Gentoo Reviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Nick Petreley over at LinuxWorld.com gives the uninitiated an excellent view of what the world of Gentoo is like."

Comments

emerge -p first_post

[Anonymous Coward]

[ N] net-www/first_post_0.23

amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Bold Marauder]

looks a LOT like the world of *BSD, only more poorly documented, choatically put together, and under a more restrictive license.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Is is similar to all the other versions of linux ;)?

What makes this one worth trying?

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[HBI]

The docs are just fine for getting the job done. Your grandmother won't be able to use Gentoo, but she shouldn't be, either.

The step by step install docs are easily ten times more understandable than my first install of Slackware back in 1994. I have yet to see any *BSD install docs that rise to that level.

Chaotic? Hardly. Get something like Kportage (there are GNOME manager applications too) and it makes a lot of sense and is easy to throw in new ebuilds which work out of the box, and run well since they are compiled for your arch. It's pretty nice to have multiple versions available of different libraries and applications, which will auto-update based on emerge -u world.

If you hate the GPL that's your own religious issue.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[chriso11]

The other two distributions that are similar to Gentoo would be Linux From Scratch(LFS), and Sorceror Linux (now Lunar Linux, I think). LFS mercifully doesn't require you to design and manufactur a CPU from scratch, but that is about it. Gentoo and Sorceror/Lunar are significantly more advanced, partially due to different priorities the LFS. LFS is designed to be an educational distribution.

As a disclaimer, I don't use LFS or Sorceror/Lunar, so this information is deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[pillohead]

I have yet to see any *BSD install docs that rise to that level.

Have you even seen the freebsd handbook? That's one of FreeBSD's greatest strengths, its solid documentation.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

... work out of the box, and run well since they are compiled for your arch.

Bahaha, and the myth of Gentoo continues.

I've done solid benchmarking that shows relatively no performance improvement by compiling everything yourself (sure, there's a tiny performance boost for the rare application, but it's not noticable). Everyone who has taken the time to run my benchmarks and compare their specially compiled stuff to off the shelf Debian quickly realises that there is no difference. Any difference they noticed is pretty much the placebo effect.

And you seem to hint at more stability because you compiled it yourself? WTF? It's the same code base.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I have yet to see any *BSD install docs that rise to that level.

uh-huh. freebsd.org/docs freebsd.org/handbook

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

The End of FreeBSD

[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]

When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.

Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.

FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.

Discussion

I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.

From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.

There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.

Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.

Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?

Shouts

To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.

To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It'

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[fault0]

I would like FreeBSD, unfortunatly, it has quite a bit more lackluster driver support than Linux does. I'm too addicted to q3 and ut2k3 to give Linux up. I also don't want to fight with software, like wine, to get things to compile flawlessly (which they pretty much always do in Linux, but may not always in FreeBSD, in my experience)

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Sir Joltalot]

Erm, ok, and what precisely would those benchmarks be? Just saying "I've run some benchmarks..." doesn't really say much. I'm sure there are many programs that don't gain a lot from optimisation - find, for example. Since find is largely dependent on the I/O subsystem having it optimised for your arch isn't likely to make two hoots of a difference when it comes to how fast it can find your stuff.

I use Gentoo every day, and have been for over a year now. I definitely noticed a tangible difference when I installed it on my laptop (which, at the time, was a PII 266 - yes I'm patient :) Before I had been running RedHat 7.2, and had been unable to smoothly play DivX files in Xine on the machine, at 320x240 resolution (even when the RPMs for Xine itself were optimised for i686). After installing Gentoo and Xine, (same versions of X and Xine) I was able to play the same files, smooth as butter on a hot summer day.

I have seen a number of other *tangible* performance differences. I'm not saying I doubt that your benchmarks didn't show any differences; I'm just saying that a few benchmarks can't be used to draw the kind of sweeping conclusion you did.

As for stability, I more or less agree, but Gentoo (like most distros) do sometimes have their own custom patches for certain packages, that *could* potentially increase stability. But in general I don't think stability is particularly great in Gentoo; it seems stable to me (I tend to get 100-day or greater uptimes, rebooting only for kernel upgrades, etc. and not due to crashes), just like most other Linux distros I've used.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[AKAImBatman]

> I would like FreeBSD, unfortunatly, it has quite
> a bit more lackluster driver support than Linux
> does.

Will someone please tell me who invented this FUD!? I've been a happy FreeBSD user for a LONG time and I can safely say that hardware support in BSD is far BETTER than Linux. Linux may have drivers for some brand new gizmos faster than BSD, but 90% of those drivers don't even work right in their intial revision.

> I'm too addicted to q3 and ut2k3 to give Linux up.

Then use FreeBSD. The Linux modules work just fine for running video games. Some have argued that games seem faster under FreeBSD.

> I also don't want to fight with software, like
> wine, to get things to compile flawlessly (which
> they pretty much always do in Linux, but may not
> always in FreeBSD, in my experience)

I've rarely met a program that compiles cleanly on Linux OR FreeBSD. You generally have to tweak your system six ways to sunday. FreeBSD gets around this with the ports system. If it's in ports (which most stuff is), a simple "make install" will do all the wizardry needed to make the app work right the first time.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Angry Pixie]

I had to have a friend of mine who introduced me to Linux in the first place explain Gentoo and LFS. I get Gentoo. It sounds cool. But despite wading through the LFS site and reading the book, I'm lost on LFS. Is it that there are many permutations possible for building a minimal Linux system from source and that LFS provides just one method?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding; it just seems to me that if I follow the FHS, load a kernel, initd, and a couple of other things, I will have my own Linux, and it won't be LFS per se. Is that right?

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[swillden]

Everyone who has taken the time to run my benchmarks and compare their specially compiled stuff to off the shelf Debian quickly realises that there is no difference.

What benchmarks? I'd be interested in running them.

IME, you're *mostly* right about the irrelevance of machine-specific optimization. I've found there is significant value in building your own glibc (trivial with Debian) and there may be some value in building XFree86.

Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo

[Xabraxas]

I'd have to disagree. KDE is easily twice as fast on Gentoo as it is on Mandrake. Maybe it isn't as noticeable on faster machines but it definitely is on my 600Mhz laptop. I don't understand why anyone would say that optimization does not make anything faster. If that was true then why not just optimize everything for 386? I seem to recall many people bitching about not having 686 binaries.

Oh great, I just finished tweaking my system...

[ScottGant]

And now another distro comes out to tempt me...back...back I say!

Oh well, I'm treating my home machine with Linux installed as kinda that old car you're trying to cherry out, tinker with, adjusting the carb...things like that.

I don't do this for a living, but hey, it keeps me off the streets.

Re:Oh great, I just finished tweaking my system...

[RLiegh]

If you really feel that way, never EVER visit ibilio.org ... particularly the linux distro area ! :p

Re:Oh great, I just finished tweaking my system...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo makes it easy to tweak your system

Re:Oh great, I just finished tweaking my system...

[RLiegh]

[whine]
The grand parent post made a +5 funny comment about how tempting he found it to play with a new linux distro.

I then made a joke about how he [the grandparent poster] should avoid visting ibiblio; a site that has every linux distribution known to (wo)man.

Hilarity insued.

Or should have; had it not have been for the infamous CSM brigade.
[/whine]

Quick cut'n'paste of the story

[parkanoid]

A new distro in town: Gentoo emerges victorious By Nicholas Petreley Originally published May 16, 2003 Printed from LinuxWorld.com http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2003/0516.p etreley.html Summary The 'meta-distro' Gentoo makes it possible to compile and configure everything on your system exactly the way you like, providing you with more structure and tools to ease the process and automate updates. Do I still like Debian? I absolutely love it. But until further notice, Gentoo is now my flavor of Linux. (1,900 words) Advertisement (LinuxWorld) -- A relatively new distribution called Gentoo Linux is gaining a rapidly increasing, rabidly loyal group of users. The increasing popularity of Gentoo is almost difficult to explain, given that it's clearly a distribution by geeks, for geeks and for nobody but geeks. Obviously a geek can set up a Gentoo system for a non-geek, so you may find novices using Gentoo. You just won't find many novices installing it. To be more precise, Gentoo Linux is not really a distribution but a meta-distribution. You don't usually install pre-compiled binaries when you add software to a Gentoo system. You most often compile and build the binaries yourself, according to your own personal optimization and configuration settings. Gentoo gives you the ability to treat almost the entire system this way, but it also lets the less-patient users start with a basic pre-compiled system. After that, you can build your own higher-level packages on top of that core installation. This may sound a lot like another project called "Linux from scratch," but Gentoo has an important difference in philosophy. While Gentoo Linux makes it possible to compile and configure everything on your system exactly the way you like, it also provides you with more structure and tools to ease the process and automate updates. The heart of Gentoo is its packaging system, Portage. Portage is similar to the BSD Ports system in that it installs software by retrieiving source code and building it on your system, resolving any dependencies as necessary. If any given package is available only in binary form, Portage grabs and installs it that way. Gentoo considers the process one of merging software into your system, so the basic command for installing software is emerge, which is mostly intuitive. If you want to get rid of some software on your system, you use the command emerge unmerge, which isn't entirely intuitive, but it works. Installation If you have any familiarity at all with the process of partitioning hard drives, mounting partitions and basic Unix commands, it isn't all that difficult to install Gentoo if you simply pay careful attention to the instructions. However, the process certainly isn't "easy" when compared to mainstream distributions. You can't just pop in a CD-ROM and answer a few questions; you have to get your hands dirty. Just how dirty depends on the version of Gentoo you are attempting to install, as well as your choice of installation methods. If you want the most-optimized system possible, installation will be a long and tedious process. If you can deal with a generic base system for Gentoo but want to optimize most of the high-level software, it will still be a long and tedious process, but less so. I installed Gentoo Linux 1.4 rc4, which is available for a few different processor types, but the x86 support is only generic x86. Under normal circumstances, Gentoo offers a choice of optimized base systems for a variety of x86 processors so that you don't have to compile everything from scratch to get enhanced performance on Athlon, Pentium 4, or other systems. You can still compile everything from scratch if you like, but installing an optimized base system makes it easier to get a performance boost without as much time and trouble up-front. I chose the quickest installation, which sacrifices a little performance. The basic software on my system is pre-compiled for a generic x86, but most of the rest of the software is optimized according to my preferences. For exam

Re:Quick cut'n'paste of the story

[parkanoid]

Why did this get modded redundant? The two comments with the text made two minutes after this one are modded up. Of course, I do deserve to be smacked for pasting it as a solid block (mozilla acting up).

Re:Quick cut'n'paste of the story

[muzzmac]

People don't like Karma whoring. Post it anonymously next time. A true selfless act. BTW. Don't blame me. I didn't do it.

Re:Quick cut'n'paste of the story

[parkanoid]

I honestly couldn't care less about karma, just posted it because the server felt shaky to me (yes, I do realize that it's linuxworld, but it didn't load very fast for me at least). Ah well, guess I'll have to post as AC or not at all next time.

Re:Quick cut'n'paste of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, let's rebuild nuke

The problem with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

It lacks to the l33t factor. Either you're dealing with people who have no clue what Gentoo is, or you're dealing with people who will know what it is and laugh at you. That's why you have to pick a real distro like... Slackware. That makes your fellow geeks take notice and salute you.

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[jgaynor]

That's why you have to pick a real distro like... Slackware. That makes your fellow geeks take notice and salute you.

Except you wont notice that salute, because youll be too busy looking at man pages. I ran slack for three years - Gentoo is just superior in my opinion. Most software is available through the ports system. Some builds are buggy but get fixed quickly. Dependency checking is no longer a headache and all software installs in a "locked down" but still usable configuration. The forced optimization via clean compile during install breathes new life into old hardware as long as you get your hardware flags right. The support forums are great and full of pretty damn knowledgable people. I love this distro and wouldn't go back to slack.

I realize Im biting at a troll - but hey Its Saturday . . .

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[tzanger]

The only time I've had trouble with Slack was at the very beginning... Mind you my beginning with Linux was back in '95.

The only other distro which has made me stand up and take notice has been SuSE; it's almost a totally different Linux than Slack -- built for the corporate environment -- but between setting up SuSE for people who don't want to know the nitty-gritty and then using Slack for myself to keep my edge (well and LFS for my CompactFlash firewalls), the rest of the distros can go to hell; they're either a less featureful version of SuSE or a gone-too-far vesion of Slack. :-)

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[Rooktoven]

Not that I mind using man pages, but I haven't been _too_ busy using them. Why would I for *installs anyhow? That's why one reads README and INSTALL and does ./configure --help. This goes for _any_ linux system where one compiles, unless you want someone to do it for you.

Quite frankly, Slack packages usually install flawlessly and almost always very quickly. I'm willing to sacrifice a small percentage of speed for the convenience of getting my software (even the stuff I compile) installed quickly. I don't want to wait a day or two to try something.

Slackware is aptly named; it's for people who want things to work simply and without a lot of effort. I've tried Gentoo and though some features are impressive, it tries my patience. I for one am sticking with Slack on my home box _and_ my servers at work.

Your mileage may vary of course, just pointing out that Slack doesn't require a bigger investment of time (far less in fact) than Gentoo.

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[Q2Serpent]

Slackware is aptly named; it's for people who want things to work simply and without a lot of effort.

Ok, I must be missing something. Every so often I read something like this, and I think, "I'll give Slackware another try, maybe in this new version things work better".

What am I missing? I can't install things easily at all - I have the same stupid problem that I've always had - you want to install package X? You better go download packages Y and Z. Oh, but Z depends on A and B. You have B, but it's not new enough. Can you upgrade it? Maybe. What if C depends on the old B? How do you know? Do you upgrade B or install the newer one along side of the old one?

Confused? So was I, so I never get very far with Slackware. I hated RPM-based distros for this game too, until I found urpmi for Mandrake. Yeah, it comes with it, and it's like apt-get for RPMS. I would have used Debian because it handles all of this too, but I was already used to RPMs and Mandrake, and once I found urpmi, I was set.

What is so appealing about Slackware? Maybe it makes a good server distribution where you keep track of everything you install, and you never install much, so you don't need to worry about this. I just never understood it.

Using Slackware, to me, is like having to think about salivating before you eat, so the food doesn't stick in your throat. Who wants to micro-manage things like that unless it's a mission critical server? (Which may be the only place Slackware makes sense...).

Does anyone have an answer to this?

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[Ed Avis]

Slackware is aptly named;

What, they have apt for Slackware packages now? And you used it to install named?

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[Cro Magnon]

I agree that Slackware's manual package management can be cumbersome, but I've also found it to be very reliable. I've had trouble on several occasions with Debian apt-breaking my system. I only broke Slack once, and it was easy to fix because I knew EXACTLY what broke it. I've never tried Gentoo, but I suspect that it would have similar problems.

Re:The problem with Gentoo

[Ghengis]

If you wanna be 1337, use LFS, otherwise, quit being a lame poser.

And I have the cojones to put my NAME on this one... not some AC crap!

I LOVE Postgresql!

[FUCKING FAG]

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

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Re:I LOVE Postgresql!

[the_real_tigga]

o yeah? which one?

Text incase of Slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

A new distro in town: Gentoo emerges victorious
Nick Petreley sans Debian may seem like cereal without the milk, but Gentoo is the new kid on his box
May 16, 2003

Summary
The 'meta-distro' Gentoo makes it possible to compile and configure everything on your system exactly the way you like, providing you with more structure and tools to ease the process and automate updates. Do I still like Debian? I absolutely love it. But until further notice, Gentoo is now my flavor of Linux. (1,900 words)

By Nicholas Petreley
Page 1 of 3 Advertisement

(LinuxWorld) -- A relatively new distribution called Gentoo Linux is gaining a rapidly increasing, rabidly loyal group of users. The increasing popularity of Gentoo is almost difficult to explain, given that it's clearly a distribution by geeks, for geeks and for nobody but geeks. Obviously a geek can set up a Gentoo system for a non-geek, so you may find novices using Gentoo. You just won't find many novices installing it.

To be more precise, Gentoo Linux is not really a distribution but a meta-distribution. You don't usually install pre-compiled binaries when you add software to a Gentoo system. You most often compile and build the binaries yourself, according to your own personal optimization and configuration settings. Gentoo gives you the ability to treat almost the entire system this way, but it also lets the less-patient users start with a basic pre-compiled system. After that, you can build your own higher-level packages on top of that core installation.

This may sound a lot like another project called "Linux from scratch," but Gentoo has an important difference in philosophy. While Gentoo Linux makes it possible to compile and configure everything on your system exactly the way you like, it also provides you with more structure and tools to ease the process and automate updates.

The heart of Gentoo is its packaging system, Portage. Portage is similar to the BSD Ports system in that it installs software by retrieiving source code and building it on your system, resolving any dependencies as necessary. If any given package is available only in binary form, Portage grabs and installs it that way.

Gentoo considers the process one of merging software into your system, so the basic command for installing software is emerge, which is mostly intuitive. If you want to get rid of some software on your system, you use the command emerge unmerge, which isn't entirely intuitive, but it works.

Installation
If you have any familiarity at all with the process of partitioning hard drives, mounting partitions and basic Unix commands, it isn't all that difficult to install Gentoo if you simply pay careful attention to the instructions. However, the process certainly isn't "easy" when compared to mainstream distributions. You can't just pop in a CD-ROM and answer a few questions; you have to get your hands dirty. Just how dirty depends on the version of Gentoo you are attempting to install, as well as your choice of installation methods. If you want the most-optimized system possible, installation will be a long and tedious process. If you can deal with a generic base system for Gentoo but want to optimize most of the high-level software, it will still be a long and tedious process, but less so.

I installed Gentoo Linux 1.4 rc4, which is available for a few different processor types, but the x86 support is only generic x86. Under normal circumstances, Gentoo offers a choice of optimized base systems for a variety of x86 processors so that you don't have to compile everything from scratch to get enhanced performance on Athlon, Pentium 4, or other systems. You can still compile everything from scratch if you like, but installing an optimized base system makes it easier to get a performance boost without as much time and trouble up-front.

I chose the quickest installation, which sacrifices a little performance. The basic software on my system is pre-compiled for a generic x86, but most of the rest of the sof

Re:Text incase of Slashdotting

[bsharitt]

You whore! Well karma whore at least. I don't think LinuxWorld will get Slashdotted.

Re:Text incase of Slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

I posted as an AC. How can I be karma whoring?

Re:Text incase of Slashdotting

[timmyf2371]

With all due respect, how can an AC be classified as a karma whore? (please note I wasn't the OP).

My experiences with Gentoo

[revmoo]

I've taken the plunge in the last week or so, and totally switched my system over to linux.

I decided to go with gentoo, since one of the things that always annoyed me abour slackware(my second favorite distro) was the package management(or lack thereof), and just the overall annoying process of having to compile dependant packages by hand for every piece of software.

The install process was grueling to say the least, it took me forever to get the kernel compiled properly(gentoo is rather picky about kernels), but once I got the system installed, and waited for kde to emerge, I was impressed to see that things "just worked". When I want a new program all I have to do is 'emerge program', and it is installed, no having to deal with dependancies or lenghty configuration processes

In other words, the install takes forever, and does demand a fair bit of linux knowledge, but the process IS worth it, once you are finished. I find Gentoo to be quite user-friendly(though it may be picky who it's friends are :)), and I would definitly reccomend it to friends.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[gilesjuk]

Same here, I've tried all the popular distros and Gentoo seems to just work. The compiler setup is great and compiles most things better than other distros I've tried. Debian is the only other distro I can tolerate using, but that has some minor compiler setup quirks sometimes (mainly location of some includes, symlinks fix that).

The only downside with Gentoo is if you lose your system partition it takes ages to get the system going again.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[drinkypoo]

Since when does it take quite a bit of linux knowledge? The only "hard" part is compiling a kernel. Everything else is outlined quite well in the install documentation; Just do what they tell you and you'll be fine.

Hell, they even provide nano as your default editor (yecch) so you don't even have to know how to use vi in spite of the fact that there is no automated installer. (There should be, though. There's no reason why not.)

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[chriso11]

You know, even though Gentoo is supposed to be a "geek" distribution, it does make a lot of things easier.

For example, I could never compile my own kernel under SuSE. For some reason, I could never get it right. All I would get is a near-endless stream of agony out of the boot console, then the whole thing dying in a kernel panic. Not so in Gentoo. Gentoo makes it easy to get a new kernel going, and to try out different versions. When I want to use my Archos Jukebox - hey make sure you compile in IDS-200 support.

However, I must stress Gentoo is not for everyone. Not everyone has time/interest in getting such a distribution going. But you certainly learn a lot more about what is going on in a linux machine.

My boss always says "using a pc is like going to a movie to look at the projector". I guess that is why he uses a Mac...

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Majix]

When I want a new program all I have to do is 'emerge program', and it is installed, no having to deal with dependancies or lenghty configuration processes

And how is this different from Red Hat or Debian when using apt? With apt for rpm or deb you don't have to spend a day compiling OpenOffice or Mozilla. And don't get me started on customized compilations... the performance increase is usually neglible, but you will never recover the time you spent compiling the software.

You also end up with whatever crappy defaults the project maintainers have chosen, BigRedCursor theme in Xfree86 4.3 anyone? Gentoo also has no configuration tools of it's own, just because I've used and mastered samba and iptables for years doesn't mean I want to go editing files or writing complicated rules when my distro can (gasp) do it for me, meanwhile I can hopefully get some real work done.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what I have to do in order to install Redhat 9:

1) Pick a time zone
2) Switch CD's
3) Format the drive

The end. And there's an automated installer. As I see it, that's zero "hard" parts, as opposed to reading through the Grand Book of Documentation and Compiler Flags(tm) installing Gentoo.

