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Gentoo Linux Announces Gentoo Linux 2004.1
Keppy writes "The departure of Daniel Robbins hasn't dented the progress of Gentoo Linux with version 2004.1 being released. ... please support Gentoo by purchasing something from the online store. The Gentoo homepage also has a short message about the future of Gentoo Linux now that Daniel has left. ' Robbat2 writes with an excerpt from the linked announcement:
"Please consult our
mirror index for download
locations and the
Gentoo Linux Installation Handbook
for detailed installation
instructions. Support for Gentoo Linux 2004.1 can be found through our
user community by way of the Gentoo Forums,
IRC, and various
community mailing-lists.
Release notes for each architecture
can be found linked from the
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering project page."
Gentoo really is a great operating system, and maybe even for beginners. One of Gentoo's many strengths is the portage system. The portage system is a easy to use system that allows you to build just about any application from source automatically (and often with Gentoo optimizations). It can automatically build all the dependencies for the program too, saving you much time and effort. The portage system also supports binaries (must mention to avoid stoning) however that is often only used in replication systems. Since you can easily setup your own portage mirrors you can create your own custom packages (either that compile from source or are binaries) and easily deploy across your own servers. This would allow you to configure packages on one machine and then just distribute the binaries across duplicate machines if you wished (as I have heard of being done). I also have found Gentoo emerges rarely fail when compared to some of the problems you can run into with RPM. Another large benefit of gentoo is it doesn't install anything that isn't needed to clutter your system up. It will install the bare bones, (ssh, etc) and then you can emerge anything you want. This is much nicer than most OS's which will load it with crap from the start. It is one of the most configurable distributions I have seen, and every Gentoo install is truly unique. Again, while it may give you the barebones to start it takes little work (minus the cpu time to compile) to get it to where you want it. As I said earlier, I think Gentoo may even be a bit beginner friendly. While setup is a bit long and not nearly as easy as something like Redhat, they have a very easy to follow tutorial which walks you through it step by step that I think most beginners could follow. In addition, they have 3 different ways to install Gentoo. A live cd version that is basically bootable and then you have 3 different stages you can choose from. Stage One is a bit insane, for those who really need total control over what is installed. For most people Stage Two is fine as it still compiles virtually everything from scratch, giving you a ton of control, just saves some time over Stage One. Stage Three is for those who just need something fast or are a bit new, and can install binaries of various things to save you compile time and easy of install. This makes Gentoo truly amazing.
I am already ugrading, this is by far the best distro I have used :) together with debian :-D
This sounds more like a commercial than news to me.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
1) For posts like this, it's good to be a subscriber. ;)
;) )
2) It's good to see that the DR announcement has not changed anything in terms of release schedule, and the job they did setting up the hierarchy seems to be working very well.
3) At least one mirror has a file claiming to be 2005.1. While Gentoo is great, I don't think that it's being delivered from the future. (At least not yet.
4) The minimal CD is still only 82MB!
5) Slashdot, could Gentoo get its own icon? It's here. Thanks!
libertarianswag.com
Debian has announced their expected release of Sarge to coincide with the next ice age.
That, folks, is karma whoring at it's best!
I've used Gentoo since last October. Before that, I had essentially never seen a Linux machine. It is my first distro and I haven't really looked back. I've tried others just to see what they were like, mainly Fedora and Debian, but they just don't shape up to the standards I've put and Gentoo has given me. It took a while in the beginning to learn all the ins and outs, but now I can navigate through it with so much ease. Hoorah to Gentoo and its bleeding-edge innovation.
And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
If you have never tried Gentoo, you should give it a try. Contrary to popular belief, you can have the base installed and running in 15 minutes, and from then you just emerge the packages you want. gentoo-dev-sources, openssh, sysklogd, vixie-cron, at, ntp, whatever.
The documentation is brilliant, and all the defaults for the packages are sensible, and well thought out.
When I install a box, I do it at about 4pm. Give it 30 mins to configure, and install a new kernel, reboot, and leave it to emerge -u world ; emerge kde mozilla overnight.
Couple of things though - emerge ufed, and gentoolkit - ufed is a gui for editting USE flags, and gentoolkit contains qpkg.
