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

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.

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

[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?

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

[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

[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

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.

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!

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: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.

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...

[tlianza]

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

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...

[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...

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..

[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..

[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?

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...

[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.

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

[handsomepete]

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

I take my phone off the hook.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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).

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

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 :)

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.

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?

"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. :-)

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: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: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: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.

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: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.

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.