Fuck you and the install documentation. Even Slackware is easier to get running.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[gilesjuk]

I can't see how it makes it easier other than unpacking the code for you. But in the next release there will be some kind of script or tool to aid kernel configuration and installation.

I've read of problems people have with compiling kernels on the Gentoo forums, I used to hang out there helping people a little a while back. There does appear to be a lot of less experienced users giving it a try despite it being aimed at more experienced Linux users.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[chriso11]

I am still quite the n00b at Gentoo, but there are some things I do know. SuSE uses an initrd and some other features in the kernel, so the bzImage wouldn't just boot for me.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

iptables and samba? dude, what a lame excuse for config tools :-))

for iptables get something like fwbuilder and stop bitching - the generated rules usually suck anyway (for rh especially, no flexibility there).

and samba??? why would you edit config files? samba-swat, or even webmin will do just fine - and with webmin you're quite off the 'edit-configs' hook for most stuff.

get an education first, get gentoo after that :-D

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[the_real_tigga]

For example, I could never compile my own kernel under SuSE. For some reason, I could never get it right. All I would get is a near-endless stream of agony out of the boot console, then the whole thing dying in a kernel panic. Not so in Gentoo. Gentoo makes it easy to get a new kernel going, and to try out different versions.

I don't see how a distribution can alter the success or failure of kernel compiles. Either you compile in everything you need, or the thing panics. I doubt SuSE ships glibc or gcc versions which break kernels (RedHat did for a while, but worked around).

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[EdgarSparingly]

The answer is, that gentoo does all of the package management in a very smooth way.

I've used debian and apt, and even *shudder* apt for rpm, but both have quite extensive flaws in the depency trees sometimes, that require a lot of re-jigging to master, and that's without moving into unstable.

I don't mind compiling the software, the performance is a better, although more noticeably in some apps than others (e.g. mozilla). Gentoo allows me to compile all the latest software without having to download different versions of different libraries from all over the place to find out on of them won't compile etc...

It's sleek, it's high performance, and it works...

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[the_real_tigga]

I agree the benefits from optimized compiles are mostly negligible.
The performance benefit comes from the linked libraries.

Binary distributions have to link everything and the kitchen sink (sorry for stressing that old quip again) into their packages in order to satisfy a boad customer spectrum.

Compiling from source keeps that configurable, and with gentoo's system it even becomes automated.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[inkedmn]

You know, even though Gentoo is supposed to be a "geek" distribution, it does make a lot of things easier.

i think this is the case with most of the "uber1337" distros (deb, gentoo - slack being the exception). a pain in the ass to get going (compared to RH, Mandrake, ), but once it's up and running, maintaining packages, etc. is a piece of cake. Granted, a Microsoft-esque installer is great and everything, but I'd much rather have an iffy, somewhat-cryptic installer and a beautiful package system than vice-versa.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call the performance increase neglible, I noticed vast speed improvements after switching to Gentoo.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[PyromanFO]

Granted, a Microsoft-esque installer is great and everything, but I'd much rather have an iffy, somewhat-cryptic installer and a beautiful package system than vice-versa.

But its not an either or proposition. Having excellent package management, which I hear emerge is, is no excuse for having a cryptic installer.

Another topic altogether though, is the thing that got me, the person in the article actually stated, "if you have three days a week to dedicate to Gentoo, its the best" or something along those lines. Who has three days a week to dedicate to installing software? Dont you want to get something done at some point? Thats why I cant accept primarily source based distributions, I like to spend my time actually doing things. The one time I tried Gentoo, which I admit was about 1.2, it took 2 days to compile KDE and Mozilla. What kind of performance difference would make up for the fact it took 2 days to compile? How long would you have to use that box, untouched without upgrading anything, to get those 2 days back?

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[ignorant_newbie]

> How long would you have to use that box, untouched
> without upgrading anything, to get those 2 days back?

it's a preference thing. Since the compilation (generally) just finishes it's self in the background (and if it doesn't, it's generally my fault for using insanely aggressive compilation flags) you don't really use that time - just start emerge kde before you go to bed - when you get back from work it'll prolly be done.

also - you shoudn't underestimate some of the optomizations, such as -fpmath=sse - which uses sse for all the floating point math on the system, instead of the ancient, slow, x387 instructions. with my opmizations, I laugh at people who call kde slow

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[hendridm]

> You know, even though Gentoo is supposed to be a "geek" distribution, it does make a lot of things easier.

Yeah, some things might be easier at the expense of other things being a total, horrible, mind-numbing pain-in-the-ass.

Perhaps I'm alone, but I wanted to try it. I usually give all the new distros a try. I'm no Linux genuis though (why should I have to be?)...

I downloaded the 1.4rc3 (I think?) ISO and tried to boot from the CD. The damn thing wouldn't get past the inital boot process and froze. I decided to go with 1.2 ISO, and everything went pretty smoothly. I consolidated the installation instructions to 4 pages of notes in Word and followed them step by step. I went through the instructions and eventually rebooted my system, only to find it couldn't find a bootable volume on drive C:. I'm pretty sure I marked it bootable, but I wasn't about to go through the pain-staking process all over again (which took forever to compile, even on my 2.5GHz Intel/RAID 0/512MB), so I just said to hell with it.

Why?!

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Spolster]

Another topic altogether though, is the thing that got me, the person in the article actually stated, "if you have three days a week to dedicate to Gentoo, its the best" or something along those lines.

The exact quote is "If you have three days to a week to devote to Gentoo", The author was referring to the initial setup time, rather than the ongoing maintenance time required.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Rooktoven]

The implication there is that Slackware is difficult to get running. I don't agree with that. The ascii setup is more straight forward than most GUIs. The only non-intuitive part is the fdisk--which even when dressed nicely ala Mandrake and the late Caldera can be hazardous or at least inconvenient/impractical for the computer novice. (Even a windows fdisk can fsck things for the newbie.)

Slackware like most other distros ha a general setup and a granular method. OK, off my OT soapbox.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[A Naughty Moose]

While it can take 2 to 3 days (or more for a slow computer) to install Gentoo, do you really lose 2 or 3 days of your life? Seriously, do you just sit in front of the computer and watch the screen as the compiler messages goe by? When I install Gentoo, I start the process, go do something else, check on it to see if it needs my attention every once in a while and get on with my life. I don't feel that I've lost 2 days.

Upgrading major packages like KDE also is in the "No time lost" category. Even if it takes a week to compile KDE, you can still use the computer. Heck you can still use KDE. I've done, and again I don't feel like I've lost any time over it.

It is just a matter of perception, but people who try Gentoo already have a good idea of how long it is going take to install, and they're willing to give it a try anyway. Those that continue using it have decieded that the benifiets of Gentoo outway the compilation times.

And, as an afterthought. If you use a binary based distribution, you are still waiting on the compile time, it is just a hidden quantity, generally paid for only once per upgrade (of any given package) cycle.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well... the version you had problems with first WAS a Release CANDIDATE.

It's not a distribution for "everyman" yet. It's a GREAT way to learn the HOW and WHY of making Linux work for people that are interested in learning nuts-and-bolts though.

If you're not interested in being a "Linux Genius" there's always Mandrake or SuSE, both of which have gotten ease of installation down to a science.

The right tool for the right job...Not cutting you down, just suggesting a better alternative if you're really not interested in Gentoo.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Corbin Dallas]

Just a FYI:

You could have stuck your 1.2 CD back in the drive, gotten to a prompt, and then run fdisk to make the partition bootable without deleting everything. 5 minutes tops.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Unregistered]

using a pc is like going to a movie to look at the projector

My dad does that

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Zapman]

Reguarding performance, there is a difference. Anything CPU intensive (and especially math intensive) is going to get a nice boost. LAME went from 2x encode to 4-5x encode by recompiling after playing with compiler settings (from defaults to using -march, -mcpu, -pipe, -fomit-frame-pointer, and a few others)

And reguarding 'whatever crappy defaults', that's also a yes and a no. I for one hate the fact that MTR will link to GTK if it finds it. It should forever be a command line app. So I can easily do this:

USE="-gnome -gtk" emerge mtr

Now, as for configuration defaults, gentoo tends to take whatever the source code comes with (for example, no bluecurve).

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Vilim]

My god, you just described my exact experiance, right down to the picky kernel, and the fact that Slack is my second favorite distro. :p I have only been using gentoo for like a month however I am already in love. I did a stage 1 install from Slackware, I actually devised doing it from slack independantly and figured out other people did it like that later :p. Anyways I almost gave up quite a few times, however I pushed through and now Linux makes alot more sense to me. :)

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[PyromanFO]

While it can take 2 to 3 days (or more for a slow computer) to install Gentoo, do you really lose 2 or 3 days of your life? Seriously, do you just sit in front of the computer and watch the screen as the compiler messages goe by? When I install Gentoo, I start the process, go do something else, check on it to see if it needs my attention every once in a while and get on with my life. I don't feel that I've lost 2 days.

I didn't mean that, I meant that Ive lost 2 days of using my computer. I could have used those two days on a binary distro actually getting work done, instead of waiting for KDE/Gnome/Mozilla to compile so that I can use a graphical web browser.

And, as an afterthought. If you use a binary based distribution, you are still waiting on the compile time, it is just a hidden quantity, generally paid for only once per upgrade (of any given package) cycle.

Yes, but I dont have to pay it with my machine, it is only paid on one computer, not on every computer running the distro. Also, the first time I install the distro I dont have to pay the price on my machine to get a useable system, someone else already has, I can just start running.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[PurpleFloyd]

RPM (in its standard form) and apt have the same problem: moronic package maintainers. I can't tell you the number of times I've torn my hair out because some idiot has said their package is dependant on version=X when they should have said dependant on version>=X. While Redhat's default packages are decent in this respect, user-created RPMs and a lot of debs have this problem; it ends up having apps require two different versions of the same library, even though I can modify the packages' dependencies and make them both coexist happily.

This should never happen. I cannot stress this point enough. The version=X dependancy should be a special case that is almost never used. Instead, it's rampant throughout the Debian tree and far too many user-created RPMs.

While I haven't installed Gentoo or used it extensively, getting rid of these dependencies means absolute bliss to me (a cutting-edge desktop user; my servers tend to run Debian stable, where these problems aren't so bad as there's only one version of most libraries and programs that users can be expected to run anyway).

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[PyromanFO]

it's a preference thing. Since the compilation (generally) just finishes it's self in the background (and if it doesn't, it's generally my fault for using insanely aggressive compilation flags) you don't really use that time - just start emerge kde before you go to bed - when you get back from work it'll prolly be done.

If you want to do that, thats fine, but I dont want to plan my day around the installation of my OS. What if something goes wrong and my disk gets corrupted? Itll take X hours to get my system useable again, and it may not be a time of day where that is convenient. Also, if this is a work box, that may not even be an option. Mandrake takes 30 mins to install, and its fully useable, for example. Debian takes less. My schedule isnt to the point where I can let my computer sit for a day or more.

also - you shoudn't underestimate some of the optomizations, such as -fpmath=sse - which uses sse for all the floating point math on the system, instead of the ancient, slow, x387 instructions. with my opmizations, I laugh at people who call kde slow

I would like to see some benchmarks on this, not that I dont believe you Id just like to see some numbers (response time, system load, ect). When I tried it around Gentoo 1.2, I couldn't notice a difference in KDE on the RedHat box and on Gentoo running on a similarly configured machine, though admittedly I didnt do alot of research learning just the right gcc options to get it perfect.

Also, how much time did it take you to learn all of your optimizations you use? Do they work on all apps? Do you use different optimizations for different apps?

I guess what Im getting to is, how much work did you do to get your system to the point its in, and how much more optimized is it than an average binary distro? Its like you said, its a preference thing, I just want to know where Gentoo lies on the effort/reward scale.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Nothinman]

Even if SuSe uses an initrd on their kernels that doesn't mean you have to with your custom ones. Almost every distro uses an initrd by default now so that everything can be a module and loaded only if necessary, but that doesn't affect what you do after the install is complete.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Nothinman]

The only thing I might consider a flaw in apt's depdency handling is the fact that it doesn't honor packages in Recommends or Suggests, it only installs packages in Depends. But I think this is being changed and I usually use dselect anyway, which handles Recommends and Suggests just fine.

And if I ever got the urge to compile something, heaven forbid, I can just use apt-build.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[tigga]

Hell, they even provide nano as your default editor (yecch) so you don't even have to know how to use vi

That's exactly is a bad thing - why I have to learn nano if I already know vi?

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Slime-dogg]

It makes things easier with the tools, as well as the merge scripts. If you merge something on a Gentoo machine, you can be sure that the emerge program will recursively check the dependancies, compile them, install them to a set location, compile the program you want to install, and install that to a set location. Afterwards, two config files are usually put into /etc, one is the default, the other is the one that you modify. This way, even if you completely botch a program with how you've configured it, you can just remove the conf file and the program will run.

Other good things are the java-config utility, which lets you set the system and user JVMs on the fly. opengl-config (or is it -update) lets you specify which GL version that you're gonna be running. etc-update is pretty "eh," as the reviewer states, I would've designed it with curses to make the menu a bit cleaner.

The best thing about Gentoo is the way that it installs to set paths, like a tyical distro. You can be sure that if you emerge OpenOffice, for instance, that OO menu items will show up in KDE and Gnome. There's a reasonable structure to everything too. If you run into a bad version, you can just unmerge that version, and Gentoo will put the old version back into place without harming anything (if you set it to keep packages around after compile, it'll do this without recompiling.) Also, about the desktops, I like how Gentoo hasn't fucked with any of them. I like seeing the original version of KDE and Gnome, and not any integrated / special system type of crap.

I like how clean the configuration is too. They've got it set up pretty simply, and if you're not afraid of a CLI, you can configure to your heart's content. Configuring X was a breeze, and I only used the text X configurator to generate a template XF86Config, and then edited it to suit my system. If you check out /etc/make.conf, you'll see a nice area to put your machine-specific USE flags too.

The portage tree is pretty useful too. You can surf through it and look for packages to install... you know that they're all going to be free in some way (as in beer, or GPL). They've got ebuilds for most commercial game executables, so that you can have a specific Quake 3 compiled for your box, and not have to rely on a vanilla compile that comes with the game.

emerge -up world
emerge -u world

Is quite possibly the easiest way to update your system, EVER. You don't have to register your machine, you don't have to log on to a "special" network, or any crap like that. The merge system uses RSync, which is cool because it minimizes the actual amount of stuff you have to download, and it also does checksums on all tar.gz files that are being merged.

I'll tell ya, though... You start to get used to nano after a while, and then you're hitting "-O" in emacs, and it isn't doing what you intended.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Sevn]

the performance increase is usually neglible

Depends if a 20 percent increase in performance is
what you consider negligable. That's what I easily
see over a typical debian install. I can tell you
really love debian a lot. That's great. But it would
help if you actually tried Gentoo first before
spewing forth half-truths. I've used both, and
prefer FreeBSD over both of them. It just so happens
I had a set requirement for Linux, and couldn't
use FreeBSD for a contract, so I tried out Gentoo
instead of deb and ian's concoction for once.
I'm completely sold. I'm hoping some of the
neato options from portage make it into BSD
ports.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Majix]

I have tried Gentoo, in fact I have a very powerful machine dedicated solely to playing with it. It's a neat system, but the optimizations ARE in my opinion completely negligable. The reason you are probably seeing an increase when going from Debian to Gentoo is that everything is compiled with GCC 3.2 in Gentoo while the base Debian system is still using GCC 2.X. That's your 20% speed increase right there for most C++ programs.

Trust me, or better yet, try it yourself, going from a modern distro like for example Red Hat 9 to Gentoo gives virtually no speed benefits.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Daniel Phillips]

In other words, the install takes forever, and does demand a fair bit of linux knowledge, but the process IS worth it, once you are finished.

Like many developers, I've considered switching from Debian Sid to Gentoo, because of Gentoo's reputation for being an up-to-the-minute distro that also has a good stability and is highly configurable. Though Debian has great strengths, particularly the massive number of maintainers that take their work so seriously, and a huge, detailed policy structure, it also has its limitations, such as no downgrades, breakage in important packages that sometimes lasts for months, and sometimes being a long way behind current development, KDE3 being an example of that.

Supposedly, Gentoo doesn't have the above problems. The only drawback of Gentoo I've heard about is the long initial compile. On a fast machine, it may not be that bad, but in the long run, something could be done about it. For example, certain common configurations could be pre-compiled and cached on a server that acts like a database, so some large chunks of code wouldn't have to be compiled for every install (much like Compiler Cache). Well, I'm sure the Gentoo guys have thought of that.

Another thing that could be done, and this would require some pretty serious gcc hacking, would be to compile the source into an intermediate form, something like java bytecode, or a tokenized version of the intermediate format gcc already uses, that is, RTL. The final code generation would happen on the installation target, so the intermediate binary would be cross-platform. RTL might not work for this because of processor specific features and other problems (I haven't yet looked at it closely enough to know for sure) so ideally, you'd design a new intermediate form that's ideally suited to the problem, optimized both for accurate representation of the partly-compiled code, and for quick code generation.

Needless to say, this would be a massive amount of work, but it would also be a legendary hack.

Regardless of the above, I think I'll install Gentoo on the next machine that comes in here.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Bert64]

The performance difference for one or two programs may be negligible, especially compiling something optimized on a distribution where most of your libs are not particularly optimized provides very little effect... But consider how much code the average machine will be running through every second, a few cycles saved here and then will soon add up.
Sure, i didnt like the default cursor theme they used for XFree, and it didnt work very well with my displaycard.. so i submitted it as a bug and it got reset to the old defaults, but defaults are just that... there to be changed, and you get default settings with any precompiled distribution too.
The difference, is that while precompiled distro`s compile things with all options enabled, to satisfy as many potential customers as possible... gentoo lets you choose wether you want some features or not. Compare that with the crazy list of dependencies redhat will make you install, most of which are optional at compiletime... think of lynx or wget with SSL support.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Bert64]

Theyre negligible in a single app, IE if you take your debian system and compile a program with aggressive optimization flags you`l get *some* benefit in the program, but you`l still be linked against the unoptimized libs, and most programs spend a lot of their time executing library routines. This is why most binary distributions provide multiple versions of glibc compiled for different processors.
However, when you consider just how much code an average system will be executing at any given time, if you save a few cycles in each routine they soon add up.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Jonner]

You also don't have to reboot anything to build a new Gentoo system. You just need some functional GNU/Linux system. The install process is all inside a chroot environment, so the external environment could be anything: a previous Gentoo install, a Debian system, a Redhat system, etc. Who knows, it might even work from a BSD. The install from scratch does take a while, but it doesn't have to interrupt your use of an already functional system, as long as you have space for both. I've installed Gentoo a couple of times, but only booted from the CD the first.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Daniel Phillips]

Anything CPU intensive (and especially math intensive) is going to get a nice boost. LAME went from 2x encode to 4-5x encode by recompiling after playing with compiler settings (from defaults to using -march, -mcpu, -pipe, -fomit-frame-pointer, and a few others)

-pipe won't affect run speed, it affects only how the compiler communicates between passes internally.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

wget is 170KB on RH9, the OpenSSL libs are about a megabyte. It would be silly not to have that dependency, just imagine how confusing it would be for users if wget suddenly didn't work with a bunch of servers because they are secured. If you are doing a reverse suck of some web site and none of the https links are fetched, that's a bug in the eyes of the users and no explanations about how this "optional" feature bloats the binary by 50KB is going to be accepted.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[gilesjuk]

I don't use nano, vi is so much faster to use when you get used to it. Plus nano always makes me think of Mork and Mindy "nanooo nanooo" :)

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Slime-dogg]

VI isn't available with the install cd. You're only choice is nano.

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[gilesjuk]

Yup, so I have to suffer it when doing installs. But as soon as the system is going it's back to VI (or VIM to be precise).

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[KermitJunior]

But you CAN get stuff done. For instance, I first emerge Xfree and icewm with "-qt -gnome -kde" and it only takes a few hours, during which time I have lynx at my disposal, nano or vi (short compiles). Once Ice is up, I emerge phoenix-bin for the binary and I have a fully functioning GUI with web. And 2 days of USING your computer, I'm assuming that means you never sleep, you don't work, and you just sit there. I tend let it do the nasty compiling in the background of my LIFE. And it's still functional. As far as paying prices... um... oh yeah GRP. Full binary install, set your flag, nice -10 recompile in the back ground while still working with what you need. B/R, KJ

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Xabraxas]

To be fair you don't really have to learn nano. It's more intuitive than any other CLI based editor. I'm not going to say it's better than vi or emacs because I know that would upset some of the zealots out there, but nano really is simple. Besides, that's like saying, "I already know Windows so why should I have to learn Linux".

Re:My experiences with Gentoo

[Xabraxas]

Not true. I did exactly that. I went from Redhat 9 to Gentoo and Gentoo is considerabley faster. I said this earlier in the thread but I really think it makes more of a difference on slower machines. I have a 600Mhz laptop and the speed increase was definitely noticeable. This is not to mention the startup time which is minimized with Gentoo. I have nothing against any of the other distros but I like Gentoo for a few reasons and one of them is that my machine runs much faster than it did with Redhat 9.

