the parent down as flamebait because of that line, but decided it would be more constructive to reply.

There are a handful of other distros that do what Gentoo does, and some might argue that they do a better job of it (I won't get into that).

1. Source Mage - The evolution of Sorceror after it's original maintainer ran off, has been doing this for nearly as long as Gentoo (maybe longer even? It's close). Instead of "emerge gnome" you'd say "cast gnome", but other than that it's more or less the same thing - download, configure, compile, install with one command. It's all coded in very elegant and easy-to-understand bash scripts, which is kind of neat, but other than that it's very comparable to Gentoo. I believe they plan to release 1.0 on Halloween.

2. Other source-based distros - there are two other Sorceror-based distros besides Source Mage - Lunar and the non-free Sorceror. Personally I'd suggest sticking with the above if you want to go with a Sorceror-evolved distro though. I think there's also Rock Linux but I don't know much about that.

3. Debian. Apt-get downloads and configures and installs programs, but you save hours and hours on the compilation step by using binaries. Or you can use apt-src and go through with the compilation. Personally, I found that it was not worth the time to compile everything when Debian works just as well if not better, has a far more reliable, well-established testing system, and stays nearly as up-to-date (if you use sid, the "unstable" branch, which I've found to be more stable than any of the source-based distros). As for the alleged speed gain in compiling, that is more of a theoretical claim than a number-supported one, and I honestly do not notice a difference.

Parent - keep in mind that it is never a safe thing to say definitively "no other..." or "never" or any kind of all-encompassing statement - you're asking to be disproven. Certainly Gentoo is a nice distro, but let's not be close-minded about it.

Re:Stupid question

[greenrd]

emerge unmerge

Yes but amazingly, if you read the docs, this command is not recommended! This is one of the issues I'd have to see fixed before I'd consider switching from RedHat.

Re:Stupid question

[asuffield]

Joey Hess implemented this for Debian in about 400 lines of perl, some time ago. Hardly a "major" feature.

What I'm waiting for

[ivan256]

If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?

I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available. I'm waiting for it to have widely available high performace mirrors that serve binaries, so I only have to compile when I want to, and I can be using that new piece of software in seconds. I'm waiting for it to have a proven track record for strict filesystem hirearchy standard compliance (the same standard each release, please). I'm waiting for it to run on all the platforms I currently use (still missing arm). I'm waiting for it to have a dedicated team of hundreds of developers that release security updates in hours (In binary form so that I don't have to wait for compilation for security). I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system. And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken.

Glad you asked?

Re:What I'm waiting for

[swright]

dunno about the rest but the transparent integration of non-free stuff is as good as it can be....

emerge nvidia (downloads and installs nvidia's binary closed source drivers, kernel and glx)

emerge ut2003-demo (yup, you guessed it...)

things like RealPlayer are slightly more complex (you have to get the install file from real.com then stick it in a directory before emerge'ing it - presumably because of Real's licensing).

Seriously, its good - even for non-free stuff..

Re:What I'm waiting for

[krogoth]

"I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available."

Have you actually looked at the list of packages? It's more than KDE 3 and GNOME 2 - since installing Gentoo on my desktop and server two months ago, I've only found 3 packages (out of... probably over 100 packages that I installed, including some very obscure ones) that didn't have ebuilds - hopefully the ebuilds I made for them will be added to portage soon.

The list of packages available is already very impressive (I'll bet that Red Hat and Mandrake don't have packages for the unreal tournament 2003 demo, or the Quake 3 OSP mod - these are in portage!), and making a new ebuild is very easy.

Having 4000 packages is completely irrelevant - there's tens of thousands that you'll never use. Debian's 9000 packages might make you certain that nearly everything you can think of is included, but would you even use 1000 of them?

"I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system."

richard$ emerge -s nvidia ut2003 quake
Searching...
[ Results for search key : nvidia ]
[ Applications found : 2 ]

* media-video/nvidia-glx

* media-video/nvidia-kernel

Searching...
[ Results for search key : ut2003 ]
[ Applications found : 1 ]

* app-games/ut2003-demo

Searching...
[ Results for search key : quake ]
[ Applications found : 4 ]

* app-games/quake3

* app-games/quake3-cpma

* app-games/quake3-osp

(those aren't my ebuilds - it's a completely clean portage tree from a few days ago).

"And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken."

Portage and ebuilds.

Re:What I'm waiting for

[dattaway]

I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available.

If you don't mind tarballs, it looks like that 4000 number has been surpased. This is my gentoo distribution tarball directory last updated a month ago:

dattaway@attaway $ ls /usr/portage/distfiles/ | wc -l 4279

dattaway@attaway $ du /usr/portage/distfiles
6881448 /usr/portage/distfiles

Re:What I'm waiting for

[Shelled]

If you want a binary distro, use a binary distro. There are dozens around. Gentoo isn't for you and that's not a failing on the distro's part. I've always found a mirror first try and they've almost always been DSL-saturating fast. You need 4000 available packages and instantaneous perfect security? And don't find that contradictory?

Re:What I'm waiting for

[fault0]

Exactly, I think "from-the-peer-pressure-dept" line that michael tagged to this story is very applicable.

Gentoo is very nice and all, but there are a number of things that made me switch back to other distros after using Gentoo for a few months.

First, there are better completely source based distros. The most important of these is SourceMage.

