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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."
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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.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
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.
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.
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
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!
My journal has hot
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...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
My journal has hot
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.
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.
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.
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.
"I'm wondering what others do when less computer literate family members start using Linux"
I take my phone off the hook.
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 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.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
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.
Won't you be my my neighbor?
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
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
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
"I've got to stop masturbating! It makes me too lazy! Stop it, Albert. Stop it." -- Albert Einstein
Wow, that post gets funnier every time I see it.
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
Sitting Walrus Blog
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.
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.
:) 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 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
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.
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
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.
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."