A very brief doc I knocked up is here. It's probably slightly out of date by now, but you get the idea.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I am relatively new to the Linux game, so perhaps I am just ignorant -- so please forgive me if that is the case. However, it seemed to me as an outsider that true geeks used Linux, while mortals used Windows and Mac. However, having joined the fray it seems that within the Linux community is highly fragmented. Now it seems that the true geeks use Debian and Gentoo, while the mortals use Mandrake and Redhat. Weird.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
What's the easiest way to upgrade for current users?
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
I just switched about three weeks ago from Debian to Gentoo, and so far I love it!
:^), but I find Gentoo as easy as Debian. BOTH are MUCH better than RedHat, IMHO.
emerge is as easy for me as apt-get was, and the only difference is I have to be patient with long builds. For me, thats a "so what" ?
I'd personally rather wait during the install, than wait while the machine is supposed to be running.
And while I am not a linux newbie, I certainly am no guru (yet
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming. *sigh*
Linux on THE desktop? Linux is on MY desktop.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Yeah, but why do people put so much energy into these different distributions when it would profit the linux community and the rest of the world much more if linux was able to easily do things like download pictures from my digital camera ?
don't worry... i'm also already running gentoo, and a emerge -p world doesn't list anything outdated on my system... I think this release is only going to provide updates to the install process and to the base system. once you're up and running, emerging new package will keep you just as up to date as the new releases will (since all they install is the very base system anyway).
"The departure of Daniel Robbins hasn't dented the progress of Gentoo Linux with version 2004.1 being released. ... "
Robbins anounced his departure.. what.. last monday ?? Ofcourse his departure didn't affect the release... it was already finished !
And Robbins hopes to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo...
If you're going to install it on your 486, do us a favor:
1) Stop complaining about long installs, it's your fault. 2) Read the instructions because it should take nearly that long. 3) Install from binary... that should shorten your install time 100000x fold.
----
This message has been written on a Gentoo Linux System.
The gentoo store's funds go directly to Daniel Robbins. This is planned to change as soon as drobbins has the not for profit org in place. Untill then your purchaces fund him directly not the gentoo project.
-Not that he hasn't done alot to deserve the money. But If your trying to support the community that supports gentoo you may want to wait untill the NFP community is actually created instead of funding the departing founder.
updating: emerge -D world
Actually, with the Gentoo portage, current Gentoo users should be the ones least interested in new Gentoo distributions, since Gentoos portage allows updating of components to "the latest version" regardless of what cd-version you used to install it.
:)
To me the greatest benefit of Gentoo is this: I do not need to blow a machine clean and install a new version or risk a lot with an uncertain install of large packages, I just gradually update my system as new versions become available!
And contrary to popular belief, Gentoo is pretty "user friendly" since it allows "on the fly updating". But this is of course once you actually have your system working flawlessly to begin with..
I'm assuming one can upgrade by doing the following:
/usr/src/ after the emerge)
#emerge sync
#emerge -DUu world
(oh and upgrading to the latest kernel that will be in
Could someone confirm or deny?
----
How is this funny? Someone should mod it down for being redundant and over played.
Hmmm, funny, but I just plug in my USB Fuji Camera and Linux automatically mounts it as a removable drive and I can then drag and drop the pictures anywhere on my other drives, no problems at all.
Maybe your problem lies somewhere between the keyboard and chair....
No need to download this CD to upgrade.
1. "emerge sync"
2. "emerge -pv world"
3. Look at the list of packages and see if you need to upgrade them, or if the upgrade will break something.
4. "emerge [packagename]"
Some people say to just "emerge world", which will upgrade everything on the system. Problem is that you don't really want to be doing blind upgrades like that. A new version that just came out could have some security hole in it that you don't know about. Also, you should only upgrade if the newer version is a security fix or has a feature you need. UPgrading for shits and giggles is not a good idea. Also, don't forget to run "etc-update". (but READ THE MANPAGE FIRST, it can severely bork your system if you don't do it right. Consult the Gentoo forums for more infol.)
Why would you want to install from a binary? Won't your biggest speed gains come from optimizing libc and other widely-used libraries?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Well a year ago I had a system administrator try to get Mandrake to talk to an Olympus C3030 and it never happened!
You shouldn't just blindly update everything on the system. (which is what emerge world does) Do "emerge -pv world" to see what would be upgraded; then check and update each package individually.
