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."

Comments

Almost there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! So if I start the stage1 compile on my P90 it should be ready by Easter.

Oh no,

[Anonymous Coward]

as if the Gentoo zealots needed any more encouragement to post.

Re:Oh no,

[cayenne8]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[ultrabot]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[pb]

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. :)

Re:Oh no,

[October_30th]

I've got a dual Opteron.

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.

Re:Oh no,

[mehaiku]

"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.

Re:Oh no,

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Oh no,

[nial-in-a-box]

You know, 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. Everyone who runs Linux is a "zealot" in Bill Gates eyes. We're all bullied by him and big business in general, and then some of us decide to turn our anger and frustration towards members of our own community simply because we find them to be easy targets.

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?

Re:Oh no,

[ultrabot]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[nial-in-a-box]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[drunkentiger]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[myg]

Reasons I run Gentoo:

• Full support of the XFS filesystem.
• My Gentoo machines are servers; so compiling everything to the exact specs of the machine gives a performance boost (especially on non-x86 platforms).
• I can turn off any trace of Xwindows. I'm sure some people like it, but I don't. I hate X. I don't want so much as the client libraries on my box.
• The live CD makes recovery and certain other operations easier since it pretty much matches the environment of the running server.
• The Gentoo community provides a good amount of peer review into package selection.

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!

Re:Oh no,

[bt3]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[TheLinuxSRC]

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...

Re:Oh no,

[adaran]

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.

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 ... 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).

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.

Re:Oh no,

[Drantin]

on a side note, 'emerge -lskfa file' only returns:
$ 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/proje cts/pam_dotfile/
Description: pam module to allow password-storing in $HOME/dotfiles
License: GPL-2

...plus lots more results, 45 to be exact...

Re:Oh no,

[Lobo93]

This is just a way to sidetrack them, so they won't be posting to other threads while this one is active.

Oooh, oooh, pick me; Being sidetracked is one of my specialties, aside(!) from being abducted by those pesky fish-people from the planet Sirius.

On a more serious note: why do people run Gentoo?

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!

So, zealots, fire away!

No can do - I seem to have misplaced my mini-gun... ;)

(...)previous Gentoo experiment was short circuited by unavoidable crash on entering X.

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".

Re:Oh no,

[Valar]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[FattMattP]

I fail to see how Debian is better than Gentoo.

Well, for me it's easy to see. Debian has proper package management such as keeping track of dependecies. That's very important to me. For example, from the Gentoo portage docs:

Warning: Unmerging packages can be dangerous. If you remove any core packages your system may cease to function and the removal of various libraries may cause software to fail. Portage does not warn you if you are removing core packages or dependencies for other packages.

So with Gentoo I can accidently remove a package that many programs depend on and it won't tell me. That's terrible. That also makes me wonder if I can get a list of programs that depend on the package. It doesn't look like it.

Gentoo may be a nice system but for me this was a major showstopper.

Re:Oh no,

[petabyte]

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 :)

Re:Oh no,

[BeastOfBurden]

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. ;-)

Re:Oh no,

[lerouxb]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[ttrafford]

That also makes me wonder if I can get a list of programs that depend on the package. It doesn't look like it.

You can. I believe using the 'etcat' program.

Re:Oh no,

[Zigg]

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!

Well, until upgrade time, that is... :-)

Re:Oh no,

[kashani]

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

Re:Oh no,

[Sweetshark]

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).

Re:Oh no,

[myg]

Ahhh. How I upgrade you ask? I use rsync to mirror-image my servers root disk to a spare box and then using the Live CD upgrade it there.

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).

Re:Oh no,

[Chuck Bucket]

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

Re:Oh no,

[FreeForm Response]

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. :-)

Re:Oh no,

[bonch]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[Solosoft]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[Anonymous Coward]

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 =)=)=)

Re:Oh no,

[koh]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[kashani]

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

Re:Oh no,

[arkhan_jg]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[shadowbearer]

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. /me slaps forehead

Not that I unmerge packages much anyway, but thanks.

SB

Re:Oh no,

[Valar]

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.

Re:Oh no,

[Surye]

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)

Very well.

[Krapangor]

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...

Re:Very well.

[Xeed]

Because compiling from source is what makes Gentoo, and most Linux distros so powerful. That is what those make and use flags are for.

Gentoo is a distro that is designed to be fully customizable. With binaries compiled on your own computer, you'll get better performance.

Re:Very well.

[m.mascherpa]

That's why Gentoo Linux LiveCDs provide GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform): a complete set of precompiled per-architecture-optimized binary packages a-la-slackware (including X, KDE, OpenOffice and more) to speed up the installation process for those who don't want or can't wait for compile process to complete.

Re:Very well.

[cies]

"Honestly, what's the point when you can have binary packages."

Come on you know exactly what is the point...

The retro feeling can be one of the though :)

Re:Very well.

[colinleroy]

The main reason I use gentoo is bugfixing made easy. emerge your soft, if you find a bug you can fix it yourself quite fast by re-running emerge, stopping the merge when make begins, and hacking in /var/tmp/portage/$soft.
Well, it may not be "fast" if it's a hard bug but it's noticeably faster than with a binary-package distro where you'd have to go get a tgz, figure out the configure options you want, and go into bugfix mode - fucking up your distro's package database by the way.

Re:Very well.

[Anonymous Coward]

To a degree you're correct.. But lots of software is *very* configurable if you build from source. You'd either have to have a shitload of prebuilt binaries or just assume that one size fits all.

Not that I use Gentoo; my desktop is a Slackware system, for which I build everything by hand (and install using a script I wrote to create a package, and incidentally I wrote myself a package manager that I use. Yes I know it seems silly!)

I use FreeBSD for servers and its ports system is veeeery cool (once you start using portupgrade anyway), because things can be tailored to suit your needs. I can build Postfix with a myriad of options and get rid of the cruft I don't need, for example.

For the average desktop user, source builds probably aren't too useful (though for the average desktop user, MacOS X {without that hideous default look} is probably the best).

Re:Very well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, best performance, whatever.

Your IRC client and office suite MUST be compiled with the correct USE flags, who cares that they spent 99.9% of the time waiting for IO?

Who cares about the fact you won't get even a few percent of your compile time back due to saved time?

It only makes sense for a few critical libraries, such as libc maybe, and your video card drivers, oh wait, they're probably distributed as binaries anyway, oh and games, such at UT2004, Gentoo helps them work so much better!

Re:Very well.

[Gentle Troll]

Same old song again and again as soon as we write about Gentoo... You can install a binary distro ( If you dislike Gentoo, you can use another such as Debian or Knoppix and install Portage over it... Just follow instructions at:

• http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.x ml?part=1&chap=2#doc_chap2
• 
  
  And then you upgrade one package at a time in the background when you need to emerge a huge package, you can do it in background ( unless you have a P-1, a P-2 or an old Celeron ) or just do it overnight.
  
  Compile time wasn't a big problem for me ( Athlon-XP 1800+ with KDE and OpenOffice each compiling in one night...)

Re:Very well.

[U.I.D 754625]

Have you shared this script on the web at all? I run slackware on my desktop and here is how I upgrade software:

Run pkgtool and remove the package.
Grab the source and ./configure, make, make install

So, over time, the packages I have installed dwindles to just the core stuff and I hand manage everything else. I know swaret is an option too but my method hasn't annoyed me too much to change yet.

Re:Very well.

[gaijin99]

Gentoo is a distro that is designed to be fully customizable. With binaries compiled on your own computer, you'll get better performance.

I use Gentoo on my computer, but for none of the reasons you listed :)

Frankly, the performance gains I've gotten from compiling locally aren't particularly noticable; and the compile times are a pain in the ass. I use Gentoo for two reasons, first and foremost I wanted to learn more about Linux. So I got a distro that forces you to learn without being quite as death-defyingly l33t as Linux From Scratch. And it has excelled in that purpose, I've learned more in the 4 months I've used Gentoo than I did in the 8 months I used other distros. Bloody well had to, which is why I got it.

The second reason I got Gentoo was as a way out of dependancy hell. I find the gentoo ebuilds to be a bit more up to date than the Debian packages usually are. I don't like the compile times, but the days of conflicting RPM's are gone. As are the days of being told to get RPM foo, then being told by foo that I also need bar, then being told by bar that I need quux. I'm quite willing to sacrifice the time needed to compile to get the convenience of not messing with the whole RPM dependancy scene.

Re:Very well.

[corebreech]

Exactly.

I could care less if my computer consumes a lot of time performing a task. It's when I have to consume a lot of time performing a task that annoys me.

And screwing around with RPM's consumes a lot of my time.

With Gentoo, I can issue one or two commands and be done with it.

(don't tell anybody, but Linux is a multitasking operating system, so when I do compiles I can actually be accomplishing other work on that very same computer at the very same time.)

Re:Very well.

[thre5her]

From emerge --help:

--usepkg (-k short option)
Tell emerge to use binary packages (from $PKGDIR) if they are available, thus possibly avoiding some time-consuming compiles. This option is useful for CD installs; you can export PKGDIR=/mnt/cdrom/packages and then use this option to have emerge "pull" binary packages from the CD in order to satisfy dependencies.

Re:Very well.

[gaijin99]

(don't tell anybody, but Linux is a multitasking operating system, so when I do compiles I can actually be accomplishing other work on that very same computer at the very same time.)

Heh. But on a practical note if you are compiling a big package you really don't want to be running even X, much less KDE or Gnome. For the piddily stuff, sure I'll do that while I check the news, but for any sizable package I vastly prefer to stay away from windowing systems (I do realize I can use multiple consoles in the CLI, but Lynx isn't my fave browser).

Re:Very well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you not use X? Is X using that much resources or is the multitasking so bad it does not work for you? ;)

Re:Very well.

[DJerman]

My system works fine running X and compiling, oh, say openoffice or Gnome. It just chatters a lot. If your system isn't working well I suggest you look to your filesystems and memory.

Re:Very well.

[DJerman]

I found that a lot of my RPM dependancy problems arose from packager decisions that were contrary to my preferences. With Gentoo I set my build preferences for which sound, graphic, processor, peripheral, etc. preferences I like and the ebuilds apply the correct compiler switches for me.

For instance, I have a few music and sound editing programs that can go KDE, Gnome or ALSA. When I was working with Redhat I had to extract sources, look up option settings, configure, make, repackage and install when the author's preference conflicted with mine (I could have just done make; make install, but I wanted to be able to remove it with rpm). So...with Gentoo I just emerge and all that happens automagically. I still know what I'm installing, and I can still stop and unpack the sources, but I don't need to as often.

And yes, I learned a bit more about system configuration with Gentoo, as the scripting is a little less involuted than dear old Redhat's. Not necessarily superior, but I find it easier to follow what happens when you try to start eth0.

Re:Very well.

[gaijin99]

It slows my compile down quite a bit. Not that its a huge problem, but I can get around 30% more speed by not running a windowing system while I compile. Like I said, with small packages it isn't a big deal, but with huge packages that extra 30% adds up to a significant amount.

No stability problems during compile, just slow compiles.

Re:Very well.

[binary tr011]

use the nice command. ie. # nice -15 emerge -u world It schedules the task at a lower priority and allows you to do other tasks. I usualy watch movies on the same machine while compiling.

Re:Very well.

[antoinjapan]

-15 is higher priority I think. Maybe 15.

A paid political endorsement:

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG!!!

Great!

[cies]

luckily i download this 4 hours ago...

now all you guys can enjoy the fleed :)

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

#@%$@#! Crud! I downloaded 1.4 on Friday!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, suck the shit right out of my fucking asshole, you loser cum-drinking piece of dog shit.

Thank you,
Your mom

Re:Great!

[Lobo_Louie]

The only way you could allieviate the Gentoo servers is to announce a LOTR download site. :-)

hmm

[B3ryllium]

I heard that Gentoo can be fully customized into a perfectly-tailored distribution .... ... if that is true, can I make Gentoo Tanooki Linux?

Re:hmm

[KingOfBLASH]

You can customize any distribution to your heart's content -- that's why it's called Open Source. I remember changing around everything on a Mandrake 8 box some years ago, so that when it booted up the splash screen said something like "Dan's Linux", and the prompts replaced Mandrake Foobar Linux with Dans Foobar Linux (Mandrake names their releases -- forget which foobar it was). Not only is it really easy to make cosmetic changes, if you know what you're doing, it's relatively easy to make other changes to the distro as well.

Re:hmm

[Gondorian Warrior]

Yea but can I get it to turn on???? I use Apple and want to try Linux. I bought (hear that b-o-u-g-h-t) Gentoo, Debian and Mandrake (I want to pay my way). I know I don't know much (if anything) about computers or Linux. But if 1 in 100 people feel as I do i.e. they believe that open source is the future, but can't get the dam thing to turn on, then look at the massive potential Linux is missing. I think there needs to be a VERY simple Very basic version of Linux to get us super-newbies started. I think it is just like learning to code. If the first thing yu needed to code was a million lines then you would never get going. You start with two lines then ten then a thousand. Sorry for the rant I am just desparate to try Linux (any distro) on an ibook 500 G

Re:hmm

[tornado2258]

Hmm I think you might be trolling but you can have a link anyway:

Yellow Dog linux

Re:hmm

[KingOfBLASH]

Well, I understand your pain. Linux has a learning curve, even though, IMHO, Mandrake and Suse have made it much lower. If you are having problems e-mail me privately and I will try to help you.

Re:hmm

[BlowChunx]

Gentoo has been available for the PPC for a while. Not sure if you knew this or were just advocating using Yellowdog (a fine distro in its own right).

The only reason I don't run Gentoo on my PPC is that the default install CD didn't recognize my Adaptec 2940 (? I think that's the card...?) that runs the only hard drive in my Power Tower (no snickering!). The PPC maintainer lamented having kernel panics related to SCSI drivers, so he decided to leave that out of the previous 1.4 release (though it's present in the 1.2 release...).

Go figure.

Re:hmm

[Gondorian Warrior]

I'm sorry. After re-reading my post I can see I wasn't clear. I understand that their is a PPC version of many of the largest distros. The problem I have run into is there is no easy way to install Linux (the term covering all varients) I have a standard iBook that is a few yers old. This sems to me to be the perfect machine, not too old, not too young. The day that I can buy a CD and jst install will be the day that Linux will explode. Once I have found my way around the default I can then make the next step.

Re:hmm

[Gondorian Warrior]

Further,

I think many 'geeks' are confused.