I loved Gentoo

[A Proud American]

Granted, I can't tinker with Linux at work anymore (based on NDA/contract stuff), but I really enjoyed the opportunity to truly learn Linux with Gentoo rather than have my hand held like Mandrake does.

If you're going to spend the time and effort to deal with Linux and try to learn it, you might as well go all-out rather than just learning how to install it.

I personally recommend Debian or Gentoo if you want to learn more about operating systems, and I recommended Mandrake if you just want to use Linux (for price reasons or philosophical reasons).

Gentoo is great, but make sure it's the right flavor of Linux for you. I miss Gentoo some days when I'm stuck in Windows with another blue screen.

Linux is just plain fun. Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done, but it's an amazing teaching tool if you want to truly learn computers.

Linux is great.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[primus_sucks]

Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done

So what kind of work are you doing that you can't get done in Linux? Trying to find security holes in the OS or something?

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Surak]

Granted, I can't tinker with Linux at work anymore (based on NDA/contract stuff), but I really enjoyed the opportunity to truly learn Linux with Gentoo rather than have my hand held like Mandrake does.

I agree. I was a former Mandrake user, and my first distro was Slackware, and even then I can tell you, Gentoo makes you learn everything... maybe not quite as much as LFS, but then again, installign Gentoo is actually not unlike installing LFS. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that Daniel Robbins based the whole project on LFS.

Linux is just plain fun. Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done, but it's an amazing teaching tool if you want to truly learn computers.

Yeah, I personally use two boxes -- one for tickering with Gentoo and one for production work on Gentoo. So that way I can do some good integration testing before going live with it. Using this system as worked out great for me, especially since the hardware is cheap enough.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when does being easy to use make a distro un-linux. You can learn everything in mandrake that you can in gentoo. Just because it forces you to learn instead of you using your own curiosity doesn't make gentoo more LINUX than mandrake. I'm sick and tired of the harder to use so it's better crowd. I use mandrake because in 25 minutes i had a completely usable system with everything a workstation could want installed and working and theres nothing gentoo can do that mandrake cannot. The 0.0023 miliseconds you save when loading a program compiled specifically for your hardware (can be done with mandrake as well) does not make up for the days, sometimes even weeks you spent building the system.

you said "I personally recommend Debian or Gentoo if you want to learn more about operating systems, and I recommended Mandrake if you just want to use Linux (for price reasons or philosophical reasons)."

I say, I personally recommend ANY linux distrobution you feel comfortable using and a healthy curiosity if you want to learn about operatings systems and ANY distro to match your skill level if you just want to use linux.

lets recap: mandrake is linux, gentoo is linux. Both can compile programs specific to a certain hardware. Being forced to learn is not better than being curious. Installing linux is not a test of pain, it does not make you better, nor smarter to have spent more time doing it.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tinker with Linux at work anymore

So use FreeBSD.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[tzanger]

How the hell did you learn anything with gentoo other than running emerge and looking at the forums for answers? If you want to learn a distro, use LFS or Slackware; the actual quantity of what you learn with Gentoo is not exactly all that great.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny because it's true!!!

Re:I loved Gentoo

[John Hurliman]

Linux is just plain fun. Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done, but it's an amazing teaching tool if you want to truly learn computers.

I only run Linux on my computer at home and I get things done at least as quickly/efficiently as with Windows. There's just a fairly steep learning curve if you are new to computers, and it's designed for programmers not end-users (not yet, at least).

As far as Gentoo goes, it's my favorite distribution by far. I use it on all my low-end servers for optimized performance, but my home computer runs Mandrake 9.1 because it installed without fuss and came with programs I would never dream of compiling (Gnome and all it's extensions and tools, OpenOffice, KDE libs, the countless random desktop tools I use).

Re:I loved Gentoo

[the_real_tigga]

for a glggle, look here

Re:I loved Gentoo

[timmyf2371]

Linux is just plain fun. Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done, but it's an amazing teaching tool if you want to truly learn computers.

Not too sure how you come to this conclusion, unless its specifically related to your line of work.

I personally use a Linux distro on my home computer, and the computer I use for business - I get a lot of work done. Through Crossover I successfully use MS Word (I prefer it over OpenOffice) and it's a great platform for manipulating our internal/external databases and also our order processing.

IN the end, an operating system be it Windows, Linux or Mac, etc etc is simply the platform. The tools available for said platform define your productivity (to an extent).

Tim

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

What are you basing that on? I taught an informal internal training course based solely on the Gentoo install docs. To novices.

I suppose Slack has improved, but it wasn't workable for that purpose when I tried it a couple years ago. LFS might be more nuts-and-bolts for learning, but that's not really what I was looking for.

I personally have learned a LOT more from Gentoo regarding system configuration, compiler optimizations, etc, than I EVER did from the distributions I used previously.

Re:I loved Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Surak,

Hi! I noticed that you just responded to "A Proud American" - otherwise known as ekrout. Tickle me pink, but I thought you hated ekrout?

Quit trolling yourself!!! U are so transparent. I am 100% positive you are ekrout. Milk.

3 days to a week to compile?

[Surak]

I've been a happy Gentoo User for almost a year now, and I can tell you that on my machine 2-3 days is a more accurate time estimate. I just totally rebuilt my machine from scratch a couple of days ago and it took me about 3 days working on it part time to get it going. If I had more time to devote to it, I could have got it up and running in 1-2 days.

One thing Pietrely (sp?) misses though: you need a high speed Internet connection to use Gentoo. If you're on dialup, Gentoo is gonna take a llllooonng time to complete the installation because, unless you're starting from a precompiled base system (GRP), you pretty much have to download everything -- from the kernel, GCC, bash, XFree, KDE, GNOME, whatever.

Also of note, there's very little in the way of GUI admin tools -- no Linuxconf, no graphical init system editor. You'd better get to loving modifying everything with a text editor. For me this was no problem as I'm an oldskool Unix sysadmin. ;)

Anyways, I love gentoo. Emerge ROCKS! No more dependency hell! And the system is FAST! Way to go Gentoo!

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Tyrdium]

Yeah, compiling KDE took me a day or two on my P4... It's slow, but worth the wait.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

You just built a system? I reckon it's at least marginally high-end. That explains why it's fast, and why it's taken you only a few days to compile everything. Key is, not everyone who uses Linux has a high end machine, and some people (like myself), are still using AMD K6-2's to get things done. 3 days to a week sounds reasonable...

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got it all compiled and configured in 6 hours including xfree and gnome-light packages. (2.5Ghz PIV)

Of course this was the 3rd time because of various fuckups and such ;p

Then I setup my XF86Config wrong and fried my Geforce4 ;( Thank god for warantees!

P.S. KDE is bloated as fook and has many annoying ideosyncrasies (sp? right word? heh)

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Surak]

I suppose my Athlon XP 1800+ is high-end compared to your K6/2 -- which was my previous box and the one I'm currently using as a firewall -- and I can say that on that box, a week to a week and a half for full-featured X11 system with KDE or Gnome. But browse the Gentoo forums and you'lll find that amongst most Gentoo users, my configuration is pretty typical.

That being said also, I think you'll find that you build decent mid-range Athlon system like mine for less than $500.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[tzanger]

You're on crack. A total KDE CVS compile (including kdenonbeta and kdeextra modules), using -O3, -mpentium3, --enable-final and prelinking takes no more than about 7 hours. kdelibs and base are both about 90 minutes on a Pentium III/1G with 256M of memory, with kdenetwork being the next largest and everything else taking between 10 and 40 minutes.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[aggieben]

uh...I keep hearing from various sources that it takes days upon days to install gentoo. I used to only see it in irc channels; now slashdot too?

I've been using gentoo for a few months now, and I installed in on several (4-5) systems, some more than once. Granted, the first couple of times you do it, it can take a while, especially if you're on a slow network link --- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap).

The computers I acoomplished this on aren't fantabulous or anything: cpus ranging from 733 MHz to 1.4 GHz, RAM ranging from 128 - 396 MB.

Anyway, now for my general comments:

Previously, I was a RedHat user for about 4 years. I liked RedHat (and still do), but Gentoo just really does it for me. I've tried a couple of other distros too. Slackware is terrible. Mandrake is a lot like redhat, except they push bleeding edge software in their rpms and don't test nearly as much as RH, and it isn't nearly as pretty or well supported. I think I liked Debian, but it was awkward to me, even with apt-get.

Then I found Gentoo. The package management system is almost everything I would ask for in such a system, managing config files, runlevels, and all the other tedium of linux administration is made intuitive and mostly easy to deal with without abstracting what's really going on. Another big plus to me is that it's much easier with Gentoo to keep unneccessary software of my system. With the other distributions, there seems to be more bloat that is unavoidable.

There's my 2 cents. Of course, I'm still a young'un though.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont know why but the p4 is really slow at compiling stuff in linux. i tried a install on a xp1800 and a p4 2.4ghz
and the xp cpu just run circels around the p4. i wouldent be suprissed if the p3 is faster than some p4 as well.
well i guess that alot of p4 strength is in sse2 witch i think that gcc isint using

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

hen I setup my XF86Config wrong and fried my Geforce4 ;( Thank god for warantees!

LOL, fried your hardware because of a bad config? I hardly think so.

It's just not possible. Sure, back in the day when Linux kernel was at 0.99 and 1.0 you could fry your cheap monitor with a bad modeline (everything was manual back then). Older/cheaper monitors didn't have protection from over-driving them.

Those days are long gone, and I've never heard of a graphics card being fried. Especially modern hardware, it won't do what it can't do, no matter what you tell it. It's as simple as that.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Surak]

It depends on what you view as a 'complete system'. Compiling KDE along with some GNOME libs and a few others (my USE clause is long) took 12 hours on an Athlon XP 1800+ with 256 MB RAM on a 2Mb/s cablemodem connection.

Now if your idea of a complete system doesn't include a full desktop, complete with ALSA sound support, OpenGL and a whole bunch of goodies, and you started from a Stage 3, then I could see getting the system running in 4-5 hours, yeah.

Bear in mind that when I say 3 days, that's starting from Stage 1 tarball with a USE clause a mile long and all the goodies. Compiling large pieces of software like Mozilla or OpenOffice (as opposed to grabbing the binary-only packages) can take even longer.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yeah, compiling KDE took me a day or two on my P4... You mis-spelled 486.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[whoever57]

I have an Athlon 1800+ with PC2700 memory. I would guess my total compile time for the system (I started from a stage 1 tarball), X, gnome and OpenOffice was about 2 days.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[antiMStroll]

If you prefer a GUI configuration app, Webmin is in Portage. Works very well and (!) allows changes to be made just as easily from a remote machine.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Kashif Shaikh]

HAH!

Did you try compiling OpenOffice? It takes 24+ fucking hours even on a p3-500mhz!!

Hell, that took longer than all the packages combined! However, KDE took approx 12 hours to compile.

Kashif

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Bert64]

It only took me a couple of days on a K6-2/400 clocked to 420 (4x 105 bus) with 768mb ram and some fast scsi disks, to compile a complete desktop system with X, mozilla, kde, galeon (and its gnome dependencies)
Admittedly the ram helped a lot... on an athlon system i have access to, which has 128mb ram and ide disks... the compile speed is throttled by disk io.
But the end result, was a machine that ran kde 3 with all the eyecandy turned on at a more than useable speed, and this for a machine thats a few years old now!
And speaking of old, my Alphastation from 1997 runs gentoo aswell, and i can do everything on it that i can do on the athlon system.. mozilla, galeon, kde etc are all speedy as hell.. I`m typing this right now on the alpha running galeon.
It can even play divx and xvid files without breaking a sweat, and this is a 6 year old machine with an old 8mb pci displaycard.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Bert64]

You`d be surprised... some cheaper monitors expect windows to plug+play detect their capabilities and not over drive them... I fried my friends monitor recently... i took an SGI machine and a 13W3 adapter over, and hooked it up... Ofcourse the sgi starts up in 1280*1024 by default right from initial poweron, and the monitor did NOT like that..
It was some cheap unbranded monitor made somewhere in asia i assume, so thankfully it didnt hurt my bank balance too much when i had to replace it!

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Surak]

I didn't compile OO, I emerged the openoffice-bin package. Much quicker, and there's really not much to OpenOffice that demands a custom compile anyway.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

hELLO fRIEND!! I just had a cUSTOM cOMPILE into the tOILET!!! aSK mE aBOUT iT!!!!

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[aggieben]

--- however, after the first couple installs, I had the whole process down to about 4 hours from stage 1 (bootstrap)

The systems I mentioned are full systems, including X11, Gnome, window managers, a full development environment (gcc, gdb, etc), emacs, mozilla, etc. My system at home is an Athlon 1700+ with 256 MB RAM (almost identical to yours) on a 768K dsl line (btw, I would love to know how your cable modem gets 2MB!). It was finished within 5 hours, give or take half an hour.

Bear in mind that when I say 3 days, that's starting from Stage 1 tarball with a USE clause a mile long and all the goodies. Compiling large pieces of software like Mozilla or OpenOffice (as opposed to grabbing the binary-only packages) can take even longer.

Bear in mind when I say 4-5 hours, that's starting from a stage 1 tarball with a USE clause 14 miles long and all the goodies, mozilla (source) included. OpenOffice (source) took another 13 hours. All in all, even with the largest package (OpenOffice), it's still less than 1 day.

Re:3 days to a week to compile?

[Surak]

btw, I would love to know how your cable modem gets 2MB!

Roadrunner. Bright House (nee Time Warner Cable) segments their cablemodem network by square block. I'm the only person on my block with a cablemodem. ;)

4-5 hours including KDE, GNOME and Window managers and mozilla? I compiled KDE, gnomelibs and XFree in one big emerge (emerge kde, with GNOME and X in my USE clause), and when I went to bed at 11:30, I woke up at 5:30 and it was still compiling, just finishing up. That's 6 hours right there. I could see maybe doing all that in about 8, from the time you boot the LiveCD and partition the hard drives to finishing the last compile (not including OOo)

My 3 days includes all the necessary tweaking to get my nVidia GeForce working with accelerated drivers (which was not easy considering that certain builds nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx seem to be broken on XFree 4.3 and it took me a bit of searching to discover that, ultimately, the problem involved turning 'Allocate IRQ to PCI VGA' in the BIOS to 'ON' which I found confusing since I have an AGP nVidia card, and not a PCI nVidia card, but then again isn't AGP an extension of the PCI bus? grr... and having that turned off worked *fine* in Windows XP with nVidia's drivers, and also worked fine under XFree 4.2.1 with the OLD nvidia 3123 drivers, so I don't get it) and other things like my printer, M$ optical trackball, etc. working the way they should, plus apache and mysql and getting those setup to do development work, recompiling the kernel a few different times til I got framebuffer working (just so I can get tux to display while booting -- yippee ;), etc.

aaaaahhhhhhhhhh

[neurostar]

One big paragraph!?!? AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! MY EYES!!

Have you no shame?

:o)

Debian?

[SHEENmaster]

It also "just works", but without the long install process.

Just out of curiousity, does emerger also upgrade? If I was upgrading MySQL, would I have to uninstall it first and live without it while recompiling? This sounds rather wasteful...

Re:Debian?

[revmoo]

Well, Debian is great for servers, I still would use debian for a production server, partially because it is so stable, partially because you don't have to wait for things to compile

However, those who like to run bleeding-edge workstations, and customize their configurations like crazy are the ones that I think Gentoo is aimed at.

Re:Debian?

[intermodal]

Debian may be fine for you, but I run into all sorts of conflicting dependencies and such whenever I try it, or the install things exit out before I intended to. It may be old hat to you, but it made me want to quit.

Gentoo, on the other hand, while it takes some work, is simple to set up and doesn't have the same complexity to the install interface (because it lacks one).

And to answer your question, emerge upgrades as well. You can simply type emerge [programname] or emerge -u [programname] to upgrade to the latest version, the -u flag also updating every dependency to the latest. No need to remove first.

Re:Debian?

[nathanh]

However, those who like to run bleeding-edge workstations, and customize their configurations like crazy are the ones that I think Gentoo is aimed at.

This used to be true; Debian focussed so heavily on stability that it trailed the bleeding edge by several years. But thanks to unofficial apt sources (which are now surprisingly common) it's possible for your servers to be stable and your desktops to be bleeding edge.

For example, I'm an exclusive Debianite now running Evolution 1.2.4, Galeon 1.3.4, XFree86 4.3.0, Nautilus 2.2.3.1, etc. I haven't had to compile a package for my desktop since dumping Slackware back in 1994. Not regretting it for a moment.

Re:Debian?

[N1KO]

The debian install process was short for me because it crashed halfway through (during x setup i beleive).

I had similar problems with gentoo (i screwed up the kernel and couldn't boot into the system). The great documentation and the livecd which basically gives you a bootable rescue disc helped me get through the problems.

Emerge can upgrade packages without having to uninstall them first, sometimes it even keeps the older package around (gtk1.2 and 1.4 for example can be installed side by side with no problems).

Re:Debian?

[OneEyedApe]

emerge sync && emerge -u world

Or

emerge sync && emerge -u <package-name>

Takes a while, but usually does its thing without any trouble

Re:Debian?

[fault0]

Well, I ran Debian for nearly four years, and as a relatively recent switchee, I'd have to definatly recomment it to the class of people who love new software. Debian, when I left it, was quite good, but lacked new software (this was when KDE3, Xfree 4.2, and GNOME2 was missing from unstable)

I thought compiling was wasteful before gentoo, but it's so goddamn transparent that I love it. I just compile things like KDE or Mozilla when I'm sleeping. In exchange, you get a lot of added flexiblity of picking compile options (i.e, doing manual ./configure --help;make) with the convenience of automatically installation, dependancy handleing, upgrading, upgrading the whole distro, etc..

Gentoo, and the *BSD ports system, imho, is the best of two worlds.

Re:Debian?

[Kashif Shaikh]

Ahh, the bleeding-edge.

Because of the extensive customizability of emerges(from USE variables, to aggressive CFLAGS, etc) and because you can remove an ebuild without encountering integrity constraints(i.e. dependencies), it's very easy to break your system...which is why Gentoo is targetting to be a developer-friendly environment than for use in production systems.

Though if all the variables are kept constant, there is no reason why Gentoo can't be as painless as Redhat SRPMS.

Re:Debian?

[Nothinman]

You will never see any sort of broken dependencies with the official Debian repositories, if you add 3rd party APT sources you're taking your chances.

Personally I've been using Debian on my workstation for over 4 years and I havn't had a problem that wasn't my own fault or didn't have the package fixed in a day or so and I've been running unstable the whole time.

Re:Debian?

[cdemon6]

Got Debian unstable running kernel 2.5.65, latest MPlayer, MozillaFirebird, Unreal Tournament 2003 and many other things on my home workstation - and it was really easy to set up, using the old Debian potato install CDs!

Dselect is hard, and the apt-get dist-upgrade was a little bit tricky, but nothing an average linux user couldn't handle!

Note that i had only 2 problems (while upgrading almost every day) with unstable (!) packages installed via apt in the last few years and had of course never to reinstall in.

The workstation runs as a server for my home LAN/WLAN, a video player connected to the tv, too and ist of course my favourite java developement platform.

The only thing that annoys me is that i want to switch to tv mode without restarting X, but i have not figured out that yet.

Re:Debian?

[Seeker5528]

"You will never see any sort of broken dependencies with the official Debian repositories"

I guess that depends on your definition of broken. Or maybe you have not seen them because you don't update that often.

I update from unstable every 1-3 days and I can tell you if you follow unstable there will occasionally be packages that don't install because of conflicts or will cause something else to be uninstalled, there will be packages that don't install correctly, there will be circular dependencies where package A won't install because it depends on package B and package B won't install because it depends on package A, and there will sometimes be one or more packages that don't install because they depend on something that has not made it into the repository.

Granted most of these are not big issues usually because they tend to be short lived situations, but half installed packages can be a bear to deal with sometimes.

Later, Seeker

Re:Debian?

[Genom]

Agreed - which is why it's always a good idea to use the -u option to apt-get when upgrading off of unstable - saves a lot of headaches in the long run ^_^

Re:Debian?

[intermodal]

well, perhaps it was simply user error, but every time i try to install debian i get tons of conflicting dependencies that give me hell. Perhaps a minimal install would solve it and building from there. However, while it may not be the same dependency hell of red hat, it's still a different dependency hell. Oh, and good luck getting help in any debian irc or whatever...tried it, got flamed, gave up.

Gentoo advocates drive me nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience I've found that there exists no Linux problem so small or trivial that someone won't come along and recommend changing your distribution as a "fix".

Re:Gentoo advocates drive me nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what could fix that attitude problem of yours?

Gentoo.

Re:Gentoo advocates drive me nuts

[Cipster]

Heh so true.
My favorite part is the condescending tone (the italics denote the implied but not written words):
"Well retard if only you had used [insert favorite distro here, generally Gentoo or Slack] then you would not have this problem.
But you will have a ton of other problems which will send you to the forums asking other n00b questions. Then I'll be able to make more condescending comments aimed at you!

Love it!

[ChiefArcher]

I love gentoo... I've been using it for about 6 months now...
the best thing in the world is
emerge sync
emerge -up world
The updates work.. Unlike upgrading from other distros...
If gnome 2.4 came out tomorrow, emerge will have it.

I don't think i can go back to any other distro now.