By far is esearch. "emerge esearch" will get you a suite of utilities that will index the portage tree and make it easier and faster to search the package descriptions. It will also sync and show you any new or updated packages since the last time you synced. A great addition to any Gentoo machine.
This is not a troll. Here, let me explain this joke so the humor impaired can figure it out. Debian released in the next ice age, Microsoft postponing the ice age.
Is this a deliberate abuse of the moderation system, or just the result of the moderation work by an idiot who never should have had mod points?
The scary part is that this is the kind of thing which tends to just get clicked off affirmatively during metamoderation. "Looks like the usual anti-M$ diatribe to me! (click)"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can get binary stage3/grp install cd's or .iso's for your particular cpu and architecture.
This lets you take advantage of both the speed of a binary install and a base system that's been optimized for your cpu class.
I should add, that your response is too typical of the linux community - "To get it to work is easy..just do such and such...oh it didn't work ? You must be ignorant" or some such insult. This is exactly the sort of nonsense that keeps linux from being widespead.
Dude, who needs an installer? You bootstrap Gentoo and off you go. Other distro are so archaic. Geez, I installed Gentoo two years ago and have completely forgotten what "installing" means. Just upgrade, that's it.
Have you tried gphoto for all you digital camera access needs?
Last time I was looking at Gentoo (about a year ago), one could not safely remove a package from Gentoo. Has that changed?
On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time ... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods :)
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-maticGentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Supposedly Gentoo is switching Portage over to a new system (moving away from python, and to another language), and I thought it was happening soon(like 2004.0), but possibly not. Does anyone else have any idea on when this is happening, because apparently its a big step for Gentoo?
je suis parce que j'aime
hmmmmmmmmmm... I am one of those 'ignorant' people, and I got my Minolta E223 camera mounted no problem. (by the way, never buy an E223; it's not a great camera. Go for an Olympus.) It simply mounted as a USB bulk storage device.
Maybe, though, Olympus cameras are different -- I know my Olympus USB multi-flash-card reader doesn't play nice with Linux -- or Windows, for that matter. I wonder what they're using for controller chips.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
Does anyone have a torrent up for this release?
Gentoo has an installer? That's news to me! Seriously, though, Gentoo doesn't really need an installer because part of the point is to build your system from a minimalist base. Sure, some scripts could be hacked out to automate most things like HDD setup and extracting the stage tarballs, but I think that providing an excellent install document (as Gentoo does) that forces users to understand a bit more about what is really going on under the hood saves many times the effort on the backend when something goes wrong because more users will have some clue where to start troubleshooting.
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
Stages are more flexible than that. If you use a tool like stager or catalyst you can compile fully-optimized stage3 tarballs for your next install from the system you're working on already, so you can still use 'today's' machine while building 'tomorrow's'.
.ebuilds for desired result (gcc-3.3.3 and linux-headers-2.6.5 come to mind). Also modify stager for optimizations and stager/files/make.conf.$ARCH for USE flags. /var/stager for good luck
I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'
here's my process, IIRC:
1. have working gentoo system with stager and a stage1 snapshot.
2. emerge sync
3. unmask or modify certain
3. stager snap $DATE-custom
4. stager athlon-xp 2 stage1 $DATE-custom
5. stager athlon-xp 1 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
6. clean out temp files in
7. stager athlon-xp 2 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
8. stager athlon-xp 3 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.
My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I tried Gentoo a while back, all the hype round here made it sound quite exciting. I installed the binary base, set all the build variables and let it do its thing.
.tar.gz source. ./configure --prefix - how hard can it be?
The system it built for me wasn't noticably faster than my old Slackware install. It certainly wasn't worth the pain of the build process.
Gentoo worked just fine, but in the end I decided I preferred my old "home grown" Slackware setup because I already knew where everything was and how it all fitted together, so I dug out the tape and went back to that.
I've tried lots of distributions over the years and I really can't see any one with any clear benefits. It's all the same kernel, the same desktop and the same tools. (Pretty much.)
I know a lot of people like gentoo's packaging, but I don't really like any packaging beyond the
Don't forget to run etc-update after you upgrade; that way you can merge any changes to the config files in /etc. (hence the name "etc-update")
IMPORTANT!!!!: make damn sure you know what you are doing before running etc-update!!!! It is very easy to bork your system if you're not paying attention. Read the manpage and check with the forums before using it.