You all talk about how important customisation is. Don't you see that the one thing you lack is a base to work from.

We mere mortals can't get on the Linux ladder until we can get hold of the bottom rung

Re:hmm

[KingOfBLASH]

Well, that's the thing, with Mandrake you should be able to. The only problems you might run into for the installation should be related to not knowing how to partition your drives or what components to install. Even then Mandrake provides buttons to just install and now worry about minutae till you get a better grasp of Linux. So, what are you having problems with?

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

Mac OS X is a Unix OS for the common mortal. I don't really know why you want a Linux user-friendly OS if you already have a user-friendly Unix system available for your platform.

If you find OS X too slow, don't start OS X native GUI. Install X11 and a lightweight Window Manager. You want be able to run OS X native graphical apps but you will be able to run almost as many open source apps as Linux or any other Unixes...

Yes, I prefer to run Linux on my iBook but I took the time to learn it. It is as easy (or as difficult) to install on a iBook than intel-based hardware.

anonyme2

How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

# emerge sync
# emerge -uD world

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't there some automatic way to do it?

Re:How to upgrade

[LnxAddct]

Isn't there some automatic way to do it?

yes, this new innovation called cron ;)
-Steve

Re:How to upgrade

[SuperBanana]

You forgot:

• run revdep rebuild because recompiling one of the libraries broke something else
• run etc-update to update various etc files, and tell emerge for the 50,000th time that NO, you DON'T want to overwrite smb.conf because you changed 2-3 lines(multiply this by 20+ config files that are normally configured as part of a system)...and struggle to figure out if there was actually anything important in the new config file emerge wanted to merge in, since the hand-merge tool is as clunky as could possibly be
• merge in one updated config file only to discover you just merged an "old" new config file, because you forgot to run etc-update last time and it was left-over
• listen to some pimply puke tell you "luz0r, y0 sholdn't be runninz unstable" when your system breaks, and have to explain to him for the thousandth time that the reason you're running unstable is because the packages in "stable" are so old you'd be hacked overnight(and we're not talking unusual stuff here, either- we're talking packages like apache). Notice with frustration that there have been 6 unstable releases of a particular package since the last stable release, none apparently good enough to earn promotion to stable.

Gentoo has come a ways from when I first tried it, and I use it on 3 systems- but the Gentoo team needs to make a serious effort to recruit people for maintaining the portage tree and especially fast, thorough certification of updated packages.

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, for the first half, you were bashing Gentoo. Then, you switched over to making fun of Debian. Which is it? Plz explain, kthnx bye HAND.

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the last bullet is debian. Not gentoo. Gentoo's stable is VERY up to date. I have Gnome 2.4, and Mozilla 1.6 and I'm running stable. That's the main reason I switched.

Re:How to upgrade

[Hieronymus Howard]

The funny post was modded "Informative" and the informative reply was modded as "Funny".

Re:How to upgrade

[justMichael]

Points 2 and 3 can easily be avoided by merely reading the manual.

Search for "Configuration File Protection" on that page.

As with anything else if you don't bother to RTM you are going to have problems.

Re:How to upgrade

[yarbo]

Apache:
stable 2.0.48-r1
unstable 2.0.48-r4
link
You realize you can unstable packages on a stable system, right? You also realize unstable updates like 5x as often, right? I recommend running a stable system with a few unstable packages if you need them.

Re:How to upgrade

[Bombcar]

Uh, your shell script has both those lines commented out.....

It won't do anything. :D

[/sarcasm]

Re:How to upgrade

[prat393]

Sadly, that won't upgrade everything... just the packages recorded in the "world" file, which means if you let emerge figure out your dependancies somewhere along the line, rather than explicitly mentioning them on the command line, they might be skipped here, depending on how good the -D detection works.

I use a series of awk and sed scripts to make sure my world file contains a list of all my installed packages to make it easier to keep track of what's been changed recently.

Re:How to upgrade

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

Isn't there some automatic way to do it?

yes, this new innovation called cron ;)
-Steve

You ever updated Gentoo?

You ever updated Gentoo...on weed??!?!?

Re:How to upgrade

[Aneurysm9]

would you be so kind as to post your scripts? I'm always worried that I'm missing something that isn't in my world profile.

Re:How to upgrade

[00420]

As with anything else if you don't bother to RTM you are going to have problems.

This may be true, but with the Gentoo forums if you have a problem people will still (usually) tell you how to fix it even if it's in TFM.

For being a distro that mainly appeals to more advanced Linux users it's amazing how newbie-friendly their forums are.

Re:How to upgrade

[00420]

You ever updated Gentoo...on weed??!?!?

Yes. But that would be spelled chron'.

Re:How to upgrade

[justMichael]

Yes the forums are great and the docs are pretty damn good.

#gentoo on the other hand...

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

#gentoo | irc.oftc.net
cya there :)
--tseng

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a noob.

Seriously.

Oh wait, let me speak so you'll understand it: y0u'r3 4 n00b

Re:How to upgrade

[puddpunk]

Hello,

"Sadly, that won't upgrade everything... just the packages recorded in the "world" file, which means if you let emerge figure out your dependancies somewhere along the line, rather than explicitly mentioning them on the command line, they might be skipped here, depending on how good the -D detection works."

-D stands for deep. It means everything in the world file and everything that everything in the world file depends on. This does the same thing as your awk/sed scripts according to the docs. After all, if you didnt expicitly specify it on the command line (therefore added into your world file) and isn't a dependancy of a package in your world file, what is it? See below why this is a bad idea.

"I use a series of awk and sed scripts to make sure my world file contains a list of all my installed packages to make it easier to keep track of what's been changed recently."

Bad Idea, you are just asking for dependancy problems by doing that. For instance:

PackageA depends on LibraryB 1.0
LibraryB 2.0 is released and is Binary Incompatable with LibraryB 1.0. LibraryB 1.0 is upgraded to 2.0 when you emerge -uD world breaking Package A.

SLOTs fix this problem to a certain extent, but with things like libraries is there any reason to have the bleeding edge? It's not like your dependant programs can use the new features.

Cheers,
Chris.

Re:How to upgrade

[anthonyrcalgary]

This sounds like a troll, because stuff usually makes it to stable within a few days (unless there's recursive dependencies with something that could cause major breakage, this usually isn't the case with security patches). But you're 100% right about this:

Gentoo has come a ways from when I first tried it, and I use it on 3 systems- but the Gentoo team needs to make a serious effort to recruit people for maintaining the portage tree and especially fast, thorough certification of updated packages.

Every package in stable should always compile. Always. There have been times when no one bothered to do a sanity check (trying it on a stable system would have caught some of it) before releasing something to stable and it resulted in significant and long duration breakage. I think they've been rushed to get everything up to date for 2004.0, but it's been one thing after another. I don't expect it to be bug free, but I do expect to be able to install a working system with an up to date stable. Branch it temporarily if necessary, compile errors in stable are not acceptable.

Re:How to upgrade

[prat393]

You're right, of course, and this had occured to me. I've been watching my emerges carefully to see if anything of the sort occurs, but so far, simply having the libraries in the world file doesn't seem to auto-unmerge the older versions when they're upgraded. The emerge system is smart, give it some credit.

As to there being a reason for bleeding-edge libraries, no of course there's no good reason, but I long ago stopped trying to offer any!

Re:How to upgrade

[prat393]

#!/bin/bash
TMP1=`/bin/tempfile`
TMP2=`/bin/temp file`
DEST=/var/cache/edb/world
SOURCE=$DEST
qp kg -I -nc > $TMP1
sed 's/^#.*//' < /var/cache/edb/world | uniq | sort > $TMP2
diff -u $TMP2 $TMP1 | egrep "^\+" | fgrep -v "+++" | sed 's/\+//' >> $TMP2
uniq $TMP2 | sort -o $TMP2
install -g root -m 0644 -o root $TMP2 $DEST
rm $TMP1 $TMP2

Re:How to upgrade

[Trejkaz]

Wouldn't you want:
# emerge -eD world
?

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but then I could not crack the aformentioned joke.

Wow...

[NeoGeo64]

That has to be the *biggest* version jump in history! From 1.4 to 2004.0!

Re:Wow...

[LittleKing]

I know it was probably meant to be funny, but just to clarify, they changed the naming format.

It goes something like this (I believe):
There will be about 4 official releases per year and the releases will be named by the year followed by which release it is.

So since this is the first release of 2004 the name is '2004.0'. The next release should be '2004.1'. The first release next year will be '2005.0' and so forth.

I hope I got this right.

Re:Wow...

[somethinghollow]

I think 2000 to XP is a pretty big one. It indicates they ran out of numbers (versioning in long integer) and had to move to letters... Or maybe that they just used a two number versioning system and realized that Windows [19]00 was less than [19]98. Damn 2K Bug.

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's funny but I like that they are now using a simple and obvious versioning number that isn't marketing based.

Re:Wow...

[ndogg]

Yeah, I was like, "Alright! Linux has finally caught up with Windows! W00t!"

Re:Wow...

[jd]

Depends on the base used. Assuming base 36 (so as to include all the letters of the English alphabet), then Windows 2000 is version 91312, (compared to Windows 98 at only version 324). Windows NT, CE, ME and XP are only marginally further on than 98. Which explains a lot.

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG. Of course, they would count from 0. Jezus christ, will these people stop at nothing? They sure wouldn't miss any opportunity to demonstrate that Gentoo people need to get a fucking life.

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they didn't start at 2003.99999999...

Re:Wow...

[Jugalator]

Meh... It's even worse than Microsoft's naming scheme. At least they still know the difference between years and version numbers and don't mix them.

Re:Wow...

[truthsearch]

Wow, that's a whole new level of geekiness. You've intelligently brought up base 36 in a thread. You have earned your low /. ID. ;)

Re:Wow...

[drinkypoo]

I'm not sure which of us is more pathetic, you making your jabs from behind the AC shield, or me who immediately thought, "of course you start at zero you ignorant numbfuck!"

Guess it takes all kinds or something.

Re:Wow...

[russellh]

I think 2000 to XP is a pretty big one. It indicates they ran out of numbers (versioning in long integer) and had to move to letters... Or maybe that they just used a two number versioning system and realized that Windows [19]00 was less than [19]98. Damn 2K Bug.

Huh. I always read XP as a "death" emoticon...

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Hope you get modded funny. X-P X-)

Which is better?

[Anonymous Coward]

a) New version of Gentoo,

OR...

b) Sex with a mare?

Re:Which is better?

[kewsh]

sex with xdfgf

It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
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."
"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!"

-

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you get pleasure watching this get modded and getting replies - you really need to get a life!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a great life! Dating supermodels, driving fast cars...

Oh wait, I'm sitting here eating crisps and writing a WAP/IRC gateway...

Oh dear.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

lol

I use gentoo, but I gotta admit a lof of that is very true......... it's getting better and better tho and the community is brilliant

Funny post tho!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

As the OP states, GCC optimizations don't make a great deal of difference to performance. In fact, with -O3 (and function-inlining as a result), the code is BIGGER and consequently causes more CPU cache misses. Then end result is slower performance.

Gentoo's speed comes about through the trim system set up and lack of pointless gadgets - this is great, but it's not hard to tweak a Debian or Slackware system to make it just as fast (or even faster).

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

What version of GCC are you using? Mine doesn't understand the -fomit-instructions flag and I would like to try it. Is it some kind of an experimental fork? I say it's high time someone took positive action to cut down on the bloat of modern-day software. I'm sure my computer is running millions of useless instructions right now and it's really bugging me that there has been nothing that I can do about it so PLEASE tell me where you got that -fomit-instruction support, okay?

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[supun]

emerge -C "Anonymous Coward"

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[kewsh]

interesting...let me know how that turns out

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Sloppy]

Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something...

I guess one of the reasons that Gentoo has appealed to me, as a former Amiga user, is that a long time ago, I became accustomed to the idea that my personal computer can do more than one thing at a time. In my case, I installed X, so I'm able to have multiple aterm windows open at once!

I realize that some Linux users came from the MS-DOS background, so they do not run X or screen, and they have modified their kernel to disable virtual consoles. They're from the camp that thinks that whenever you type a command, you should wait for it to finish before you use your computer for anything else. I can understand why they would find Gentoo to be frustrating, and I would not recommend Gentoo to them. I think they would be happier with FreeDOS.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[m1a1]

Umm, gentoo doesn't even have an installer. How is that less scary than a text installer and how did a clueless fuck like you figure out how to post on a forum?

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[sloptaco]

You can take any group of software users and poke fun for your own satisfaction, calling them wannabe's, whatever ... But mind me asking: "What's the freaking point?" This is like a flash back to my days on the playground. Grow up, please, and quit wasting bandwith with your meaningless bantering. Next time just summarize your thoughts as:

"I think some people are posers!"

The end!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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..."

This quote proves that you are clueless and have never used this operating system. I have never had a machine that was overclocked in any way successfully install Gentoo. Gentoo has however helped me to identify a great deal of crappy hardware that needed replaced. Gentoo WILL NOT run on flaky hardware period...

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[WIAKywbfatw]

Someone please inform the Pentagon that m1a1's sense of humour is MIA.

Dude, it's a joke. Lighten up before you get an ulcer.

Sheesh. And I thought I was tense...

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're eating crisps? Now I'm sad!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[jd]

Hmmm... Actually, this shouldn't be too difficult to write. All you need to do is tell the assembler to drop instructions at random, padding with NOOPs so that the jumps still worked.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Enahs]

That gets funnier every time someone cut-and-pastes it. I salute you!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to provoke dumbasses like yourself to post whiny rebuttals.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[richie2000]

How can she sail with no wind in her sails and no tide?

Day after day, day after day
We struck nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean
Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

I impressed the hell out of my English teacher once when Coleridge came up in class and I could recite several lines from The Ancient Mariner by heart. You know why. ;-)

Oh, and to be slightly on-topic: I'm also an old Amiga user and run Gentoo on all my machines. It seemed the natural choice.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[gustaffo]

"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."

Isn't finding bugs and reporting them part of the spirit?

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[fsterman]

Translate this: Gentoo is not JUST a from source distro (which, yes, any distro can be from source, they just make it easier by adding optimization settings) They are trying to do a lot of cool things, and their special optimizing technics are not the only thing. The from source distro is largely to remove having to keep 10 versions of the same package.

Catalyst is largely an extension of that. How many ^&*%@#$ "Live" CD's are out there? Why does everyone make such a big deal of it? Live CD's are NOT a new thing, Linus made the boot and root floppies very early on. Live CD's are not an innovation, Gentoo has finally put some fresh innovation into an old field.

