Slashdot Mirror
Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released
Quique writes "Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.0 for the x86, AMD64, PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and SGI MIPS architectures. Additionally, the Gentoo Hardened team is announcing the inaugural release of a security-enhanced Gentoo platform for the x86 architecture.
Installation stages, LiveCDs, and GRP sets can be
found on the mirrors.
More information about the Gentoo Hardened project
can be found on its project page.
For more information, please consult the
documentation,
mailing lists,
user forums and official IRC channels.
The new Gentoo
Store has also been announced." I've put more of the release notes below - might also be worth checking out the tutorial for LPI certification done by the President/CEO of Gentoo; there's also a note about Gentoo's newest meta-release tool, Catalyst below as well. Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information.
"
In addition to many bugfixes and security updates since the 1.4 release,
Gentoo Linux 2004.0 contains a cutting-edge development toolchain and user
environment including, but not limited to, Linux kernel 2.6.3, GCC 3.3.2,
GLIBC 2.3.2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.2, and xfce4.
Gentoo Linux 2004.0 marks the debut of Catalyst, the new Gentoo release meta-tool. Using Catalyst, developers and users can create and customize every aspect of their Gentoo Linux system; from installation stages, to bootable LiveCDs, to customized binary packages for the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP). For more information on Catalyst, please see the Catalyst project page and online documentation."
Cool! So if I start the stage1 compile on my P90 it should be ready by Easter.
6 days later I will have a newly compiled system. Honestly, what's the point when you can have binary packages. Sourcecode distribution is so 1980ies...
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
luckily i download this 4 hours ago...
:)
now all you guys can enjoy the fleed
I heard that Gentoo can be fully customized into a perfectly-tailored distribution .... ... if that is true, can I make Gentoo Tanooki Linux?
# emerge sync
# emerge -uD world
That has to be the *biggest* version jump in history! From 1.4 to 2004.0!
By M, version 1.0
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." .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."
"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
"...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..." .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)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"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!"
-
Also note that existing gentoo users only need to "emerge -[D]u world" to upgrade to the 2004 release.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Anybody know the location or a mirror with the non-sse version of hardened Gentoo? I can't seem to find a mirror anywhere.
This is very nice. Im running 1.4 and ive been following the stages of 2004 and catalyst. I cannot wait to finish downloading the cds so i can archive the 1.4 and start checking out the changes theyve worked so hard on.
Cool...I'm just about to build a Gentoo Linux box on a Sun Ultra2 dual 300Mhz 1G ram box I got off eBay...should give some new life to an old box.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The stages that say 2004.0 are only for Hardened Systems I hear, the mirrors haven't updated yet
Setec Astronomy
Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration? I've got a 3.2GHz system with a Radeon 9700 and I'm running XP Pro on it. I was thinking of installing FreeBSD on it which I run with two other systems, but ultimately this system is my primary desktop and I'd like to have a Linux dist installed so I could take advantage of, well, Linux desktop ease-of-use (never thought I'd say that!). Still, I like BSD's ports system, which is why I'm interested in Gentoo (the portage system is supposed to be similar).
... Any info would be appreciated ...
I've never installed Gentoo, though, so I'd be curious about what Gentoo users would have to say about this and how it compares to, say, Mandrake or Suse
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
My P-III 450 and I will let you know what we think of it in about a week.
Josh
Note, you'll only get a 2.6.x kernel if you put ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" in your /etc/make.conf file before or after "emerge system." The current gentoo-sources kernel is 2.4.22-r7. gentoo-dev-sources is the one that will give you a 2.6.x kernel, presently 2.6.3-r2.
as if the Gentoo zealots needed any more encouragement to post.
This is just a way to sidetrack them, so they won't be posting to other threads while this one is active.
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
So, zealots, fire away! I might even be convinced to give this one a try - previous Gentoo experiment was short circuited by unavoidable crash on entering X.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
After having this distro reccomended to me, I tried it out on a new laptop, and to be honest, I'd say it was not a great experience. Being a linux nub, I guess it was a bad distro to choose as my first install, what with no automated installer, and freaking 4603453 years to compile anything. emerge kde took a few years, as did anything else. While I acknowledge the benefits of compiling everything with optizations for the exact platform it's on, and also realize that installing is a one time thing and using is a many time thing, I still would say there's not a good enough mix between precompiled and source distributed in stage1 and stage2 releases, and stage3 jumps right to all compiled for you. Where's the median?
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
I can remember when I couldn't get it to work. I used to hate it too. There's still Fedora for the rest of ya!
Can KDE compile without help on a clean system? That would be nifty. I'm talking about the 8 days where kde-base wouldn't compile due to a bug in the build script that affected fam where the build script used a tool that was masked in the stable branch. This bug could not have happened if someone had tried it on a stable system before it was released to the stable branch. Mod me a troll if you like, but I'm not making this up.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
I went to three diff mirrors. No ISO for 2004.0/livecd/x86
???
What gives???
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Check out catalyst. It allows you to build your own stage taballs for Gentoo. You can even build the binary GRP packages to your specs and it will automatically arrange for the packges to be burnable to more than one CD. Talk about flexibility. You can cook your Gentoo up how ya like.
What I really want to know is what they have planned for April Fools this year. I do not see how they will ever be able to top last year.
But I'm still compiling the last version!
A clarification - I just checked out the gentoo page, and they talk about support for Sun Ultra, not SunSparc.
A Sparc5 is different than an Ultra5... I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.
It will be nice to upgrade it from the RedHat 5.2 that it currently is running, all things considered.
I'm very fond of it on my desktops, I have one running 2.6 and one running 2.4 (both gentoo sources) and both are very responsive. I have yet to see another vanilla system that can handle running at 100% load without missing a beat handling the desktop.