ChiefArcher

Nope.

[handsomepete]

The original package is not unmerged until the new one installs successfully (i.e. if the install fails, you've still got the complete original version untouched). Even then, you can turn off the automatic 'cleaning' of packages and keep the old version until you feel like uninstalling it.

And now, a translation...

[Clockwurk]

I know that every single statement on this list will be made at least once, so I decided to post it to get it all out the way now. Enjoy!

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

NetBSD rules! Anyway, Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

-

Re:And now, a translation...

[drinkypoo]

Okay, so you're a troll. But anyway; BSD is easier to install than gentoo, but runs on less hardware, unless you mean netbsd, which has less features than (say) FreeBSD, but which is getting better. On some architectures (notably K6) compiling everything for your native architecture is much faster because the K6 is a great chip but it's lousy at being an i386. Depdency Hell, well, you're the one disses it here, by saying oh of course it doesn't work with rpms for which it was not "designed".

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks Ive seen this post before.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's supposed to be funny you humourless twat.

By the way, learn to speak English properly. And yeah, I'm a troll too Sherlock, but it doesn't make you any less stupid.

Re:And now, a translation...

[srealm]

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

Thats very amusing. Where I work, we now have 12 Gentoo Linux systems (excluding desktops) and will be converting the other 13 linux machines to Gentoo in the near future.

Gentoo has one huge advantage for business in this regard. Although it takes longer to do the initial setup, maintanence is MUCH easier. Remember, you don't need to compile everything on every machine, you CAN compile it once (make a binary package in the process), and then just distro the binary package you made (which is as simple as supplying a '-b' argument to the emerge command) to all the other systems, and emerge it onto them too. I don't think a sysadmin in the world could fuck that up.

The biggest advantage though, is that we don't need the next version of bsd or (insert binary distro here). We don't need to wait for them to release updates for various software packages, we don't have dependancy hell when we want to upgrade any individual part of the system, etc.

Lets review that procedure:
emerge -b mypackage
for x in $all_my_machines; do
scp /usr/portage/packages/All/mypackage.tbz2 $x:/usr/portage/packages
done
Then on each machine:
emerge mypackage

(assuming you have set PKGDIR to /usr/porage/packages on each of these machines).

Sound kind of like .RPM or .DEB? Well, it is kindof, except the package (no matter WHICH package it is, even glibc) is optimized for your hardware, you don't need to download it to each machine, and you don't have to go through dependancy hell.

Re:And now, a translation...

[YokuYakuYoukai]

its sickening to see a troll modded up like this

Re:And now, a translation...

[tlianza]

Wow, that post gets funnier every time I see it.

Re:And now, a translation...

[^Case^]

While I may agree with most of your post one thing did need a response:

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

This is actually not quite fair. If you emerge your ebuilds with "nice -n 19 emerge [ebuild]" you really won't notice it's building.

Re:And now, a translation...

[the_real_tigga]

I don't think a sysadmin in the world could fuck that up.

You, Sir, are an optimist.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget distcc, and you could mount /usr/portage/packages on a network with nfs.

Re:And now, a translation...

[questionlp]

Same could be said about FreeBSD as you can also compile and build packages on a fast machine, plop it onto a central store and use pkg_add to install it on as many machines as you want. The same idea also works for kernels.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Billly Gates]

Hehehe. Sadly your generalized commit is all so true.

If I find another pro Gentoo zealot on the BSD forums here I am going to have a physcotic episode!

GO USE GENTOO YOU DO NOT NEED BSD, we be ports too!.. bla bla bla bla....

Sigh.

Maybe us BSD users should revenge and do the same for every gentoo article.

Oh wait this is slashdot. Anything non pro Linux is modded as flamebait or troll. But agaisnt any other os its including bsd is ok.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where by "sickening" you doubtless mean "fucking hilarious"?

Re:And now, a translation...

[donscarletti]

Oh wait this is slashdot. Anything non pro Linux is modded as flamebait or troll. But agaisnt any other os its including bsd is ok.

I am getting rather sick of people spouting out that same falisy about moderation. The Bungi has an Excelent karma (although he claims to the contrary in his .sig) and I havn't seen a single post of his that isn't an anti-linux rant.

Looking over your own posts I see many of your posts modded up, and I have seen very few of your posts that are not in a way anti-linux. You also appear to have exelent karma, showing that you have been modded high regually in the past. It seems ironic, in light of this discussion that it is your past moderation that undoes your argument.

Re:And now, a translation...

[donscarletti]

I am a gentoo user, and I frankly don't give a damn about what you say about Gentoo. It after all is just a distro, I used to use Redhat, I didn't like it as much as Gentoo but I still activly encorage my friends to use it; even over Gentoo in many cases.

What does annoy me however is when people stereotype me and my Gentoo using friends as crazy "zealots" just because of the distro we use. You claim that we are hostile towards users of other distros yet flame us for ours, the irony is sickening.

Sorry, about the rant, but after seeing so much flamebait, I just had to bite.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

but more, usefull stuff runs on Linux than BSD, in my experience.

I love FreeBSD for the applications it's appropriate for, but for my desktop system where I want to be able to run applications that I use on a day to day basis, it's just not workable for me.

I don't dislike any distribution (apart from Redhat, I'll pass on the "subscription fee in order to ever apply necessary patches in a reasonable timeframe" model, thanks), or Unix-like OS (apart from anything directly associated with SCO).

Yes, the *BSD's would have more support if more people ran them, but I'm not willing to make the jump and "do without" until develpers follow me.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Just as an FYI, the post you responded to is a trollpost that has found its way into every Gentoo thread I've seen for the last month or so. I'm thinking Gentoo makes someone feel "inadequate" and he just has to share with us...

Re:And now, a translation...

[questionlp]

I understand that... for what I use FreeBSD for is primarily for mail, file, FTP, web and FTP servers, so that's something I don't have to worry about too much.

I also don't need that many applications under FreeBSD on my BSD workstations. OpenOffice.org, JDK 1.3.1, rdesktop/VNC, vim/gvim, Apache, PHP and Python all run without any problems on FreeBSD... so it meets my needs there. But where it hasn't fit my needs just yet is FireWire support (it's there but not all controllers are supported right now) can be met with Mac OS X and possibly Linux...

Re:And now, a translation...

[Hanji]

I don't think a sysadmin in the world could fuck that up.


Oooh ... you don't know some of the people ... :-D.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Ozric]

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

This is the funnest thing I have read in a very long time. I always thought that it would be a good project for someone with too much time to turn that "whizzing output" in to some type of ansi animation as a program builds in gcc.

Then they could really say their code is art.

Re:And now, a translation...

[tigga]

I always thought that it would be a good project for someone with too much time to turn that "whizzing output" in to some type of ansi animation as a program builds in gcc.

Yep. And also copy it to /dev/audio or whatever is in use by audio drivers.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work, we now have 12 Gentoo Linux systems...

Gentoo is a success in the Enterprise market!

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need to wait for them to release updates for various software packages

Erm, that's the point. Big businesses DO want boring, slow and behind the times -- look at RH Advanced Server, the most successful enterprise Linux distro. Saying "ah who cares about testing and patching, we can just emerge the latest bleeding-edge foo" to your boss won't cut it.

Red Hat and Debian test, test and TEST (and patch) their software; Gentoo throws out anything new that will compile. It's not attractive to big business.

And yeah, I wrote the original text for that. Glad to see people spreading it. I even posted it on the Gentoo Web Forums, and the Gentoo users with humour hasd a good laugh :)

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, by "sickening" he doubtlessly means "fucking stupid".

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the bright side, truly successful companies usually have a staff of smart IT people that are left alone to do what is needed of them. It's those companies that are going to find a superior product like Gentoo and use it. My Gentoo machine are a hell of a lot more stable and secure than any redhat or debian box could ever be. I'm glad my direct supervisor is clueful and recognised the benefits of using a source compiled distribution. It's great when you can pass your admins an ebuild and some source for an inhouse project instead of having to mess with dpackage or rpm hell. The idiots that share your opinion will eventually figure out how stupid they are.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh...

Alas, it is true. I am the original creator of the "troll". I tried to get Gentoo to work, but just could not figure it out. Instead of reading the documentation on the website, I just gave up. I've done that a lot. Just given up on things when they are too hard. I'm back to running windows 98 now. It does what I need it to do. Maybe if they make Gentoo easier for me to install and use, and maybe if the people on the forums are nice to me when I ask questions next time, I'll take back everything I said in the troll I wrote. I was just trying to be funny. I'm so sorry I made so many people angry. Please forgive me.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

but it isn't fonny. it's GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY. Like you!

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, his generalized comments are true of EVERY OS. Especially *BSDers and the win32 crowd. Zealots abound. Clockwurk is obviously a debian/redhat zealot.

Re:And now, a translation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I'm sure you haven't seen the last of this post from this one trick pony. I wonder if it will be funny the 230948239084'th time you see it. It came across as pretty GAY the first 500 times I saw it. I'm sure the lowest common denomonator and the mediocritomatons will continue to love this post for at least another 3 weeks.

Why I like gentoo..

[windows]

I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.

Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile. And keeping track of the dependencies is next to impossible to do. I don't like to clutter up my directories with files and directories that aren't needed anymore.

I'm a big fan of the ports collection in any BSD because it solves both of those problems. Everything is compiled on my machine and later it's simple to cleanly remove stuff I'm no longer using.

Gentoo also has a ports collection, which is why I chose it over other Linux distros. Debian is quite nice but I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable, while still having everything getting along. I like almost everything else about Debian, but that's what frustrates me about it, and why I give Gentoo the nod.

It would be nice, however, to have a more automated install process in Gentoo. I'd like to be able to choose being doing it myself and starting from any stage, or being able to use an automated install program like other distros have. I'm not asking for a lot, but just something as simple as Slackware's install program would be a nice touch.

That being said, I use Gentoo, and I like it a lot. :)

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Majix]

I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine.

Using a package manager and compiling everything yourself doesn't have to clash. Every package has a source package, just build those with whatever options you desire. You get all of the benefits of using an package manager, almost every file on the system can be accounted for and queried and you get to be a control freak too.

Check out CheckInstall, this little gem of a program replaces the "make install" part of a normal software installation process. It will create an package for your system (RPM, Deb, Slack tgz...) of the software in the active directory and add it to your package repository. Every file is still accounted for and you can remove the package without any problems later. It's invaluable for maintining a consistent system when most programs don't even include an "make uninstall" target anymore.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[KrispyKringle]

"I'm one of those people who insists on compiling everything myself and not using packages. I do this because I like to have some control over what options are used when compiling and that everything is optimized to run on my machine."

Aside from the fact that many big packages (kernel, X11, etc) are available in CPU-optimized versions (i.e. i686, etc), I'm sure the time you spend modifying compile-time optimization flags is quickly regained by the milliseconds faster in which your computer runs.

"Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile."

If I'm not mistaken, the SRPM or deb-src style packages both do this. Personally, I save my time and use precompiled binaries.

"I'm a big fan of the ports collection in BSD because it solves both of those problems."

Me, too.

"...I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable..."

Try adding specific modifications to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, or simply download the .debs and use dpkg to install.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit Debian-biased, but here are my main concerns with Gentoo:

Compiling from source: Nice, if you want it, but a pain if you don't. While some distros (FreeBSD, Debian, and RedHat, for example) give you the option, Gentoo has no alternatives. And while it may not take a lot of time to compile the gaim source, I just don't care that much about having a few CPU-optimzations in there when I'm chatting online.

Installation: Hell, the Debian installation is nothing pretty, but I haven't heard much good about Gentoo's, either. At least Debian has various derivatives, like Knoppix or Librenix, which can ease the pain.

Speed of updates: This is the biggest issue, by far, with a package-based update system--how fast security updates make it into the package tree. Debian has some issues with this still, compared to the commercial distros like RH, but my perception while reading bugtraq is that Debian tends to beat Gentoo. Gentoo just doesn't have the community and developer base Debian does.

Of course, to each his own, and as long as you are happy, stick with it. I've heard good things about Gentoo and may have to give it a try sometime soon, but until I see some feature I just can't live without, I'll stick with Debian.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed of updates: This is the biggest issue, by far, with a package-based update system--how fast security updates make it into the package tree. Debian has some issues with this still, compared to the commercial distros like RH, but my perception while reading bugtraq is that Debian tends to beat Gentoo. Gentoo just doesn't have the community and developer base Debian does.

You're kidding right? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Whoa that's a good one.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Lukey Boy]

It's invaluable for maintining a consistent system when most programs don't even include an "make uninstall" target anymore.

Uh, any source package that uses the GNU autoconf/automake system (read: probably 99% of them) have a built-in make uninstall target.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a great comment. You really showed the parent who knows what they're talking about. Everyone will think twice before they mess with you.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[be-fan]

I'm sure the time you spend modifying compile-time optimization flags is quickly regained by the milliseconds faster in which your computer runs.
>>>>>>
That's a phenomenally stupid arguement. The compile time is a one-time investment, usually done while you're sleeping, partying, having sex, eating, whatever. The pay-offs in performance, even if it is a piddling 5%, are recurring every time you use the software.

Compiling from source: Nice, if you want it, but a pain if you don't. While some distros (FreeBSD, Debian, and RedHat, for example) give you the option, Gentoo has no alternatives.
>>>>>>>
Not true. There is a binary reference platform available, and if you're really obsessed with getting your software this very minute, you can always install the RPMs, which, by and large, work pretty well in Gentoo.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[KrispyKringle]

Hmm, I wasn't aware that RPMs worked with Gentoo. While they still aren't as good as DEBs, there's more of them (assuming Gentoo can use RPMs for all distros equally well).

In response to my "phenomenally stupid argument," well, this really isn't how we like to carry on civil discourse, you know? I can take criticism just fine, but some people might consider something like that an insult, and, hell, might even be annoyed or offended by it. Just a thought.

I don't see anything stupid about the argument, though. People who like to claim they have faster computers or are really elite because they compile themselves often don't know what they're talking about. As I stated before, sure, you will find some optimizations for your kernel or other large, CPU-intensive applications. I make sure to compile my kernel from scratch whenever I install a new system. But doing this for most applications just doesn't make sense. Take my example with gaim. What payoff is there, at even 5%? Could you run gaim, or Mozilla, or any number of simple command line applications like Pine or mutt any faster if you compiled them from source? Is that really the issue? I don't think so.

And while no single one of these applications should take an extraordinary time compiling from source, the added time adds up; the Gentoo installation is, from all accounts, far lengthier than it should be, is, in fact, far lengthier than even the most fertile stallion should be having sex, as you suggest.

This post shows that some people have arguments based on logic and what's best for their needs, and some are just fans for the sake of being fans. As I said, use whatever you like, but just because your distro makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn't mean it does that for everyone. I'd never get as angry as you clearly did if someone insulted my distro of choice. Debian works for me, but may not be right for everyone. I use it on my workstation for the reasons I specified above, but I use other OSes where need be. Hell, I even suggest RedHat to people new to Linux; the installation is just that much better. I'm perfectly willing to admit Debian isn't best for everyone, and even that Gentoo has its advantages. There's a clear line between academic discussion and mindless zealotry. Make sure you don't cross it.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[buckminst]

Having switched from Debian to Gentoo on my fastest machines (and one pretty slow one, relatively), I can definately say a couple things.

1: Debian is really good for server admins who don't want to bother editing their config files a lot.

2: Debian Stable, however, is not all it's cracked up to be.

I switched a long-time Debian system (it started as Slink... then went to Potato... then to Woody) over to Gentoo because I encountered something that should never exist in a "stable" tree: A stable package depending on an unstable one.

Namely, sendmail. Sendmail would crash on run, unless you have Glibc 2.3 installed, which is in Unstable. Attempting to go to unstable to get Glibc 2.3, caused apt to crash when it was trying to parse the new package list. (Probably my fault, though it works just FINE in stable @_@)

Out of absolute frustration, I switched to postfix... then switched distros shortly thereafter. Mainly because the box got upgraded from a P-166 to a P3-600... but I'd wanted to reload that box for a while.

The switch, of course, was not painless: I had grown too accustomed to point #1, and did not really know how to configure the services the box was running manually. I do _now_, thanks to Gentoo forcing me to learn it.

In the end:

Debian is an easy, (usually) server friendly distribution with a superior package management system (compared to RPM, the person who suggested that the way to avoid dependency hell was to specify both packages on the command line either hasn't dealt with enough RPMs yet, or knows more than I do)

Gentoo is a not-quite-as-easy, enthusiast distribution that is very good at making a fully optimized system a reality, with an easily expansive package system (ever tried to make a .DEB? *shudder*), and is definately a good Linux learning experience. (This is based on experience and comments from some of my friends)

And with 1 good binary distro, and 1 good source distro, who could ask for anything more?

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true at all, take almost any GNOME or KDE application in my experience, and it will almost certainly NOT have an uninstall target. Make uninstall is not an automatic feature of automake, it must explictly be set up for the build system by the author.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[Bert64]

Not to mention the minor/negligible security benefits gained from compiling your own apps..
For instance, with gentoo you dont enable features you dont want... if you dont want to run an ssl website, you dont built apache with ssl support..
And, since every binary is compiled slightly different, the script kiddies exploits may be foiled if the buffers theyre trying to jump into are located in a different area of memory than they would expect.

Re:Why I like gentoo..

[be-fan]

What payoff is there, at even 5%? Could you run gaim, or Mozilla, or any number of simple command line applications like Pine or mutt any faster if you compiled them from source?
>>>>>
You wouldn't run them any faster, in the sense that you'd save any real time. However, there are certain algorithms that can make the app feel smoother. For example, in Gentoo (no complex optimizations, just -march=pentium4 -O3) Konqueror resizes more smoothly. Why? The optimizations help out the text-reflow algorithms so they go faster. Do I save any time by having Konqueror resize more smoothly? No. Does it save me some irritation the two times a day that I actually *do* resize Konqueror? Yeah. And two less irritations a day is definately worth an overnight compile of KDE for me.

Its the Debian Kiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, it is! Debian's lost A large amount of users to gentoo, because it gives the users power, and what they actually wan't!

The documentation is better too. Want to get your sound working? Read the comprehensive DOCs, debian will just flame you n00b and laugh at you.

So, while debian is left with it's declining user base, gentoo is finally what the linux leet want, and it's even trying to compete in BSD territory.

Re:Its the Debian Kiler

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo: When you're so 31337 you can run automated scripts and read.

Happy Gentoo User

[iso]

I started a new job where I was allowed to run Linux on my desktop at work. Great. I installed my old (server) standby, Debian. It was alright, but stable (which I use all all my Linux servers) was far too out of date for a desktop system and I had too many problems with unstable (and even it was behind Gentoo I later learned). I tried a few different distros and later settled on Gentoo.

The installation process for Gentoo, as most people echo, is quite lenghty, but it's quite striaghtforward to anybody who knows Linux/UNIX and I found the documentation to be fantastic. Now that it's running I'm in love. It's hands down the best desktop-Linux distro I have ever used. Everything works well, and on the painfully slow Pentium III/500 I have at work it runs quickly and efficiently. I'm a convert--Gentoo rocks! (Though I'm still using Debian on all my servers :).

- j

I take issue

[irokitt]

Obviously a geek can set up a Gentoo system for a non-geek, so you may find novices using Gentoo.

As a *geek*, I can appreciate Gentoo on its merits. But I know I would never install it for a non-geek, or recommend it for a non-geek.

I love Linux, but most distros are not for the faint-of-heart. Non-geeks are unlikely to appreciate the beauty of Linux, since they'll wish to do nothing more than use Word, e-mail, and chat. And AOL doesn't work with Linux.

And therefore, installing Gentoo for a non-geek is like crucifying myself. Can you imagine the frustrating phone calls? Certainly not my idea of fun...

Re:I take issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I've recommended it to several non-geek linux newbies, they're all getting on quite well. Better than the ones that ignored me and installed deadrat

the dark side of gentoo...

[guile*fr]

I've been a user of gentoo for some time now... overall its pretty good, init script dependencies, up to date software but there is a few points I dislike:

• init script is broken. when you want to relaunch a service that died, it says the service is already launched. no big issue but still...
• gcc is a fscking python script, everytime you compile a file you call python... and i wondered why xfree compilation took so long.
• no cli to check options in ebuild scripts. read the script, edit /etc/make.conf, build

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[deeeev]

Your first point... You realize that you can "zap" services right? Example: /etc/init.d/apache zap would reset the init script so that you can start it up regularly. I figured that out first week using Gentoo and I'm no rocket scientist.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[guile*fr]

in addition to the third point... I'd prefer "opt-in" features. Darwin ports are much more sensible in that area.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[guile*fr]

no I didn't... :) I hadn't bothered to read the lenghty help output of init... thanks to your post I finally did, and I discovered "pause" too...
Thank you... :)

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[omega_cubed]

hum, point 1 already resolved by another post.

point 2: gcc is not a python script. though everything else is. The ebuilds are written in python, so are all the rc scripts if you haven't figured that out. But if you are building anything from source, you would most likely be going through a configure script to get your makefile anyway. The ebuild script just simplifies everything in one step.

And why would you need a cli to check options in ebuild scripts anyway? go edit it with your favorite text editor, and emerge with your own version. You can specify specific ebuild script to use on command line.

W

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

init script is broken. when you want to relaunch a service that died, it says the service is already launched.