No distro is the future, every distro can make it's contributions. Which is why some people say "Gentoo is the future." It has a lot to offer, which I hope other distro's can/will use.

I have an iBook, and Gentoo runs my file server. Sometime this decade I hope that I can use portage instead of Fink and Darwin ports. Now that isn't Apple switching to some sort of Gentoo fork, but it is some good things about Gentoo spreading.

I do think that they are duplicating a lot of work with the package manager. Like the UNIX forks it is hurting everyone.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the versions are pretty old now, I mean glibc-2.3.2 is sooo last year, and with gcc-3.3.2 you hardly bleed at all. Where's the fun in that ? ;-)

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[teh*fink]

I realize that some Linux users came from the MS-DOS background, so they do not run X or screen, and they have modified their kernel to disable virtual consoles. They're from the camp that thinks that whenever you type a command, you should wait for it to finish before you use your computer for anything else.

what on god's green earth are you talking about. have you ever hit alt+F2 at a terminal screen?? it's been around for a loooooooong time...X isn't necessary for multiple terminals/multitasking.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[joeykiller]

I know you're trying to be funny (and your post are), but is this correct?

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.

Don't ask me why, but one of my servers (running Debian) creates a lot of animated gif files automatically. Using the version of ImageMagick provided by Debian, this job typically takes 2 seconds per gif file.

Just for fun I recompiled a static version of ImageMagick using gcc 3.3, with Pentium IV optimizing, on a RedHat Linux box, and tried running these binaries on my Debian box. And you know what? The same job now takes just under one second.

So for me recompiling was a significant factor for speeding up my program.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[paradizelost]

Him having said "so they do not run X or screen, and they have modified their kernel to disable virtual consoles", ALT+F# would then NOT work because they aren't turned on in the kernel, think before you speak

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[SyniK]

He gets the insightful, you get the troll :). What a (/.) wonderful world.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Imperator]

On another note, I love people who insist on compiling with -O9 or -O6 or something. The documentation doesn't mention anything above -O3, but that doesn't faze our brave hyper-optimizing friends, who "can tell the difference" between a program compiled at -O3 and one compiled at -O9. These are also the people that love to list a dozen specific -f flags that are in fact implied by their optimization level, because they don't trust the -O9 flag to turn all those flags on for them. They'll also specify -march, -mcpu, and maybe -mmmx for good measure, in case the compiler wasn't smart enough to figure out that athlon-xp has MMX extensions, and in case the compiler can find some use for those MMX extensions in chfn, which is invariably the sort of "performance-critical" application they're compiling.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[minkeyboodle]

Let's hope you plagiarized yourself. :)

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/cumbria/2003-A pril/000825.html

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Whatthehellever]

My screensaver says

emerge -u life

I think that says it all.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[cayenne8]

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days"

I keep hearing this...but, have never really run into the problem. Unless you have a really old machine with slow processor and memory...it isn't a problem. I've been compiling, browsing, playing flac files..editing images..etc. all at the same time..and barely a glitch...

I will admit it takes a good bit of time and you can't do much on an older box...but, they do seem to benefit the most in the end with the custom compiled code...I've seen old boxes that I usually wouldn't touch...actually become usable again...even with some GUI's...

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Aneurysm9]

"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."

Have you ever installed Gentoo? Installing FreeBSD was a breeze compared to my first Gentoo install. At least FreeBSD gives you purty menus to play with and automates all kinds of things. Gentoo requires everything to be done by hand.

NOTE: I seem to remember reading that 2004.0 was supposed to add some degree of automation, but I'd still wager it's no walk in the park.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[drinkypoo]

Amusingly enough on certain architectures -O3 is known to introduce bugs and you should stick with -O2, K6 being one of them. This is particularly amusing because the K6 is one of the processors which benefits most from CPU-specific optimization. Gentoo is ideal for computers with strange or at least poorly supported processors, because if you're going to be recompiling everything anyway, you might as well use a system designed around that idea.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[drinkypoo]

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."

That's almost right. I use gentoo because it has the equivalent of a ports tree, which is to say portage, and a Linux kernel. Essentially I think that provided you don't mind recompiling things (which you do on your own schedule - it's not like anyone holds a gun to your head and forces you to upgrade all those packages all the time) if you do any optimization, you might as well use gentoo.

What I like about Linux is that it runs on everything (like netbsd, should you want me to continue to make your point for you, though I've run netbsd on mac68k) but has the huge mass of functionality that the Linux kernel provides (essentially just about everything everyone else's Unixes support in one place - unlike netbsd.) Amusing side note, I installed netbsd on my IIci, then netbsd went to ELF, so I built and converted to ELF. Wheee!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[shish]

You probably already have support for instruction omission, just as a seperate program to the compiler - building it in is still very experimental :( If you want a similar effect, try this:

alias 'oi'='rm -f'

Then when you want to omit some instructions, use "oi [program]"

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[eloki]

Just for fun I recompiled a static version of ImageMagick using gcc 3.3, with Pentium IV optimizing

But now you don't know whether the main difference is gcc 3.3, or the P4 opts, or the fact that it's statically linked :)

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

However "screen" would work.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't ask me why, but one of my servers (running Debian) creates a lot of animated gif files automatically.

I'm not going to ask why, because I already know. You are the devil and you work for doubleclick.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[paradizelost]

However, that isn't the point that he was trying to make, some people just don't like to do more than 1 thing at a time on their machine. I couldn't handle it, but some people(the crazies!!!;))

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Sevn]

I have never had a machine that was overclocked in any way successfully install Gentoo

You must be doing something wrong then. I've got a 2.4C pushed over 3.3 running Gentoo with a gig adata pc500 running 1:1 memory divider. It screams with the UT2004 demo and my FX5900. I ran memtest off the Gentoo boot cd all night with no errors. CPU voltage is at 1.6v and mem voltage is at 3.0v. I use an MSI Neo2-LS. If you plan on running a 1:1 divider, save your money and avoid the 875 chipset boards. The performance with the 865 is identical with the 1:1 ratio. I'd avoid reiserfs like the plague with any overclocked board though. EXT3 is a much better choice.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[gentoo_is_hyped]

Thank you so much for this poke in the eye to Gentoo Zealots. Way to many new users get a horrible first impression of Linux by being sadistically pointed to things like Gentoo or Slack by retard l33t teenagers with big mouths.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[gentoo_is_hyped]

" "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days" I keep hearing this...but, have never really run into the problem. " Liar

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Nicholas Q Name]

recompiling was a significant factor

Yes of course - I mean if GLIBC is a significant factor, then why wouldn't re-compiling be significant?
BTW I'm going to up my 2.2.4 to 2.6. tomorrow and (discounting downloads, which I've already done) will take approx. two hours.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to provoke dumbasses like yourself to post whiny rebuttals.

Ouch, how ironic.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[MarcQuadra]

I've found that keeping it sinple is the 'best' solution.

Compiling at -O2 is much faster than -O3 and the code often runs faster because all the 'unrolled loops' in -O3 code can get bigger than the CPU's cache. -O3 is probably best for older architectures with miniscule caches and synchronous memory busses (read: 25MHz 68040 Mac, 90MHz Pentium I). Modern machines benefit more from having the bulk of a loop run inside the cache. -O2 binaries are also significantly smaller.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[MarcQuadra]

no no no, The guy's problem is probably that he has a well-built Gentoo system with hdparm misconfigured or not added to the boot scripts. He's thinking that maybe if he recompiles with -O9 and seventeen useless and dangerous flags that it'll speed up enough to let him multitask.

I deal with that shit all day.

Boss: "Linux is SLOW, I tried it yesterday!"

Me: "Did you check the bottleneck out? Maybe hdparm was off."

Boss: ::stares blankly::

Me: Wait a minute, let me just fix your device manager here, it says you've got a 'VIA Miniport UATA' but I know that this 'Standard PCI ATA' driver works better ::grins horribly::. Oh my! You've got write caching turned on too! That's a good way to lose data! ::grins more horribly::

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[garbagedisposal]

"I keep hearing this...but, have never really run into the problem. Unless you have a really old machine with slow processor and memory...it isn't a problem."

- Liar! Liar! Pants ob fire!

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[garbagedisposal]

Thank you so much for this amusing poke in the eye to Gentoo Zealots. Way too many new users get a horrible first impression of Linux by being sadistically pointed to things like Gentoo or Slack by retard l33t teenagers with big mouths.

Re:It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you and every other metalhead.

Easy upgrade

[koh]

Also note that existing gentoo users only need to "emerge -[D]u world" to upgrade to the 2004 release.

Re:Easy upgrade

[HuggybearVT]

That's the best part of Gentoo... the people who care the least about a new version of Gentoo are the Gentoo users. It's a beautiful model... they way Debian was supposed to work.

Re:Easy upgrade

[frodo from middle ea]

What about kernel ?

I run gentoo 1.4 with 2.4.20 soething kernel, Now I want to try 2.6.3. I don't think "emerge -uD world" would do the trick in this case.

Re:Easy upgrade

[HuggybearVT]

Sure it will. The newest patched kernel sources are downloaded with emerge updates. Sorry, that will take one more command. >> genkernel Done.

Re:Easy upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the best part of Gentoo... the people who care the least about a new version of Gentoo are the Gentoo users. It's a beautiful model... they way Debian was supposed to work.

Was supposed to work. Two things:

1) Debian users also don't have to think about new versions. Just apt-get it.

2) Debian's system has no intention of being a from-source model.

Gentoo would be much better if it offered precompiled binaries (for everything) in addition to source.

Re:Easy upgrade

[Spolster]

doing emerge -Up world on my 1.4 system lists (amoung other things) sys-kernel/gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.3-r1 so its gets you half way there at least.

Re:Easy upgrade

[greenskyx]

To upgrade to the 2.6 kernel you need follow the upgrade procedure. Be sure to read about it before you do it or you won't have too much luck.

Here are some topics on the forum you can take a look at (there are many more, just search!):

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=70838 http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=110117&hi ghlight=hdparm http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117445&hi ghlight=2+6+burner http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=725814

Re:Easy upgrade

[HuggybearVT]

True re: binary packages. If GEntoo offered a --binary option, it would be perfect. I meant "supposed to work" in that packages are available almost immediately after release. Debian is synonymous with slow. As in "Your Camry is sooo D3b1an. My Civic is l33t."

Re:Easy upgrade

[tomstdenis]

They do. The GRP cds are stocked with pre-compiled binaries for basically all the desktop packages you could need.

The point though is who wants bloatware? You can go from nada to KDE in about 900MB. Knoppix is about 1.6GB and Redhat distros are always like 4GB or whatnot...

Tom

Re:Easy upgrade

[temojen]

genkernel --menuedit all

Not all the hardware you might want is turned on by genkernel (notably Video4Linux and tablets are off)

Re:Easy upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting numbers. I've always found that any distro I've installed on my machine is just about the size I want it to be. There is always more software available, but most have a custom install option. This will let you choose what packages you want to install.

Re:Easy upgrade

[keesh]

--usepkg, --fetchpkg

Re:Easy upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, because upgradeing potentially every pice of software on your system is a good idea..... That might work ok for you gentoo users with your desktops but I doubt it. Config files change and if you have actually god for bid learned to use half of the stuff on your box and configured it to anything but the default settings you really should look at the change logs before you blindly upgrade don't you think. What happens if you just Upgrade the file server/authentication gate way from samba 2.2.28a to 3.0.2 I don't know do you? The gentoo model is no good for production systems. Its too simple for dep resolution to upgrade other packages even if you emerge only the things you think you want individually. Its also not great where down time is concerned while you wait to complile stuff. Gentoo is a stupid idea if you need to do so much optimization that the entire system needs to be build for source you might as well talor it more and use LFS, otherwise work with something simple like slackware or *BSD as a base and make packages and costomize form there. There are very few apps that even need that, most of the time you are fine performancewise with *BSD, Slackware, RH, Debian, or whatever else floats your boat, binary systems in their entirety and then just patch and rebuild that one particular item you need a little different then most folks. Gentoo has no place in the world except on the desktops of 1337e57 |\|0065 and other misguided individuals.

Re:Easy upgrade

[redog]

"Also note that existing gentoo users only need to "emerge -[D]u world" to upgrade to the 2004 release."

Not completly true. Gentoo's portage not only depends on the current portage package and tree but the profile you use.
To upgrade completly you must make sure that /etc/make.profile is a link to the version you wish to run.
ie: ls -l /etc/make.profile
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Jun 14 2003 /etc/make.profile -> ../usr/portage/profiles/default-ppc-1.4

ls -l /usr/portage/profiles/
has alot more than 1 profile per arch.

Re:Easy upgrade

[U.I.D 754625]

Yeah, I recompiled my Cavalier's engine the other day with an -O4 flag. Let us see how "l33t" your Civic is now VT!

Re:Easy upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

also one needs to update the profile much like
one did when moving from 1 to 1.4.
one need not download the 2004.0 cd, all one
needs is a generic 2004.0 stage3 tar bar which
will may then be used to build arch stages or
cd's using the catalyst tool. isn't Gentoo great!
hth

Re:Easy upgrade

[gyrojoe]

Avoid genkernel at all costs, I've had nothing but problems with it. Your best bet is to configure and compile the kernel yourself. You'll have a better, faster kernel with less bloat and support for only the things you actually need.

Re:Easy upgrade

[vandan]

I beg to differ.
If you had tried Gentoo, you would know about the etc-update script, which takes the pain out of config file updates like you are describing above.
I've been running our server at work (http://www.nusconsulting.com.au) on Gentoo for over a year now, and it's going quite nicely.
Looks like you were pointing the finger in the wrong direction with that 'misguided individuals' crack...

Re:Easy upgrade

[eloki]

the people who care the least about a new version of Gentoo are the Gentoo users. It's a beautiful model... they way Debian was supposed to work.

You mean like the way the people who care the least about a new version of Debian are existig Debian users, because most of them just dist-upgrade anyway? In fact because many of them run unstable and keep following it, ignoring the fact a frozen release happened at all? :)

Re:Easy upgrade

[Sevn]

"Your Camry is sooo D3b1an"

Thank you for the inspiration. I have stopped saying "man that thing is solaris" and started saying "man that thing is debian". Usage example: Man, the speed with which Xfree 4.3 made it into Debian was so like, debian.".

