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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?"
What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?
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
Have a Happy.
As with most groundbreaking papers in academia, Robbins' piece starts off with "Hi there."
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?
I'm waiting for it to finish compiling!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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
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?
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.
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
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." (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.
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:
/mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
2) mount my home directory (though it might be in
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)
Zapman
There are a few....
/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
:)
- 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
- 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..)
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?
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?
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.