As already noted, /etc/init.d/foo zap.

gcc is a fscking python script, everytime you compile a file you call python... and i wondered why xfree compilation took so long.

No, emerge is a fucking python script; gcc is:

$ file /usr/bin/gcc
/usr/bin/gcc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Compiling xfree takes so long because xfree is so large.

no cli to check options in ebuild scripts. read the script, edit /etc/make.conf, build

emerge -pv foo lists all flags defined in an ebuild along with their status. Also, USE flags exist mainly so they can be set in advance; this can be done with the aid of this dynamically-generated list of flags, the equivalent list at /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc, or ufed (a curses-based Use Flag EDitor).

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[guile*fr]

point 2: sorry... it isn't a python script... but it calls python to figure out some flags (includes path) so there is still the overhead of launching python.

point 3: say I want to build xchat. I'd like to
#emerge --features xchat
ipv6
gnome
ssl
nls
#emerge +ipv6 -gnome xchat

something along that rather than having to read the ebuild, change make.conf, build, and eventually changing make.conf back.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[guile*fr]

ok... AC took care of point 3. the only point remaining is gcc calling python... any takers? :)

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

point 2: sorry... it isn't a python script... but it calls python to figure out some flags (includes path) so there is still the overhead of launching python.

No, gcc doesn't call python either. The package manager is written in python.

#emerge --features xchat

emerge -pv xchat (pretend, verbose)

#emerge +ipv6 -gnome xchat

USE="ipv6 -gnome" emerge xchat

something along that rather than having to read the ebuild, change make.conf, build, and eventually changing make.conf back.

Refer to my previous post.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[omega_cubed]

My bad. My wording wasn't quite clear. Someone pointed out that the ebuilds and rc scripts are bash scripts. Whereas that put me in doubt of the validity of my claim that rc scripts are python, I am certain that ebuilds are at least partially python scripts. Quoth Gentoo.org:

The Portage system is a merge of a Python core with Bash script based Ebuilds. Instead of dealing with Makefiles and the make command, Portage leverages the power of Python and the ease of use of shell scripting with some object oriented characteristics to make a uniquely powerful system we dare think puts Portage ahead of all current ports systems.

from Porgage Manual.

W

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[omega9]

Currently existing:

devil root # emerge xchat -pv

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild U ] net-irc/xchat-2.0.2 [2.0.0_pre1-r1] +perl +tcltk +python +ssl +gtk +mmx -ipv6


Translation:
Package will be upgraded from current version (U), new version will be net-irc/xchat-2.0.2, current installed version is [2.0.0_pre1-r1]. When package is built it will use available hooks for perl,tcltk,python,ssl,gtk, and mmx. It will not use ipv6.

If this is not what I want, at the command line I would type:

devil root # USE="-perl -ssl +ipv6" emerge xchat

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[unborn]

env USE="+ipv6 -gnome" emerge xchat

I do agree however more ( and more intuitive ) command line options ( this is just a workaround ) should exist.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Billly Gates]

Do not get me started on documentation either. All the docs are only for the 1.4rc.

The rc is quite bleeding edge and flaky. Compiling does take awhile longer compared to FreeBSD ports because of python.

Gentoo is great for goofing around but is too bleeding edge for my taste. Freebsd is cool because it comes conservative out of the box but ports for newer versions of gcc, kde, perl, and java are installed if you ever want to upgrade.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

All the docs are only for the 1.4rc.

I agree; the decision to replace the main set of docs on the Gentoo website was premature.

The rc is quite bleeding edge and flaky.

1.4_rc4 was quite nearly the release version, but it was delayed largely to QA more binary packages for the Gentoo Reference Platforms. I hope you reported anything "flaky".

Compiling does take awhile longer compared to FreeBSD ports because of python.

I'm curious how you came to this conclusion. In my experience, the most significant additions to compile time are due to the sandbox and consequent gratuitous use of bash.

Gentoo is great for goofing around but is too bleeding edge for my taste.

This is a common complaint and the reason for the Gentoo Linux Stable project. The definition of "stable" still frequently is 'installs properly', but there is a vocal minority of enterprise users working to change this.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Mr.Ned]

>I've been a user of gentoo for some time now

These are all misperceptions. To answer you point by point:

1) Yes, sometimes services that are configured improperly die but the start-stop-daemon still thinks that it is "on". That's easy to fix - run `/etc/init.d/service zap` and the service will be reset to the "off" position.

2) gcc is not a python script - if you doubt me, do a "file `which gcc`" - it's a regular old compiled program. Distributed by the GNU foundation.

Emerge, the gentoo package manager, _is_ a python script. Yes, it's called when you compile something through emerge. But it doesn't add signifigant overhead because the part about compiling is really just emerge saying, "Make!". Nothing different than you saying "Make!" from the command line.

3) For individual scripts, no, there is not yet a tool in mainstream use to check options in ebuild scripts. I've seen some in the pipe, but they're slated for later release in the gentoolkit package. But you're missing the point of these options, called "USE flags", if you read each and every script and edit your global options before telling the emerge script to start.

You can edit global USE flags manually in your /etc/make.conf (there's a up-to-date list of them on the Gentoo website) or by a bash script called UFED. They're pretty intuitive - for example, if you wanted X support for applications, you'd pass "X" into your USE list. If you wanted support for GPM, the console-based mouse driver, you'd pass that into your USE flags and all packages that could take advantage of GPM would.

It's designed to be a mostly static thing - no one in their right mind goes through and checks each one. For those big packages like GNOME and KDE, yeah, go ahead and see what each does, but otherwise, don't sweat it.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Unregistered]

init script is broken.

You are using restart, aren't you? I've found that it does tend to be kinda hit and miss, but i think that's just because i only restart fucked processes that don't respond to anything but zap.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[slittle14]

Hmm, I used Gentoo for about 8 months before it finally drove me nuts and I quit using it. In my opinion it certainly has a dark side, but I think you kind of missed it. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of things that I really liked about Gentoo (bleeding edge software, and the ease of installing new stuff mainly), but in the end I just didn't have the endless hours to hold its hand and help it along. I am certainly not a Linux expert, but I can hold my own w/out much trouble. I managed to get Gentoo into a state where it wouldn't boot two or three times and got out of those jams w/out a complete reinstall. These major problems were generally due to bad ebuilds. This problem has been partially fixed by having and unstable and stable portage tree as well as the devs paying more attention before releasing a mission critical ebuild w/ a bug.

Here are my issues w/ Gentoo...

1. When a big ebuild dies in the middle for some silly reason (i.e. I forgot to switch openGL drivers or something) I have to start all over from the beginning. I had a problem w/ getting kdebase to compile that I could never figure out (yes, I posted to the forums and other places several times, but no one could figure out why it wouldn't build). It would happen about 90 minutes into the build and every time I would have to try something new and wait 90 minutes to see if it helped. Why can't there be an option to not rebuild the entire package (I mean they are using make)?? Seems a bit silly if you ask me. I never did get kdebase under KDE 3.x to build via the ebuild. It would build fine from the latest CVS, but never from the Gentoo ebuild. Go figure.

2. Disk space!!!! Gentoo uses a TON of disk space compared to the other distributions that I used. I figured that since I would only install the things that I wanted I would have plenty of disk space. WRONG! Gentoo keeps all kinds of stuff lying around in /var. It is nice to not have to download the source code each time when only a small patch is applied for the recompile, but it takes up a ton of disk space. You can flame away that I can just clean up the src code each time. Yes, I can, but then I have to download it when I need it again. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.

3. Keeping track of exactly what is installed on my system and uninstalling the stuff that I don't need. Yes, there are some utilities (i.e. qpkg) to help with this task, but none of them work very well in my opinion. I know that I had a ton of junk lying around that I had installed at one time to play w/ a new package. I could maybe remember the package, but not its dependencies. In the end I had as much useless kruft on my system as with other distros. The difference I had to update and recompile this kruft whenever a new version came out.

4. Time to maintain the distro!!! I am willing to spend some time tweaking my load and making sure things work like I want, but Gentoo just seems to take A LOT more time than other distros. A lot of the time I was trying to figure out why this or that wouldn't build quite right or trying to figure out how critical system files had changed and merge my customizations. I guess I just never got good w/ etc-update, but that sucked a bit of time on the files that are updated frequently and often customized (make.conf comes to mind). This was probably b/c I used the unstable portage branch, but if I want bleeding edge then doesn't it make sense to use that branch??

I am sure that I will try Gentoo again in the future, but for now it was just took too much time and had too many little quirks (I never could get my env vars to work quite the way I wanted and how they work in other distros...and I fought that stupid opengl-update script too many times) to use for now.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Colonel Panic]

gcc is a fscking python script, everytime you compile a file you call python... and i wondered why xfree compilation took so long.

Not sure what you're talking about:

$ file `which gcc` /usr/bin/gcc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

I'm running gentoo 1.1

Those who would trade security for freedom deserve neither!

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[arjun]

gcc is a fscking python script, everytime you compile a file you call python... and i wondered why xfree compilation took so long.

huh ? i am using 1.4 rc 4 and this is what I get
anupam@parth >>> file `which gcc` /usr/bin/gcc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed gcc being a python script also, however after I was done bootstrapping the system it magicly turned into a regular ELF executable. I think gcc is only a pythin script during the bootstrap process, which is why I recommend just getting the base system installed, then booting from hd to compile everything else.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Balinares]

> When a big ebuild dies in the middle for some silly reason (i.e. I
> forgot to switch openGL drivers or something) I have to start
> all over from the beginning.

No you don't. Take a look at 'emerge --help', and especially the --resume option.

> Disk space!!!!

This is true! The preferred way to deal with this seems to be cleaning up your distfiles directory regularly.

> Keeping track of exactly what is installed on my system and
> uninstalling the stuff that I don't need.

qpkg is the way to go. It will tell you (flawlessly, mind) which package a given file belongs to, which packages are installed, if there are dupes, etc. Read the man page. 'qpkg -I' does exactly what you're asking for.

> The difference I had to update and recompile this kruft whenever
> a new version came out.

Absolutely untrue.
Only the packages you specifically request go into the 'world' file, and only those are upgraded when you upgrade the system. Dependancies are only upgraded as needed by the packages that depend on them.

> Gentoo just seems to take A LOT more time than other distros.

I am not sure. I ended up sticking with it after trying it out precisely because I find it's a very low maintenance distro for me. 'emerge -U world' every night before I go to bed is about all I need to keep the system 1) current, and 2) working.

You know, I'm re-reading your post again, your gripes about how you never got the hang of the Gentoo admin tools, and I'm wondering... You DID read the many docs that Gentoo ships with, did you?

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[mbyte]

huh ? where does gcc involve phyton ?

# which gcc /usr/bin/gcc

# more /usr/bin/gcc

******** /usr/bin/gcc: Not a text file ********

# ldd /usr/bin/gcc
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40028000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Jack Greenbaum]

gcc is a fscking python script, everytime you compile a file you call python... and i wondered why xfree compilation took so long.

WTF?

jack@statest ~
$ uname -a
Linux statest 2.4.20-gentoo-r2 #10 Sun Apr 27 16:20:08 PDT 2003 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
$ type -a gcc
gcc is /usr/bin/gcc
gcc is /usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.2/gcc
jack@state st ~
$ file /usr/bin/gcc
/usr/bin/gcc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[The trees]

I am also a happy Gentoo user. Here are a few things you may have missed:

• As deeeev already mentioned,

  /etc/init.d/service zap

  will reset its status.

• file `which gcc`

  tells me my gcc is an ELF 32-bit LSB executable. Portage is written in Python, that may be why you're seeing it when you emerge something.
• If you want to know what USE flags will affect an ebuild, use

  emerge package -vp

  If it's not using an option you'd like it to but don't want to add to make.conf, you can

  USE="flag" emerge package

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[slittle14]

> I am not sure. I ended up sticking with it after
> trying it out precisely because I find it's a very
> low maintenance distro for me. 'emerge -U world'
> every night before I go to bed is about all I need
> to keep the system 1) current, and 2) working.

I am not so sure that I totally buy this argument. Maybe my experience was due to the fact that I was using the unstable portage branch to get bleeding edge software and maybe it was b/c I didn't spend enough time reading the docs for all of the Gentoo admin tools, but I found that it was always as easy as emerge blah to get new software going or as easy as emerge -U world to keep things updated. Stuff didn't always build as advertised. Ebuilds didn't always work flawlessly. I guess I shouldn't have tried to figure out why things failed, etc. It ended up taking more time than just grabbing a new binary package when the updates came out.

> You know, I'm re-reading your post again, your
> gripes about how you never got the hang of the
> Gentoo admin tools, and I'm wondering... You DID
> read the many docs that Gentoo ships with, did you?

Well, I guess I didn't keep reading them as they were updated. Emerge seems to be a moving target with features being added and removed (and the docs weren't always updated immediately when things changed). I didn't keep checking to see if the feature that I wanted had been added yet. Like I said I will probably switch back to Gentoo in the future. I think it will be great once it matures, but I just didn't like dealing w/ the growing pains.

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Sloppy]

D'oh! No, I didn't know about that one either. I have had the same problem with one box and postgresql, so I always end up restarting it manually (w/out the script). Looks like you knew the real answer...

Re:the dark side of gentoo...

[Balinares]

> Ebuilds didn't always work flawlessly.

This is true. In half a year, this must have happened to me four, possibly five times, using the stable branch. Because I don't want to waste time, I generally just leave it as is and wait for the dev team to fix it. I've been known to occasionally fix it myself when it's not too complicated and when I have time, but that's the exception, not the rule.

> Emerge seems to be a moving target with features being added
> and removed (and the docs weren't always updated immediately
> when things changed).

Yep, the dev team is very reactive wrt. feature requests. The man page isn't always 100% current as a result, but 'emerge --help' always is, it would seem.

> I didn't keep checking to see if the feature that I wanted had been
> added yet.

If you're actively interested in some features, you may want to 1) request them yourself on bugs.gentoo.org, and/or 2) rapidly skim over the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter, which you can subscribe to or read directly on the Web, to see if they've been implemented that week. That would probably be the least time-consuming way of going about it, I think.

Hope this helps!

Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Speed Racer]

This is a very timely article for me. My wife's computer died (one of the infamous IBM 75GXP drives) a few weeks ago. I didn't have any time to work on it before now so I set her up with Knoppix 3.2 in the interim so she could e-mail and surf. As a side note, Knoppix is a life saver. I'm very impressed with it and I'll always have a copy of the latest release burned and ready to go in an emergency.

Getting back to the story, this morning I asked her what she thought about the "Linux" software she's been using since the crash and she said it's been fine. Of course, she's only been using Evolution and Mozilla AFAIK so that's to be expected. I suggested installing Linux on her machine for good and she said "sure, why not".

I've used Gentoo for a little bit and I'm pretty sure that's the route I want to go. I just finished burning the 1.4RC4 CD and I'm gearing up to install Gentoo this evening and I'm wondering what others do when less computer literate family members start using Linux. Any tips or experiences would be appreciated.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[teklob]

I've set up family members with linux before, and just make sure if they don't know lots about computers, that it all works before you let them loose on it

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[handsomepete]

"I'm wondering what others do when less computer literate family members start using Linux"

I take my phone off the hook.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[irokitt]

Hard to avoid communicating with your own wife, unless you took up bowling...

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Speed Racer]

Hard to avoid communicating with your own wife, unless you took up bowling...

I find golf to be pretty effective for that with the added benefit of coming home 4 hours later tired and angry.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking homophobic moderators modding this guy down! Whats the matter with a little rough trade?

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a troll, stupid, and no a particularly good one too.

And while I don't know about the moderator, I'd say this guy is a fucking homophobe for sure.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach her how o use the gentoo forums, that's one of the best sources for linux information, I use them to solve non gentoo problms all the time.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[JasonB]

Bah. I've been running Gentoo linux as the only OS on my wife's desktop machine for over six months now, and she has had very few problems with it.

All she really wants is KMail, Konqueror/Mozilla, and OpenOffice (which she was able to figure out on her own after using MS Office for a few years).

Every couple of days I just ssh into her machine, and type:

> emerge sync ; emerge --update world

And everything just works.

Re:Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo

[Zapman]

I love Gentoo, but you're not going to get mozilla and evolution installed this evening.

Just getting gnome going took from 10:00 PM to 8:30 AM on my 850 MHz laptop with 256 MB. If you do a stage3 build, you'll have CLI done by the end of an evening. Either gnome or KDE will take the time while you sleep and do work the following day. Mozilla will take 2ish hours, and evolution will take 4-5ish (IIRC. I havn't done that yet on this hardware).

My suggestion: Get computer up to CLI, and Friday after work run:

emerge kde gnome gdm mozilla evolution

It probably will be done by Sunday.

Go Gentoo!

[digicosm2]

Whoo hoo!

I've been using Gentoo for a few months and absolutely love it. Once you run the gauntlet of installation a few times and get used to where things are setup in the system, then it's smooth sailing from then out.

But I think the best feature of Gentoo has nothing to do with the distribution. It's the legions of enormously helpful folks who hang out on the Gentoo Message Board. These folks sacrifice their time to answer all kinds of questions about the distribution. Moreover, they are all polite! It's the most unique thing I've ever seen on the Internet...

I hope that Gentoo becomes more popular, but I also hope that this doesn't disrupt the stellar community behind it as well. Time will tell.

Ignorance is bliss.

[rice_burners_suck]

If you want to run ntpd at boot time by default, you would issue the command rc-update add ntpd default. This puts a link to the ntpd startup script in the directory /etc/ runlevels/default. Notice also that this is not the traditional Unix SysV path for runlevel scripts (one fewer reason for SCO to think it can sue the Gentoo folks, I guess).

SCO's startup script directories suck, IMHO. I honestly don't see the advantage of filling the filesystem up with all kinds of garbage a la SCO when a simple text file containing a few configuration options will suffice just fine.

Since I will likely get modded down for talking such blasphemy on this screwed up init system anyway, I may as well go ahead and say that FreeBSD's system is really cool. The defaults are read from /etc/defaults/rc.conf and then your overriding settings are read from /etc/rc.conf... As far as all these useless runmodes are concerned... On FreeBSD, the system starts up in Single User mode and then immediately switches to Multi User mode. These are the only two modes that I could ever conceive uses for. I don't understand why all these Linux distros give you 10 different runmodes, of which only one or two are ever used, with five or so of them being used solely for different types of shutdowns and restarts, and in fact, one of the first things I do on any Linux distro is blow all those excessive modes off. Either this machine uses XFree or it doesn't... it's not that hard to start from the command line if you don't ALWAYS use it. Oh, well... Maybe I'm just an ignorant fsck.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[Majix]

The Big Idea behind the SysV init style is that you use tools to administer it. Sure you could do it all manually, but why would you want to? All the symlinking of scripts to runlevels is done automatically for you, as a benefit it is easy to build very complex post install configuration scripts of server software installations.

A init script in Gentoo is little more than a wrapper to call some binary. Even the status checking seems to fail ever so often in my experience. Compare this with an Red Hat style init script, they can be hundreds of lines long and perform a dozen checks and dependency tracking before it'll start the service.

Which is better? It's a matter of taste I guess. If you like to tinker around the Gentoo scripts are ok, but these days I don't expect to have to think about init scripts. They are there, they work, other than that I don't want to care.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[radon28]

I don't understand why all these Linux distros give you 10 different runmodes, of which only one or two are ever used

Actually, on Sys-V systems there are more than ten.

0 - halt

1 - system adminstration mode/single user

S/s - Single user mode

2 - multiuser, no networking

3 - multiuser + networking

4 - administrator definable

5 - multiuser + networking + GUI

6 - move to 0 and reboot

7 - administrator definable

8 - administrator definable

9 - administrator definable

a - administrator definable

b - administrator definable

c - administrator definable

Q/q - tell init to reread /etc/inittab (ok, not REALLY a runlevel but init will accept it as an argument)

Of course this an absolutely absurd number of runlevels for the home user, but I suppose there could be situations where you would want 7 different custom runlevels, namely on very large systems, instead of having to edit the contents of each runlevel's directory every time you wanted a certain set of services to start or stop. Try them sometime.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[Zapman]

The number 1 advantage of SysV init:

/etc/init.d/sendmail stop

And sendmail will stop. No remembering obscure syntax. No weird rules. All of it (should) be encoded in that script.

The problem with traditional BSD init files is that it is deeply challenging to add/remove the code to start/stop a package because it has to insert code into a single script. If there's an out-er 'if' statement that the code doesn't expect, the program might not start. Well, it's somewhat easy to add. It's almost imposible to cleanly remove, especially if the admin has modified the script in any way. With SysV, you just drop the script in place, and add some symlinks. When you remove, you delete these files.

Granted, I havn't played with a recent *BSD to see how the init scripts have evolved. So, note the 'traditional' above.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[BVD]

Amen. On my openbsd box, I often reboot after making nfs changes and the like. It is easier to reboot then get the pids, stop the services, look up the cmd line options, and restart the daemons.

On my debian (sys V init ) boxes, /etc/init.d/daemon restart takes care of the whole mess. Modules are good when it comes to init scripts.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[Nothinman]

And how do you restart a daemon that doesn't handle SIGHUP with BSD init? With SysV I just type /etc/init.d/daemon restart.

SysV can be a little overwhelming at first, but to me BSD was just too limiting because there's no system for individual startup scripts and I'm not going to waste my time creating one when SysV works so well.

Re:Ignorance is bliss.