Re:Easy upgrade

[broeman]

and note that we (the typical gentoo-users) discussed this half a year ago. This is what Gentoo really is about: a great user-community through the forums, irc and mailinglists.

A lot of (what many people believe is l33t) discussion on the latest technologies and newest software is going on here, which is why I choosed Gentoo Linux (well, LFS was too much of a hasle to upgrade, and Debian just says fuck off or RTFM, where a typical gentoo-user shows you a helping hand, which creates even more helping hands, like me :)

Gentoo rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

Suck it, Fedora!

Anybody find a mirror

[nberardi]

Anybody know the location or a mirror with the non-sse version of hardened Gentoo? I can't seem to find a mirror anywhere.

Re:Anybody find a mirror

[Squinky86]

http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/gentoo/releases/x86/2 004.0/livecd/universal/
The oregon mirror also has the livecds, but I'm downloading from them and want my bandwidth :-P. If you wanna use the oregon mirror, you'll have to find it yourself!

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OMFG, I FAIL IT! spectacularly.

[Anonymous Coward]

link here.

Man, how did I screw that one up that bad?!!!!

Well, here's a bonus to make up for it.

Wow.

[Can it run Linux]

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.

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wow.

[Can it run Linux]

So you don't deny the fact that you are a poseur?

Re:Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

if you buy at the gentoo store

[Hall and Oates]

are they going to pay the SCO license fee for you cock-smoking tea-baggers?

Too many distributions

[superpulpsicle]

Ok there are too many distributions out there. All linux folks should unite to create a united linux.

Oh wait SCO already ruined that one.

The stages...

[Bishop, Martin]

The stages that say 2004.0 are only for Hardened Systems I hear, the mirrors haven't updated yet

Re:The stages...

[Anonymous Coward]

Martin, for the last time . . . shut the fuck up.

Experience with dual-boot?

[Chromodromic]

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).

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 ... Any info would be appreciated ...

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[ultrabot]

Has anyone here installed Gentoo on a dual-boot configuration?

I think these days pretty much all distros are equally good dual-booters. If you have grub, and /boot is big enough to hold the kernel, you can boot pretty much anything.

As long as you order all the distros *not* to touch your boot config, that is. Install the boot configuration once with a distro you trust, and take advantage of the config with subsequent distros.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[AbstracTus]

I'm using dual boot Gentoo/WinXP on my laptop, without problems.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Mr Smidge]

Gentoo's installation guide will tell you how to set up a dual-boot configuration *properly*, with no wizards or anything, just plain old text file editing.

If that sounds daunting, don't worry because it's as easy as pie. Personally, I use grub, with a config file a bit like this:

# Gentoo
title=Gentoo Linux (linux-2.6.1-mm4 kernel)
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage-2.6.1-mm4 root=/dev/hde5

# Windows XP
title=Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1

Dual boot couldn't be easier.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only posers dual boot. Why do you hate the Free Software revolution so much?

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[tangent3]

Gentoo makes you go through the lilo/grub bootloader installation stage manually, and provide some guides on how to do it. Of course, you should be able to find more detailed documentations elsewhere like from tldp. Basically, if you do it yourself, you can easily setup any boot combination you like.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[JBMcB]

I use Gentoo dual booting with XP on my wife's TiVO I built. Use grub, it's the best bootloader I've seen. Plays fine with XP/2k/Whatever, no reinstallation needed after recompiling the kernel, loads of options, pictures, you name it.

Gentoo is a bit more low-level than Mandrake, especially the install :) . The configuration layout seems to make more sense than Mandrake, IMHO, but Mandrake is a great install-and-go system. Gentoo is nicer for hackers/power users.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

wow, you've had your comment up for almost 4 minutes and it hasn't been flooded with fanboys yet. Amazing. But seriously, if ease of use is what you're looking for then you should probably stay away from Gentoo. I will admit that it's a dream once you finally get it running but getting to that point takes quite a while. It's quite simply the most masochistic installation I've ever seen. The live cd will dump you to a prompt and then it's up to you to partition your drive, mount it's filesystem, untar all the files manually, set up fstab by hand, compile and install your kernel, manually set up your bootloader, set up your networking, choose which compilation options you want to use, and then start compiling things. (desktop? hope you've got a day or two handy..)

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[glawrie]

I have an AMD XP2400+ based system (using ASUS A7V8X-X Mobo) with ATI Radeon 9600 video card. I dual boot Gentoo and Windows XP Pro.

Simply put, the dual-boot bit works just fine. I use Grub to dual boot, and once I'd worked out how to configure it, it does the job well.

The learning curve for Gentoo is steep if you are new to to Unix - editing a working /etc/fstab file is not really so easy compared to an auto-installation system. But the online manual / documentation / tutorial is pretty helpful provided you have standard ish hardware. The gentoo support forums (forums.gentoo.org) are also very active and very helpful for the most part.

The compile time is a factor - on my system it takes about 24 hours to get from blank HD to running KDE / Gnome - but once you have some sort of desktop running the ability to 'emerge' applications in the background becomes a major boon. That bit is really easy to do and works wonderfully. As does the auto-update bit (emerge world).

So challenge is to get something like a desktop going - some find this easy, but my experience is that many end up having two or three goes (it took me about four to get an installation that worked) - and many hours reading manuals / discussion forum entries tracking down why that bit of stuff won't work. Almost always it is a simple typo in a config file - the dependency checking in the emerge system means almost never do you end up with stuff that is installed but won't work due to some failed / missing app. Question is do you have time / energy to do the three or four builds plus research - and will the time you spend be compensated by the ultra-fast / efficient system you end up with (and your learning lots about the gubbins that make up Unix systems).

For me I stuck it out and am very happy with Gentoo. But I'd think carefully before recommending it to anyone else -especially a new user.

Regards

gavin

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[blueleo]

All this will work well if everything is on one disk. I have Windows (2000) on one disk and Gentoo on another. The Windows disk is the secondary, so it was necessary to MAP the drives in the Windows stanza. It is difficult to find this in the Gentoo docs, but it is there. It is a bit tricky if you have never done it before, or only done it with an automated installer (most other distributions).

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

'd be curious about what Gentoo users would have to say about this and how it compares to, say, Mandrake or Suse ... Any info would be appreciated ...

That's comparing small rocks with oranges.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Vancorps]

You know, that's the thing I love the most about Gentoo. I installed 1.2 a while back custom compiling everything. Took my laptop a good 12 hours to compile but it was worth it. A rock solid OS in the end. But then again, that's because I can read instructions. The install process takes you through every segment of a linux based OS so you end up learning a lot about how its all put together. A great experience for anyone willing put in the time I'd say.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[ameoba]

You make it sound like Gentoo and/or Grub somehow make this easier than normal when, in fact, it hasn't been all that difficult for something like 10 years. Even back then, the hardest thing you had to worry about was making sure that Lilo could find its files below the 1024th cylinder (or was it sector...).

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing Gentoo on my computer provided a great learning experience for me on Linux. That being said, I would NOT recommend you install Gentoo unless you are willing to devote at least an entire weekend to the installation. If you just want to have linux on your computer, I would strongly suggest Mandrake. That distro is very user friendly and still has the "essence" of Linux.

But if you do choose Gentoo, I will say that their installation manual is simply first rate and the forums are invaluable for dealing with those odd nuances (or even if you need clarification on something). The Gentoo Zealots aside, most Gentoo users are usually very helpful, especially to those new to the community.

Oh, and it's been said before, but a lot of Linux distros handle dual booting with XP very well. Plus, Mandrake's installer is able to resize NTFS partitions (used by XP) safely. I actually used the Mandrake installer to repartition my harddrive before install Gentoo.

And in case you were wondering, I'm dual booting Athlon-XP 3000 with an All-in-Wonder Radeon 9800 with WinXP and Gentoo. Good luck in your search!

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[liquidsin]

I'm running Gentoo and Win2k pro with absolutely no problems. I have a 50mb boot partition, gentoo on ext3, win2k on ntfs, swap space, and the rest of the drive is fat32 so I can share (music/movies/documents) between the two OS's. Lilo lets me boot either without a problem, and the whole thing was entirely painless, except for the part where windows ate my lilo install and I had to boot from a bootdisk to rerun /sbin/lilo. For all the trolls who like to talk about everyone thinking they're so 1337 for running gentoo, all I have to say is that if you want to actually *learn* about the os, I learned more in the weekend I installed gentoo that I had in the previous two years of running mandrake, and the documentation on their website is incredible.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[HarriSeldon]

I dual booted using Microsoft's boot loader instead of Grub. It works, but it is an awful way to do it. Every time I udate my kernel, I need to reload lilo and dd my boot sector on my linux partition to a file. Then copy it onto my windows partition in c:\.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Mnemia]

While Gentoo hasn't necessarily made this "easier", it is certainly more clear what is going on. I'm always nervous about some GUI installer just doing stuff to the MBR without telling me what it is, whether it is the Windows installer or the Redhat one.

And, at least for x86, GRUB IS an improvement in usability over LILO. I haven't used any version of LILO in the last two or three years since I switched to GRUB, but the main advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to remember to reinstall it into the boot sectors every time you change the config. You just edit the config file, save, and it'll work fine on the next reboot. And, it's nice because you can manually edit the config file right in the GRUB GUI...

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[TrevizeNet]

I did a similar thing with Redhat this weekend, except my Windows section was something like this since I have the luxury of 2 hard drives title=Windows 2000 map (hd1) (hd0) map (hd0) (hd1) root (hd1,0) chainloader +1

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[TrevizeNet]

Lets try that again with proper spacing (note to self, use the preview button)

title=Windows 2000
map (hd1) (hd0)
map (hd0) (hd1)
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[avante]

I have installed Linux on a system like you describe, except I could not get Gentoo running. I will try again though. I think I made a few mistakes along the way (I also installed Gentoo on two other systems successfully).

Usually there is no problem if you install windows on your hard drive FIRST and on the first partition of the first drive.

The problem I ran in to is that I installed Windows first, but on my last hard drive. Since I was using Serial ATA for that drive I had no choice. The solution was to tell the boot loader to trick Windows in to thinking it was on the first drive and first paritition. You can find out about it if you read the docs for GRUB.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

You installed XP on your TiVo?

What?

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[wormbin]

I run gentoo, debian, and windows on a single box and also have spare partitions to test out other distributions.

The one recommendation I would have for dual booting is to use grub and to make sure that /boot/grub is it's own partition. This way all of your linux partitions can mount the same /boot/grub so changes to it will have the appropriate global effects. It also means you can nuke any of your linux distros and not screw up your boot loader.

You may have to add the following symbolic link in order to keep everything sane:

# cd /boot/grub && ln -s . grub

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[ChaserPnk]

I have a dual boot system with Windows XP Pro and Gentoo. The gentoo installation guide is extremely useful. Anytime you're running UNIX commands such as fdisk and grub it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot. This is where the installation guide really comes through.
Mandrake's installer is definitely easier, but then it doesn't have the portage systems. I am a former Mandrake user and believe me I felt empowered when I switched from RPM to portage. Once you setup Gentoo, it is very easy to extend and maintain.
The docs are the best I've ever seen. You should definitely give Gentoo a shot. The docs will guide you through setting up a dual boot.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will a chainloader +5 of Doom work as well?

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Gherald]

I think he means HTPC, not TIVO...

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[milkman_matt]

It's quite simply the most masochistic installation I've ever seen. The live cd will dump you to a prompt and then it's up to you to partition your drive, mount it's filesystem, untar all the files manually, set up fstab by hand, compile and install your kernel, manually set up your bootloader, set up your networking, choose which compilation options you want to use, and then start compiling things. I think installing gentoo is a great learning experience, which leaves you with a good, stable OS.

See, I thought it was totally intimidating when a friend of mine suggested I install gentoo. Now I couldn't be happier. I'd say I was about a 5 on a 1-10 scale of linux knowledge, certainly didn't know enough to install any distro from a CLI, however the Installation Forum made this the easiest installation i've had in a while. Sure, it was a manual installation, but the instructions they provide on their website (Which they link to on the homepage under the second link on the left, easy to find) this couldn't have been easier. What impressed me was that their instructions don't say "do this, now do this, now do this" which it does say to an extent, but it explains to you exactly why it's asking you to type everything that it's asking you to type, I think installing gentoo helped me to know what I was doing with linux in general a lot better.. I feel a lot more comfortable and familiar with the filesystem than I did before I did that install.

-matt

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

so why don't you use grub then?

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Rick and Roll]

I'm using triple boot Gentoo, WinXP Pro, and OpenBSD without problems. GRUB kicks A**.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[/dev/trash]

I am typing this on my Gentoo/Windows 98 dual boot machine. The Gentoo install guide was pretty simple in its steps on how to dual boot.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Sevn]

I went the other route and installed Gentoo in the first three partitions, then put XP in the 4th. I made sure to make a grub boot disk so I could easily overwrite the crap that XP puts in the boot partition during it's install with grub goodness.

Re:Experience with dual-boot?

[Bertie]

Yes, but that approach has its advantages. You really learn about how your system works. I always used to use SuSE until I had to try Gentoo out on a Mini-ITX system because I couldn't even get SuSE to start its installation process. It was an absolute nightmate at first, but now I'm so much more knowledgeable about where all sorts of system files are located, what they do and how to change them to do different things. And the instructions provided are brilliant - if you just follow them, you'll get your system up and working. Sure, it's not as easy as pointing and clicking, but it's just following a process, you don't actually have to do a huge amount of thinking.

I'm a total convert now, because the advantages far outweigh the initial inconvenience. When you've done it once, you're away, and every time I've done it since (I've done four installs now) I seem to have managed it in half the time. I've got a system into a usable state in just a couple of hours recently, and it feels like my system because I made it myself from the ground up - you can't put a price on that sense of pride you get from seeing it finally up and running.

Yea!

[stateofmind]

My P-III 450 and I will let you know what we think of it in about a week.

Josh

Re:Yea!

[Hayzeus]

That should be about enough time to get KDE built. (seriously -- I emerged kde a c ouple of weeks ago, qt and all, on a P-450. Took about 5 days -- a bit more if you count fixing some hickups in the qt ebuild).

Re:Yea!

[stateofmind]

I believe ya. I had quite a few problems along the way, and I still don't have all of the kde builds compiled.

So I wiped it, and did just kde-base and a few others. But this was also my first Gentoo install, so I'm planning on wiping the whole machine, and starting fresh.

Josh

Re:Yea!