Second, I don't like to compile every single little thing. There is no point to compiling every single little thing. Most of the optimization claims that people say about Gentoo are mostly myths; it's really mostly a placebo effect on most modern computers. The only place it would have a discernable effect (above 10% increase in speed), is on really old i686 hardware (p3-katami, early p3-coppermine, slot-A athlons). Anything other this obviously isn't 686. The only other processor where i586 optimization helps is the Pentium Pro.

Third, Gentoo brakes more often than other distros do. I had more breakages in running five months of Gentoo than two years of Debian unstable/testing, and four years of various slackware releases.

Finally, I would like to say that Gentoo is a great distro. Non-free software availablity is very good. It's not however the "killer" distro that some people say it is. Portage is quite slow compared to other package managers (perhaps it should be rewritten in C or C++), or even the BSD ports system. Hopefully portage2 should address these issues, if it ever gets done.

Basically, gentoo is somewhat of the "in-distro" that Debian was several years ago.

Re:What I'm waiting for

[Per Wigren]

wigren@oggy portage $ find . -name '*.ebuild' | wc -l
4274

Re:What I'm waiting for

[srussell]

OpenOffice is free, but this is interesting nonetheless.

ser@bean public_html/webcam% emerge search openoffice
Searching...
[ Results for search key : openoffice ]
[ Applications found : 2 ]

* app-office/openoffice
Latest version available: 1.0.1-r1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Homepage: http://www.openoffice.org/
Description: OpenOffice.org, a full office productivity suite.

* app-office/openoffice-bin
Latest version available: 1.0.1
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Homepage: http://www.openoffice.org
Description: OpenOffice productivity suite

In fact, it is easier for commercial developers to build ebuilds for Gentoo than to build RPMs. RPMs require rebuilding their basic package distribution mechanism; Portage will use whatever they already have (with caveats).

Re:What I'm waiting for

[ivan256]

If you want a binary distro, use a binary distro.

That was my point. the original story was trying to imply that gentoo was for everybody. It's not for people who want t a binary distro.

You need 4000 available packages and instantaneous perfect security? And don't find that contradictory?

I don't need 4000 packages, I need to know that when I want one package that it'll be available. The more packages there are, the better the chance of that.

Re:What I'm waiting for

[ivan256]

If you don't mind tarballs, it looks like that 4000 number has been surpased.

I was going by their website which says that there are 2800 tested packages.

Re:What I'm waiting for

[richie2000]

Hey.. what if we had a better compiler?

we do. It's called gcc 3.2. (.Or maybe it's GNU/gcc 3.2 RMS Edition.)

That would defeat the purpose

[fava]

Gentoo is a very up to date version of linux. Most of the packages available are the latest stable versions. Installing from an cd means the next 'emerge world' will end up downloading lots of packages as it updates your system. The older the install cd the more downloading to be done. That would defeat the purpose of loading everything from cd in the first place.

my gentoo experience

[emoeric]

i went through a series of reinstalls on my linux desktop over the summer, and in the month or so when i was on gentoo, i was a fan. There's definitely something to be said for optimizing binaries for your specific hardware. OTOH, the reasons i eventually returned to debian were:

• dependency problems in some portage scripts and
• having to compile everything.

It may be a great thing, but when i wanted to try a new program right away, waiting for it to compile was a definite pain in the arse.
Now, as far as my dependency issues, i'm not sure if they got them resolved with the new version of portage, but it might be worth checking out. At any rate, i love dselect and i dunno if i'll be reinstalling now that i got the unofficial kde3 debs working

Waiting for a floppy install

[The Turd Report]

With my newest box, it came down to either being Debian or Gentoo. Gentoo would only do a CD install (I didn't have a CD-R) so Debian won. Give me a floppy/FTP install and I will give it a go.

Re:Waiting for a floppy install

[Splork]

i installed using a GRUB boot floppy to netboot a kernel and i was up and running. another machine on your net to run bootp and tftp is required.

Re:Waiting for a floppy install

[MyHair]

i installed using a GRUB boot floppy to netboot a kernel

Oh yeah? Well I hand-weaved a linux 1.2 kernel using only the lint caught in the fan guard and installed from that.

Seriously, GRUB netbooting is cool and I want to try it. Do you TFTP an initrd, too, or do you just grab the kernel and magically make it work?

Re:Waiting for a floppy install

[Splork]

i believe it tftp'd an initrd image after getting the kernel using bootp. i did what was documented in the install docs for 1.2. it was on a laptop with a built in eepro100 network interface (sony vaio z505s)

I love you!

[fire-eyes]

I've been a slackware user for 5 years. Only slackware. No other distro.

Then I tried Gentoo recently. It's everything I wanted. the Ultimate power of customization (save LFS), everything from source, etc. The speed difference IS noticeable in every app, as long as you have a clue about optimization flags for your CPU.

The only real problem is that two things are essential:

1) Moderately fast system
2) Fair connection to the ineternet

I have dial up at home, so I brough my system to work and installed there. Ever since, I haven't had to download too many huge ebuilds (packages) over dial up. Things are good.

Check it out some day.

Re:download 10 times or more

[Tyler Eaves]

Install desired packages on one machine. Copy /usr/portage/distfiles to the other 9 machines/. It only downloads if it can't find it in /usr/portage/distfiles

Gentoo has matured quickly...

[PhilipChapman]

Only a few months ago, I tried gentoo and had like 10 broken ebuilds while installing. That was too much for me, so I wiped it and put slack back.