:)
It's not as easy as Redhat Mandrake et al, but then doing more complex stuff (custom kernels, odd hardware support etc) is much easier, which is really part of the Linux spirit
On the other hand I think the people running Gentoo on Zauruses are nuts. Gentoo might be good, but man if there was ever a place for Debian that was it!
Beep beep.
I'm one of the not-very-skilled, but I found gentoo relatively easy to install from their pre-compiled CD. It's good enough that I don't absolutely need the biggies compiled from scratch. So I don't see that the argument about long compile-times need be so determinative.
Above all, I found documentation items from gentoo specially helpful, because they were written by someone with the skill of remembering and including _all_ of the needed steps -- and this isn't true of all documentation in linux-land. (OT -- another very very good documentation IMO is the GRUB manual.)
So let's hear it for user-helpful gentoo folk and their well-documented distro.
-wb-
I tried Gentoo on my notebook, and it seemed that support for PCMCIA and wireless just wasn't all that great. Documentation for such issues was pretty much non-existant at the time.
Has this improved? Any Gentoo want to point me towards portable nirvana?
Jonathan
USE flags. They let you compile in (or out!) support for whatever you want in your system, which is great for custom-tailoring your own sets of packages for whatever tasks.
:)
Otherwise, you could just use the binary packages, and it'd be quite a bit like any other distro.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Torrents please...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Catalyst sounds nice, but what about a tool for making our own initrds so I can, for example, load the module-only driver for my raid card? I think a lot of people have a need for loading third-party drivers in order to boot.
RAID card vendors have a funny definition for "linux support". My Promise SX4 card's SATA interfaces, and not the raid interface, are the only thing 2.6 supports, so you get to stare at 4 separate drives instead of your RAID-5 array; one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay. Promise's half-closed-source driver(which is available from 'some guy in germany') won't compile under 2.6, but does under 2.4; however, only as a module, so bringing up the system off the card is impossible without an initrd, even though LILO will work since it uses the BIOS to get the kernel and initrd.
I tried using genkernel, which does build initrds, but I haven't been able to make an initrd that'll boot a -normal- system without tons of module errors, and adding the FasTrak driver module into an already built initrd is a huge pain as well, something else I haven't gotten working. Anyone have a good link to a guide to making initrds and specifically dealing with module headache and describing how the initrd then boots the system off the real_root partition?
'course, i'd also settle for a howto on tricking the kernel into linking the module directly into the kernel, that'd do the same thing...
Please help metamoderate.
That will update your packages.
;)
If you want to upgrade only use:
# emerge -UuD world
Does anybody still care about Gentoo? It is like the ultimate poseur distro. Everyone uses it because they want to be 'leet' and 'kewl' and say 'I run Gentoo and not Windows XP so I am a badass.' Way lame.
As opposed to those who run RHEL or SUSE because their boss gets warm fuzzies from writing subscription checks?
As opposed to those who run Debian because they'd rather argue parlimentary procedure and voting rules than have code that actually works on recent hardware?
As opposed to those orphans still running RHL because dammit, Red Hat == Linux, just like Xerox == photocopying and Jello == flavored gelatin.
I gave Debian up when I bought a year old graphics card and the XFree that came with stable Debian didn't recognize it.
hehe, its funny. at lesat the poster admits that gentoo is "interesting", its not really flamebait and real gentoo users can poke fun at themselves!!
And i just finished boot straping and emerging an hour ago.
:)
all well a few more hours wont hurt
---
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
Yep, so mature that it's near death.
Gentoo has the Live-CD market cornered, with Knoppix remaining as the only serious competitor. :)
In fact, the Hardened-Gentoo CD rocks. Get it, burn it, take it with you wherever you go, you won't be sorry.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
i just finished installing release 1.4 last night!
...
wait... i did a stage 1 using emerge -u...
never mind.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Well that may be but so is then the average joe trying to convert over [I type this... into Mozilla 1.6-r1 using the latest ~x86 icewm on my FUCKING GENTOO INSTALL] users from others OSes.
I went to the mirrors. Followed the release/2004.0/livecd/x86 and found nada [found nada in the i686, p3 and p4 dirs too].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
AMD64 Mandrake and Fedora pre-releases hard-crashed during boot. FreeBSD installed cleanly but I felt more comfortable with Linux so that's how I wound up with Gentoo on my machine.
It took three hours to compile the base system (I intentionally chose stage1 installation where you compile almost everything; you could install Gentoo binaries too) and after that I just emerged the apps I required.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm running a Gentoo / XP dual-boot, and I have to say, I really love it. Gentoo doesn't just slap any ol' bootloader on there...you get to choose which one you'd like and configure it yourself...this ensures that both of your operatings systems are immediately available. For anyone who already is comfortable working at a command line, Gentoo linux is the best way to learn a linux system from the bottom up. Every aspect of gentoo just makes sense. Besides, with a 3.2g processor, you'll hardly notice the compile times. Gentoo.org has some really excellent install guides, and the people on the official forums are some of the most helpful forumers around. Try it, you'll love it!
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
I've got about 50 Compaq Deskpro 4000's that are begging for something to do.
Why not? Support your local electric company I say!
driver support.
I was forced to change one of my machines from FreeBSD to linux just for the driver support.
and gentoo does a nice job for a linux system.
ever heard of cron?
For those with more machines who wish to run gentoo, you can use distcc (distributed c compiler) to speed things up. You can use it from the early stages ;) :)
Gentoo has great documentation on distcc!
Have fun!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Hi...
What version of XFree86 is shipping with this release of Gentoo? Any statements about the licensing issues some are having with the latest XFree86 release?
"On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo?"
Did you ever hear Debian users bitch in the early days about how difficult it was to install Mplayer?
emerge kplayer
Done
That's why.