[MarcQuadra]

The trick is not NOT 'emerge kde' but to 'emerge kdebase'

kdebase has the window manager, a slew of the basics (kedit, kate, konsole, konqueror, etc.) in it and I've found that it satisfies most of my KDE needs.

Also, QT and kdelibs are what really take a long time to compile.

Try compiling with '-mcpu=|yourcpu| -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer' and see how much faster it compiles, -O3 is a misnomer, it's actually slower to execute a lot of -O3 code than -O2, and -O3 takes a hell of a lot longer to compile.

Re:Yea!

[jdh-22]

For all you complaining about how much time it takes to compile such apps, there is a plus side! I installed Gentoo on my p3-500, with 512mb of ram. KDE runs just as fast as it does on my p3-500 as it does on my desktop amd barton 2500+.... AND it is 3 times as fast handling Apache/MySQL server than my 1.2 Ghz Pentium on Win2k (yeah yeah).

After the initial compile, everything after that is pretty much cake. Emerge is the greatest thing ever.

Re:Yea!

[spitzwegerich]

PIII 450, 256MB RAM, compiler flags -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer.

Emerging complete kde 3.2 (not only kde-base!), including qt and kdelibs, took me about 2 days.

Re:Yea!

[Hayzeus]

Wow -- I should have a look at those compiler flags -- this machine only has around 160 meg as well. Emergeing KDE was done pretty much just for fun (I don't actually use it)

The next machine to be switched to GenToo is a dual processor PIII -- I'll definitely pay more attention to the compiler flags when time comes to upgrade.

Re:Yea!

[Brandybuck]

You're doing something wrong then. Or maybe it's a bug in Gentoo. Updating a 100MHz Pentium laptop from base FreeBSD to all KDE ports from source takes me only about two days.

Re:Yea!

[LearnToSpell]

distcc is your friend. Everything's better when you have a 6 GHz processor.

Re:Yea!

[CelloJake]

Why in the world would you install KDE? Most people who run Gentoo actually want their machine to be responsive. -Jacob

Re:Yea!

[Hayzeus]

Just for fun -- this is just a machine for screwing around. Its also headless. I don't generally use either kde or gnome -- if I need a GUI at all, I just use FVWM.

Still, I like to see what's new every now and then. Besides, once I started the emerge, I was loathe to stop it.

Re:Yea!

[cobar]

That should actually be -march=cputype
-mcpu dictates that the code should be scheduled for your cpu type, but will still be backwards compatible with 386's. Using march will let you use instructions that are only available on newer cpus. For personal use, there's seldom need for compatibility with other machines.

Re:Yea!

[MarcQuadra]

My bad, I've been in PowerPC-land for the last month where -mcpu= is the only way to go.

Re:Yea!

[peeon]

My emerge of kde3.2 on Via C3 1gigahz cpu was about 1 day. The FPU on this cpu is lacking. This i686 cpu was also using i586 architecture flags.

2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[Bishop, Martin]

Don't give out wrong info, all you have to do is emerge gentoo-dev-sources for a 2.6.X kernel

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[afabbro]

Not accurate. You can emerge development-sources to get 2.6.3 (actually, 2.6.4-rc1 now). You don't need to use ~x86. Know it 'cause I've done it.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[Caeda]

And maybe you should actually check things like this before you post them. Since it even says in the install page for 2.6.3 (This is a stable release, even though its labled as gentoo-dev-sources)

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[temojen]

development-sources is currently at 2.6.4-rc1 and is not masked.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[VE3MTM]

Uh, that's not cool to do that. I did that once, and forgot to take it out, and then I wondered why I suddenly had to upgrade 4 dozen packages (to unstable releases, I soon realized) It's better to specify the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS on the command-line for the single command.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[rizzo]

You never "have to" do anything unless there is a specific version dependency. It's just a portage notification that there are newer versions out there if you want them.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[djeca]

Wrong: that way, Portage will want to downgrade the package to the latest stable version at your next emerge -Du world.

You should actually put a line like:

sys-kernel/gentoo-dev-sources ~x86

into /etc/portage/package.keywords (create the directory and file if they don't already exist); then emerge -Du world and Portage will select the latest unstable release of that package only.

Re:2.6.3 kernel only from unstable ~x86

[__aabvlw4075]

DON't put that in your make.conf! If you do you'll upgrade you whole system to unstable packages. If you ever want packages that are still in testing, specify it on the command line like this:

$ ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" sudo emerge kde

MOD PARENT UP, COMPLETLY VALID CRITICISM

[Anonymous Coward]

nt

The hidden meaning

[Anonymous Coward]

'gentoo hardened' is just an anagram for 'nerd head - ton ego'

MOD PARENT DOWN: -1, TURD BURGLAR

[Anonymous Coward]

My Experience with Gentoo

[LordoftheFrings]

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?

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the ethos for gentoo was more of a server orientated distro rather than desktop, although it certainly can be used as a desktop distro.

Then again as pointed out before, there's always pre-compiled binaries via GRP.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[miracle69]

You can emerge binary only packages in Gentoo. emerge --usepkg gets you the binary only.

If you still want to compile everything, get distcc and let your beefier hardware do the trick.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Would whoever is recommending any distro other than say Mandrake to newbs please stop.

Seriously, it is of no help for people who want to try Linux to be given anything but the easiest most brain damaged friendly distro out there.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[mehaiku]

Install Gentoo from a chroot within Knoppix. Or better yet, from a chroot within a Linux distro on another drive. This allows you to use your computer while everything compiles. Even after the system is built you can chroot into the installation and build KDE, GNOME or whatever you want.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

yea you should stick to redhat or mandrake until you jump to gentoo

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[HuggybearVT]

I hear you, but i disagree. I always reccomend Gentoo to linux newbies. It forces you to get past the GUI to really understand what's going on. I didn't ever "get it" until I installed Gentoo the first time. Now I stay with it out of loyalty. No other distro taught me more.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[aliens]

Very true, that's how I learned. But with slakware way back in the day.

But I think for someone who wants a desktop replacement, an alternative to Windows, they're not really looking to learn much.

I think it's just being smart about who is asking for Linux info. If it's not the kid in your CS class , provide a Live CD first. Then move on from there.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Etyenne]

Exactly the worst thing you could do. Recommending Gentoo to just any newbie is counter-productive advocacy.

When you make a recommendation, you have to take your target audience into account. You should not recommend Gentoo for someone who don't care about the innard of his OS and just want to use a word processor, read his email, surf the Web and play a game or three. They don't want to get past the GUI, they just want to get things done.

Power user, system administrator and programmer are a totally different story and *may* be good candidate to recommend Gentoo to.

That's so obvious, I can't believe it have to be said.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[mal3]

Amen. Knowing how to edit an fstab file, etc. Are the things I needed to learn about Linux. The red hat\mandrake installs are of no help later when I want to install a second hard drive. Gentoo taught me how.

Give a man a fish, and all that.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[damballah]

"While I acknowledge the benefits of compiling everything with optizations for the exact platform it's on [...]"

Serious question to anyone that uses Gentoo: what exatcly are the benefits of compiling from source, apart from having bleeding-edge software? How more noticeable can app speed get? Does it feel faster than using i586/i686-optimized binaries? For me, the tradeoffs (time, time, time!!!) of compiling sources seems to outweigh the advantages.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[McGarnacle]

I'd say you have that backwards. While I'm sure many people are using it on servers, some of us refuse to do so unless there's some kind of package freeze (eg only security updates).

Fortunately, someone has thought of this, and is making it happen.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Shinobi]

Application speed can be significant, it all depends on what kind of app... A simple low-life editor such as Vi will run fast on anything beyond a 286, and will be I/O-limited when you work with larger files. OpenSSH, OpenSSL, rendering programs, graphics programs etc tend to enjoy a greater benefit from optimizations for your architecture, especially if you enable the use of MMX/3DNOW/SSE and similar extensions. Even though GCC is not auto-vectorizing, those programs do gain a noticeable boost from enabling those extensions.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[sbennett]

Alternatively, do your install from a stage3 with binary packages, and then do emerge -e world and let it recompile everything while you're working.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[lerouxb]

You're right - 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 are newer and more stable than debian unstable. They usually have things before other distros.

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.

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.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[KozmoStevnNaut]

The speed increase is only about 3-4%, though in some cases it's more, and in other cases it's less. (This is guesswork, though, based on startup times and so on)

What I really like is that you can pick and choose exactly what you want your programs to use. The GTK2 support in MPlayer is still flaky and messes up the right-click menu. Some distros just supply it with GTK2 compiled in even though it's bad and messes stuff up. With Gentoo (and all the other from-source distros) you just tell MPlayer to forget about GTK2 and use GTK1 (which works fine) instead. Combined with Portage handling programs and updates, it's really quite handy sometimes.

Yes, compiling takes a lot of time (especially when installing KDE, GNOME or Mozilla), but since you install from source, adding a package is in fact nothing more than writing a small script, which means that you are right on the bleeding edge (which you also mentioned), instead of waiting for a binary package.

Some people don't like that, and they probably use Debian or something else, but for us crazy people who love to tinker, it's great.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about it. Every zealot follower of some barely used Linux distro wants newbies to come to his distro... no matter how unfriendly it is. They just don't seem to understand that a newbie takes one look at their setup and runs a fucking mile... right back to Windows. No amount of explaining will change their mind -- EVERYONE MUST USE GENTOO/SLACKWARE/[INSERT DISTRO OF CHOICE] -- it doesn't even occur to them that more Linux users means more people trying out fringe distros... No, they must all use my distro of choice because it will help them become l33t, just like m3.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Woody77]

That's kinda a blanket statement to make. I installed Mandrake as my first linux OS, turned around and ripped it back out the next day, and went with RedHat, and then ripped THAT out, and then went with Debian before I found one that I liked.

I'm currently using Gentoo, as I prefer emerge to apt-get. Not saying it's better, just I like it better.

But different people at different skill-sets shouldn't all start with the same distro. I purposely recommended Gentoo for a friend as a second Linux distro to install because it would force him to actually learn about how Linux works.

If my mother wanted to install Linux, I'd probably suggest Mandrake, but people that are comfortable installing OSs can usually handle (and often prefer) a bit less hand-holding that the new GUI installs are giving.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[EMN13]

I run gentoo; my suggestion is just not to worry about it...
I've compiled with some rather experimental flags in my time and they often cause problems in things like xine or mplayer or whatnot; and the speed difference isn't that great... (not perceivably so anyhow)

Anyhow; just use stage3 if you feel like it - you can always recompile portions with new CFLAGS by

emerge --oneshot [my-package-here]

I run ~x86 and for me the real advantage of portage is the access to up-to-date packages.

Some people are really snobbish about this; pretending that updating other systems is even remotely as easy (it's not) or as up-to-date (witness debian)

With so many developments happening in linux-land is nice to be able to actually get those features.

For example kde 3.2 (in my opinion full of real world improvements over 3.1.x) was available for gentoo right away (the same day...) - not so for other distros. Also gentoo has ebuilds for pretty much anything under the sun... almost all programs you'll want to install are emerge-able.

Gentoo may not be so bug-free; it may not be as fast (at installing); but it sure as hell has a great forum and bug-support system. It's really a great way to get help and to post some help to others that suffer from the same problems.

So it has costs (more hassle to set up) but benefits too (more up-to-date, great support, good documentation).

I.e. don't worry about the compiling from source bit... that's not even so important.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[N1KO]

I agree that gentoo/slackware would be a bit extreme, but users need to know a little bit of how their system works. Otherwise, they end up with a box full of virii, spyware, adware, programs that load at start up (slowing everything down and taking up memory unnecessarily), etc.

To use anything, you need to have some idea of how it works. Computers shouldn't be an exception.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[gentoo_is_hyped]

Did you read this (below). It is not just sarcastic, it is pretty much accurate. "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!"

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Sleepy]

> I hear you, but i disagree. I always reccomend Gentoo to linux newbies.

You must hate newbies.

You would do these users less of a disservice if you simply directed them to an InstallFest and let them hear less biased opinions.

Just like the BEST BEER in the world is a free beer :-), the BEST distro for a newbie is one where he has SUPPORT. For that reason I usually recommend Red Hat because it is the more common Linux (at least in the USA) and it seems to have above average hardware detection. Personally, I always liked Debian best.

If the bar for Linux is learning it without the GUI, then there are a lot of people you don't want running Linux.

Where all the Linux seem to break down is when you go off the beaten path, and mix source and packaging (all too common). For this and some other reasons, I am starting to appreciate FreeBSD more.

I can see how people like Gentoo. I just can't see how they would suggest it to Joe Sixpack The Newbie.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[Nicholas Q Name]

I agree with you utterly.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[scosol]

Do you actually use Gentoo?

emerge --usepkg does not magically download a precompiled package specific to your USE flags...

it looks for a *local* precompiled package-
eg: if you're installing 20 new identical machines, it doesn't make sense to compile 20 times-
instead, you compile on one, and then generate packages from it, and then install all the others using --usepkg

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[garbagedisposal]

Did you read this (below). It is not just sarcastic, it is pretty much accurate. "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!"

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[broeman]

I am in the believe that Joe Sixpack shouldn't touch computer at all, since he is the one who spreads viruses, worms and create network-disruptions because of his ignorance on computers.

If you don't have the proper education to use a computer, then you shouldn't use it. Nobody should use a car without a license, I account the same with computers, just that slackware, debian and gentoo helps you to learn it yourselves.

Mandrake, Redhat, SuSE and other "ignorant"-desktop-a-like systems, which promise easy setup, but leaves the user without any knowledge on the "real" setup of the computer.

Everyone is using the "Joe Sixpack" and "Grandma" metaphors, and I agree that they should be part of the information "super-highway", but they can use some kind of minimal browser-system (like a tv-setup-box), until they feel ready to learn computing.

Re:My Experience with Gentoo

[BgJonson79]

The more I work with regular people and computers, the more I realize non-technical people SHOULDN'T USE COMPUTERS. I had a customer today ask why he couldn't log into his account. It would help if he had registered first. Non-technical people just Don't Get It (TM), and don't have the inclination to try and Get It (TM). I'm not trying to troll or be flamebait, but most people don't care enough about computers to learn how to use them properly.

I can remember

[boudie]

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!

Re:I can remember

[Hassman]

I KNOW! I've tried intstalling it several times. Each time something different would go wrong. I was so frustrated.

Looks like I'll have to give it another go...

wow

[anthonyrcalgary]

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.

Re:wow

[Nasarius]

Worked for me not so long ago. After "emerge system", I just did "emerge kde" and let it run overnight. Configure X, and KDE works great.