So, in August, I gave Gentoo another shot. Only had one faulty ebuild on the install, which is ok with me. Skip ahead a few weeks, I install the GCC 3.2 1.4 pre-release. Not a single problem during the base install, and no problems with anything else either(kde, gnome, mozilla, etc).

Overall, I'm very impressed with how far Gentoo has come. Thanks to everyone who contributes to the project!

---

Re:Why not?

[ncc74656]

K6-350...

It will take HOW long to download, and compile? yeah right..

I built a minimal Gentoo system on a P5MMMX-233 for use as a firewall. I started it before going home, and it was mostly done by the next morning. It does take a while, but it's doable as long as you don't plan on trying to run KDE (for instance) on it.

My take on Gentoo...

[danielrm26]

To all those who have mentioned the difficulty of the install, when I made the switch to Gentoo I had only installed maybe 5 or 10 other Linux boxen (Redhat, Mandrake, etc...), and Gentoo wasn't all that different.

It was more INVOLVED, but not more difficult per say. If you print out the instructions from the site and follow them, good things will happen.

For those who think that another distribution (especially a source-based one like this) is pointless and only for the uber-geeks, think again. The idea behind distributions like Gentoo is CONTROL. When you have finished your first Gentoo and compiled everything for your specific hardware it is a distinctly different feeling than throwing in a Redhat disk and pressing 'go'.

Those attracted to Gentoo are those attracted to having everything just the way they like it on their computers (and arguably in their lives as well). It's an approach to computing that many have here on /.; if you don't have that approach then perhaps that is why you don't like Gentoo.

No kidding.. it smoked my harddrive...

[mooman]

I have an old P166 CTX laptop with a 1.6G hard drive I got back in '98. I did the Gentoo download and bootstrap build approach a couple days ago. It started compiling around midnight, and was still gcc'ing away at 8:30 the next morning when I left for work.

When I got home, it had aborted due to being unable to connect to their rsync machine (a problem that others have reported as well) so I kicked the whole process off again. This time, I think my poor old harddrive gave up the ghost from all the thrashing. Now I get nothing but hda errors, even when I boot from a tomsrtbt floppy. It's almost like Gentoo slashdotted my hard drive.. :)

I'll give gentoo another try after I find a new laptop HD on ebay... (Anyone got a 2-6 Gig 2.5" notebook IDE drive that needs a new home?)

So yeah, plan on some compile time if you have anything less than a speedy box...

Gentoo Linux 4 Newbies

[rdslater596]

Acutally, I tried Gentoo as a semi-newbie. I've nearly all the major releases working but, it wasn't until I installed Gentoo that I really learned the inner workings of Linux systems. That was a HUGE benifit. If you are an 'experienced newbie' I would suggest if you have the Phat Pipe (TM) and l337 Hardware (TM), then wade into this full blast. Even if you don't keep Gentoo as you distribution of choice--You'll be better for the experience. The task is challenging but the documentation is good. I also personally like the non-bloatware feature and portage system (I admit nothing about being a BSD user!--you have no proof!).

Like I said give it a try. At the very least you can pick up some skills and that is worth the compile times (on a 1.2Ghz w/ 256DDR system takes me about a long evening start to command line--then emerge gnome or kde while you sleep).

Done

[djohnsto]

You should read the install instructions on the Gentoo site. If you have a bootable floppy that can:

- fdisk the install drive / partitions
- format the partitions
- give you a working network connection
- Let you run a command shell with ftp and chroot working

That's all you need. You can probably use that Debian floppy to install Gentoo. Of course, there's the matter of downloading a 50-100 MB tarball + kernel sources for the initial install, plus more downloading and several hours of compiling to get a usable system. But you can do it without a CD (or even a CD-ROM drive).

no more waiting.

[Xiphoid Process]

"I'm waiting for Linux to get where FreeBSD is for ease of building..."

that's where gentoo is. the *point* of gentoo is that it uses the ports system... so congratulations to you, no more waiting

The biggest advantage of Gentoo...

[SlickMickTrick]

...is the one they're not using.

Gento is source based, meaning big compile times. However, it has the possible advantage of very small downloads. Imagine, that instead of downloading all the source packages for KDE 3.0.4, you simply had to download the patch level difference for the source from KDE 3.0.3. The diff file would probably be less than 500k.

Of course, patch files would be too difficult to manage, so why not set up an rsync or cvs server, and use cvsup to grab the differences. Not from the production cvs, but from another set up by Gentoo. This would turn a bandwidth hungry dist into the lightest one of all. After downloading the initial sources, the updates would be noticably smaller than binary dists.

Of course, gentoo doesn't do this, but I use it anyway. :-)

Re:The biggest advantage of Gentoo...

[Shelled]

Are you sure? My /usr/portage/distfiles directory contains plenty of diff (.patch) files.

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[TheGratefulNet]

amen!

as a long-term linux bigot (running on linux since the 1.1 days. kernel versions, that is) I'm now giving freebsd a serious try. my bsd bigot friends tell me that there's near zero that linux can do that fbsd can't. I know that its missing filesystem journalling (linux has reiser, ext3, xfs and jfs). but other than that, what else CAN'T freebsd do? so far, according a bsd bigot friend, nothing. all hardware that linux supports bsd also supports. maybe even better (to this day I don't trust linux and ide controllers. nor do I trust firewire or even usb, totally, with linux).