To get the equivalent of MS' "Just download the updates & inform me when they're ready to install:
#!/bin/bash
emerge sync >/dev/null
emerge -uDp world
emerge -uDf world
Cron should take care of mailing you the result.
man... i can gurantee any prob you had someone else already encountered and was posted and resolved on the forums. You just didn't use all the resources gentoo provides... i.e. the community (forums)
gcc-3.3.3-r1.ebuild
is there, it is just not the *stable* package yet, probobly still undergoing some testing
Ah, correction. I'm using mine to get transparent titlebars in kahakai. And they look mah-velous!
If there is a bug in the code, then using binaries is most certainly not helping. Not to mention IF the person is FIXING the bugs, the binary does almost NO good.
Now admittedly debian may use non-standard patches to fix some things (what distro doesn't? LFS...maybe) and not have a certain problem, but that should be sent upstream, which it is most likely what colinleroy is doing.
Who cares if you don't like Gentoo or BSD or whatever? Just because someone else likes to run them doesn't make them an idiot. Pretty much any current Linux distro or BSD distro or any similar OS is going to get the same things done for you. They may do things in different ways, but ultimately they have fairly similar results. I'm not trying to devalue any viewpoints or systems here, but honestly there is no point in bitter, angry fighting over superior open source OS's because they are pretty much all way better than Windows.
I happen to like Gentoo, and I run it on some of my machines. But I also run RedHat and Mandrake and Mac OS X and I even have one Windows XP box. I don't particularly care about the alleged optimization in Gentoo, because there is no noticeable difference in speed between any recent distro I have run. What I do care about is the fact that it is highly customizable, fairly easy to use, and frankly pretty cool. The Portage system is a unique adaptation of BSD Ports and the similar Linux counterparts.
I fail to see how Debian is better than Gentoo. They are somewhat similar, and I wouldn't say that either is necessarily better. Of course, with Linux, it ultimately comes down to what is best for you. Either way, there is no way anyone can definitively say one is better. One could go on all day about the goodness of Debian, and I could throw that all out in my mind because I happen to not like how Debian feels and acts. Or I could just go by the simple fact that although initial installation of Gentoo can be more complex than that of Debian, Gentoo worked infinitely better with my hardware from the start. But all that demonstrates is that I like Gentoo better than Debian. It might be the case that I'm the only person that feels that way, and you know what, I would be fine with that.
What I am trying to say here is that we just need to try to be more tolerant here on Slashdot, and ultimately in all areas. Sure, we shouldn't tolerate an OS that is blatantly or hopelessly flawed, but I just don't see that describing Gentoo or any other OS that I have used recently. Go ahead and debate, go ahead and criticize, but realize that you can't really fault someone for their opinions.
I answer your question of why I run Gentoo: because I like it. I respect that you don't like it, if that is the case. I can see how many, if not most people would not like it at all. But I do like it and I am no "zealot." I wouldn't take a bullet for Gentoo, but I'll stick up for it if it is unfairly slammed. I am willing to see the flaws in my chosen distro. Are you?
I am feeling fat and sassy
I really find it ironic how often groups of people get attacked on Slashdot and called "zealots" as if their ideas were worthless and wrong simply because you can't understand their reasoning.
Relax, man - the term 'zealot' was not intended to be offensive. I think the the significance of the word has been watered down quite a bit. We're all zealots in some ways, and there's nothing wrong with it. "Gentoo zealot" is kinda running joke around here.
As someone said, life is too short to not be passionate about something.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
can I make Gentoo Tanooki Linux?
Wouldn't Nintendo sue you for trademark infringement? Or have you never heard of Super Mario Bros. 3?
/* Insert Insane rant about how gentoo is the greatest thing since sliced bread here */
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Sorry, didn't mean to be too defensive, I just get sick when I see all the stupid fighting over BSD and such. It really is so lame, and I would hate to see all serious discussion of Gentoo on Slashdot be cancelled out be such garbage.
I am feeling fat and sassy
You missed the point.
How do you merge your fixes into apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ?
You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
Maybe because Gentoo accomplishes both of your first two points? And why not go ahead and throw in optimizations for the arch of the machine... sure it doesn't always help, but if you're compiling from source you might as well.
So maybe if you just want a desktop and don't feel like compiling everything for over a week you can use a different distribution. But I've found Gentoo works well for servers.
In particular for busy servers that are co-located behind > 100MBps of bandwidth for database-backed sites: Every clock cycle helps!
So you don't deny the fact that you are a poseur?
Not at all. I only pretend to maintain the 140 or so Gentoo machines in my department. My users are so in awe of my l33t status that they feel unworthy to ask me to do anything.
The reason we're called "zealots" (yep, I use Gentoo as well) is because everytime a Linux article comes out on /. there are 30 comments that say "What's the big deal, Gentoo already does this" or "All I have to do is emerge -lskfa file", and it's completely irrelevant.
I love the way Gentoo works, and I understand that there are many people who feel the same way I do. But keep it to yourself unless someone is specifically asking for advice on a distro to try. People are sick of hearing us push Gentoo at every freaking opportunity.
Since all the servers are getting hammered pretty hard, this should be mentioned. If you have run
sudo emerge sync
sudo emerge -uD world
in the past few weeks, there's nothing new out there for you. All you'll get is the new packages (like always) and bragging rights to run a "new version." There's not even a new minor 2.4 kernel version - I've been running 2.4.25 since it was released.
So, you do NOT need to sync up now. Especially not while half the slashdot userbase is doing so. You're pounding the living **** out of the servers, and for no good reason. If you must get new everything, whether to brag about running "version 2004" or what have you, su to root and set an at job to do so late tonight. Thank you for making Gentoo usable for people who actually NEED to update.
OK how do I upgrade from 1.4 to 2004?
I suspect the answer is emerge sync ; emerge -u world but I'm not sure.