[tigga]

SysV can be a little overwhelming at first, but to me BSD was just too limiting because there's no system for individual startup scripts and I'm not going to waste my time creating one when SysV works so well.

It's not true anymore. NetBSD and FreeBSD have new system with scripts in rc.d and configuration in rc.conf. So it's /etc/rc.d/daemon restart.

Scripts start not in lexical order but in dependencies defined order - for example sendmail starts after network config is done. Reordering and adding new scripts are pretty easy for now.

For some reason OpenBSD left behind...

Here come the Gentoo love fest

[Anonymous Coward]

but it will take a few days to compile

Gentoo Topic Icon

[zerOnIne]

I'd say it's about time for a Gentoo topic icon. We've been seeing a fair bit of press about this distribution lately (on here anyway). It has a very active developer and user community, and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. I mean, if we've got a bunch of different icons for other distributions (including a bunch that no longer exist), why not Gentoo? For fairness, I'm still a Debian user, but I think they deserve a fair shake here now.

Re:Gentoo Topic Icon

[the_real_tigga]

noooo.

I am a big fan, but the gentoo logo is just plain ugly. Larry the Cow is a bit better, but still no beauty.

Re:Gentoo Topic Icon

[Anonymous Coward]

the gentoo penguin rox my socks, tho.

To each his own

[infiniti99]

Gentoo really requires a speedy system if you want to have any fun, as you'll spend so much time compiling things. I have Gentoo on my desktop here, and it is great. I used to use Slackware, and this is definitely an upgrade. Well, for me at least. The great thing about Linux is that there is a distro for everyone, no such thing as 'best'. ;-)

However, on my laptop, which is about half the speed, I use Debian. While Debian has been around for a long time, I only recently tried it, some six months after I discovered Gentoo. I'm very impressed by it, apt-get is as good as emerge as far as I can tell, but without any compilation to wait for. I had a full system, KDE and all, up in just a few hours instead of days.

If you use Gentoo and a friend says to you, "oh you need program X", throw your instant gratification out the window. By the time you have program X, your friend will be asleep, and you'll have to coordinate another day.

I still recommend Gentoo, but I think Debian is probably a better choice if you want easy software installation. Of course, neither of these distros is very user friendly. Setting up Gentoo is almost like LFS, and Debian is sorta like Slack. Give your mom SuSE.

Re:To each his own

[Goalie_Ca]

Well actually the vast majority of apps take less than 5 minutes to install. Only the big ticket items like X, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and a few others actually take any time to install.

Most of the time when i want an app in another distro i still have to gather all the dependencies and sometimes still compile them.

With gentoo I simply type emerge, and usually within a minute or two its all done.

Re:To each his own

[fastdecade]

According to the article, the big ticket items would be a showstopper for most serious users. I've been thinking about setting up gentoo for a while, but after reading about the length of time to download anything significant, I think I'll pursue a life instead.

To be specific, this part of the article is scary:

OpenOffice took at least two days to finish building. Gentoo fans will no doubt point to the fact that this process is hands-off, but that isn't always true. The OpenOffice installation warns you that OpenOffice is sensitive to some compiler optimizations, which means it may fail. If so, you may have to modify your build options and install it again.

Two days for one app? Yes, a big app! But two days??!!! He didn't say what PC he's using, but if it's even close to that, it would spoil all the "point and click" fun of installing stuff with linux.

Re:To each his own

[Anonymous Coward]

That's two days on a fairly fast machine (2+ Ghz or so).

And if it fails half way through, you've got to start over.

Fuck that. Debian, apt-get, 5 minutes later it's done and works.

Compiling all that crap yourself is completely pointless. The performance boost is nonexistant. Benchmark it yourself if you don't believe me. What a waste of time. Wannabes.

Re:To each his own

[Goalie_Ca]

Very few people build openoffice. Almost everyone uses emerge openoffice-bin. What's so hard about that?

Re:To each his own

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Well, I'd agree as far as it requires at least ONE "speedy" system. Using distcc and ccache, if you have multiple machines, even the slowest will be quite usable. I have an old 233mhz notebook that I set up for a "library terminal" (complete with hacked Cuecat, etc). With distcc, I can emerge packages for it just as fast as for the 800mhz, 600 mhz and 1.1ghz machines that are available to help.

"Give your mom SuSE"

Good advice. Right tools for the right job.

Re:To each his own

[be-fan]

OpenOffice is going to be slow no matter what you use, so most people just use OpenOffice bin. By and large, anything under 8 hours can be done while you're sleeping, so it's usually not a big deal. On my 2GHz P4, everything I've ever tried (including KDE) is under 8 hours.

Re:To each his own

[Unregistered]

for the record, if you don't use kde or gnome installing on a shitbox is not bad at all. Trust a broke man on this.

Re:To each his own

[antiMStroll]

I'm just going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one. Gentoo is essential for leveraging the power of older hardware. My mid-line desktop rarely gets used any longer for other than gaming, all my online activities and media playing, including full screen video, are on a P2 366 notebook. I doubt this would be possible, or perhaps as easy, with any other distro.

And compiling isn't as bad as all that. A couple of nights ago while using GAIM to yack away on IQC I realized it didn't support file transfers and emerged LIRC in the background, all the while listening to MP3s from a network server. LIRC was done before the chat ended and Gentoo never dropped a note. Not bad for a machine slightly less powerful than the latest PDAs.

Re:To each his own

[ultraslacker]

I think gentoo has yet to come into its own, really. It's a fun distro, and I use it on my workstation, but there are somethings for which I prefer slackware and freebsd. Portage is built around a workstation model and common usage . The compile time is a gripe, but consider Moore's law. Compare the compile times between pentium generations - compile times will continue to decrease dramatically.

Re:To each his own

[nadaou]

Debian is quite nice but I have yet to find a way to use some packages from stable, some from testing, and some from unstable, while still having everything getting along.

How to do it:

- install as stable
- change /etc/apt/apt.conf to include the following:

APT
{
Default-Release "stable";
};

- add a 'testing' line to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list file. (cut-n-paste your existing stable line, replace 'stable' or 'woody' with 'testing' or 'unstable' depending on what you want. or both, each on their own line) Add non-US lines as needed.

- apt-get update

All set up!
To grab a package from the testing or unstable branch, and anything it depends on but otherwise leave your system tracking 'stable', use:

apt-get -t testing install PACKAGE

and check that you don't need to upgrade/uninstall 100mb before you start.

Another way is to add deb-src lines and apt-get source --build the package, although I haven't used this for yonks as the -t above works so well.

Happy debianizing.

Re:To each his own

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out distcc, it's really very good to speed up compiles. Also easy to use over a compressed SSH port forward to a shell on a fast machine over the 'net, if you have broadband..

Re:To each his own

[fastdecade]

Isn't compiling the point of gentoo?

How does it then handle a combination of binaries and source? Would that be something like the dependence mess of installing mandrake, polish etc on a redhat install, or is it manageable?

Re:To each his own

[fastdecade]

Compiling while you sleep wouldn't be so bad if you didn't get problems, but the quote above indicates those problems can happen. Also OpenOffice + Mozilla + Apache + ... a week of sleeping for a basic setup.

Re:To each his own

[Anonymous Coward]

well, yes it is, but that doesnt mean you can't use a bin (wich there are STILL ebuilds of) on things that you just DONT have the time to compile, you wont suffer a big performance hit not compiling one thing, its not compiling a whole system that whacks performance in the knees.

Re:To each his own

[be-fan]

I haven't gotten a compile problem in Gentoo for maybe six months now? My last install, which I did only because XP tried to mount and fsck my Linux partition, went totally smoothly. Considering this was a release candidate, that's pretty good. Also, once things are installed, any future compiles leave your system usable 100% of the time. So, for example, if I try to upgrade KDE, my existing installation is not touched until the entire compilation process succeeds.

Also, OpenOffice is a rather strange program in terms of compile time. It's a monster, and nobody sane tries to compile it manually. All the other applications compile quickly. From stage1 to a full KDE desktop (including KOffice and KDevelop) takes maybe 11-12 hours on my Pentium 4. Mozilla takes under an hour, and while I haven't compiled Apache in Gentoo, I remember my old PII-300 compiling Apache 2.0.40 in about an hour and a half. In all, a full setup (not just a basic setup) is about one day, rather than one week.

For anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo may tought itself as a distro for those who know what they're doing, but with the literature and actual helpful members of the gentoo community, anyone can get it running. Even of crazy Sony hardware (firewire DVDROM that's invisible(magic!)) there is someone out there who WANTS to help you, as opposed to just shoutting RTFM (Soooooo unhelpful) Try it, you'll love it too.

I've switched to gentoo then off and now returning

[strider3700]

I first installed gentoo last november and I loved it after the initial hell of installation. However one day a power outage corrupted the drives in both of my machines and I went to suse 8.1 on one machine and put win2000 back on the other.
kde crashed almost daily so I removed suse and put gentoo back on that box. Everything was great and I decided to ditch win2000 for gentoo.

The install was hell as always and things went fine untill I tried to get alsa support for my sbLive going. I fought with it for 3 days before deciding to try the newly released suse 8.2.

Suse install was great but there is too much installed by default. Divx and DVD movies both skip during playback. They don't on the same hardware under windows, and they didn't under gentoo way back.

So today I'm prepairing to install gentoo on this box again. Hopefully with the new rc4 the hardware detection is improved a little and I can get the sound working.

(the sb live works for thousands of gentoo users so it has to be something I'm doing that is causing it to fail)

Anyways, I love the portage system. If someone would make a nice gui installer for gentoo I'd be loving life.

Further note

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has possibly the nicest software installation, upgrading, and uninstallation system ever devised. Upgrades work all or nothing, no half-installs, and uninstallation of old versions does not in any way damage the new version. Upgrades work on a running system, even while you're using the software. (Thanks also for linux file deletion and running semantics!) Overall it is truly beautiful. It's painful when I have to return to using Windows. The "easy" installers aren't half as easy, and the uninstallers aren't a tenth as reliable.

Re:Further note

[Rich0]

I hate to sound redundant, but I can't agree more. All builds are done in a sandbox (temp directory), and then all make installs are also done to a sandbox as well. This can all be done suid non-root if desired (defeating makefile trojans). Once the makefile has populated the sandbox, gentoo will then take all the files in the sandbox and apply them to the base system. Files defined as configuration files (anything under /etc and other config paths based on user-definable but well-defaulted rules) are not overwritten (changes are written to a new file and there is a script to assist you with automatically merging changes). So the whole install operates as a transaction and you don't get errors due to aborted compilation. Since the tarball's makefile only installs to a sandbox you can rest assured that the file you are compiling won't go changing files on your filesystem outside of the normal gentoo rules.

When unmerging applications (like the old version of whatever you just merged) the system verifies that any file to be deleted has not been modified since it was installed (as would be the case when it was overwritten by the next version). The result, user-modified files are preserved, as are files created by a newer version of a package. The only thing that gets deleted are files used by the old version which are not used by the new.

Oh, the portage system can also handle cases where you need more than one version of a package installed. If you have libxyz-1.2 which is needed by some program, and libxyz-4.5 which is used by everything else, and then emerge libxyz-4.6 it will know to unmerge 4.5 but keep 1.2.

There is quite a bit of documentation on the portage system at the gentoo website. I found that the initial installation took a little time but went straightforwardly. If you're a novice with some knowledge of how to compile source and a general knowledge of how linux works you'll be pretty safe just following the directions on their website to get things going. Once you're up and running an "emerge rsync" followed by "emerge -u world" will keep you up to date.

Parallel Use with Other Distros ?

[billstewart]

How well does Gentoo work on the same system with other distros? I'd like to try it in its own partition to see if I like it, but I don't want to mess with the partitioning scheme, and my system is running GRUB because Mandrake wanted that - is it easy to add a Gentoo along with that? (It's easy with LILO, but I confess I haven't spent enough time messing with GRUB to be comfortable with it.) And of course it *can't* mess with any of the Windoze partitions, because they've got my tax software and backups of my work system.

Re:Parallel Use with Other Distros ?

[ptjapkes]

It works just fine. I have Gentoo happily sharing a drive with SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and 3 versions of Red Hat. GRUB is your friend.

Re:Parallel Use with Other Distros ?

[Anonymous Coward]

GRUB is so easy I could puke. If you've got a boot menu, then you just need to edit a file add an option for another partition. Well actually you don't *need* to edit the file, but it's the easy way.
On the partition that GRUB is installed on, there should be a file in /boot/grub called menu.lst. Edit that file by adding

title [Distro-name]
root (hdx,y)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.5 root=/dev/hdXY

the first x,y are for GRUB where 1st hdrive is hd0, 2nd is hd1 etc. And 1st partition is 0 (rather than 1).
The X,Y for the kernel parameter are the normal ones just to let the kernel know which partition to mount as root.
You can actually just type this stuff in manually each time you boot by hitting 'c' at the boot menu (to give you a boot prompt).
I luvs me GRUB.

What this linux thing, anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, BSD is the one true way. Best convert now, before this happens to you.

Longtime Gentoo user

[be-fan]

I've been using Gentoo since 1.0-RC3. I switched my whole system completely over to Gentoo about a year ago, and haven't looked back since. Here are the top reasons I like Gentoo:

1) Community support. The Gentoo community is absolutely awesome. forums.gentoo.org is a one stop shop for any problem you might have. To this day, I have yet to encounter a problem I couldn't fix by a quick trip to the forums.

2) Excellent documentation. Everything is very verbose, and the most thinking you have to do is substitute devices names and the like for the appropriate values for your system. Previous Linux distributions I have used (and I've been using Linux since Slack 3.5) almost always required you to deviate a little from the written instructions, but this almost never happens with the Gentoo docs.

3) Great package management system. It easy for anybody that knows a bit of sh to write their own package build scripts (.ebuilds). As a result, the forums are full of ebuilds for the latest software. Thing of forums.gentoo.org as "0-day Linux Warez." Also, the ease of writing your own packages means you rarely have to bypass the package manager, since it's almost as easy to write your own ebuild (or, more often, edit an existing ebuild) as it is to compile the software manually.

4) Thoughtful extras. The NVIDIA Linux kernel drivers autodetect your kernel, and apply the appropriate patches if you're doing something like running a development kernel. It's these little tidbits that just makes life

5) Great configuration system. The init system makes sense. All environment variables are in files in the directory env.d. All module aliases are in seperate files in modules.d. All configuration parameters are in conf.d. Also, great utilities like etc-update for managing configuration files and whatnot.

PS> Note that nowhere in the top 5 is any reference to optimization. I use Gentoo not to be 1337, but because, after an initial investment in installation time, I ultimately get a very low maintenence, customizable, and flexible machine. So you anti-Gentoo trolls can just fuck off.

Re:Longtime Gentoo user

[WWWAvenger]

The points you note remind me of what I like about FreeBSD. Mmmmm... FreeBSD.

Re:Longtime Gentoo user

[be-fan]

Except the latest version of Gentoo, unlike FBSD 5.x, is actually stable :) I like FreeBSD (ran a server on it for a couple of years) but I'm not very impressed with the progress on 5.x to this point.

Re:Longtime Gentoo user

[WWWAvenger]

The FreeBSD development team has been very straightforward about the stability of the 5.x branch and I do not use it because of that. 4.x is still the best server platform available.

Re:Longtime Gentoo user

[Kashif Shaikh]

"PS> Note that nowhere in the top 5 is any reference to optimization. I use Gentoo not to be 1337, but because, after an initial investment in installation time, I ultimately get a very low maintenence, customizable, and flexible machine. So you anti-Gentoo trolls can just fuck off."

Nice comment -- I found gentoo to be a joy to use too. It's just that some people are the "pfft!" snobby type who don't like gentoo, because it is easy for novices to pick up and use.

Personaly, I liked gentoo's simplicity as you could get a grasp of the system very easily. And writing ebuilds is easier than rpm spec files.

Re:Longtime Gentoo user

[futuresheep]

Community support. The Gentoo community is absolutely awesome. forums.gentoo.org is a one stop shop for any problem you might have. To this day, I have yet to encounter a problem I couldn't fix by a quick trip to the forums.

This is the single best reason to use Gentoo. The forums are filled with some of the most friendly and helpful people in the Linux community. There are no 'RTFM' answers to new people who simply don't know how else to find out what they need to know.

The main reason that I'm happy to use, and promote Gentoo, isn't the 1337ness factor, it's the community that I would send my grandmother to for help.

Gentoo and its community

[YokuYakuYoukai]

Gentoo has one of the best linux communities ive ever seen. I've only experanced the gentoo forums and the #gentoo on efnet but both are full of cool tricks and helpful people. Its simply amazing to find a community of friendly, inteligent and knowledgeable people like this on the internet. It must be some kind of shock and awe type campain.

Excellent view?

[omega_cubed]

Isn't 1900 words a tadbit short for an "excellent view" of Gentoo linux?

Personally, I don't think the article did a fair job describing the Gentoo philosophy. Having widely sampled flavors of linux and bsd, I found the installation process to be most similar to that of OpenBSD. It is commandline all the way. Which is good for me, because I don't really go for the eyecandies of a GUI installation (they make me dizzy). And after the basic install, what you get is much similar to the base system you get after the openbsd install: a system that boots, can access the network, with some simple tools.

I think the main reason Gentoo won me over was the portage system. After having used the BSD ports system, I found the concept very pleasurable. the gentoo emerge is truly wonderful, it solves the dependency issue with source compiles automatically, while still allowing the control over compilation options.

A note about the compilation time though. Whereas a typical compile of KDE or GNOME would take forever (a whole day and some on my P4 2Ghz), Gentoo recently started the Gentoo Refernce Platform, with certain packages offered in binary form. Mostly the packages that would take a long time to compile.

Also on the analogy to Debian's stable v. unstable versions, I don't think the article was quite correct in saying that Gentoo has "one branch". By using the "~ARCH" keyword in the configuration, Gentoo allows the using to emerge from packages still in testing, not unlike Debian's unstable branch. There were quite a few packages that were only available in the unstable branch (until recently), one example that I remember is bittorrent. And for many packages present in the stable branch, the unstable branch is, as its name suggests, a few releases more up to date.

And I don't think Gentoo was a release "designed for geeks only". The forums often give wonderful aid to newbs, and the documentation pretty much let you do everything with a step by step instruction if you so choose. As for the complaint about etc-update, personally I found the software very self-explanatory, and it is basically just a script that searches the directories for updates to config files and offer you the option of running sdiff on the old and the new (which, incidentally, I've been doing for 5 months by hand before discovering etc-update).

The only complaint, after running Gentoo for 7 months, is the occasionally lack of packages. But given that it is a relatively new distro, it really isn't all that surprising that some items that I would find helpful do not come in nice little ebuild scripts. I guess I could go and contribute by writing my own...

But all in all, I think that to truly appreciate/understand the experience, the only way is to install Gentoo yourself and try it out.

W

bwalaa

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"

-

Modem install

[justrob]

I've noticed a few comments advising people not to try Gentoo if you don't have a high speed internet connection.

If you already have an existing Linux distribution
installed, you'll have no problem installing Gentoo on another partition, even with a modem.

I was running Red Hat and downloaded the stage tarball, did a chroot on an empty partition and had my system downloading and compiling in the background.

Yeah, it took a long time but it was worth it. I started with Slackware then switched to Red Hat and now I'm very pleased with Gentoo. The portage system is incredible.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats the point in installing ALSA when there are SBLive drivers directly in the kernel?? I never understood that.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[deeeev]

Regarding your movies.. you sure you got dma going?

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[omega_cubed]

I had one of those intel motherboards with sound built in, and wasn't supported back when I was using the 2.4.19 kernel (I had to use .20-ac to get it recognized at all).

Not so recently I started using the 2.5 kernel branch, and I got no sound. At first I thought it was a kernel problem again. But no, it wasn't. After some digging around, I've narrowed it down to ALSA. But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work.

I tried various versions of ALSA and no luck.

And then, one day, while messing around, I typed alsa /tab/tab/ and in the list was a program called "alsamixer".

For some reason, the compilation of alsa-tools is such that everytime you reboot, the default setting for volume in alsa is that everything is muted (In alsamixer, you see MM on top of the muted volume control). So it turns out that the sound works all along! All I needed to do was turn on the volume.... -grumble-

Not saying that this is your case, but heck, I know many a geeks who overlooks the simplest solution to a problem.

Cheers,

W

bash, not python

[Anonymous Coward]

The ebuilds are written in python, so are all the rc scripts if you haven't figured that out.

ebuilds and init scripts are written in bash.

Okay, an article on Gentoo

[kingLatency]

I felt that review was incomplete and rather poorly written. In addition, it spoke too broadly and not about the specific features that make Gentoo appealing. And frankly, I don't care that he had to switch his motherboard or that he needed a special patch for his graphics card. But we all know the old saying: any publicity is good publicity, not to mention this was a positive review. So, it's good to see some publicity on Gentoo (it's quite a good distribution) but that article stank. :D

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[strider3700]

Nope my problem was in actually installing the driver for the sound card, I got errors for awhile and then eventually the system said I was successful. But alsa wouldn't load ever. I had been switching hardware in the box and just hoping the machine would keep up to the changes at the time, so I'm not at all suprised that it got flakey on me. On a good note the new version of gentoo just auto detected the card from the live cd. A couple of days of compile time and I'll know if it's good to go ;)

BS

[Balinares]

> init script is broken. when you want to relaunch a service that
> died, it says the service is already launched.