I'm going to really give bsd a try now. 4.7 is just out and while it takes some time to convert from linux's way of doing things to bsd's, its not a major hurdle.

for me, the big obstacle was "would there be things linux could do that bsd can't". and I'm told that's no longer the case.

so when it came time to build my next unix box (firewall or host), I'm now spending some time with freebsd rather than choosing YET ANOTHER linux distro. the fact that there's only ONE freebsd sure makes MY life a lot easier!!

oh, and the 'make world' thing is really cool. no linux distro really matches the cvsup/make-world deal that bsd has going. lockstep release from one vendor. wow ;-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Down Side of Maintaining

[swright]

There are a few....

- ebuilds arent perfect. some dont work, others have known problems. it isnt always perfect. things are usually fixed quickly though.

- version mismatches. although its kinda cunning and you can have multiple versions of things installed (Qt 2 in /usr/qt/2/, Qt 3 in /usr/qt/3/ etc...) this doesnt always work! Can end up with some painful instabilities needing things to be unmerged and then re-emerged again after

- other version mismatches. some apps like autoconf 2.13, others like 2.5. you can easily change your 'active' one (export WANT_AUTOCONF_2_5="1" for 2.5) - but the ebuilds don't 'know' which one they want. Again, broken builds and more problems. Easily fixable but still a pain.

- upgrading doesn't get rid of old versions. Sometimes you really need to unmerge an old version of a program before emerging the new one or dependent apps will get confused and pick up the wrong versions of shared libs. I know this isn't meant to happen but it occasionally does..

- other weird stuff. recently I somehow lost my TEMP environment setting and emerge unpacked a fresh glibc version into / (still haven't cleaned up the mess..)

- cant resume an aborted build. start building big package (openoffice!). quit for whatever reason. have to start again from the beginning...

Don't get me wrong - I love Gentoo dearly, its my primary desktop that I spend 16 hours a day on doing all my work and all my pleasure. But nothing's perfect... :)

(and the support on the lists is truly excellent, so you're never completely lost..)

(and admittedly many of the problems above are as likely to be caused by the apps themselves as Gentoo..)

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[(startx)]

hardware support? are you kidding? If you've got an sb audigy and/or nvidia video card, you'll be comming back to linux soon enough.

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[Zigg]

You wink, but it's true. That's why I left Gentoo. I got sick of the constant compiling, even on my 1GHz P3.

Now I follow Debian sid and I do just fine.

The biggest problem I have with it

[Twister002]

Is it requiring a network connection.

Yeah, I know I can download all of the packages that it needs and put them in /usr/portage/distfiles but first I have to find out WHAT packages it wants to just install.

Plus I'm in one of the far corners of the world (Santa Fe, NM) that DOESN'T have broadband everywhere so I have to do all this downloading over dial up.

I should just take my machine down to the lead guys house in Albuquerque and hook on to his hub to install. ;)

Other than that, it looks pretty neat! nifty even.

Mod parent up

[Plug]

My system disk filled up a few weeks ago.

It was a ~4gb volume; I found 1.5gb in the /var/dpkg/cache directory. About 9 versions of most packages. Every time you download a new version, Debian keeps the old ones.

Remember Debian users, apt-get autoclean is your friend.

I've had a different experience...

[fireboy1919]

I had a lot of trouble getting esoteric packages written by one guy for some strange task (that I happen to be working on too) had a lot of trouble installing on my previous distro, so I decided to try a source distro.

This one by FAR had the most documentation. And it had more docs than Debian, Mandrake, and Slackware for installation. So I decided to give it a try.

And I screwed up by not following the directions. Undaunted, I tried again. This time, I succeeded - without the help of the developers. Everything compiled perfectly - I had a working version of X with support for my video card, along with a full install of Apache, Gnome, KDE, IceWM, and my favorite development environments and text editors. It took me three days to succeed.

From that point forward, occasionally, I ran into problems. Unlike Mandrake, my previous distro, I found the solutions by going to the user forums for the site - it seems other people had problems similar to mine. A lot of the problems weren't even due to the distro - things like how upgrading postfix sometimes leads to a difference in how the alias files are stored (so that they have to be rebuilt) are things I would expect to have to scour the internet to find out, rather than just checking at my distro.

And the three times when I couldn't find the answer, I posted to a forum, and within hours (one time within minutes) I had my answer.

There sure is some brokenness with the distro - but to me its worth it. The documentation, while out of date, is still pretty useful, and the forums are the best support I've ever had from anyone for using Linux (including a local LUG, #linux, and #linuxhelp on Dalnet, #linux and #linuxhelp on EFnet, and my local net admin).

Now my computer nearly sings - I can install, uninstall, and fix problems faster than I ever have before, (even faster than I could with nice, user friendly options), and its only getting better.

Perhaps you have been a sysadmin for four years, and used linux-pmac, but perhaps you didn't get as many scars as you say. You don't like the kernel? They don't force you to use it, you know. You don't have to run it even once - you can use any kernel you want, if you're so inclined, even plain vanilla. Switch. Problem solved. Can't use simple compile flags? They wrote a huge 10 page html file about how to use them and documented the file with the compile flags so you'd get them right. I've NEVER been a sysadmin, and I didn't even doubt that I got them right. Can't stand the 5 minutes of doing stuff by hand? You know you can just do exactly what the guide says, right? A trained monkey, or the newbie I was when I first installed it could do it. Why don't you? It doesn't really take that long.