Hey is 2004 still using devfs with 2.6? Get with the times guys!
I've got a dual Opteron.
;)
;)
Sweet....
Seriously, how do you like it? How well does the rest of your hardware work with it? Do you run X and games? I currently have two dual-PIII machines (both running Gentoo 1.4 I might add -- and before I get flamed, I also have RedHat 9, Slack 9.1 and FreeBSD 5.2 on other machines in the house
I know this is slightly off-topic, but I am trying to decide between dual Xeon for a new machine or a dual Opeteron. 64 bit is enticing...
Gentoo isn't for the average Joe
On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo? You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable, and the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth.
... unpleasant to work with, it expected weird things of my CD-ROM drive and I pulled my hair out when the live-installtion (net-inst) cd didn't have Bash avaible - no tab completion sucks. After having installed it, the X-Server wouldn't work and I gave up, tired and exhausted. Way too much stuff preconfigured in my opinion - not necessarily a bad thing - hey, apt-get seemed quite nice (I mean it).
You must be lucky, because I am the guy you have been looking for to answer all your questions - I run Gentoo on my desktop, Slackware on my Server and recently installed debian-testing. And here is the reason why I like Gentoo the most:
Slackware is a great distro, I could have been the one I liked most. It is barely "extended", everything seems to be where it should be and there are no strange custom configurations/extra control panels/pre-installed programs like on Mandrake or RedHat. But after a while Slackware got pretty tedious, because I had no decent package management (swaret sucks and no central point for mirrors) and the init script system, though I learned a lot through using it, was more than I wanted to handle on a regular basis.
debian-testing. After I found that #debian does have some more helpful users than the ones I encountered last time (Actual quote: "You tried to install unstable? HAHAHAHA"), I found debian hard to install - not because of the lack of an installer but because there is one. It was to some exten
Now Gentoo. I love it - but it is not because I want that so-called CFLAGS Performace Increase(tm). Yes, it's mostly a myth. There are a few apps where it matters, but most of the time it doesn't. But I love portage - I did almost everything on that system myself, except the area I don't like to touch - it has a nice init-script system (think rc-update add apache default). Portage rocks, because compiling from source, while it may be timeconsuming, circumvents a lot of dependency problems, because programs that compile with libX 0.1 will most of the time work with libX 0.2 too, and vice-versa. Also, if I want a new version of a program, no need to wait for a maintainer to make a new release of the package. Most of the time it's just down to renaming a single ebuild-file (i.e., renaming cdrdao-1.1.6.ebuild to cdrdao-1.1.7 ebuild) and portage will try to fetch the appriopriate file from the same server and compile with the same options.
And last but not least: USE flags. I like my emacs without X, thank you, so that's USE="-X" emerge emacs for me (please, no flames from the vi/nano/edit.com crowd)..
I could go on about other things I like, but that mainly sums it up. I hope that obliterates some counter arguments such as "performance myth" and "compile times" because I think those things suck too - and I still like Gentoo.
on a side note, 'emerge -lskfa file' only returns:
e cts/pam_dotfile/
$ sudo emerge -lskfa file
>>> --changelog implies --pretend... adding --pretend to options.
>>> --pretend disables --ask... removing --ask from options.
Searching...
[ Results for search key : file ]
[ Applications found : 46 ]
* app-admin/pam_dotfile
Latest version available: 0.7
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 223 kB
Homepage: http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users/lennart/proj
Description: pam module to allow password-storing in $HOME/dotfiles
License: GPL-2
...plus lots more results, 45 to be exact...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Hi,
/usr/(lib|bin|include)/) and take my own kernel .config file or would I have to rebuild a .config file? I assume of course it won't force me to trash my preexisting partitions and data (such as /home, /vol, etc..)
I've been running Mandrake with numerous patches (mainly nForce-related) as well as the 2.6.2-rc2-mm1 kernel from src.
Will gentoo builds upgrade in-place (into
I'd prefer a source-based system that optimizes for SSE, 3DNow, etc..
(and I have 1.4 CDs for Athlon XP and SPARC, just waiting to get the dual-150MHz SPARC in to blow away and drop Linux on.. wh33!!)
Download the whole set!
Oooh, oooh, pick me; Being sidetracked is one of my specialties, aside(!) from being abducted by those pesky fish-people from the planet Sirius.
Hardly because we love to watch text flow by on a terminal for hours, as some f*cough* people love to insinuate at every smeggin' chance. I primarily use it because of superior dependency checking, the "fire and forget" of "emerge app", the ability to run the very latest software with the hard-to-come-by-patches just by declaring 4 letters(~x86), and the choice of running a highly customized OS on a customized rig because I'm capable and want to!
No can do - I seem to have misplaced my mini-gun...
Well, not to offend you, but that's exactly the same scenario one could encounter with distros like Slackware et al - and it's a learning experience well worth the hassle of Gung Fu fighting with flat files in vim, emacs or $Favorite Editor.
I higly recommend the distro, if you are a tinkerer by choice and want to learn and perhaps live a little bleeding edge, "software-style".
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Someone finally gets it. It isn't the CFLAGS so much as the USE flags. Don't want evolution to build with PDA support? -pda. Want to make sure that nothing on your system gets built with X support (because this machine doesn't run X): -X. Gnome fanatic that wants to be free of all traces of kde? -kde. vice-versa for the kde fans. That's the level of control you can't get on a "binaries only" distro.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Gentoo may be a nice system but for me this was a major showstopper.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I recently axed my gentoo box. Its now a slackware box along with my laptop. I came to gentoo from debian and am now quite happy with slack. After I install slack and dropline I can pretty much build anything I want, they way I want. There aren't endless updates - just security fixes and the occasional dropline updates.