Here are some excerpts from the make.conf that I use:

USE="qt kde dvd alsa cdr -gnome gtk2 imap acpi aim apache2 curl directfb emacs fbcon flac java mmx mozilla oscar perl samba sse usb"

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -funroll-loops -pipe"

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

What an interesting concept - a bug in a build script in open source software! Who would have thought.

As someone who is very in tune with Gentoo and KDE, I can safely say you have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:wow

[gustaffo]

It worked fine on my 2ghz AMD64 from the 2004.0 CD. And as for those complaining how long it takes to compile stuff, well if you dont want an OS that gives you those options you can always use emerge packages, or just install SuSE. :)

P.s. this release abolsutely flys on the AMD64. I started the emerge, and at the time it was downloading QT I left to go get some fast food. A quick drive down the road through the pickup window, and back down the road I had come up and I was home, and QT was already completly compiled/installed (and it was working on another package). Shortly after that, I was in KDE 3.2...

Re:wow

[anthonyrcalgary]

It works now, but immediately after kde-3.2.0 went to stable a number of things were broken and they took a while to fix.

Re:wow

[anthonyrcalgary]

fam-2.7.0 emake error

It wouldn't build fam-2.7.0 which was one of the packages required by KDE 3.2.0. KDE was the first non-essential thing I tried to emerge on a fresh install. The build script was fixed some time later, and an "emerge sync" allowed KDE to build properly.

Re:wow

[Some Bitch]

As someone who is very in tune with Gentoo and KDE, I can safely say you have no idea what you're talking about.

As someone who installed Gentoo from scratch two weeks ago I can assure you there most definitely is (was?) a problem with libfam-2.7.0 (most ran into this while emerging KDE 3.2) and the OP was correct. See the Gentoo forum thread.

Re:wow

[Zigg]

As someone who bailed on Gentoo some time back mostly because he was tired of buggy build scripts sucking down hours of compile time, I can safely say you're either naive or a troll.

Re:wow

[anthonyrcalgary]

It worked fine on my 2ghz AMD64 from the 2004.0 CD.

That's good to hear.

P.s. this release abolsutely flys on the AMD64. I started the emerge, and at the time it was downloading QT I left to go get some fast food. A quick drive down the road through the pickup window, and back down the road I had come up and I was home, and QT was already completly compiled/installed (and it was working on another package). Shortly after that, I was in KDE 3.2...

I don't mind the long compiles, only the compiles that die right in the middle. No matter how fast your CPU is, you still have disk i/o to worry about. You're not going to get something like KDE 3.2 compiled on a clean install in less than 2-3 hours without a pretty outrageous system. More like 3-4 on mine, and mine is no slouch. I want that to happen while I'm asleep or at uni/work.

Um?

[tomstdenis]

I went to three diff mirrors. No ISO for 2004.0/livecd/x86

???

What gives???

Tom

Re:Um?

[Graelin]

You have to compile it first - only takes a few weeks.

Re:Um?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom, for the the last time . . . shut the fuck up.

Re:Um?

[dryan]

Probably due to the fact that it's not actually officially been released yet.

Re:Um?

[gspr]

Some mirrors have a "universal/" dir under releases/x86/2004.0/livecd/. It's populated with two different 2004.0 liveCDs.

Re:Um?

[tomstdenis]

I know you are but what am I?

Re:Um?

[Noksagt]

Righ. One is a minimal, one is the full version of 1 disc (so no optimized compiles for individual platforms yet). Many mirrors only have the minimal CD (from which you can make a full CD). Or get the full from ftp.ussg.iu.edu (but I beat you to the queue!)

Re:Um?

[Squinky86]

Indeed. Check the topic in IRC:
"ignore slashdot, 2004.0 is not released" It almost is, though.

Re:Um?

[DarkBlackFox]

http://store.gentoo.org/

Then why on the front page of their store are they selling 2004.0 calling it "in stock and ready to ship"?

Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[mehaiku]

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.

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[Anonymous Coward]

care to fill me in on what they did last April fools?

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[amembleton]

Portage 2.1 to adopt RPM format for LSB compliance

It's a shame they had to put a disclaimer on it.

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[avenj]

Yeah. The problem was that a bunch of not particularly bright individuals apparently didn't check the date and pitched a fit. Which was fucking stupid.

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[Frizzle Fry]

Isn't that the whole point of an april fools joke? To actually fool people?

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[Al-Hala]

ok, I'll bite. What did they do last year?

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[vericgar]

Apr 1 2003 Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:

Portage 2.1 to adopt RPM format for LSB compliance

In what will likely prove to be a controversial decision, Portage 2.1 will adopt the RPM format for all packages moving forward. The use of ebuilds will be deprecated in favor of the defacto RPM standard. The primary driver for this decision was to ensure compliance with the Linux Standard Base specification, which mandates RPM support for package management.

The developers have been hard at work to make this migration as easy as possible. Already a proof-of-concept ebuild2rpm script is in place and being tested by a pilot group of developers. Unfortunately, because of the architectural differences between the two formats, some features will not be supported once Gentoo moves to RPM. USE variables are one such feature; sandbox security is another. However, the added benefit brought about by full LSB compliance should far outweigh the loss of these two minor features.

Additionally, because of LSB's required library support, the xfree86 package will move to become part of the base Gentoo Linux system, rather than an optional addition. Users interested in learning more about the Linux Standard Base should read the LSB FAQ or the full LSB 1.3 specification.

Re:Gentoo never ceases to amaze..

[Al-Hala]

Riight *snort*.

Ok, that was good for a chuckle, all right. Much obliged :)

But..

[stateofmind]

But I'm still compiling the last version!

Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[djh101010]

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.

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[ultrabot]

I'm going to try it on one of the Ultra5's I have sitting around and see how it goes.

Considering the blazing performance of SPARC chips, it might have completed the compilation process by the time Sarge is released. So you might as well wait for sarge.

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[BrookHarty]

I have Gentoo running on my SunBlade 100, it runs rather fast, compiled mozilla in a couple hours. KDE failed last night, going to see what happended today.

So far, no problems. I tried linux on my sparc 5 with SuSE, and it was slower than Solaris 2.6. But that was a few years ago.

I'm still running Mandrake on my home boxes, I can't have it down for a day while its compiling. Now if Gentoo just offered a full binary build also.

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[keesh]

Sparc and UltraSparc are both supported. You do, of course, need different CDs / netboot images.

Gentoo/Sparc project page

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[richie2000]

I'm still running Mandrake on my home boxes, I can't have it down for a day while its compiling. Now if Gentoo just offered a full binary build also.

a) You can chroot into the Gentoo environment and compile whatever while multitasking. I'm actually compiling gcc right now in a VMWare window from XP. You're saying that Mandrake can't do something that XP can? ;-)

b) Check out the second CD in the big LiveCD set. My God, it's full of binaries! KDE, Gnome, the lot. It's available for x86, PPC and Sparc. Read more about it here.

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[BrookHarty]

Only problem, there is no second CD for RC 1.5 for Sparc. :(

Maybe thats fixed in Gentoo 2004, but I am using a less supported hardware.

Re:Ultra-Sparc, not SunSparc.

[richie2000]

Use the 1.4 CDs, then update specific packages with binaries from the mirrors with portage. If there are no new binaries for your architecture at least you'll have access to a lot of usable programs and applications while the new ones compile. Just make a new partition (5 gigs should be plenty if you want all the bells and whistles, but I have Gentoos running on a tenth of that) and install to that from a shell in Mandrake.

Gentoo isn't really release-specific in that you'll need to reinstall the entire system to upgrade to a new release. the releases are just milestones for the LiveCDs and included packages. If you already have an installed system, you can upgrade only the parts you need off the net or CD as source or binaries.

What I'm saying is that you can safely install all of Gentoo 1.4 as binaries and then go hardcore with tweaking CFLAGS, upgrade and re-compile gcc, KDE and OpenOffice to your heart's content. But it's not mandatory. If you're willing to wait a while or stay behind the bleeding edge a bit (less supported systems wait longer/further back), you can get binaries for everything.

True story

[Anonymous Coward]

xxxx

Gentoo has it's place

[Realistic_Dragon]

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!

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, "not as easy" is surly part of the Linux spirit.

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[jdavidb]

I'm presently running Gentoo on my dual boot snow ibook. The fact is that I would prefer Debian; I used to run Debian exclusively on this machine's predecessor, a blueberry that couldn't handle the static electricity of the winter of 2002-2003. :) Unfortunately I spent half a year trying to get Debian X to work on this machine with no luck. I finally discovered that the version of X with the correct drivers is still considered experimental. I never could get any luck figuring out how to rehome my machine to get the right XFree86, and finally decided Gentoo would be easier, which it was.

I like Gentoo. I admit it seems speedy (though this is the fastest machine I've ever owned). I used to like compiling my own Linux distro through Linux From Scratch and sort of like the idea that everything on this machine was compiled for source (though since I didn't do it manually myself I don't have quite the same since of satisfaction). That said, Gentoo currently doesn't offer anything that will make me stay with it after Debian catches up. Worst of all, I have some doubts that all of the software I can emerge is under licensing schemes I want; they seem to be a little bit more lax about that than RedHat and Debian.

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[KozmoStevnNaut]

You can check the licensing for packages with 'emerge -s [package]'.

Gentoo is also dropping XFree86 4.4, BTW.

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[Zigg]

Just FYI -- unstable now has XFree86 4.3. I don't have to pull those packages from experimental anymore.

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[jdavidb]

Thanks. I'll probably migrate back once this semester ends, then.

Re:Gentoo has it's place

[robotoverflow]

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!

Actually, assuming you cross compile all the source you won't be putting the thing though much stress at all, so it's not as if it'd do any harm. If anything a handheld is a great place for gentoo as with a relatively low performance cpu it would benefit the most from the optimisations that compiling would give you.

eh

[Anonymous Coward]

not to troll or anything, but what does gentoo have that freebsd doesn't?

freebsd is not only faster, more stable and generally more mature, but its community is far better than those gentoo people who only seem to be using linux to get transparent titlebars in fluxbox.

Re:eh

[Anonymous Coward]

freebsd is not only faster, more stable and generally more mature

Yep, so mature that it's near death.

Re:eh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:eh

[boudie]

Ah, correction. I'm using mine to get transparent titlebars in kahakai. And they look mah-velous!

Re:eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to troll or anything but "troll troll, troll troll troll troll troll. Troll troll troll"

*throws a cracker at the troll*

gentoo helpful to a new user

[waterbear]

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-

Re:gentoo helpful to a new user

[cayenne8]

And the forums are fantastic too!!! Anytime I run into a problem...if I can't find it quickly with a search (which usually solves it)....I can post and generally have an answer in a surprisingly short period of time.

And...I find the people there are VERY patient...you rarely if ever see RTFM as an answer...

Re:gentoo helpful to a new user

[eugene ts wong]

& to add to that, a well written document is several times better than a well made gui.

Re:gentoo helpful to a new user

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, hear!

I've a semi-linux-newbie. As in, I've been _using_ linux for years, but never really understood the innards nor had time to dig into things - I once installed a Mandrake 9.0, but that didn't teach me anything except that there were easier installs than windows installs (and that configuration of a system you don't know anything about but which does contain some 2 Gigs of stuff is pretty much impossible).

However, four spare days and Gentoo with its _SUPERB_ documentation were everything I needed to now have a thorough grasp of linux and of how my specific system is set up - there's nothing here that I don't need or know about, and keeping things up to date is a breeze.

Gentoo definitely isn't for everyone, but thanks to its documentation, it _is_ my sole recommendation to any geek friends who finally want to go and give linux a try.

Re:gentoo helpful to a new user

[shadowbearer]

Ditto here. The documentation and forums are light years past where other distros are at. I haven't had many problems (system is extremely stable and the portage system extraordinarily so) but with one or two exceptions, I haven't had to look outside the docs or forums for an answer, and those were kernel driver questions.

Thanks @ all Gentoo devs and community. Gentoo is by far the best linux dist I've ever used.

SB

Hello.

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason I use gentoo is bugfixing made easy.

% apt-get update
% apt-get upgrade

Wow, that was hard. Now hold on as my tested and verified binary packages get back to work while your untested sources are still compiling.

Re:Hello.

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved Debian, but I really, really hated the snail-pace development of it.

I gave Debian up when I bought a year old graphics card and the XFree that came with stable Debian didn't recognize it.

Re:Hello.

[pantherace]

Mods on crack: this doesn't help with what the parent is talking about.

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.

Re:Hello.

[homeobocks]

I use gentoo, and almost everything compiles very quickly . . . because I have compilied and optimised gcc! I mean, OOo and Mozilla aren't exactly instant, but still Gentoo is my favorite distro, as everything else is. Also, many apps go about 10% - 15% faster. I say, give it a try. It won't kill you.

Re:Hello.

[sqlrob]

You missed the point.

How do you merge your fixes into apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ?

Re:Hello.

[runderwo]

apt-get source foo
cd foo && patch debuild && debi

Re:Hello.

[runderwo]

Stupid fucking Slashcode.

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.

Re:Hello.

[sqlrob]

Thanks. I've been thinking about switching from slack to debian because of package management. apt-get is more flexible than I thought.

Gentoo Notebook Support

[hirschma]

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

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[Minam]

I will agree here--it was something of a pain to get PCMCIA wireless working with the 2.4 kernels under Linux. However, with the 2.6.x kernels, it's a no-brainer. It worked almost out-of-the-box, for me. (Just make sure you've configured your kernel properly...and perhaps that statement just negated my previous one, but configuring the kernel is the kind of thing that Gentoo is all about.)

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[tjgrant]

I first built Gentoo on a ThinkPad 570e two years ago. At that time I was using SMC wireless equipment and all went swimmingly well.

Last March I upgraded to a ThinkPad R31 and installed Gentoo on it. It had internal wireless, and that worked beautifully until the hardware quit. I then plugged in my trusty SMC wireless card and built PCMCIA wireless support and all worked perfectly again.

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[dougnaka]

"Notebook support" is an arbitrary statement about a specific end use environment.