See the 'zap' option of the init files. /etc/init.d/ zap

FYI, it's a problem in DJB's daemontools, not the init scripts.

> gcc is a fscking python script

bali@byblos ~ % which gcc /usr/bin/gcc
bali@byblos ~ % file /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.0.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Some Python script, isn't it?

> no cli to check options in ebuild scripts

emerge -s ufed

HTH.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[omega9]

I believe the only way to get 5.1 audio is with the ALSA drivers.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[strider3700]

Not sure, How could I check? The machine is a 700 with 256mb/ram so I assumed it was just a little to slow to handle everything else running in the background. Might it also have to do with the video drivers? suse 8.2 didn't detect my radeon 9000 pro although I see drivers for it in the emerge tree so gentoo should. I just ran with a default driver for an older ati card.

Well, Debian is great for servers

[ignorant_newbie]

I run gentoo on servers as well, both at home (for fun) and at work (so I'd get fired if they hung). Two things mitigate the slow compiles: the ability to save tar.gz'd versions of the optimized compile, so that I only have to compile a given package once and then deploy it onto the other machines, and distcc - so that all the machines help with the compilation.

distcc is particularly cool - I love compiling kde on my laptop with help from my 4 dell 2650s :)

Re:Well, Debian is great for servers

[oohp]

I'd not say Debian is great, but it's ok for servers. The software is out of date in between releases. I'm talking about stable, not testing or whatsoever. They also have this annoying habbit of patching old versions instead of just upgrading to the new ones (as RedHat does). I can understand this, upgrading would probably break things, but I can't live with it. So almost all my Linux (Debian) servers were converted to FreeBSD. It's up to date, I can build anything from ports, very easy to keep the system up to date and bug-free (almost, nothing is bug-free). Still using Debian (testing) on the desktop, but I really want to give Gentoo a try.

Re:Well, Debian is great for servers

[lemox]

That "annoying habit" is damn useful if you're running several servers that perform automatic upgrades via a cron job. Which would you prefer: an out of date version that does what it was intended to do (if not, why did you install it in the first place) or an up to date version that changes some config options that result in vital services crashing due to incorrect configs...?

I prefer the former, myself.

Easy answer

[Balinares]

I don't know about you, but myself, when I come across someone trying to make fire by rubbing sticks together, I feel it's polite to lend them my lighter.

Re:Easy answer

[Billly Gates]

" I don't know about you, but myself, when I come across someone trying to make fire by rubbing sticks together, I feel it's polite to lend them my lighter"

THEN WHY DON'T YOU USE FREEBSD! ITS SO MUCH BETTER AND MORE RELIABLE AND STABLE! ITS LIKE PURE SEX!! WE NOT ONLY HAVE PORTS BUT DISTRIBUTIONS FOR BINARIES SO WE HAVE NOT ONE BUT TWO PACKAGE MANAGERS! NETCRAFT CONFIRMS FREEBSD IS THE MOST STABLE OS! NO ENDLESS CONFIGURING EVERYTHING! SWITCH! SWICTH! SWITCH!

Why are you looking at me this way? I just see all you guys making a fire by rubbing sticks together and I want to hand you a lighter. Why do you find this so personal?

This is what drives some of us crazy. You may not care if I run FreeBSD and I do not care if you run Linux. I feel no need to change or convince anyone they should change as well.

Re:Easy answer

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry mate i tried your ligther and burned down the house
i will never use your ligther agin

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[deeeev]

For newer ati's I believe you need xfree-dri

And you can check whether or not dma is on with an "hdparm /dev/hdX" as root. And test your speeds with "hdparm -tT /dev/hdX"

Search the gentoo forums and you'll find lots and lots of posts about enabling dma and such.

Why not use stow?

[Abcd1234]

Unfortunately, there's no consistent way to cleanly remove things that I compile. And keeping track of the dependencies is next to impossible to do. I don't like to clutter up my directories with files and directories that aren't needed anymore.

Actually, on my Debian system, I have a mix .debs and stuff I've compiled myself, and my solution to the cruft problem is to use stow. I install all custom-compiled packages to /usr/local/packages/package-name, and then just enter the package directory and type

stow package-name

Voila! Very handy, and makes it VERY easy to uninstall packages (stow -D package-name; rm -rf package-name). Of course, there's still the dependencies issue, but I don't find that to be a big problem on a normal system.

Incidentally, stow is great for users who want to maintain their own private software repo as well. I do this at work, where I don't want to mix my personal software with the stuff from the default workstation install.

How long does it actually take?

[hanzwurst]

Can you post more exact numbers on how long software takes to be compiled? Maybe name programs and state your hardware (CPU, RAM) and say how long it took? Also, how is harddisk usage? Is it comparable to Debian?

Re:How long does it actually take?

[Omicron32]

On my P4 2.53GHz/1Gb RAM it took about 6 hours to get a base install, (bootable system), then ages (went to sleep, not sure of exact time), to build XFree, KDE and GNOME.

I did this chrooted into my Gentoo installation from a now dead RedHat partition, so I could continue using my computer (IRC, and not much else, however ;) while it did it's work.

Despite how long it took, (overall about 20-25 hours to get it how I liked it), I'm very happy with Gentoo, and I've been using it for about 7 months.

Also, you should know, I was a Linux newb, (Linux newb, not a computer newb), yet managed to get this working, and to understand a lot more about Linux in the process. Gentoo shouldn't just be resigned to those with Linux knowledge - a bit of common sense and a dashing of general computer knowledge will see you through the installation. :)

OT: Re: your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.

That's like saying "No, I don't trust those doctors. I want to be healthy first, then I'll quit smoking."

You're the customer with God. You pay up front, he delivers the goods.

Re:OT: Re: your sig

[tigga]

That's like saying "No, I don't trust those doctors. I want to be healthy first, then I'll quit smoking."

You're the customer with God. You pay up front, he delivers the goods. Well, doctors have some diplomas or licenses - somebody has checked them for knowledge they got in univercity..

What does have god? ;)))

Re:OT: Re: your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I could say the same about Santa Claus, you know. "I'll be good when I get the presents".

You religious nuts are all so small-minded. In a fantastic world that has so much to investigate, you prefer to sit in your little hovel and say "God did it". Any disease? "God did it". Lightning? "God did it". The only other response is "Satan did it".

Religion is a method to close people's mind. I hate to admit it, but Marx was right when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses.

All of you religious nuts are willing to accept the benefits of technology. But when science says that hey, there was no Adam and Eve, we all evolved, then you get all worked up.

Package granularity

[vanza]

Gentoo has drawn my attention when I first heard of it (it kinda reminds me of the time when I used to use Slackware and compiled everything myself from tarballs), but I don't think I have the time to invest on it... but I've read some of the documentation, and I couldn't find anything about how to control the granularity of the packages.

What I mean is: let's say you're installing KDE and you "emerge" kdeutils. There are lots of applications in that package, but let's say that I only want konsole and a couple of others. Is there an easy way to specify that?

I know that other distros (RedHat, at least) aren't much better in that area, but I use Conectiva at home, and it has a very fine grained package setup. That's one of the things I like about it (aside from the fact that it has a few tweaks that makes it better to use with Brazilian Portuguese).

For instance, I can install only konsole, and only konsole's documentation in Brazilian portuguese. Each single application has its own package and its own documentation packages (one for each language for which it's available). I think that's very cool. Add that to the fact that apt is the standard package manager, and it's a very pleasant system to maintain.

"rpm -qa | grep konsole" brings up:
kde-i18n-fr-docs-kdebase-konsole-3.1.1-26675c l
konsole-3.1.1-28534cl

So, back to the question: is it possible to do something like that with Gentoo?

Re:Package granularity

[sweede]

Nope, Gentoo is a source based distribution. It simply downloads the source tarball from a Gentoo mirror (if it cant get it from there, it will usually download from the authors website) and execute the ebuild to do ./configure, make and make install.

For instance, emerge dev-sources, and you will download from www.kernel.org. if you emerge xfree86, it will download the 7 or 8 tarball packages from www.xfree86.org (or the gentoo mirror). Would you go KDE and download kdelibs.tar.gz and expect to ONLY compile the Konsole application without the rest of kdelibs ?

Perhaps there is a --konsole-only ./configure option for kdelibs that will ONLY compile the konsole ? if there is then for that package they could provide those type granularity and control.

Many people are so used to the grainularity that binary distros can provide they forget what compile from source really is. They also seem to pin this as a failing of Gentoo and Portage as if it is their fault. That the authors of the applications didnt write this kind of control in their applications.

Gentoo is a source based distribution and will remain as one.

Re:Package granularity

[vanza]

Perhaps there is a --konsole-only ./configure option for kdelibs that will ONLY compile the konsole ? if there is then for that package they could provide those type granularity and control.

I don't know if it exists, but if Gentoo could provide a way to do that that would work for all packages, it would be nice. Kind of a "USE" flag, but for "components" inside a package. That way I wouldn't need to know how each developer decided to call the configure flag that enables/disables the compilation of that component.

For KDE, for example, it seems that each app has its own directory under the expanded package file tree. It shouldn't be difficult to map that to a "components" list.

Re:Package granularity

[sweede]

"For KDE, for example, it seems that each app has its own directory under the expanded package file tree. It shouldn't be difficult to map that to a "components" list."

I've already thought of something like this for the php package :)

Re:Package granularity

[ShortSpecialBus]

There have been a number of threads on that particular issue in the last few months on the gentoo forums. I'm a bit lazy right now to go search the forums for it, but go to The Gentoo Forums and do some searching. A few options were proposed.

The pythonicity of ebuilds or lack thereof

[Anonymous Coward]

I am certain that ebuilds are at least partially python scripts.

They're managed by python scripts, and some of them call python scripts, but that doesn't make them "partially python scripts" any more than calling grep would make them 'partially C'.

The Portage system is a merge of a Python core with Bash script based Ebuilds.

Exactly: python core (emerge, etc.), bash ebuilds. Incidentally, quite a bit of the "core" also is bash:

$ file /usr/lib/portage/bin/* | grep python | wc -l
19
$ file /usr/lib/portage/bin/* | grep bash | wc -l
41

It's like:

[Anonymous Coward]

"excellent view of what the world of Gentoo is like."
Like a bad imatation of BSD

"drink-the-koolaid"?

[Zigg]

You forgot

1. Buy the koolaid and sugar and dump into pitcher.
2. Turn on the faucet and wait for it to fill. Normally this would be a short process, except your water is distilled-on-demand. (You like your water as pure as possible.)
3. Wait some more.
4. Still waiting. Take the dog for a walk.
5. Wait wait wait. Need some sleep, or else you'll sleep through your morning commute tomorrow.
6. Whoops! You fell asleep, and your pitcher overflowed. You must start over. So, start over.
7. Twiddle thumbs.
8. Pitcher falls over due to a freak gust of wind through the open window in your kitchen, and shatters. Sigh, find new pitcher, star over.
9. (More waiting steps, which I'll spare you.)
10. Ah, it's done! Brag to all your friends that you have the purest koolaid in town.
11. Drink the koolaid.
12. Discover you need new koolaid in order to continue drinking it. Go to step 1.

Thanks, I'll keep my Debian. :-)

Re:"drink-the-koolaid"?

[grolschie]

Me too. And with Debian we can even build our own cpu optimized packages if we like simply with dpkg - if we also wish to waste valuable processor hours. Simply put, anything Gentoo does, Debian can do better.

Re:"drink-the-koolaid"?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

After I got my first two systems installed at home (I never throw legacy hardware away) There wasn't enough waiting to speak of (distcc is a wonderful thing). I learned pretty quick how to keep the pitcher from falling over.

Never really had a good experience with Debian. Glad it works for you, I just prefer Gentoo.

Also, Gentoo is a relatively young distro, compared to Debian, Slack, etc. For the short time it's been widely available, it's made great strides in correcting many of the usability issues. Compiling 98% of everything from source isn't for everyone (OpenOffice is available as a Binary ebuild, due to the EXTREME touchieness it has regarding compiler settings) though.

Re:"drink-the-koolaid"?

[Zigg]

It is true that I quit Gentoo, oh, it seems like a year ago now but is probably less; things may have changed for the better since. But I really never saw the benefit of recompiling. It meant my system wasn't available for "real work", even if I niced emerge out of existence. I never would have dreamed of running it on my legacy hardware.

And when it broke -- oh, boy, did it break. I believe I went through the install three times before I gave up for good. Thankfully, I had stage3, I think it was, ready to go. If I'd had to rebuild the system entirely each time, I would have given up after the first try, I think.

I think Debian's quality control is (was?) higher, and you can't beat the comparatively instant gratification. And I think it bears mentioning that I've never been afraid of installing an official package "just to try it out". Gentoo made me afraid of this. Seeing what Gentoo was doing, and having worked on OpenBSD ports for a few years and gaining an acute awareness for just how much a source install can fubarify your system did this to me.

Re:"drink-the-koolaid"?

[intermodal]

Simply put, anything Gentoo does, Debian can do better.

not true. Debian has rarely installed properly for me, whereas I've never had problems installing Gentoo by simply following the document. If I want a minimal install system, debian runs fine. If I want more than that, it just tends to fuck everything up. You can't blame that sort of result on someone who can successfully install Gentoo's technical knowledge of how the system works.

Re:s/Gentoo/FreeBSD/

[Anonymous Coward]

mv /linux /why/bother
mv /better/software/freebsd /
reboot

FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

First post!

No just for hobbiest or geeks.

[purplebear]

Gentoo is a great distribution. I use SuSE as my daily workstation just for the simplicity, but if I were in a more open and willing IT situation, I would seriously consider Gentoo in that environment as well.
Gentoo's Portage system is it's main strength and potential advantage to IT departments. It does mean a little long term thinking in regards to the ease of network administration it could bring. But standardizing on fewer hardware platforms in business also makes life easier. Using a custom, local portage tree within an organization, and custom ebuilds, an IT department could keep complete, tight control on their software library, nothing is there that would prevent you from having a portage tree with custom binary packages to make initial installation and updates quick. And the power of profiles adds in deciding what a system requires, you could nearly deploy servers with a custom stage3 install, a custom profile, and 'emerge system'. Workstations, anything.
It would take quite a bit of initial work for an IT organization to switch to a system like this, but I would love to see it in action. I could only image the ease of administering it.

No vi?

[essdodson]

Several months ago when I tried out gentoo the only editor available during the install process was nano. WTF? nano! Come on guys! I had headaches by the time I had finished the install from typing vi, and getting "command not found".

Re:No vi?

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

well, after getting the bootstrap done, or a stage 3 install, you can always type

emerge vim

and you'll have your vi.

nano is much more useful and editor agnostic to those not schooled in the ways of vi. I was forced to use vi in my programming classes in college. I now ONLY use it when forced. preferably when I'm doing a system recovery for someone.

of course you can always alias, so that when you try to invoke vi, you get nano instead, but I know how personal editor choices can be.

Re:No vi?

[Unregistered]

1) is it really that big a deal
2) vi is on there now.

Re:No vi?

[DebtAngel]

I couldn't believe that either.

I have been using Linux on and off for five years now, and the Gentoo install was the first time I've ever encountered a system without vi.

Granted, this was painless:
emerge vi
but it's the principle of the thing, you know? I mean Hell, Macs even come with vi.

Re:No vi?

[10Ghz]

Since you are only tweaking few files during the install, why would you need vi? Nano does the job just fine. Of course you can always install Vi on the machine, but I fail to see why it would be required to have Vi on the install-CD.

Re:No vi?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't believe Red Hat doesn't let you use vi during install!"

Yeah, I know, it's not what you said. But does it sound any less stupid? It's a freakin' installer you twit. I'm sorry your hand is so permanently cripled that you can only manage to bang out :wq to save a file, OR that you're to elitist or stoopid to figure out something as simple as nano. So which is it?

Haha, true

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it. Good post, even if it has been posted before.

Every word, 100% accurate. LOL

You know you're a sad b'tard

[joshsnow]

when you laugh at posts like the parent post.

To moderators on crack:

[drinkypoo]

I don't know why you felt the need to mod me. BSD has an installer, gentoo does not, so BSD must be easier to install. (Having installed openbsd, freebsd, netbsd on a couple architectures, gentoo 1.3 and 1.4, various flavors of redhate, sco unix, sco xenix, solaris on x86, solaris on sparc, and the list goes on -- I think I know what I'm talking about here.)

further, the K6 CPU is a 32 bit RISC processor with an x86 emulator glued onto it, so that part of my statement is also absolutely correct.

I don't think I need to defend my statement on RPM. Either you like it or you don't, but certainly if you depend on RPMs, you will have issues sooner or later; Either what you want will not be available in an RPM, or the RPM you need to install with have dependency issues. Hmm, I defended it anyway.

Re:To moderators on crack:

[Corbin Dallas]

Having installed openbsd, freebsd, netbsd on a couple architectures, gentoo 1.3 and 1.4, various flavors of redhate, sco unix, sco xenix, solaris on x86, solaris on sparc, and the list goes on

SCO?!?! You evil bastard! Moderators, get him!

Re:To moderators on crack:

[drinkypoo]

Well, that was a long time ago. I'm from Santa Cruz, and I used to hang out occasionally with quite a few SCO employees. Even applied there once, heh. They chose someone else, big shock in a town full of old-school Unixheads and whatnot.

In fact, I used to run Xenix-286 2.3.2 on my 286-6MHz with 1MB ram and a 40MB Seagate RLL disk, WD controller. I had an external Microcom MNP 1-5 modem (2400 baud + compression, whee) and a teensy little UUCP feed on that 286, and it worked really well :) Oh yeah, I had CGA, too! I got to have a color terminal, whee!

You are a fucking moron

[Anonymous Coward]

Bu, bu, but the server felt shaky to me...

Amen!

[Ryquir]

I've used all the major distros at one point or another, my last distro for my linux server was debian. My Server is a BP6 400 megahertz system with 256 MB ram.

I decided to try switching to linux on all my system which ran windows (mainly cause I wanted to play games) in late september, this a direct result of MS's heavy handed XP SP1 debacle. A friend had mentioned gentoo and I switched to it.

Gentoo didn't take more than a day to install, installing KDE/Gnome took longer when I wanted to do it but since I use enlightenment that was a much later day/time.

I enjoy compiling my own software and while optimization was cool, that is not the reason I use it. On by BP6 it took less than 24 hours to install, going from a clean install to fulling functioning web/mail, etc server took an additional 30 minutes.

I'll not argue that I spent a day installing something that other distro's could have done in minutes, my statement is while it took "forever" to install. Admining this server has been a piece of cake.

For example, the previous openssl vulnerablities. I had to download 5 redhat packages to "fix" my distro, these packages were entitled "openssl-0.9.6b-36" or something similar. Now on that same system when I do a "openssl version" check I get 0.9.6b, it takes a couple more steps for me to easily figure out if I've patched the system or not. Using tools which aren't always intutitive and certaintly aren't part of the openssl software itself.

In gentoo, you aren't backporting fixes to old software your using the software that is the most uptodate and recommended by the developers. If the openssl group just released a patch then all I have to do is read the gentoo forums and look for the security announcement (or bugtraq which I do anyways). This announcement interestingly says "to update your software, do: emerge sync, emerge openssl). Plus, I also know that everything that was linked to the previous OpenSSL version is now linked to the new OpenSSL version as well. Yes Gentoo does have its own "versions" ie "openssl-0.9.6i-r2" but all I have to do is look at the changelog to see why its at "-r2" and not "openssl-0.9.6i".

Hell, the really scary thing was when those security vulnerability's hit patching solaris boxes was a pain but since gentoo already had the patches available and they were not specific to the distro. All you had to do was copy the relevant patches, to your solaris system and then patch. BINGO I've suddenly used Gentoo as a tool to make my administration duties on a totally different arch/os easier.

Gentoo may not have all the features you want, it doesn't have a nice easy to use installer, heck it may take forever to install but for me it has not only the potential for a very interesting future both on the desktop sector and the server sector. The philosophy of Gentoo users and the community itself has made it my OS of choice with desktops or servers.

Course this is all IMHO, but when I can spend more time developing services for my users and less time on patching my job becomes easier. It also gives me more time to have fun. Ladies and gentlemen, patching servers just ain't fun and I don't want to be a patch monkey all my life.

Gentoo and Debian

[vadim_t]

I think they're the two best distributions, and should complement each other. Debian is great for the server, it's solid and works as it should. That's why it's still on my server.

Gentoo, on the other hand, will give you the latest stuff without problems. You won't have dependency problems like you can have on Debian due to strange package mixes. When you install stuff from 5 unofficial sources you end running into trouble sooner or later.

Oh, and here's a hint if you're thinking about upgrading your hardware and installing Gentoo. Get a dual CPU motherboard. It's not *that* expensive, and it more than compensates the increased cost with great stability and smoothness. I have a dual Athlon MP 2000+ and don't notice that the system is compiling at all. And KDE emerges in about 4 hours.

Re:An attempt to name 37 operating systems

[Anonymous Coward]

the mods are smoking dung tonight, it seems. this crapflood appears in several of /.'s gentoo stories so far!

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Try

hdparm -iI /dev/hda

(assuming you're talking your first hd)

You might need

hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 -k1 /dev/hda

to get your drives fully up to speed.

REPOST -5; Redundant overrated flamebait

[Unregistered]

what i'd kill to burn a full 5 mod points to kill this post. every time you post it.
You're not funny. You're not cool because you can't read documentation.