If you use, as I do:
"emerge sync && emerge -UDvp world"
once a day, or once every other day or so (not more than this, once daily should be enough, if you do it more it could slow down the rsync servers...don't be greedy).
You do this a few times a week and you've GOT the up-to-date Gentoo already. The "Gentoo Linux 2004.1" is mainly a new version for the install CD's.
And I've also been using Gentoo since about last October and haven't looked back. It's kinda cool since I built this system from scratch (bought the components and case etc etc and slapped it all together) and then built the OS from scratch that goes on it. This machine has never run any other OS...hehe, it hasn't been "tainted".
And as far as compiles go, people saying that it takes forever are full of it. I let mine emerge sync at night and it's ready to roll in the morning. The only time I ever reboot my machine is when I have major Kernel upgrades (for instance going from 2.6.4 to 2.6.5 etc). And even then that only takes about 10 minutes...tops.
Gentoo is a great distro. And personally, it was the easiest to get up and running. And I know EXACTLY what is loaded and what isn't. Not a lot of un-needed crap that other distros tend to throw in for no good reason.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Could you please discribe your difficulties in this area?
If you do this, perhaps people will be able to give helpful advice.
*sigh* back to work...
The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I also agree that the installation process is user friendly. User friendly isn't necessarily the same as automated. Sometimes you need to have certain options, but if the installer automatically installs without the option, then it could be considered user unfriendly. I consider the install documentation user friendly, because it tries to explain what you need to do, as well as give reasonable defaults.This is not true. It installs some things that I definitely don't need. I don't use my CD drive, so it shouldn't be installing things like "eject". There were a couple of other programs that I definitely didn't want, also. These programs weren't huge so it didn't really matter, but still.
Another complaint that I have is the modprobing every time you boot up. I turn my workstation off each night to save electricity, & wear 'n tear. To have to go through the modprobe each time is wasteful. Modprobbing is supposed to be done during kernel install.
It's still a wonderful OS, though.
testing out my trending skills
This is another variation of the problem. Yes right,
"it worked for me and so it will work on every possible distribution with any device. I can't possibly imagine that with a COMPUTER things might be more complicated in different scenarios."
Things are so fragmented this just isn't the case. It is the one advantage Apple has over Linux. So many times have I had responses like this about "sure no problem in Linux!" and in the end it is either impossible or a total pain in the ass. I really am starting to think that their is a serious psycological issue - too much of the community would prefer to be cogniscenti, and stay "the smart computer guys" rather than let the rest of the world be a part of linux.
Good day,
I literally just moved my home computer from Slackware 9.1 to Gentoo 2004.0 last week (ok, over the course of the last week!) and I have to say that it is indeed the slickest Linux distribution I have ever used!
I still run Slackware 9.1 on my laptop, which has 5/3 the memory and a CPU twice as fast as my home computer - but my new Gentoo box actually runs about TWICE as fast!! It's amazing how compiling everything w/ -O3 and -march=XXX really makes a huge difference. Last night I was simultaneously compiling OpenOffice, Evolution and Gimp, with no slowdown at all in my web browzing, development, etc!
Also, nvidia, sound, FB, kernel 2.6.5 worked the first time, plus it has thousands of packages to download (everything I need), and boots faster than Windows did on my faster machine (by ~8-15 seconds, depending on my readings).
One more thing - Portage is even more user-friendly than downloading *.tgz from linuxpackages.net and running installpkg. It searches for the right version from various mirrors, then downloads, does MD5 checking, and compiles automatically, and maintains a nifty little log, and checks for all dependencies. Also - it provides the most freedom I've seen in a distribution - nothing I don't need or want is installed. Getting evolution to be optimized to my machine is just a matter of typing "# emerge evolution"
Gentoo is indeed fan-freaking-tastic (if you have the patience to compile everything from scratch).
A. Coward
BTW, you can disable or add packages to the 'base' system by editing /usr/portage/profiles/.
I disable a few packages from the 'recommended set' before I snapshot the tree and start building.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
As relfected in previous posts, it looks like slashdot is becoming more Freshmeat.net with each passing day. Then again, it is news for nerds.
Just my two cents
The Gentoo store doesn't support Gentoo, it supports Daniel Robbins' family and his debt incurred in administering Gentoo.
;)
Just wanted to clear that up.