So let's go over Gentoo's "support" for anything...
Gentoo runs the Linux kernel, so your support is going to be the same as any other distro that runs the Linux kernel.
In Gentoo you have to either a.) configure your own kernel; b.) use genkernel and accept the gentoo config; or c.) use genkernel and tweak the default config (genkernel all --menuconfig)
I've run Gentoo on my laptop for I don't know how long.. well I'm sure I could figure it out, but it's been well over a year. I have a howto for my laptop brant (HP ZT1150) and it's actually the link in my sig.
Here's another HP ZT1000 site, and he also runs Gentoo..
So, without trying to flame you, the "distro" support is, at least, misleading. As the support for things is generally based on the kernel you build, or someone builds for you.
The real advantages of Gentoo are it's all to easy upgrade path. I used to reinstall Linux every 4-6 months just to get the latest base system. With Gentoo I just emerge system every month or so. It's almost a drawback if you're someone who likes to wipe the slate clean and start over, as there's little reason to...

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[Xeed]

Has this improved? Any Gentoo want to point me towards portable nirvana?

The answer is yes. I am currently running Gentoo on my laptop, connecting wirelessly to my University. A very big change for laptop users would be to upgrade from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel (I did emerge gentoo-dev-sources).

From there, the difference is going to be that you no longer need to locate the drivers and load them as modules, because they are built into the kernel. You can, and must, actually have PCMCIA support in the kernel. The only thing you need to do with the new kernel is to select the appropriate driver!

Hope that helped.

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[AsnFkr]

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=142059&hi ghlight=

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[Bodhammer]

The real advantages of Gentoo are it's all to easy upgrade path. I used to reinstall Linux every 4-6 months just to get the latest base system. With Gentoo I just emerge system every month or so. It's almost a drawback if you're someone who likes to wipe the slate clean and start over, as there's little reason to... "

How is this different from Debian apt-get update apt-get upgrade-dist?

Re:Gentoo Notebook Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Things work pretty much flawlessly for me - thanks to the excellent documentation in this thread (Acer Travelmate specific, but I think a lot of it will apply to laptops in general).

Save the mirrors.

[starman97]

Torrents please...

Re:Save the mirrors.

[magarity]

A lot of the US mirrors are on universities. Your tax dollars at work, assuming you are in USA too, so "saving" them is not really a strong concern.

Re:Save the mirrors.

[Llarian]

At least my mirror is running a very low capacity at the moment. I think people are figuring out that this is still in the "experimental" phase.

However, if you feel like using it, http://gentoo.llarian.net/experimental is one of the US Gentoo mirrors.

Hmm. Sounds like the problem could be

[Anonymous Coward]

the fact that you are a complete fucking moron.

Re:Hmm. Sounds like the problem could be

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:Hmm. Sounds like the problem could be

[yarbo]

Gentoo isn't for the average Joe

suck it gentoo whores

[Anonymous Coward]

gcc 3.3.2? freebsd 5.2.1 has gcc 3.3.3!

Re:suck it gentoo whores

[Anonymous Coward]

debian sid also has gcc 3.3.3! what happened to 'cutting edge elitism', gentoo fanbois?

Re:suck it gentoo whores

[Anonymous Coward]

gcc-3.3.3-r1.ebuild

is there, it is just not the *stable* package yet, probobly still undergoing some testing

Initrd tools?

[SuperBanana]

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...

Re:Initrd tools?

[Etyenne]

Don't know about Gentoo, but under RedHat, it's called mkinitrd. Or at least it was last time I had to use it (about 2 years ago).

Re:Initrd tools?

[DevNull Ogre]

Etynne is right on. Just...

emerge mkinitrd

And then it should work just the same as on RedHat. (And it's pretty darn easy on RH.)

Re:Initrd tools?

[dAzED1]

you could always try:

emerge mkinitrd

to install it...heh. Then type "mkinitrd" and it will tell you the format. Its really a very simple tool.

Re:Initrd tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

one helpful page suggests that "that's ok because software raid is better anyway"- um, okay.

This is the truth. The Promise SX4 is not a true hardware raid card. It has no onboard processor or memory, so it relies on the host to do parity calculations and caching. In other words, it's really a software RAID anyway, even with "drivers." You'll get better performance and reliability running the kernel's software RAID implementation than Promise's.

Re:Initrd tools?

[runderwo]

What are you talking about? The SX4 has a DIMM slot as well as a hardware parity engine. It's not as good as a dedicated RAID processor, but it's better than all the software "RAID" cards (including those from Promise) with _no_ onboard RAID processor or memory, and it's cheaper than the 3Ware solutions.

The problem is that the partially-host-dependent implementation doesn't really map well into what we already have support for; hardware RAID cards where the implementation details of the RAID are not exposed to the block driver, and software "RAID" cards which do nothing more than set up arrays in the BIOS and expect the host-based driver to pick up the array configuration stored on the disks, and do all the RAID work on the CPU (most HPT and Promise chips work like this).

Tweak

[Anonymous Coward]

That will update your packages.
If you want to upgrade only use:

# emerge -UuD world ;)

Re:Tweak

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, -U and -u are somewhat redundant, you should use -U if you have emerged masked versions of packages that you don't want to be downgraded when you do an update world, where -u assumes that you only want those packages that are unmasked even if that means getting an older version of said packages.

mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!

oh joy

[towaz]

And i just finished boot straping and emerging an hour ago.

all well a few more hours wont hurt :)

---

Live CDs

[Tom]

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.

Re:Live CDs

[fr0dicus]

Gentoo has a Live-CD? I've never heard it did before, Knoppix seems to be the market leader here. Sorry.

Re:Live CDs

[BrookHarty]

I would say Knoppix livecd has better support for hardware, and more applications. But Gentoo has those live Game CD's that totally rock (if you have supporting hardware with linux drivers).

Re:Live CDs

[fsmunoz]

Uh? I never heard of Gentoo LiveCDs. Nobody I know ever mentioned Gentoo LiveCDs. I Know Knoppix, Gnoppix, DynaBolic and Linux BBS and some others, but not Gentoo.

I might be the only person in the world to be oblivious of the Gentoo LiveCD's market cornering. On the other hand you might be confusing what you like with World Domination. I love Debian, but for most people that I talk to Linux is RedHat or SuSE, so there would be little to be gained from saying that "Debian has the Linux desktop market cornered".

Not implying that you are not being honest in your observation though.

Re:Live CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom, for the last time . . . shut the fuck up.

Re:Live CDs

[Chainsaw]

Oh boy, a Gentoo Live-CD... So you just have to boot it, wait for glibc+KDE to compile and THEN you can use it?

Re:Live CDs

[kundor]

Not according to this livecd review... Between Knoppix, MandrakeMove, and Slax, which were chosen as the most newbie-friendly LiveCDs (and what are live cds for other than convincing newbies?) MandrakeMove was favored by a test group with no linux experience.

Re:Live CDs

[mushroom blue]

how can one distribution that uses the same linux kernel (where all the drivers are located) as another distribution have better support? if anything, using Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel would have MORE hardware support, as there are more drivers in 2.6.x than 2.4.x.

Re:Live CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

nope, it's awsome, a bit out of date though.
i am sure we will be seeing a lot of gentoo
based live cd this year, as the catalyst
tool makes making those a breathe.
the live cd may be found in the experimental
directory, check it out, eventhough it's quite old, i am sure you will be impressed, much
better than the latest knoppix ones...

Re:Live CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

the gentoo live cd they are refering to is
the gaming live cd, it has kde, gnome among
other things
http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu/experimental /x86/gam ecd/
it's relatively old, but, I do find it better
than the latest knoppix one
hth

Re:Live CDs

[verbatim_verbose]

Sure. Or just use GRP and have it done in under an hour...

Re:Live CDs

[incabulos]

I'm guessing someone has already pointed this out, but Gentoo indeed has a live CD. This can be found ( using 1.4 as an example, as 2004.0 images have yet to fully propagate ) at

Gentoo/releases/x86/1.4/livecd/

at your friendly local Gentoo mirror. Among other things, these can be used to boot up a system to perform the beginning steps of a Gentoo install. It is a fully functional livecd that can be used for anything else you might care to think of as well.. network troubleshooting, rescuing files from corrupted ntfs partitions, or whatever else floats your boat.

noooo!

[the_greywolf]

i just finished installing release 1.4 last night!

...

wait... i did a stage 1 using emerge -u...

never mind.

Re:noooo!

[mrjackson2000]

i did just finish a 1.4 install lastnight, i'll be doing an update when i get home i guess

Re:noooo!

[Neward Rylet]

Bah, I just started 1.4 Sunday night! Luckily I didn't start compiling yet, It's a Pentium MMX 166 with 64 MB of RAM, so it would have taken a while to say the least.

I have!

[IshanCaspian]

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!

time to have fun!

[pair-a-noyd]

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!

Re:time to have fun!

[DF5JT]

"I've got about 50 Compaq Deskpro 4000's that are begging for something to do."

1. Build Beowulf Cluster from them
2. Compile Gentoo with all packages in under 1 hour in a parallel build
3. Mirror build x 50
4. Profit

cron?

[Anonymous Coward]

ever heard of cron?

A little info

[Daath]

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!

Re:A little info

[UFNinja]

And for those too lazy to RTFM on distcc (I mean the actual distcc docs, not just setup info from gentoo), if you're using less than a 100Mbps connection, it's a good idea to use ",lzo" after the hostname of machines not on 100Mbit. This uses lzo compression, very useful when bandwidth is precious. Also, if you have more than 5 times the processing power of your original machine in the distcc network, a good idea is to leave it out of the hosts file for distcc.

what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[thf]

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?

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

afaik gentoo will not ship the new xfree4.4

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[dryan]

There's a thread on the mailing list about this issue here

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[TheLinuxSRC]

According to /. from last wednesday Gentoo is also boycotting XFree86 due to the licensing issues of 4.4

They have their own release of 4.3 listed as current:

mediaman root # emerge xfree -p
These are the packages that I would merge, in order:
Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild U ] x11-base/xfree-4.3.0-r5 [4.3.0-r3]
mediaman root #

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[homeobocks]

That is correct. The gentoo team is considering moving to The Y Windowing System instead, when Y is more mature.

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[abdulwahid]

On the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter they say:

The XFree team has changed their license policy two weeks ago, to something that isn't compatible to the GPL any longer. The Gentoo developers have already drawn their own conclusions from this, and will refrain from adding XFree86 versions under the new license scheme to the portage tree for the time being.

Re:what about XFree86 and licensing issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

there is also a hard packed package xfree-4.3.99.902-r2.ebuild but no 4.4
anyway who cares, however great the 4.4 may be,
without developer support, it is useless
let us hope that there will soon be an
xfree alternative with compatible licensing
and wide developer support, meanwhile xfree 4.3
is fine

MS Windows Update Equivalent

[temojen]

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.

Tanooki Mario?

[tepples]

can I make Gentoo Tanooki Linux?

Wouldn't Nintendo sue you for trademark infringement? Or have you never heard of Super Mario Bros. 3?

Re:Tanooki Mario?

[superjaded]

Er, Nintendo most DEFINITELY does not hold the copyright on the word "tanuki" by itself -- tanuki is Japanese for "racoon dog" and is basically a create that can morph into different things, if I remember correctly.

But then, I think the guy has a lot more to worry about if he released "Tanooki Linux" if the only difference between Gentoo and "his" distribution was the name. -_-

Re:Tanooki Mario?

[Stonent1]

Tanooki dancing

Seen the Anabuki Construction ads? There is a Tanooki dancing and he has a little something "special" down below.

Re:Tanooki Mario?

[Anonymous Coward]

never heard of it

Re:Tanooki Mario?

[B3ryllium]

Well duh. :P

I just thought it would be funny to make a Linux distro that turns into a solid rock statue when you look at it the wrong way.

I'll save myself some time

[Apreche]

/* Insert Insane rant about how gentoo is the greatest thing since sliced bread here */

Re:I'll save myself some time

[Sweetshark]

/* Insert the
It's here: the Gentoo Zealot Translator!
here because noone reading slashdot ever read it. */

Just a clarification...

[Pakaran2]

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.

Re:Just a clarification...

[drinkypoo]

Sorry Pakaran2 old buddy, but I've been running my update for the last three days already, it just hasn't stopped yet...

Re:Just a clarification...

[/dev/trash]

Damn. I always do my emerge syncs MWF. Guess this week I can wait til Wednesday.

Re:Just a clarification...

[teval]

Don't run it with sudo,

Add the user you run it with to the portage group, you will be able to run emerge without any special root permissions.

Re:Just a clarification...

[Pakaran2]

Hmm. I just like that extra bit of security - if someone breaks my IRC client, or whatever, I don't want them to be able to force me to upgrade from *their* server.

upgrade from 1.4...

[scharkalvin]

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!

Re:upgrade from 1.4...

[superjaded]

Yep, because of the way gentoo works the only real difference between 2004.0 and 1.4 is possibly how much you have to upgrade afterwards.

So you are correct in thinking that the only thing you have to do in order to "upgrade" to 2004.0 is "emerge sync && emerge -pDu world".

As far as devfs goes, it gets the job done while udev is still VERY much in development. udev is fun to play with if nothing else, though. ;)

Re:upgrade from 1.4...

[avenj]

Recent baselayouts have udev support if you want it.

Re:upgrade from 1.4...

[ttrafford]

Hey is 2004 still using devfs with 2.6? Get with the times guys!

A few months ago when I was using Gentoo (unstable, admittedly- I don't know about stable) all I had to do was 'emerge udev' and the boot scripts automatically took care of everything.

In short, either devfs or udev worked.

Won't fix my graphics problems though

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is slightly off-topic, and not really to do with the gentoo base system, but I'm having major problems with my radeon 9800se in gentoo. I keep getting corruption in 3d apps, even though the latest ati drivers in portage say they support the SE version of the 9800. I have no idea how to fix this.

People won't start using linux until their hardware works with it - I still have to dual boot win 2k to play games - even though I want to use just linux.

Mandrake/Redhat upgrade?

[otis wildflower]

Hi,
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 /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'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!!)

Re:Mandrake/Redhat upgrade?

[UFNinja]

It is possible to upgrade in place. In fact, the install requires that there be a preexisting Linux filesystem to install. That's why there's a LiveCD. But it is certainly not simple. It's probably best to redo your libs, include, etc. because Gentoo *does* do some things differently from other distros (mostly naming conventions and where certain things are put) What I would do is install from a LiveCD, format your root partition, backing up any directories that you absolutely *have* to keep (like /home). If you've got /home on a separate partition, even better. For your installed programs, it's probably best to just reinstall all that. Your home directory will still have all your prefs, so there's no need to keep that stuff when you can get the binaries reinstalled (assuming you don't want to recompile) from the GRP CD. Kernel config is easy. Just copy your .config file to your home directory or a floppy and then mv it to /usr/src/linux/.config when you've gotten to the point in the install where you install and configure your kernel. Making it from scratch is probably best though (unless you're using the same kernel and patch set). Besides, make menuconfig isn't that hard. ;) All you have to do to keep your /home and other directories that you backed is simply mount them at install time before you chroot. (e.g. mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/gentoo/home) But don't take my word for it. That's just what *I* would do. Ask in the Official Gentoo Forums to get a more complete answer on what exactly is able to be gentooified without rm -rf'ing the pre-existing data.