Re:REPOST -5; Redundant overrated flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

It's users like you who make Gentoo fans look like zealots. FYI, I wrote the original "troll" and have been using Linux and UNIX systems for about 6 years. I know it inside out. I have better things to do with my time than emerge stuff and check it's all working.

Debian and Red Hat patch, compile and thoroughly test their packages. That saves me time -- more time to live my life, thanks.

Re:REPOST -5; Redundant overrated flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, 6 whole years? Most of the Gentoo users I know have tgz'd home directories they've been carrying with them from system to system for at least ten years. Maybe that's why you hate Gentoo so much. You are practically a newbie. Give yourself some time to grow up a little and mature some and you'll understand why a REAL admin would prefer something like Gentoo over pre-packaged crap. There is hope for you son.

gentoo=emerge kickass-parts-of-other-distros

[carrett]

redhat->debian->slackware->gentoo the thing for me is that gentoo has really good documentation (and the forums kick ass) and i feel like when i use it i learn more about linux than when using other distros. also, the benefits of having a source based distro are great (but you can find that elsewhere). the package management is awesome (but you can find that elsewhere). i think i like gentoo so much because it's the merging (pun intended) of great features of other distros into one kickass thing.

A week is worth it.

[MarcQuadra]

It might take a long time to compile, but after three years of fiddling with APT and RPM-based distros I've FINALLY found out HOW LINUX WORKS. Gentoo provides a very detailed set of installation instructions that TEACHES you how linux really boots and runs your programs. After three years of only being able to use linux I can finally configure startup daemons, kernels, bootloaders, and other stuff that actually lets one run a healthy system. 'nano' is as easy (easier?) to use as any XFree text editor, most colleges start users on 'pico' for email anyway.

Gentoo is the perfect system for people learning how to RUN linux, leave how to USE linux to distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

I think Gentoo is going to take a LOT of ground in the Linux market, mostly because the people who give back to the linux community want what Gentoo has. Corporate servers will still run Redhat, but Gentoo will become the de-fecto standard for the intelligent army of geeks out there (the ones who file and fix bugs, and develop free software). 'Emerge' alone is reason enough to switch over, the simplified init processes and ease-of-customization will convince most committed users to take the plunge.

I'm looking forward to Gentoo-1.4 and beyond, I really think the future of linux lies in Gentoo, and I think Redhat and Debian should look into adpoting emerge as their package manager.

Re:A week is worth it.

[prairiedock]

Gentoo will become the de-fecto standard for the intelligent army of geeks out there ...

"De-fecto" standard indeed.

Re:A week is worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive me, I hit the bottle a bit last night, and there was an army of LSD-using partygoers in my apartment distracting me.

A more innaccurate article please?

[Drakonite]

[i]Gentoo uses GRUB as the default boot loader. At first I thought that was a bad choice, because I couldn't make GRUB work[/i]

Umm... noo.. The install docs list the Configuring GRUB information before the Configuring Lilo install information... So that means it's the default choice??? I think not.

Gentoo fully supports (and has good instructions for setting up) your choice of either lilo or grub, and has since I first started using it well over a year ago.

Although you wouldn't expect it to be mentioned in the article, I would like to mention that Gentoo has one of the best communities built around it. A simple search on the gentoo forums usually brings up the answer to any question you have, and if not a simple post to the forums will usually get an informative answer in less time than it takes slashdot to bring a server to it's knees...

Install time...

[Realistic_Dragon]

I have a couple of machines here, and found that installing Gentoo didn't take very long to install at all - around a day all told, including X (but not including KDE).

Most of that time however was hands off, and after the first 30 minutes or so I was back in at a functional console anyway - with emerge working no less - so that I could install emacs and pan and get on with work whilst it was compiling. If that doesn't excite you then just install it from inside Knoppix and you can work in OpenOffice or KMail (just remember to use nice -n 19 on emerge!).

As for old and slow machines, it took about 2 days to install it onto a PII 350 via ssh for a friend (about 200 miles away) including X and fluxbox. Since only 1 reboot is required I found it perfectly possible to do all of the configuration work for him, including a basic setup of X+fluxbox, without too much effort (mostly by copying my own config files). When coupled with scren (allowing the installee to watch and interact with your session) this seems to be a pretty good way to get people started.

Re:Install time...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a couple of machines here, and found that installing Gentoo didn't take very long to install at all - around a day all told, including X (but not including KDE).

A day to install isn't very long? People bitch and moan about how long it takes to install Windows 2000 which is only about 45 minute, and RH installs in half that time.

DO_NOT_COMPILE

[Praxxus]

It looks like people use a combination of "emerge inject category/package" and the "DO_NOT_COMPILE" flag to customize their KDE installations.

For example, say you don't want kdeedu when you go to install KDE 3.1.1:

emerge inject kdebase/kdeedu-3.1.1

Then Portage thinks "kdeedu" is already installed, so it won't compile/install it when you "emerge kde."

For further "granularity" within the different KDE groups, you can do something like:

DO_NOT_COMPILE="knode ksirc kppp korn" emerge kdenetwork. Then, as you might expect, it will build kdenetwork without the specified programs.

This was all ripped off from this thread from the ever-helpful Gentoo forums. ;-)

Custom Compilation Issues?

[krmt]

Around Christmas, there was a big thread on the Debian-devel mailing list titled "Are we losing users to Gentoo?". I went back and re-read it last night, and I came across an interesting point. Debian developers were toying with the idea of officially supporting custom compilation options in the various package building tools out there (apt-src, apt-build). One point that came up was that when you're trying to build a stable software platform, you've got to be able to debug. In order to do so, you've got to have reproducible bugs. With all the custom compilation options, how can you hope to reproduce the bugs if everyone is customizing the hell out of their binaries? I see a lot of posts about how great emerge is, but my question to the gentoo users out there is how often do you actually use custom options on your compilations? Do you really pass a lot of specific flags to different compilations, or do you just do a ton of generic emerge's? I can't help but wonder if a lot of the people who say gentoo is really stable just aren't using that much of the real customization options that it offers over apt.

I actually tried to scan the bugzilla database for gentoo last night too, to see if this kind of effect would be prevelant, but I don't know bugzilla well enough to really look through it. Do bugs like this pop up, and if so, do they usually get resolved?

Gentoo vs. Debian

[krmt]

I see gentoo as being very fast moving right now, and still small compared to Debian. Once they reach the peak of their growth curve as Debian seems to have, they're going to run in to the same sorts of problems that Debian has had to face.

Debian spends a lot of time making incremental improvements to the distro. Find bugs and fix them, move on. Find more bugs and fix them. Rewrite the installer because it's buggy. Rework the package classification system because it's gotten unwieldy. These are exciting things that are going on in Debian that might not be innovative or exciting enough for Larry the Cow, but then again, real innovation requires a lot of unglamorous grunt work.

It'll also be interesting to see if the userbase for gentoo remains as friendly as they are reputed to be. Most small projects are friendly because everyone is of like mind, but once it grows beyond a certain bounds, things can get tense. Debian has, unfortunately, suffered from this, although it varies. The debian-user mailing list tends to be very friendly and useful, and the IRC channel can be as well, depending on who is in it at the time. I honestly hope having gentoo get some of the spotlight from Debian will cause some positive change in Debian. Gentoo obviously was heavily inspired by Debian (Social Contract) and it'll be interesting to see how both distros influence each other as they develop.

I'm hoping we wind up with plenty of killer geek distros personally, and I hope I'm not the only one.

GENTOO USER -1; Can't take a joke

[Clockwurk]

You're not cool because you can't read documentation.

I am curious to know why Gentoo is cool. Did you write any code? Nope? Hmmmm... Oh wait, I know... You compiled the code. WOW!! That is sooo cool. I can't imagine anything more geeky or hardcore than compiling code other people wrote and tacking a few use flags on a command. That is soo awesome, I don't think I'll ever be that good. I still can't get over it.. You compiled the code for the whole operating system.. You should get an award or a trophy or something, you compiled someone elses code BY YOURSELF!!!!!!

[/sarcasm]

Re:GENTOO USER -1; Can't take a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try smoking pot or something. Maybe take up knitting or drinking or try to get some pussy or something. Retards like yourself ruin slashdot.

Re:GENTOO USER -1; Can't take a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you contribute any redhat or debian code? Nope? Hmmmmmmm. Oh wait, I know. You installed packages! WOW! You didn't even bother to compile from source! That is so cool! I can't imagine anything more geeky or hardcore than installing precompiled binaries! That is soooo awesome! I don't think you'll ever be good enough to set compile time flags and compile something optimized for your hardware! I still can't get over it! You actually installed precompiled binaries and had the nerve to give someone shit for doing something smarter! You should get an award or trophy for being a fucking idiot!! Yoo installed code compiled by someone else!!!!

What a fucking moron.

The Debian Fundamentals Are Changing

[krmt]

The incredible explosion of unnoficial apt sources lately has been nothing short of amazing to me. I've been a Debian user for years, and I've always run unstable, and this is the kind of developement is incredibly underplayed outside of Debian, and even within it to a large degree. Debian is a community-based distro, and the users are finally waking up and really seeing this fact and going and doing their own backports based on the work of the official developers. Everyone can be a part of Debian, even if they aren't a developer, and backports are a fantastic way of doing your part while helping yourself.

Debian evolves because it has to. The last paragraph in the review hit me hard because it's true, but I think in a year or two it won't be quite so bad, simply because Debian will have changed. It'll be fundamentally the same, but with small changes that often don't go announced, like unofficial apt sources or a new project on alioth, the thought process of using and creating the distro will change.

Short answer: yes

[Praxxus]

One of the most tedious (in my opinion) steps in installing Gentoo is setting up your "USE" variables. Portage uses your USE variables to determine what options to include/exclude when you install a new piece of software. And since this is source, that means compiling the software.

Say I install an app that can be compiled with KDE and/or GNOME support. I'm a KDE bigot ;-), so I have "kde -gnome" in my USE variables. So when I type "emerge foo" it will parse my USE variables, and run ./configure with the appropriate commands to build the app with the options I want it to.

Now, if there is an app that I'm installing that flat out won't run without GNOME, Portage assumes that since I want the app, I want the necessary GNOME components for supporting it. It will then download & compile said GNOME components prior to installing the app in question.

Portage also will let you set CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, that it uses for compiling most packages. Some really delicate apps (glibc, OpenOffice, etc.) have the flags stripped and set to something sensible before compiling, but most will run gcc with the flags you specify.

I would guess people on Gentoo get into more trouble with . . . *ahem* . . . overly-agressive compiler flags than with wacked out "USE" settings.

--

Can you do similar with SRPMs?

[rjforster]

Has anyone written a utility that lets your take a stock RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake (etc) system that is installed on your machine and recompile the binaries from the SRPM sources? Then these optimised RPMs can be installed over the top of the stardard ones already present.

Might is be as simple as a query to give a listing of what is installed piped into a rebuild of the SRPM files piped into an upgrade (or freshen) command with the force option because the version numbers will be the same? IE, all done mostly with the RPM command itself probably inside your favourite scripting language?

Obviously this applies to any RPM based distos I didn't mention and potentially applies to other package formats that distribute in binary + source variants.

Re:Can you do similar with SRPMs?

[rklrkl]

This is basically another way of saying "why don't Red Hat ship an entirely i686-targeted distro ?". A while ago, I spec'ed out an automated way to take Red Hat's distro CDs (you'll need all the binary/source CDs) and re-build them to create a new 3-CD i686 binary release that could be installed just like the (mostly) i386 release they currently ship.

Problems that could have fouled things up included:

• Red Hat GPG-signs its RPMs - will Anaconda reject unsigned RPMs ?

• Some packages may not have a non-interactive config/install - these will have to be exceptions where options are piped through the package installer.

• Dependencies ! How does Anaconda cope with this ?

Re:FUCK GENTOO

[carrett]

yeah, redhat is a totally REAL distro. i mean, it's almost as REAL as WINDOWS. what an idiot.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[Anonymous Coward]

If you do not have a UPS and filesystem corruption is an issue, use only the ext3 filesystem, or JFS. Sure it's a bit of a performance hit, but it's better than losing data. Of course, you *should* just get a UPS..

Why I don't like gentoo.

[foolip]

I tried gentoo for a few days between Slackware and Debian, and found myself throwing it out, well, within a few days. It wasn't because it wasnt' nifty, not because it didn't work as expected.

The problem I found myself battling was how to not install non-free software. When I had most things installed, I thought it would be a good time to install MPlayer too. On Slackware I'd always avoided the win32-codecs, because I simply don't want to use non-free software (if the option is not watching the video and using non-free stuff, I chose not watching).

Anyway, when emerging MPlayer, the emerge system started downloading these wretched w32-codecs, and I thought WTF?! Asking about in #gentoo I found out I had to remove the win32-codecs from the emerge script. OK, so I did that. The next thing was OpenOffice, which suddenly wanted to install Blackdown Java, which also qualifies as non-free. It wouldn't have been much trouble fixing that either, but if I have to read all the emerge scripts to make sure nothing non-free is installed (and also figure out what actually is non-free), I'm not not going to have much fun with gentoo.

If someone wants to use non-free software on their computer, I'm not going to be a total bitch about it (although I'd reccomend against it), but for my computer, it should be my choise. I filed a bug-report, and found out that there was an environment var ACCEPT_LICENSES, but that there was no code behind it yet. Very well I thought, I'll just use a (the) distro that makes it easy for me to use only free software, and that is what I do today (debian)

In other words...

[TeknoHog]

On my P4 2.53GHz/1Gb RAM it took about 6 hours to get a base install, (bootable system), then ages (went to sleep, not sure of exact time), to build XFree, KDE and GNOME.

...even a fast machine takes ages to compile it. What about slower boxen that would benefit from the optimizations much more? Can you say, catch-22?

Re:In other words...

[ShieldW0lf]

Um... wouldn't the machines that benefit from the compiler switches be newer machines that have extensions?

And now, a translation translation

[Sevn]

"Since I'm pretty pathetic, have no life outside
of slashdot, and generally pissed off that I'm
unattractive, flunked out of college, and can't
get laid, I'll find a target for my aggression.
Today that target will be Gentoo Linux users.
I'll start out by referencing every stereotype
that I can think of. I'll texture those references
with all sorts of impressive sounding technobabble
so people will know how smart I am. Being smart is
all I have going for me since I have no people
skills to speak of. Generally, I'm afraid of
people, but I can flex my frontal lobes on
slashdot and feel like the big man I am not.
Rest assured, my post will get modded up as
funny and not modded down as the flamebait that
it is. I know this because I've posted this
exact same post 2 times before. It truly resonates
with the other people like me on slashdot that
have mod points."

I think I pretty much nailed that. :)
There are plenty of great reasons to love Gentoo.
But by all means, continue to hate the way you
do and take it out on everyone. It's very
entertaining and an awesome glimpse into a type
of person. I should write a paper.

Re:And now, a translation translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for hard line breaks. I find it sad that modern browsers still cannot manage to wrap text after nearly a decade of development. If you wern't there to format it into 80 columns for us, where would we be?!

Next time though could you try using <tt> around your text, too? My browser can't handle its own font selection either, you'll have to tell it for me.

Thanks!

Re:And now, a translation translation

[Sevn]

And that is why you are an anonymous coward!
Please don't let the importance of that fail
to sink in.

Re:And now, a translation translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey there. I wrote the original text on a rainy afternoon, for a laugh. And it has given loads of other people a laugh; I have a life, wrote it in good humour, and then endless losers like you reply to it trying to psychoanalyse me. Hah.

Be quiet, kid. Never got laid? Dropped out of college? When you're closer to my age, let's talk some more :)

Re:And now, a translation translation

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had created such a piece of pathetic contrived tripe, I'd probably be anonymouse too.

Re:And now, a translation translation

[Anonymous Coward]

And every word he said is true and you KNOW IT.

Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return

[commanderfoxtrot]

I find it interesting you can install Gentoo... yet not know about hdparm...

You may also find smartctl interesting one day.

Debian? apt-build and apt-src

[Seeker5528]

I have been running Debian unstable for a while as my desktop system and have not had to compile things very often.

Most often I use kernel package to create packages for the kernel and kernel modules.

There was a stretch when VideoLan Client would not install and more recently MythTV would not install, both of which are available from apt-gettable locations hosted on non Debian servers. In both cases I was able to use apt-build to download the source packages, compile, and install the resulting deb packages.

There is a package called apt-src also which seems like it may be more flexible than apt-build.

I have not tried Gentoo yet, but base on the descriptions of emerge these tools fall way short. However, for those of us that like the Debian way of doing things they do provide a couple of nice alternatives to dpkg-buildpackage.

Later, Seeker

Re:Short answer: yes

[krmt]

Ok, I didn't know that it was required to set up all your USE variables. I figured that you could just set up the ones you wanted and leave the rest as default (./configure works well enough by itself usually). I'd bet you're right about the aggressive compiler flags over the USE variables, but since you always hear about how much faster gentoo is, I'd be surprised if all the aggressive compilation didn't cause unreproducible bugs.

Yes

[motu_]

There is an rpm-like front-end to the portage database called sys-apps/epm. Unfortunately this is not installed by default.

Furthermore there is the app-admin/gentoolkit that includes the qpkg tool. This also very useful for searching the package database (say colored output)...

Nice Try

[Sevn]

If you had bothered to actually read my reply,
you'd notice I was specifically targetting the
poster, not the original author of the flamebait.
So please don't go trying to rescue your ego on my
behalf because I wasn't saying anything about you
to begin with. I can tell that you put the same
amount of attention to detail in your artful
flamebait as you did in your reply to my posting. :)

For the love of God, MOD PARENT UP!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of the truest things I've ever seen on /. to explain the reasons behind trolls and the people that love/support them. It is really sad that these losers have nothing better to do than destroy and tear people down. I wish I had mod points!

When posters reply to their own posts as AC's

[Anonymous Coward]

it's GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY!
Pray away the GAY Clockwurk!

THIS GUY IS A FRAUD

[Anonymous Coward]

*I* wrote the original anti-gentoo troll. I was bored during study hall. This girl I know uses gentoo and loves it. I tried to figure it out and couldn't. So I figured I'd show her! I'm not going to let some stupid girl feel good because she can do something I can't! I'm really sorry so many people got mad at what I wrote. I didn't mean it. I don't even know what I'm talking about. It sounded good when I wrote it down. I'm going to try to use gentoo again cause it really does look like the best distro. I'm very very sorry.

Your Pal,
Clockwurk

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP!!! now THIS is FUNNY!

Sevn for fucking president

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I rent you the next time I need to put a dumbass in their place?

Like it wouldn't be!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

HAIL Fellow Gentoo User! I am pleased to see you call attention to the fact that Gentoo is making massive inroads into the Enterprise market in a daily basis! Like you, I'm not surprised at all! It won't be long before OUR favorite distro is adopted by everyone! Lets just hope that it happens fast so not only people like you and me know the heaven that Gentoo is in the Enterprise!

Oh, Oh, Oh, da play hata be sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh da playa hata be sad,
dissin what he never had,
can't undastand da USE flag,
makin fwooty posts like a gay fag,
all tha gentoo yooosa make him mad,
oh da playa hata be sad.

Oh da gentoo hata be sad,
cain't figa out why he mad,
he gots redhat or debian to make him feel glad,
like the hey jigga numba one haxor fad,
someday he grow up and be glad,
cause he figa out gentoo like a smot lad.

wh0rd.

Just for shit's sake,

[Sevn]

Name one thing that runs on Linux that doesn't run
on FreeBSD. Can't think of one? That's because there isn't one. As far as support, you can run Linux
binaries on FreeBSD with the "linuxator", usually
with higher performance than on Linux natively.
Pretty cool eh?

LIAR!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote the original text during 8th period english. I am pathetic. I am a virgin. I am mad I couldn't get gentoo working right. So I DID fire off a troll. What of it? Kiss my ass fuckers! I'll haxor you good with my debian box!!!!

Re:Short answer: yes

[Praxxus]

You don't HAVE to set up your USE variables. I guess that part of installation is so tedious for me because I do try to go in and address most of them. ;-)

Usually when someone comes in to the forums with an off-the-wall bug that no one else seems to have, compiler flags are the first thing checked.

But really, the compiler flags aren't that big of a deal, I don't think. And they will become even less of one as GCC 3.x gets better.

Gentoo encourages experimentation

[danielrendall]

I've found that since installing Gentoo as an experiment on a spare machine at work, I've become much more acquainted with the way Linux works. Since then, I've installed it on various machines in my bedroom (Sun Ultra 10, P2 laptop with a broken screen, old Pentium thing and an Athlon, with a Sparc IPX box as a work in progress) and I'm also installing it on an old beige G3 machine sitting under my desk at work. The install instructions for X86 are great, the PPC ones seem pretty good, and you can sort of muddle through with the Sparc ones. I like the fact that I can keep my distribution current using 'emerge sync; emerge - u world'. With Mandrake (previous distribution on my Athlon box) I was a bit wary of recompiling the kernel, or updating anything crucial like KDE in case I missed something important. Since I replaced it with Gentoo, I've felt much more in control. Obviously it's not for everyone, but I'd certainly recommend it. But only if you've got a fast net connection...

Thanks!

[billstewart]

Too much of the GRUB documentation is about how it can act like a shell that you negotiate with, rather than just editing a file. You've answered what I needed to know - thanks!