It sounds more like you gave up when you hit a snag than that you gave this distro a fair chance. One snag in the install of this distro can take 40 hours to fix. However, the install is only the beginning of a distro's use. Perhaps you think I'm acting haughty. I'm sorry if you take it this way; know that I write this without emotion, but with more experience in this distro. Ask for help from me when installing and I'll give it if I am able.

Re:I've had a different experience...

[fireboy1919]

Sure you don't. But it really helps. There were a lot of things that weren't really good until AFTER the install, and I could really have used some docs (Mandrake was my previous distro).

Things like:
-getting rpmdrake/urpmi to work properly with any given mirror (I had to figure that one out by reverse engineering based upon how it does security update works)
-getting the firewall to work (the firewall that comes with Mandrake has a horribly inflexible Mandrake front-end (won't do certain kinds of forwarding, etc.). However, if you scour your path, you can find that it has a really good OTHER front-end that you have to use).
-figuring out why a lot of stuff won't compile (ships with a rather broken version of gcc)
-Mandrake's init path structure (sure, you can figure it out, but why don't they just tell you?)

Bottom line: even the least sophisticated distro needs documentation because an operating system by nature is a complex thing.

Rnoch

[tpv]

of being the only man that didn't die

Close, but not quite.

According to the Bible, there were two men with that honour. The other is Elijah - 2 Kings 2:11

I've always considered the Enoch passage to be quite vague - Genesis 5:24

Also he wasn't the only Enoch in the bible, Cain also had a son named Enoch - Genesis 4:17.
Perhaps the distro saw itself as the son of a murderer?

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[No-op]

Freebsd has had SoftUpdates for UFS (disk file system) for quite a while. this does a more or less journaling type feature, although as far as I understand it's not quite a full JFS. it works nicely though, and no more FSCK. that's a bonus in my book.

and as far as hardware support, it's not really a matter of HOW much stuff is supported but how WELL it's supported. this is important when you actually want to do work, like have production servers tick along forever without randomly crashing. I wouldn't even begin to pretend that Free supports as much hardware as linux does, but that's mostly because there isn't a legion of 13 year old kids writing a slew of crap drivers for things like usb webcams and cheap ass network cards and god knowsw what else they bought at CompUSA. that sounds bad, but it's what it seems like much of the time. who gives a crap whether you can do "good performance IDE software RAID" ? who does that? seriously. if you wanted good RAID performance, you'd build a box using a serious hardware raid controller, with good scsi disks... and if you're someone who wants to argue with me here, then you're really not someone who gets it, and should stick to your linux distro of choice. pretty IRC interfaces aren't all what it's about, you know.

As far as compatibility with linux "software" goes, FreeBSD is a POSIX beast, and works just fine in that arena. it also has an optional linux compatibility layer where (sadly!) it will emulate the insane mess of libs and dependencies (glibc? hello? pick a version already) and run the software as if it was a linux ELF binary. this is handy when vendors do stupid things like distribute apps for hardware as linux binaries... I've run into this with Mitsubishi high-end UPS systems, and linux compatibility mode worked out A-OK. all done, QED. no need to compromise my network with a exploit prone system (besides the windows servers, of course!)

but really, as a former linux user from the days when slackware was new and really damn cool, I have to say that I like FreeBSD more. one of my coworkers forced me to use it, and once I sussed it out a bit it made so much more sense. things are ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this is important, so important I'll say it again. THINGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this makes administration easy. installing applications is much simpler. cleaning things up is easier. restoring from backup is easier. it's great that your home linux box has some weird ass setup that makes sense to you, but start administrating hundreds of boxes built by a team of different people over the years. weird ass file system nonsense doesn't scale. move on.

Ports and the source tree- these clinched it for me. it's spiffy. you go into the directory, use the built in search tool to find an app to do what you want, and then install it from source. you can snarf the binary if you wanted, but why bother? we're using servers here, they have power, and we're not building KDE3 or something. (except of course when we are, of course.) I can't begin to say how spoiled I am by using the ports tree.

And building from source- what's easier about keeping your system up to date than syncing your source tree with one command? and then rebuilding your entire core system with another? poof! it's like magic. go figure. it's been there forever.

anyway, if you're a geek who needs to do server stuff and you'd like to cut down on the headaches, give freebsd a spin. we're not bad people and most of us work for a living. you get to avoid a lot of clueless brats and silly script kiddies. if we say "H4X0r" it's in jest. maybe it sounds bad, and if so, that's fine. either it appeals to you or it doesn't. thanks for listening.

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[Glytch]

I don't run Gentoo, but I built my system with LFS. I wanted to build my system from source for a reason other than optimizations: dependencies.

I like not having programs I use be dependant on some bizarre unknown little library or program that Red Hat or Mandrake saw fit to link to something important. (Requiring Sendmail to run a simple cron daemon? Requiring the installation of Vi?) When you build from source, you know that you won't be getting any missing library errors, and you know that your program won't die mysteriously because it can't find an odd little support program in the path.

My (negative) Gentoo experience

[hey!]

Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.

It's sweet when it works, but a royal pain when it fails. I downloaded the iso, installed it and immediately tried to emerge kde-base after getting gentoo up and running (which was very easy by the way). The emerge process for KDE took all day long between downloading the source and compiling, whereas on Red Hat or Debian it would have been done in minutes. Then to top it off, the X servers compiled by it were not functional because of an unresolved global. Something obviously was missing from their dependency graphs; other people who perhaps had emerged the missing piece in the course of other activites would not have had this problem.

