Gentoo Linux Reloaded

All these weird names by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-11 08:38 · Score: 5, Funny

What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?

Re:All these weird names by mickwd · 2002-10-11 11:45 · Score: 5, Funny

Yes, but no-one would by a Linux distribution if it kept going down.
Re:All these weird names by Monkelectric · 2002-10-11 12:30 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

--
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

Defuse by ViceClown · 2002-10-11 08:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 :-)

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Have a Happy.

Re:Defuse by Bishop · 2002-10-11 15:54 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

As with... by ekrout · 2002-10-11 08:39 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538

What am I waiting for? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-10-11 08:43 · Score: 5, Funny

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

I'm waiting for it to finish compiling!

Dependancies by Rick+the+Red · 2002-10-11 08:46 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.

some helpful links by Corporate+Gadfly · 2002-10-11 08:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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. :-)

--
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history

Re:some helpful links by teslatug · 2002-10-11 12:50 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Gentoo by bogie · 2002-10-11 09:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch

Stupid question by scott1853 · 2002-10-11 09:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 by Antipop · 2002-10-11 09:24 · Score: 5, Informative

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 by asteinberg · 2002-10-11 17:22 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now

What I'm waiting for by ivan256 · 2002-10-11 09:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by krogoth · 2002-10-11 12:14 · Score: 5, Informative

"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.

--

They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Re:What I'm waiting for by Shelled · 2002-10-11 13:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

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:Is Gentoo the new Slackware by G27+Radio · 2002-10-11 09:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

I love you! by fire-eyes · 2002-10-11 09:24 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.

Re:download 10 times or more by Tyler+Eaves · 2002-10-11 09:26 · Score: 4, Informative

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

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TODO: Something witty here...

Re:Great... now fix the documentation by drobbins · 2002-10-11 12:03 · Score: 5, Funny

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 :)

--
Daniel Robbins

Re:What am I waiting for? by Zapman · 2002-10-11 12:15 · Score: 5, Interesting

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)

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Zapman

The biggest advantage of Gentoo... by SlickMickTrick · 2002-10-11 12:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

...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:Down Side of Maintaining by swright · 2002-10-11 12:41 · Score: 5, Informative

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:Waiting for a floppy install by MyHair · 2002-10-11 12:56 · Score: 5, Funny

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:Great... now fix the documentation by Mnemia · 2002-10-11 14:07 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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