:)
My "play" machine currently has debian sarge setup on it (I'd honestly prefer gentoo on it but its really too slow to make that worth it). Debian install is pretty rough but as that was the first distro I started out with I can blast through it in about 10 minutes and have apt installing sarge. But then again, I can also do that with OpenBSD. Anyway, my advice is use what you like and eventually the differences won't matter.
Oh and just nice -n 10 emerge 'blah' and let it run in the background and compile times aren't that bad
Once I figured out how to use distcc, I stopped whining about compile times with gentoo. It isn't ideally efficient, but adding a new machine basically adds a denominator to your compile time. Not everyone has several machines at their disposal, but if you do, the experience of using gentoo can be much improved by parallel compilation.
You might also want distccKnoppix, which is a slick method to use your other non-gentoo boxen to help out.
I use Gentoo because...
;))
;-)
a) I want to understand what's under the hood in Linux.
b) I want to have complete control over what is and is not installed or running on my systems. Gentoo turns on by default only the bare minimum of services required to boot to a login prompt. Anything else is controlled by you.
c) Their documentation is both easy to get to and very helpful, and their forums just simply rock.
d) Optimized compiles are golden on the PII 300 and PII 266 systems I currently run as secondary and tertiary desktop systems on my home LAN. These boxen would be otherwise unusable using a modern precompiled distro like Mandrake or Debian.
e) Kernel upgrades on the bleeding edge using genkernel are easy. All three of my boxen at home run on Linux kernel 2.6.3 (PII 266, PII 300, and PIV 1.7) and I love it. Even before genkernel, I could upgrade my kernel easily - genkernel just reduces the steps and takes care of initrd for me.
f) Dual boot with Windows (while a necessary evil in my home) is easy to set up as long as you follow the simple install docs accordingly.
g) It is insanely easy to stay current compared to other distros I've tried.
- Gentoo
# emerge sync && emerge -u world
# etc-update (if necessary)
Done. Sometime doing the above will do something that causes someting to break, but the Gentoo forums are so lively that a quick visit usually yields a thread that has a fix or a quick workaround, and I usually learn something more about Linux internals in the process.
- Any Debian based distro (MEPIS, Libranet, Knoppix, etc.)
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this could be wrong - it's been awhile
Ok, that's pretty simple, but the stable branch is too old, and using the unstable branch would eventually hose the system more easily than Gentoo. Also, you have to update your sources.lst, which can be tricky.
- Mandrake
# urpmi ????????
I am sure that urpmi is a good tool (like apt-get), but it only installs rpm packages, and I had no idea how to get urpmi to point to something other than the install CD's (I know this is on the web somewhere, but why bother when Gentoo's defaults point to the bleeding edge already?). Using urpmi requires more learning and setup than I am willing to invest considering the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge tool. I know you can use apt-get with Mandrake, but I fear hosing the system in the same way I did with Debian without being able to recover easily. Besides, Mandrake hides too much of the internals for my taste.
- Red Hat/Fedora
I hate the dependency hell of RPM, so I haven't bothered. Same goes for the risks of apt-get.
Basically I like emerge way better than apt-get and urpmi, because I am way less worried I'm going to hose my system doing an 'emerge -u world' than I am using apt-get or urpmi. emerge protects my system from idiots like me, and I like that.
To be honest I've got a separate computer for games and anything that requires more mainstream hardware.
The Opteron system is basically an expensive exercise in running memory bandwidth/CPU/harddrive intensive work-related projects (i.e. prototyping selected computational physics code) at home.
It has been built around Tyan Thunder K8SPro (with the SCSI option) that does not have AGP and only has one legacy PCI-slot. This pretty much disqualifies it as a gaming machine. However, on a more positive note I'll probably be able to make it tax-deductible.
Some drawbacks: with the two CPU fans, two 15krpm SCSI drives, the heavy-duty EPS12V power supply and the two IDE drives it's also rather noisy. Furthermore, I'm sorry to see that, just like in my Alpha days in the mid-1990s, there is still plenty of badly written software (i.e. casting pointers to int) that won't compile out of box. Any other disadvantages? Well, now I'm rather bankrupt, too. ;-)
Quite frankly, I don't think the 64-bit desktop is quite there yet. I'm sure you've grown fond of the responsiveness of your dual PIII (that's why I mostly buy only dual CPU computers these days). A dual Xeon or dual Athlon MP will probably serve you better than any of the present 64-bit CPUs.
The owls are not what they seem
Gentoo 2004.0 has NOT been released yet, despite what this article says. People, just because the 2004.0 folder exists in the mirrors' archives, does NOT mean that all of a sudden the new version magically appears in the tree.
Gentoo really helped me learn some more advanced parts of a linux system. And I could learn it one bit at a time, because you install it step by step.
But it can still be a bit overwelming... and I have been using computers every day for most of my life.
I think that redhat and mandrake are two of the reasons why many people that try linux don't like it - it is too difficult to upgrade (try upgrading from gnome 2.0 to 2.2 or 2.4, for example) and it is generally too difficult to install things that come out afterwords that have many dependencies.
Gentoo does it all for you. I would use debian, but gentoo's desktop apps/packages are newer and more stable than debian unstable. They usually have things before other distros. But by all means - run debian on your server.
It is also a lot easier if you are developing, because there aren't separate *-devel packages. If you have the library you want to use, then you have anything you need. If you are writing a new app, then you obviously have to have the latest stuff, otherwise it is going to be outdated before you are done.
and the userbase is friendly and helpful. Yes - there are many 'noobs', but remember that we need new users and we need to help them learn linux so that linux can become successfull. All of them might not code, but they help a lot with testing and they provide valuable feedback to make things easier and better. They are the users, coders and sys-admins of tomorrow. You can't advocate linux and free software, but then shun new users.
Better let them use Gentoo where they will receive friendly help than leave them to ask "stupid" questions on elitist (you know the name of the distro) mailing lists.