If you really wanted to support Gentoo itself, make a direct contribution.
i hope Daniel Robbins will rejoin gentoo when he gets out.
It would be funnier if it wasn't so true...
I do find that emerge is a wonderful tool for installing with, however, I think they still need to do some work on the installation guide... I managed to get my gentoo box up running KDE and SAMBA (+some other stuff I require) but, the lack of a decent troubleshooting guide, and my relative inexperience with how Linux actually DOES what it does, means that I'm buggered if I can get the sound to work in an X session.
Still, my philosophy is 'This is how we learn'
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming
And hardware support... The only reason my laptop is still running XP is that my wireless card refuses to run.
After a bit of hunting it seems that the problem is an IRQ conflict between the inbuilt LAN card (which cant be disabled in the BIOS) and the IRQ that the PCMCIA tries to grab when initializing the card.
The card works in windows without a hitch.
I dare say that someone with skills beyond mine in Linux could probably get it working, but for now im stuck in windows, as are most of the computer using population.
Ever hear of loading modules on boot, like in, say, /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf (for 2.6 kernels)?
One word: RTFM!
Gentoo doesn't really have an installer. The LiveCD gives you an environment
where you can do the installation yourself, but any environment that supports
the network and chroot should work just fine (any live-cd or installed
linux partition should work just fine).
I have, in the past, installed an old minimal version of RedHat just to get an
environment to install Gentoo from when I couldn't boot off of a CD. Does anyone
know of a boot floppy that supports chrooting (Tom's didn't when I tried)?
*sigh* back to work...
Are you actually interested in getting help with your camera, or just in providing a running commentary on the state of Linux and its users?
Does it have it? If so, where is it?
"Does anyone know of a boot floppy that supports chrooting (Tom's didn't when I tried)?
Boot Knoppix. Enter virtual terminal. Proceed with well documented installation instructions. Done.Sir.!!
I guess you are typing in the wrong window.! Your gentoo irc chat window is on the 3rd desktop please cntrl-tab cntrl-tab cntrl-tab.
thank you.
Gentoo emerge -UD world FUCKS UP configuration files.
I have a server in a closet and after emerge fucked up its network I had to drag the damn thing out, bring out a monitor and a keyboard to deal with the mess. Talk about how easy Unix makes remote administration...
Thanks for you offer - that is nice of you. But the problem is moot now.
irc.freenode.net /join #gentoo
Very helpfull people there. Base install of Gentoo comes with "irssi" IRC client that you can hook up to right from the install CD. Ask your question (no need to ask "can I ask a question") and try to be as specific as you can.
Now, this IS an IRC channel so you might run into a few knuckleheads there, but be patient and you WILL be helped. The people there are very well versed and many of the OPs are themselves Gentoo developers and they know the system. They will help.
I go there to help also. It's my small way of giving something back to the community as I'm not a developer, but I can try to help others.
Most people are very patient there, but if you're asking a question that's plainly right in the install guide, they'll direct you to that usually.
Don't be a jerk there and you'll do fine. Others I've seen log into the channel and go "this sucks, I can't get this and this working...Gentoo sucks...I can't do anything". Then when no one responds in about 20 seconds they shout "how come no one wants to help me...this sucks". And on and on. Some people are beyond help it seems...and not for just and OS install either, hehe.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Let me guess for you encore you are going to do a joke about how long gentoo compiles take? /. really needs some new material.
I feel I should add that it is NOT typical of the entire linux community. In the years I have been hanging out in the #gentoo channel on freenode, I don't recall ever once having seen someone say "You couldn't get it working? You must be ignorant."
bork bork bork!
And all this emerge sync all stuff would be great if I had broadband and could utilize all those new packages. The gentoo faqs made sure to point out that a netless install was possible, which it seemed to be but just barely.
I guess I'll stick with suse until I can convince my wife to give in and get cable or dsl, but with a new baby on the way I doubt that will happen.
This gripe session has ended.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Yeah, but who says that I'm loading any modules? If I'm not, then there should be a way to specify that.