Of course, I had the source code and in theory I could have dived in to figure out what was going on. In fact, I'm fairly accustomed to tweaking source code to get it to compile and work, but futzing around with X is not what I do for fun. I played around with the system in my spare time for the next week, trying out other things and attempting somewhat half heartedly to fix my X problem. Searches on the Gentoo web site and Google came up dry. Then the new Red Hat psyche CD's I'd burned beckoned, and that was that for Gentoo for the time being.

I had overall a mixed impression of Gentoo. I think portage is pretty slick. The X problems I had didn't really put me off on it. If I seriously needed X working on the machine, I'm sure I could have got it working. The problem is that when it comes time to set up a machine for some purpose, I usually don't want to be tinkering with it for days. And I'm not talking about futzing around with configurations options, just the routine task of getting the system installed and running takes too long. If it were my personal hobbyist system, no problem; but at work I'm often installing linux on a particular machine to solve a specific problem. I want it done and off my desk yesterday. It's irritating to have to, figuratively speaking, pop the cake in the oven and keep sticking it with a toothpick to see if its done. For that reason, I'd say it's a very superior choice for a hobbyist, especially given the effort they've made to put all the most bleeding edge features into it.

The article says emerge is going to be much faster in 1.4. Perhaps I'll give it a try again.

Re:My (negative) Gentoo experience

[klieber]

The emerge process for KDE took all day long between downloading the source and compiling, whereas on Red Hat or Debian it would have been done in minutes.

That's the difference between compiling the source from scratch, custom-tailored to your hardware, based on settings that you decide upon vs. installing a pre-compiled binary that is not customizable based on your hardware.

Then to top it off, the X servers compiled by it were not functional because of an unresolved global. Something obviously was missing from their dependency graphs;

You probably just needed to modify your /etc/XII/XF86Config file. Most distros give you a vanilla file that gets you up and running. Gentoo assumes you want to custom-create one.

--kurt

Re:My (negative) Gentoo experience

[hey!]

That's the difference between compiling the source from scratch, custom-tailored to your hardware, based on settings that you decide upon vs. installing a pre-compiled binary that is not customizable based on your hardware.

I'm aware of this. Which is why I consider gentoo a hobbyist distro; it's a good thing if you are managing Linux on one or two computers, a bad thing if you are managing dozens or hundreds of them.

You probably just needed to modify your /etc/XII/XF86Config file. Most distros give you a vanilla file that gets you up and running. Gentoo assumes you want to custom-create one.

I am aware that gentoo wants me to make my onw XFree86Config file; I've been configuring XFree86 for years. The problem was definitely not an XF86COnfig file issue. It was an unresolved symbol -- a problem with missing libraries, which the portage system is supposed to fix. If you did not experience the problem with your Gentoo setup, its because you'd separtely emerged the necessary libraries earlier.

Gentoo is my Primary Desktop OS

[Zapdos]

It has the flexibility I need, without any sacrifice in power.

You can boot off of a old install cd and install the latest release. It has done all I have asked it to and no extras.

I do not have qt ,arts or KDE installed I don't use KDE and I can still compile programs requiring SDL development libs, because I have sdl devel libs installed which did not require arts now try that with other distributions. I get to use the system logger, cron tool, bootloader, mta, etc that I want from the very beginning.

Re:Why KDE is faster on Mandrake than on Gentoo

[Yokaze]

Not really interesting, just a PR statement. No real facts, besides there are people who think that "KDE on Mandrake [is] faster than on Gentoo".

This only shows, that the speed difference is a subjective thing.

I tried Gentoo (twice), and liked the low inital dependencies and the init-scripts.

(Note, I'm a developer and a happy Mandrake User.
Started using Linux with RedHat 3.0.3. I'd rather compile my own code.)

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[No-op]

I know- I always pull my binaries from mango.firepipe.net (the kde3 freebsd build mirror). I was just using an arbitrary example of some huge package that you usually wouldn't want to build. XFree is another good example.

you prove my point, though.

[No-op]

exactly as I said- how many people would group running a serious application (weblogix) and running an application for piracy (LimeWire, a Gnutella P2P client) ? if you're so concerned about having quality java support for a commercial app, you would run it on a Sun box. I know that JDK support and app support for linux are better now, but would you risk your job and reputation on it? I hope not. that's why we have budgets, and if yours isn't enough to truly build a good infrastructure for whatever applications you have then you shouldn't be building them to start with.

that being said, I'm running serious enterprise java apps on a freebsd box using the JDK right now (OpenNMS, available at www.opennms.org - great enterprise SNMP monitoring system.)

use whatever trips your trigger. if pirating mp3s and movies is that important to you, then I guess linux is your platform of choice!

Re:you prove my point, though.

[No-op]

Umm, anyone who would use a LocalDirector for serious applications should be shot. seriously.

and Dell? excuse me? you're saying the cheapest hardware on the planet is a good choice for required uptime? blah. maybe you're one of those people with the rack full of 1U boxen, and if so, then you can afford to lose systems all the time. and that's great if it works for you.

I don't use Java, I'm sorry of my obviously blatant ignorance. the last people I knew who talked to me about EJBs are all mopping floors now, and I say that in a sad way because they were cool people. oh well.

I think you and I work in different environments completely... if I tried to pass of a pile of dells and some cisco crapware as good infrastructure, I'd get laughed at. but if you're scraping those pennies together, then I understand. the cost between 99% uptime and 99.9% uptime is a huge one.