Performance optimization is mostly a myth and not a reason why I use gentoo. Customisation is a valid reason, though.
I saw this comment modded to -1, so I gave it a +1 Funny. Now, it got modded back down to -1.
People, you guys need to learn to take a joke! While compiling a complete system on a P90 wouldn't take until Easter, it would take several days. That's one of the things with Gentoo. If you want a fully optimized system, it will take some time.
Learn to laugh, not just mod -1 flamebait if you take something like that as an insult.
Can Debian or any other distro do a chroot install like Gentoo? I don't really like compiling everything, but it was really nice to be able to drop the tarball in a chroot folder on a running system and do the complete install from there.
Funny, but...
The problem I've had with RPM-based distributions isn't having to specify two RPM's in a circular dependency. It's that when I want to update one program about 3 months after installation, I have to update the 'glibc' RPM, which then means I have to updated practically every RPM.
That's just frightening.
If your operating system has a year on its name, it's obsolete! :D
"emerge sync && emerge -uD world"
Beat ya.
I'm wondering, is it worthwhile to abandon my current install and use a 2004.0 install (which currently does not have packages for athlon xp) or to stick with my 1.4 athlon-xp specific install and then upgrade to the latest packages?
Well, until upgrade time, that is... :-)
I've been wondering... How much electric power has been used over the years in compiling Gentoo?
More than the minor bonus improvements of performance and custom selection of software, the minimalist options available at installation time with gentoo are what I truly like about it, but what the hell, i use solaris on my ultrasparcs, i know what bloat really is.
Hasn't the store historically sold PowerPC, etc., CDs? Right now it only has x86 and AMD. Are the others coming?
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can with etcat, but you'll need to emerge gentoolkit to get that command. I'm not sure if they added it to the base install yet.
In general you have very few problems with this. Obviously removing glibc, pam, etc would break things and Gentoo doesn't protect you from that, yet. But how often do people start removing libs from a *nix box? I'd put people that do in the same category as those who like to "clean up all those little files in my C drive that are just sitting there."
The more likely scenario is upgrading something fairly important. The big one was the upgrade mysql from 3.x to 4.x which broke postfix, proftpd, php, and half a dozen other things if you have mysql support compiled in. portage doesn't re-emerge all the packages automatically though it does provide tools to help you fix it after you've broken it. Once they finish the reverse dependency which has been in the works for awhile this problem goes away.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
You learn enough w/ Slackware, you get pretty recent software in Debian unstable
I have just one desktop and get both with gentoo.
the performance optimization seems to be mostly a myth
True. But USE-Flags allow my to costumize the way my packages are build. And they are very stable since portge sandboxes the installs and if something fscks up it often does already in the compile.
Management of configuration files are another plus (etc-update). Without this the common upgrade cycles would be very annoying.
And finally gentoo scales pretty well:
You want a fast-installed desktop? Use Stage3+GRP
You have a server/desktop farm? Use distcc to compile on all systems, test on one machine, then share just install the binary package (the one you configured, conpiled and tested) on all machines (or use NFS to share it).
The topic of the official #gentoo channel says:
"Gentoo Linux || ignore slashdot and various other news-sites, 2004.0 is not released"
emerge sync && emerge -UD world
to get totally up to date. of course you should be doing this regularly anyway.
cheers!
I actually rebuilt the failed root disk there with only 15 minutes of downtime (most of that getting the new hard disk and SCSI controller in the squishy case.
But overall, I'm very impressed with the performance those boxes get (I suspect quite a bit of it is due to XFS though).
Topic says "Gentoo Linux || ignore slashdot and various other news-sites, 2004.0 is not released."
What's going on? OSNews and Slashdot both reported it's out. Did someone see the 2004.0 file on FTP and get jumpy? That file's been there for quite a while.
Does it disturb anyone else that:
* The headline is completely wrong--the 2004.0 file everyone is downloading is the EXPERIMENTAL pre-release that's been sitting on FTPs for a while.
* As a result, everyone and their mothers are reporting now that it is out. #gentoo has been fielding people left and right over it. Thanks, Slashdot.
* Hemos mentions it in passing with a "Looks like it's not out yet - stay tuned for more information" at the very bottom of the blurb. Uh, mind changing the headline then that says it's released? A bunch of people are downloading the experimental now.
Thanks for the journalistic integrity, Slashdot--again.
Thanks for making these points, and you're correct, in the end, you find a distro that suits you, and Gentoo suits me. I started with RH 5.0, and have been through Mandrake, Slackware, Vectorlinux, Debian and finally Gentoo. For me, it's the best. I don't use it b/c I think it's the fastest, however studies show that it actually may be faster, if you config/compile things a certain way.
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/performance.xml
As for everyone screaming "Gentoo Fanboy!", they shouldn't be allowed to pass judgement without using it, else they sound like lemmings.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Here, here.
:-)
I have a Gentoo box running random services (WWW, FTP, CVS, etc.). Network only, it's in a closet. I don't need X anything on this box, and the last couple of distributions I've used (slack, rhat) insisted on installing all sorts of GUI junk, printer drivers, crap like that.
I like Gentoo simply because I can channel my obsessive-compulsive tendencies into building and maintaining the box exactly 100% as I want it, with no extraneous services or packages. Maybe it takes a long time to compile, maybe it's not any faster than a binary-based distribution, but in 10 seconds I can check the source package and installed version of every single file on my hard drive, and I like that.
Fair enough, though a simple workaround is to do an "emerge -up world" after an unmerge and see if Gentoo wants you to install that package again.
Unfortunately, the file is in the releases directory and is dated today. Also, Hemos is clearly referring to Catalyst, not Gentoo. Grow up.