Re:Mandrake/Redhat upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can use the kernel source you are already using on whatever dist - 2.6 has the config in a file in /proc/config.gz (if you enabled it).

I am using the love sources atm, with full udev and sysfs on an Asus nforce2 motherboard.

No complaints here, the big difference I find in the gentoo community - if you buy new hardware, they don't poo poo - they sort it out :)

Save the Mirrors!

[Anonymous Coward]

Download the whole set!

This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official.

Netcraft confirms: Gentoo is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Gentoo distribution community when IDC confirmed that Gentoo market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all distribution versions. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Gentoo has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Gentoo distribution is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent computer distribution competition.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Gentoo's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Gentoo distribution faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Gentoo distribution because Gentoo is dying. Things are looking very bad for Gentoo. As many of us are already aware, Gentoo continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

2004 Gentoo is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Gentoo is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

2004 Gentoo project leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of 2004 Gentoo. How many users of 1.4 Gentoo are there? Let's see. The number of 2004 Gentoo versus 1.4 Gentoo posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 1.4 Gentoo users. 2004 Gentoo posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of 1.4 Gentoo posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of 2004 Gentoo. A recent article put 2004 Gentoo distribution at about 80 percent of the market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Gentoo users. This is consistent with the number of Gentoo Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of half-baked 2004 Gentoo apps, abysmal sales and so on, many development companies is going out of business and will probably be taken over by another company who will sell another troubled product. Now Gentoo distribution is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Gentoo has steadily declined in market share. Gentoo distribution is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Gentoo is to survive at all it will be among dilettante dabblers. Gentoo continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Gentoo is dead.

Fact: Gentoo is dying

Distcc

[yerdaddie]

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.

2004.0?

[oohp]

Whatever is wrong with 1.4? 2004.0 sounds/looks gay.

Re:2004.0?

[SoTuA]

If your operating system has a year on its name, it's obsolete! :D

Re:2004.0?

[SalsaDoom]

No matter guys, 2004 may not be so cool but thats ok... the Gentoo team is just taking a clue from Microsoft -- because it will be fixed in the next release: Gentoo XP! ;)

Re:2004.0?

[superjaded]

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.

Opteron

[October_30th]

Seriously, how do you like it? How well does the rest of your hardware work with it?

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.

Re:Opteron

[TheLinuxSRC]

Thanks for taking time to respond! I'm sure you've grown fond of the responsiveness of your dual PIII -- you hit the nail on the head there. The only single proc machines I will buy in the future will be laptops.

..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 -- I am already in that boat; the only difference is 3 10K spin scsi and one IDE.

I have a buddy with a dual 2.4 Xeon and it is nice and I have had some experience with a dual MP 2.0 that was not too shabby either -- I just can't decide which is the best bang for the buck (although finding AGP enabled MP boards is *much* easier than finding Xeon boards with AGP).

Quite frankly, I don't think the 64-bit desktop is quite there yet. That was pretty much what I expected, but I was hoping ;) Thanks again.

Ummmm

[ouslush]

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.

Re:Ummmm

[kundor]

Too bad there's been an official announcement, then.

Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[reub2000]

It got modded back down because you posted. Read the mod guidlines before using your mod points.

Re:Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[beekr]

Good post, I modded you +1, Informative. Oh, wait...

Re:Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you would stop and think for just a split second, you would realize that that I said it got modded down in my post, which means...






wait for it...









I HADN'T POSTED YET WHEN IT WAS MODDED DOWN

Common sense. Don't leave home without it.

Re:Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I'd like to add that what you said isn't true any more. You can mod someone, and post AC now without the mod being lost. You can also moderate discussions that you have posted in as AC.

That being said, I just modded you off topic.

Re:Mods - Get a sense of humor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you can't. At least that aws the case a few days ago.

chroot installs

[ceswiedler]

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.

Re:chroot installs

[kundor]

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ;)

Re:chroot installs

[smcavoy]

look at debootstrap. It allows you to install debian into a chroot.

Dependency hell...

[DrCode]

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.

Re:Dependency hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Huh? Since when do you have to update lots of RPMs when a glibc fix comes out? I thought most distros backported patches so that you could stick with one version of glibc (much like with the kernel). That's been my experience with RedHat and Mandrake anyway, at least in the past few years.

You know, most distros released a bugfixed glibc back around November, and I don't recall having to upgrade every RPM on my machine just to apply it.

Re:Dependency hell...

[ozbird]

The thing about binary packages that I got fed up with were having to download another 30MB package to fix something trivial e.g. file permissions.

With Gentoo where source tarballs are used, you can usually get away with downloading a patch (handled automatically by the portage system.) The accumulated distfiles are also very handy for keeping up-to-date with releases, particularly since I also have Solaris boxes to maintain - having to trawl through the project websites is time consuming.

It still isn't perfect - I think that the kernel packages would be better handled by downloading the x.0 tarball and adding the x.1, x.2, x.3 etc. patches on top, but at least the x.y-{pre,rc}z releases are applied as patches.

Re:Dependency hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand your post, but it's not a valid point. If you used an RPM created for and tested on your distro, it wouldn't need an glibc update.

The problem comes when you try to use a random RPM off the Net, which was created on another distro and consequently has different glibc requirements. That's not remotely an inherent flaw in rpm; it's solely down to package maintainers.

I used to have problems like you mention, but I just stopped trying to install any RPM from anywhere. Now I stick to RPMs actually _made_ for my distro -- they always work. Trying to fit Mandrake and SUSE RPM packages on a Fedora system, for example, will not always work and it's NOT MEANT TO.

"the Gentoo Hardened team"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just frightening.

Oh, yeah?

[bonch]

"emerge sync && emerge -uD world"

Beat ya.

Question for gentoo experts

[cookie_cutter]

Hi, I'm in the process of installing gentoo 1.4. I'm at the point where I can install reboot into the new gentoo system, but haven't really built/installed anything else yet(not even X). I was using the athlon-xp stage 2 installation package.

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?

Re:Question for gentoo experts

[Sweetshark]

Stick with your current install and do a

emerge --sync;
emerge -up --deep world;
emerge -u --deep world;

and you are up to date.
The gentoo releases are only about the install CDs. If you had no problems during install you dont need the new release because all newer packages are in the portage tree anyway.

Re:Question for gentoo experts

[nutbuckle]

No, once your done with your install just do an emerge sync, emerge -uD world.

that will bring you up to -current or 2004.0 what ever you want to call it.

I wonder...

[Zyblor]

I've been wondering... How much electric power has been used over the years in compiling Gentoo?

Re:I wonder...

[Pop69]

Personally I've wondered if the time spent compiling compared to installing a binary distro like slackware has been made up in time saved due to any increased speed.

Re:I wonder...

[djeca]

OK, here's a quick calculation.

$ genlop -t -s ".*" | grep total
merged totally 2191 ebuilds in 9 days, 14 hours, 52 minutes, and 40 seconds.
$ head -n 1 /var/log/emerge.log
1059351074: Started emerge on: Jul 28, 2003 00:11:14

10 days in 7 months - that's 5% of available machine time spent compiling.

Assume the power used is 250W when compiling, 50W idling: 5% of (250W-50W) is 10W: that's a maximum of 20% extra power for a Gentoo machine over a Slackware box.

Some power will be saved by optimisations, but I doubt it'll be much.

counter.li.org estimates 18m Linux users. Say 1m Gentoo users have run Gentoo an average of 2 years. As is well known, one year is \pi*10^7seconds.
1 machine/user * 1*10^6 users * 2 years * 3.14*10^7 seconds/year * 10W/machine / 3.6*10^6kWh/W/s
equals 2*10^7 kWh, or 20,000MWh

In comparison, Sizewell (a medium-sized nuclear power station near London) produces 1188 MW, or 30,000 MWh/day.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

42 power units.

Re:I wonder...

[/dev/trash]

Your PC is sitting idle anyway. Probably not even calling the CPU idle calls. That's a waste.

Re:I wonder...

[shadowbearer]

Man, so us Gentoo users have only used (approx~~! :) the equivalent of 2/3 of a medium nuclear power plant's daily output in two years of compiling?

Argh!

I feel so...so....insignificant

We have to do something about this! Quick, all Gentoo users, buy more machines! Distcc! Stacks of boxes in the closets! Compile compile compile! Aaaahhhh!!! :)

SB

More than compilation ....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Where are other architectures?

[kelzer]

Hasn't the store historically sold PowerPC, etc., CDs? Right now it only has x86 and AMD. Are the others coming?

Re:Where are other architectures?

[pyr0]

I can't speak for the sparc and hppa ports, but an install cd for the SGI mips port is problematic. Basically, the prom of SGI machines can only read and boot from EFS formatted cd's that have multiple partitions on them (yes you heard me right...partitions on a cd). There is a kernel patch to support such a cd, but implementing it in an installable iso is difficult. I know for a fact that it's being worked on right now though. Right now the only way to install is through a netboot image, or through root over nfs.

Slashdot headline is wrong

[bonch]

The topic of the official #gentoo channel says:

"Gentoo Linux || ignore slashdot and various other news-sites, 2004.0 is not released"

which is just fine as you can just

[Oo.et.oO]

emerge sync && emerge -UD world

to get totally up to date. of course you should be doing this regularly anyway.

cheers!

According to #gentoo, 2004.0 not released

[bonch]

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.

Re:According to #gentoo, 2004.0 not released

[Anonymous Coward]

the same person posted the article on both websites.

"Looks like it's not out yet "

[bonch]

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.

Nice Troll...

[kikta]

Unfortunately, the file is in the releases directory and is dated today. Also, Hemos is clearly referring to Catalyst, not Gentoo. Grow up.

2004.0 livecds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone been able to find the 2004.0 livecds?
An empty directory has existed for several days now...

Bah

[Zen Programmer]

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.

The effects of being Slashdotted...

[prizna]

...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

From the topic of #gentoo

[bonch]

"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.

Re:From the topic of #gentoo

[kikta]

Next time you want to point out a problem with an article, try not mentioning a file with today's timestamp, twisting a quote, and spouting some flamebait about the quality of Slashdot - people may take you seriously.

Also, not posting a second time to another unrealated thread, after having a +5 posted to an unrelated thread at the top of the freaking page is another good way to not look like a troll. Even more true for a third time.

So assuming your info is correct (I'm not feeling masochistic enough for a trip to IRC tonight), I take back calling you a troll.

I hope you accept my apology, you Flamemebait-spreading Astro-turfing Karma-whore.

Re:From the topic of #gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

that was funny. Thanks.

Re:From the topic of #gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if it has today's timestamp. It wasn't released yet. Slashdot ruined the release and delayed it. I didn't twist a quote, that was the topic of #gentoo for the first two-thirds of the day.

I didn't spout flamebait about the quality of Slashdot, merely pointed out the very poor work of the editor here.

Clearly, I struck a nerve with you. Your issue.

- bonch

Torrents are here.....

[Anonymous Coward]

here are the torrents:
http://www.tlm-project.org/distribution s/browse_di stro.php?distro_id=7&expand_version=9

President/CEO ???

[Anonymous Coward]

What a joke. I'll be the CEO of my WC.

CHANGE THE HEADLINE - IT IS FALSE!

[BoldAndBusted]

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.

Re:CHANGE THE HEADLINE - IT IS FALSE!

[Synic]

I think this was taken from OSNews because they have the same misleading info there... The announcement should have been for "store pre-orders" and nothing else...

My experience using Gentoo for Servers

[Natales]

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.

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 .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.

Oops, they've done it again

[oniony]

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.

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[BlueLightning]

You don't need to reinstall. That's half the point - just do the same thing you normally do to upgrade to the latest packages.

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[gentoo_is_hyped]

" Gentoo installation is easy and let's me feel (correctly or not) that I'm in control. " You are kidding yourself. When you get home from school today, ponder whether your grand children will care... The brightest & most productive people on the planet do not hand assemble their fax machines any more that they hand install an OS.

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[Nicholas Q Name]

Look, surely the logical, obvious thing to do is to install slackware and just dl whatever you need, when you need it, compile it yourself...and what's Gentoos advantage?

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[garbagedisposal]

" Gentoo installation is easy and let's me feel (correctly or not) that I'm in control. " Baby you is kiddin youself. When you get home from school today, ponder whether your grand children will care... The brightest & most productive people on the planet do not hand assemble their fax machines any more that they hand install an OS.

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[oniony]

That I know -- it's a just having to emerge world every time I want to install anything (because I don't keep it up to date enough).

Re:Oops, they've done it again

[oniony]

Bit of a non argument don't you think? I know a lot of bright people who have built their own cars. The personal abuse also hints that it is you who is the school kid, I'm close to 30. It's all about motives: I enjoy tinkering about getting Linux to work with my hardware and getting everything the way I want it -- others prefer to spend that time telling various bits of Windows and its applications that, no, you don't want to set this app as the default browser, no I don't care that I'm entering a trusted zone, no, I don't want tips, no, I don't need help with feature X. God, why I'm bothering to reply to an idiot like you I don't know, in fact I'm

NOW it's being released

[bonch]

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!

So why is listed under "releases"...

[Anonymous Coward]

and not under "experimental"?

Gentoo is nice

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

* 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 .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).

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!

Who says it's not out?

[Anonymous Coward]

GENTOO 2004

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.

- http://gentoo.org

Sounds like it's out to me!

This doesn't LOOK like an experimental release

[Noksagt]

install-x86-universal-2004.0.iso
at Indiana University under releases & dated today.

If this is an experimental release, someone better fix that mirror.

The facts about Gentoo

[gentoo_is_hyped]

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/ ?

Mod the parent... How you please.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd go for 'informative' or 'offtopic'.

Confessions of a Gentoo Zealot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Version number inflation

[vegetasaiyajin]

They went from, IIRC, 1.4 to 2004.0. Now that's version number inflation ;)

Gentoo corporate boogeyman lurks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

PPC Live CDs

[gitana]

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