I hate Sun btw, so don't think I'm pushing them... there's just a point when enough money is at stake (I work for a brokerage firm) that you don't fuck around. when your linux boxen start handling billions of dollars of other people's money daily, you'll understand.

and my last line was just a crack at your LimeWire needs. I prefer Kazaa but that's just me:)

Re:Some counterpoints.

[No-op]

if i had to use linux, I would use debian. it's pretty spiffy. there's still too many libs and other crap all over the place, but that's not debian's fault, it's linux.

one of the reasons that debian is more homogeneous is because of the whole apt-get thing. that's good, and I think that's one reason why many sysadmins choose debian. that, and you really want to be able to pick which core elements go into any server- I'm sure it's nice for that as well.

for my hundreds of BSD boxes from over the years, the only problems I run into are variances in config files due to upgrades in core OS apps. there is, however, a tool in freebsd to fix those, and it works quite well (although we use something else we cooked up internally.)

as I said to another poster, use whatever works for you- if you aren't constrained by actually having to use the systems for work, then by all means go wild and do what you want. for people who spend enough time in the datacenter that the last thing they ever want to see is another raised tile floor, FreeBSD is a great option.

Ebuilds

[be-fan]

The ebuild system kicks ass. Never has it been easier to hack your packages without losing dependency checking. Right now, I'm running KDE 3.1 beta2 on Qt 3.1 beta2. For awhile, I was running XFree 4.2.99 and Qt 3.0.5 with Xft2 patches. All I had to do was copy the relevent ebuilds, change a few lines, and voila, new package! The simplicity of portage makes it easy for people to make their own ebuilds. Check out the Gentoo forums and you'll find all sorts of ebuilds for totally experimental programs (like Phoenix).

Re:Some of us do actual -work- with our computers,

[be-fan]

Um, my box has been rock solid stable since I installed Gentoo about a month ago. In the meantime, I've installed tons of beta software (currently running a beta kde on a beta Qt, works great) and have messed around with getting prelinking working twice. Also enlarged my XFS partition on the fly while I was at it. Not only have I yet to hose it, but I haven't figured out how to crash it either. Maybe I should play with the development kernels. After all, they're in the Portage tree now :)

UNIX as a religion

[slashdot_commentator]

I'll attribute the empty bravado and flawed logic to someone who needs a religion, much like what a Minnesota governor alluded to in a Playboy interview. If its a troll, kudos, its brilliantly executed.

Freebsd has had SoftUpdates for UFS (disk file system) for quite a while. this does a more or less journaling type feature, although as far as I understand it's not quite a full JFS. it works nicely though, and no more FSCK.

Eliminating fsck is not the primary reason to choose a journaling filesystem. When properly selected, it enhances the integrity of a filesystem after a crash. SoftUpdates does not accomplish this. More telling is someone who chooses his distribution knowing there is a distinct shortcoming, and yet implies its half-measure is comparably acceptable to the real thing.

and as far as hardware support, it's not really a matter of HOW much stuff is supported but how WELL it's supported.

FreeBSD device support comes from the same trough as Linux. In most cases, its the unpaid contributions of computer enthusiasts. A new FreeBSD driver is just as prone to bugs as a Linux one. FreeBSD maintainers and developers do not possess 31337 powers that the mere Linux contributors do not. They're merely a little pickier and cagier about the QA and release process. And in return, you have a lot more hardware that you cannot run on your PC. Some people live in the real world, where they don't have the luxury of increasing the expense of their PC to spend their time handpicking components (that work).

[...] who gives a crap whether you can do "good performance IDE software RAID" ? who does that? seriously. if you wanted good RAID performance, you'd build a box using a serious hardware raid controller, with good scsi disks... and if you're someone who wants to argue with me here, then you're really not someone who gets it, and should stick to your linux distro of choice. pretty IRC interfaces aren't all what it's about, you know.

THIS, from the guy who says my half-assed filesystem implementation is perfectly adequate? People go to software raid when they can't afford hardware raid and want more reliability than NO raid. You're the one who doesn't get it, Mr. Ivory Tower. Pretty IRC interfaces??? What the f*ck are you talking about? This is Linux (and I'm a Slackware user). Who the hell uses it because its "prettier"???

As far as compatibility with linux "software" goes, FreeBSD is a POSIX beast, and works just fine in that arena.

Again, when is a half-measure preferable to the real thing? Why screw around with seeing if this Linux package will work under the BSD Compatibility system, when you can pick a distribution that is matched to it and will run after executing a mere rpm/apt-get/installpkg command???

QED. no need to compromise my network with a exploit prone system (besides the windows servers, of course!)

1) Supposed Linux compatibility does not equate to a more secure system. No logical correlation there.
2) Security in a software distribution is merely the vigilant configuration of software and restriction of desirable features. If the NSA thought otherwise, they would have based their SecureLinux distribution on FreeBSD.

THINGS ARE ALWAYS IN THE SAME PLACE. this makes administration easy. installing applications is much simpler. cleaning things up is easier. restoring from backup is easier.

The only intelligent thing you said in this entire post. I am sincere in that statement and I agree completely with your statement. But then you go on to criticize weird-assed customizations, without realizing FreeBSD is just as vulnerable to it as Linux. Linux filesystem arrangements do not mutate any more than FreeBSD systems.

Ports and the source tree- these clinched it for me. [...] I can't begin to say how spoiled I am by using the ports tree.