When you've used gentoo for a while, you'll realize why date-based LiveCDs make more sense than ambiguous versions that imply that "1.2" is inherently different from 1.4, which, where gentoo is concerned, is *definitely* not the case. I suppose that "2005.1" will also imply to most people that it's inherently better than 2004.0, but .. it shouldn't.
Sure, the stages you initially get are obviously going to be more out of date from 1.2 compared to 1.4 -- most noteably 1.4 was the point where gentoo moved to a default gcc3 profile, so 1.2 was still gcc2.9 based. But beyond that, you can essentially have the same system when all is said and done if you update all your system to the latest available in portage.
Upgrading GCC is a little more in depth and, from my experience, you might as well just reinstall the system all together -- but it's definitely doable, although it *IS* a matter of changing your profile and recompiling everything.
Heck, unless I'm VERY mistaken, you would be able to take a 1.2 LiveCD and grab the stages from a 1.4 installation and they'd work fine, since it's just a simple tarball.
Has anyone been able to find the 2004.0 livecds?
An empty directory has existed for several days now...
That's what --menuconfig is for- before I let genkernel make nice filenames and compile everything, I make sure the kernel is tuned the way I like it.
...can been seen here: http://forums.gentoo.org/statistics.php A new record for "Most Users Ever Online" has been set for forums.gentoo.org! :-D
Last time I checked debians "apt-build" worked quite nice. It even had a little page to let me choose defult GCC options.
Some things are nice to compile and some are not.
Example being somthing you want to check out or somthing too big for your CPU.
Although some packages are nice to compile (mplayer) and such I like debian cause I can choose what I want to compile or even apt-get build-dep a package and get it to install of of the things needed to compile.
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
"Gentoo Linux || ignore slashdot and various other news-sites, 2004.0 is not released."
Unfortunately, the file is in the releases directory and is dated today.
Yeah, that's the experimental 2004.0 file that's been there for at least a MONTH. It gets routinely updated.
Next time before you call someone a "troll," look into it first.
here are the torrents:n s/browse_di stro.php?distro_id=7&expand_version=9
http://www.tlm-project.org/distributio
What a joke. I'll be the CEO of my WC.
Please, this has NOT been released yet! Stop the insanity (tm)! Save the Slashdotting for an actual public release... If you can't delete the story, please CHANGE THE HEADLINE! Thank you, Slashdot.
Like many other Silicon Valley companies, my employer has not invested in IT equipment in years, and budgets are not getting better. Nevertheless, we need to keep moving forward with projects.
.tbz2 binaries in an NFS export so the other ones just install with emerge -k. Fantastic performance. Clean configurations. Only the necessary packages. You name it. Gentoo is a winner.
I used Gentoo to build 3 servers based on old SCSI-based Dell PCs with 256 MB of RAM and Pentium 3 CPUs running at 733Mhz. The application is remote training, with custom-made scripts that launch individual VNC frame buffers for each student. Then, we used a Sun Java-based application to connect to a Sun server behind.
Using the 2.6.2-mm2 kernel, the user perception is extraordinary. Nobody has ever complained about performance, and I've conducted 100% remote trainings with up to 12 sessions at the time.
Compiling is not really an issue. Because all machines are identical, I use distcc across them, and then one of them saves the
There are binary distributions of Gentoo too. Though, for natural resons they lag a bit behind in version numbers (especially if you running "experimental").
Gentoo chose portage and adjusted it to their needs instead of going for RPM based or Debian Package based systems. The Portage contains best from all three =)=)=)
For Pete's sake (whoever he is). Every time I install a Gentoo box they release a new version. I'm flobadobbled if I'm going to upgrade it now: it took me close to a week to get it this far and I still haven't installed OpenOffice. Not that I'm complaining, Gentoo installation is easy and let's me feel (correctly or not) that I'm in control. Shame they don't do Gentoo for bladders ;)
Must admit though, I fought for about three days just trying to get the Debian CDs of the 'net with Jigdo as I thought I'd give that distro a taster. Finally managed to download the right ones (I downloaded Sarge and when it failed to work I found in a forum that you can't install Sarge from CD -- think they'd mention that on the download page) and found I couldn't even partition the disk how I wanted to -- try as I might I couldn't set it up with separate root and boot partitions, boot first, like I am accustomed to in Gentoo.
Powered by onion juice.
portage doesn't re-emerge all the packages automatically though it does provide tools to help you fix it after you've broken it. Once they finish the reverse dependency which has been in the works for awhile this problem goes away.
revdep-rebuild [-p] is your friend.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
From the website:
The Gentoo release team is working hard to get Gentoo Linux 2004.0 to the mirrors as quickly as possible, but we are experiencing some technical problems with our mirroring system that are hindering the process. This should be resolved within the next 24 to 48 hours. Thank you for your patience.
Slashdot totally fucked them over. Thanks, guys!
apt-get source foo
cd foo && patch debuild && debi
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
apt-get source foo
cd foo && patch < ~/my-foo-patches
debuild && debi
or if you just like building everything from source like gentoo people, man apt-src.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
and not under "experimental"?
Too right, though I've seen it work a bit oddly and it would be nice if portage warned a bit or just took care of it for you when you were updating the problematic package. All in all I'm pretty happy with Gentoo, but it does require a bit more thinking to upgrade than the average distro.
On the other hand when was the last time you saw a Redhat user do an upgrade from 7.2 to 8.0 on a live system? Or NT 4.0 to 2k. Even BSD 4.x to 5.x has been problematic for a number of users. Usually people wipe and resinstall their operating systems these days which puts Gentoo in an interesting spot if they can handle dependencies correctly.
kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
I've been using Linux for six years now, I know people who used SLS and the ilk will still call me a newbie, but I've got some comments about the whole situation.
.deb, .rpm, or .tgz's, this is especially true if you want to install something the day (or in Debian's case, the year ^_^) something comes out. One thing I found frustrating was that I often had two copies of many software packages -- the binary (because I'm lazy) and the source (because I often refer to source files for algorithms and other things while programming).
* My first distro was Slackware. This was good because I actually got to know how to do things the hard way.
* Over the years I have flipped back and forth between Debian and Slack when a new release happens or just because I am bored.
* I switched to Gentoo a few months ago and I really like it. I think the best thing is because it really is seamless, there are a few unique tools but they aren't big and complicated. Gentoo is simple.
Everybody seems to poke fun of how long it takes to compile things with Gentoo. I figured that most people compiled things from source (except maybe Mozilla, GCC and X) instead of just using the provided
I don't see why Gentoo should be any faster than any other distribution. Honestly, ARCH and -O3 don't make that much of a difference. To me it's just another distribution but one that does what I like it to -- stay out of the way. My Debian and Slack installations have been highly modified, using my own config tools and other things, with Gentoo it's a lot easier to do those kind of things.
Gentoo is a hacker's system!
---
KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid!
I run it for three reasons:
1) bleeding edge releases. When I want to run the latest version of anything, there's almost always an ebuild available within hours. With the big releases like kde 3.2 recently, the ebuilds were ready well ahead of time. Even if it's an obscure package, and hasn't been updated yet, it's usually just a case of copy the current foo-1.2.ebuild to foo-1.3.ebuild, emerge, and it'll upgrade, stick it in package list for future upgrades etc.
Really beats waiting weeks or months for official distro binaries (i'm looking at you, SuSE, RedHat and debian) or trying to do it by hand from source and having to work out all the minor tweaks to make it fit with the distro's oddities of location.
2) The portage tree has two major advantages over the binary distros I've tried previously. First, it's trivial to uninstall software. I've lost count of how many times I ended up trying to remove something, and leaving half of it behind. Gentoo, unmerge something, it's gone. For example, I tried XFCE a while back, didn't like it. Not a trace left on my system now.
The second advantage of portage is that you never have to wipe the system and reinstall. (unless you rm -rf * by accident!) Trying to do a major stage upgrade on binary distros is a nightmare, several times I toasted my machine just doing a point release upgrade. With gentoo, just emerge sync, emerge -uDp world, and you'll have the latest of everything.
3) Finally, there's one thing that really, really puts gentoo head and shoulders above the rest. The forums. You won't meet a more helpful or polite or friendly bunch of fellow users on any other linux forum, bar none. Every time I've had a problem, someone's already posted the solution to the forums, or at least a work around while people find a solution. Seriously, forums.gentoo.org is the distro's biggest strength of all in my book.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
- http://gentoo.org
Sounds like it's out to me!
install-x86-universal-2004.0.iso
at Indiana University under releases & dated today.
If this is an experimental release, someone better fix that mirror.
Gentoo is just Linux. It's not the Messiah it's just a naught Distro! Gentoo is just From Scratch (LFS) plus a buggy incomplete package manager. Many distro's feature compile from source. Many distro's feature a package manager. Gentoo has a nice logo... If learning the arcana of Linux is truly necessary for you why not just go to http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ?
[Gentoo is hyped. Modded into the ground to suppress opinion]
I'd go for 'informative' or 'offtopic'.
Thanks. I've been thinking about switching from slack to debian because of package management. apt-get is more flexible than I thought.
That's right, I am a gentoo zealot. I've tweaked my CFLAGS to match my arch and omitted the frame pointer. I've recompiled the whole system using the latest gcc. I've recompiled X Windows using -fnew-ra (experimental setting which either breaks an app or makes it run really fast). I've tweaked the prelink path.
Yeah that's right, I'm running ~x86.
And it makes a HUGE difference. I don't even 'nice' emerges anymore because the system is so smooth. A co-worker has the exact same hardware running Red Hat and he's always cursing about how mp3s, flash, AVIs, quicktime, etc won't play. Or wasting half a day finding some RPM for a video player and then having a library conflict so it won't run. And his computer is sooo slooo...
I ran a performance test on gimp's resythesizer plug-in. The thing takes a freaking day to do it's magic but it's at least 4x faster on gentoo than windows vc++ generic-processor 386 crap. Same with vmware -- emulating Red Hat on Gentoo is almost faster than just the Hat.
I exaggerate because I'm a zealot. But Gentoo is much faster. And has fewer version conflicts. And just way easier in everything but the install.
Sweet, I never thought of that. You could use --pretend or -p to simply get a list, very quickly, and see if the package you unmerged is in there.
Not that I unmerge packages much anyway, but thanks.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Those are the CFLAGS I was talking about (-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer whatever). However, in Gentoo, there is also the ability to have a set of USE flags, which controls which functionalities get built when you build your packages. For example, a lot of packages that include optional GUI components can be told not to build those components, from your global settings. I'm not sure whether debian and apt-build can do this or not, but I'd be interested to find out.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
They went from, IIRC, 1.4 to 2004.0. Now that's version number inflation ;)
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
Why not switch to a distribution backed by a registered non-profit, with elected leadership all the way to the top, rather than working under a grey-area president/CEO and private corporate structure?
Sure, you benefit to, but remember, you are are benefiting them for free. You are benefiting a private capitalist corporate, and ultimately are controlled and directed by their wishes.
Come over to the light side of the force. Start the process of becoming a Debian developer today.
You wouldn't tolerate any less in the politics of your nation.
One thing that I appreciate about Gentoo is their support for the PPC architecture in both their live CDs and the main deal. Knopix et al do not run on PPC. There are a few other projects out there, however, they are mostly in alpha stages. yay gentoo
He's talking of ./configure style options. These are very important, and is impossible to customize on a binary distro, you just get what they feel is best for the general public, in other words, best one for the tons of applications and machine types (desktop, server, media, etc)