And realize no one using Linux cares.

anyway, if you're a geek who needs to do server stuff and you'd like to cut down on the headaches, give freebsd a spin. we're not bad people and most of us work for a living. you get to avoid a lot of clueless brats and silly script kiddies.

The only thing your post has told me is if you want to be an elitist compusnob, you're little weak in the the reasoning department and wish to mask it by advocating an elitist OS, you have more time to twiddle with your OS (than just plug-in the working product), you have more money to spend for a component FreeBSD supports, and need to replace your religious faith with a OS distribution, give FreeBSD a spin.
Most script kiddies will be running apache cgi, ftp, sendmail, and lpr exploit scripts. Somehow they will be miraculously ineffective in FreeBSD, even though they use the same codebase. Its the Divine Providence, he'll tell you. The people that care about security will know they need to spend their time understanding the vulnerabilities and prevent them in any operating system they maintain, not erroneously adopt an OS as a security crutch.

Re:UNIX as a religion

[No-op]

While I cannot defend myself from being guilty of drunken ranting, I'll point out a few things...

"Linux filesystem arrangements do not mutate any more than FreeBSD systems."

This would be true, except there are way too many distros of linux out there, and people put things in different places. I know there are several good projects out there to make this standardised, but it's still a mess.

If you're a wonky person who puts shit in a weird place (which, btw, sane usage of the ports tree etc will fix) then that's your fate. I find there are more of those wonky people in the linux world than elsewhere. (rasterman? anyone?)

SoftUpdates is a goodness. journalling file systems are a goodness, as well. if I was going to implement something that actually required a journalling file system, REALLY required it, I wouldn't be using a linux box, as I would have additional uptime requirements that generic hardware could not satisfy. This is another one of those dividing lines.

"FreeBSD maintainers and developers do not possess 31337 powers that the mere Linux contributors do not. They're merely a little pickier and cagier about the QA and release process."

FreeBSD maintainers and developers tend to be significantly older and sometimes(!) wiser people. This for whatever reason tends to impart a different view of what is good and what is not. being pickier and cagier about the QA and release process is, in my mind, vital. if you use an OS for real work, it's nice to know the people developing it are intending to use it for the same thing and just like you they don't want things to just randomly break. if this is a turn off for you, then so be it.

"Some people live in the real world, where they don't have the luxury of increasing the expense of their PC"

these people, who I hope you mean to say are using home systems and not anything in a production environment, most certainly should use linux. something nifty like mandrake would work well. it installs on most anything and will support even the crappiest of winmodem/onboardVGA/whatever hardware.

If your intent by that comment was to say that people building production equipment should ignore common sense and use COTS hardware without any regard to uptime and sanity, then you're in no position to criticise anything, are you? :)

"People go to software raid when they can't afford hardware raid and want more reliability than NO raid."

see the above comment. same situation. real raid isn't that costly. if a few hundred bucks are a huge deal for your server project, then WTF are you doing anyway? you may think this is an "Ivory Tower" approach, and I'll be honest- it is. but that's part of what I'm saying- there's a different user base for a reason. if you're not using your hardware and your OS for serious workhorse tasks, then use whatever. my desktop is a win2k box, because i like pretty colors. none of my servers have anything other than consoles, because windowing software really doesn't belong on a server. that's another ivory tower thing, I guess.

"The only thing your post has told me is if you want to be an elitist compusnob, you're little weak in the the reasoning department and wish to mask it by advocating an elitist OS, you have more time to twiddle with your OS (than just plug-in the working product), you have more money to spend for a component FreeBSD supports, and need to replace your religious faith with a OS distribution, give FreeBSD a spin."

I don't want to be an elitist compusnob. I spend a large amount of time volunteering for an inner-city nonprofit teaching kids how to read, spell, and do homework while avoiding the shit their world is full of. they also run all their infrastructure on FreeBSD, and I don't hassle them about it :)

I have absolutely NO TIME to fiddle around with my OS, at all. I wish I did, but I'm not a college kid/teenager/whatever it is that your standard linux user is. that's why I use freebsd- because it just works without me having to worry about having huge security holes, and installing software is a snap. maybe you missed that.

As far as spending more money on hardware- I'll listen to your comments when I stop hearing people bitch about not having good linux support for $400 video cards. that's a crock, and we both know it. those video cards belong in your home pc to play games on and if that's what your UNIX disto is for, then by all means make that your priority.

I think if you and I had a real face to face conversation we'd probably realize we have the same opinions on things, but we're just approaching them from a different angle here. thanks for the great roast, I enjoyed it :)

Re:What Am I waiting for ???

[Zigg]

I like not having programs I use be dependant on some bizarre unknown little library or program that Red Hat or Mandrake saw fit to link to something important.

Those dependencies are still there, actually. One of the most annoying things about compiling from source is that configure scripts have this tendency to pick up pieces of your system you may have because you were testing out this or that or the other thing and decide they can depend on their existence.

Then, you try to remove that program you never use (maybe it's even got a security hole), and instead of the package manager telling you you're broken, you just find out next time you try to run the program that depends on it...

Now, this could be mitigated very well by a very tight set of configure patches and arguments, but finding those out is very difficult and error-prone.

(Requiring Sendmail to run a simple cron daemon? Requiring the installation of Vi?)

Sendmail I can understand, although it really should be a dependency on a MDA of any kind. cron mails non-empty results to the user. If we're still talking about cron, vi would fill an "editor" class, which is needed for crontab -e.