I haven't seen any manuals that tell us how to disable the modprobing each time. I haven't really seen any documentation that explains it either.
testing out my trending skills
I keep seeing the #1 complaint being that Gentoo is always compiling stuff. Aside from the original install, this is a non-issue. You do know that Linux is a multi-tasking(tm) OS, don'tcha? Stop your whining. I'm not doing this to defend Gentoo in particular (although I like it mucho), it's just pissing me off to see the crybabies always repeating the same crap all the time. Look, you don't like it, don't use the damn thing! Compiling ain't your thing? No prob! Forget Gentoo, go to distrowatch.com, pick something else. Just stop your damn bitching already, you big babies!
</rant>
Must-not-watch TV!
if you have a different pcmci slot, try moving your wireless network card there - that might sort out the IRQ conflict
It is the one advantage Apple has over Linux.
Really? So if you plug a device which uses a propriatory communications protocol into an Apple which doesn't have drivers to communicate with the device, the Apple will still magically work with the device?
Those Apple guys must be putting pixie dust in every box!
"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 setting have you never heard of multitasking?
What is not often mentioned is the stable vs. unstable settings in portage. Ie, in /etc/make.conf is the setting 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"', which means unstable/testing packages, as opposed to "x86", which is just regular old stable pacakages.
There have been lots of issues over the past few months regarding improper (too hasty and with too little testing) moving of pacakges from ~x86 to x86. This often results in pacakges that will not compile cleanly in the stable branch for all users.
There was a hideous bug a few months back introduced into ~x86 that basically screwed up the build environment for all packages. I was one of the lucky ones that it hit. Weird permission conflicts that could not be resolved that forced a complete system reinstall. And, while one might correctly point out I'm running unstable, this was an error in portage itself, and should not have been introduced into the system at all.
Also, two weeks ago, there was an issue with xine, where the only way to get it compiled was to start the emerge, pause it, then change directory into the sandbox, remove an erroneous file, then unpause the build.
Then there was the problem with OOo not compiling correctly in the sandbox. Solution? Don't use the sandbox (red flags should be going up, here).
Then there was the problem where I somehow caught half the latest KDE upgrade in portage, but not ALL of it. So, portage upgraded some packages, then downgraded those same packages to reinstall lower numbered KDE pacakges, which then forced me to recompile everything again on the next complete sync.
Now, one may point out that all these problems will eventually be fixed with correct and updated ebuilds. And they were and will continue to be. However, these problems are not infrequent to begin with.
The moral of the story is, gentoo is great, "May she live forever", etc etc. However, updating is NOT always as simple as "emerge sync && emerge -uD world". If you put off updating for a few weeks, you will get dozens of packages that will be updated next time you sync. Sometimes you can let it happily hum for a few days autonomously recompiling stuff. Othertimes, compiling will exit for no good reason, and you'd best get your thinking cap on.
It's NOT idiot simple.
(incidentally, I started off using the stable tree only, but had enough problems with it that I decided i might as well use unstable to get on the bleeding edge.)
Hilarious. I did notice your last statement about no serious business considering Gentoo was not funny because it is not true. I do happen to know 2 high level network administrators who are very seriously considering Gentoo for their server farms. They had invested much time and effort building these systems and now Red Hat is dropping support and forcing an upgrade. They decided they would like to avoid a forced upgrade in the future . Since their time is valuable they are very seriously considering Gentoo and are evaluting it as we speak. As far as it being serious business I have to say it is so serious I cannot give out the name. Have to say though that is a hilarious post *chuckles*
uncomplicated upgrades.
This is the only reason I switched all servers where I work over to gentoo. We need some special builds and such. I don't have time to download/compile by hand. Of all distros I have used Gentoo is the easiest to maintain and keep up to date.
It would be nice with a more enterprise geared gentoo though. It is very fast with upgrades to new packages, might break something. Doesn't happen often but if it does it's often easy to fix.
For the desktop there is no competition. Gentoo is the easiest "bleeding edge distro" to maintain. Alot of unstable packages to test out. And no need to go fully unstable if you only need a few packages.
Now I have about 10 different gentoo boxes at work to take care of. Every friday it takes about an hour of work to upgrade them. Could probably handle 20-30 with not much more time spent.
This looks like a copy & paste of a horrible term paper... why mod this up?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Well then what about the above response to my original post ?
Since everyone is getting away with posting obvious shit like:
/etc. (hence the name "etc-update")"
"Update your system with 'emerge sync' and then 'emerge -DUu world'"
and
"Don't forget to run etc-update after you upgrade; that way you can merge any changes to the config files in
I figured I'd take part in some karma whoring of my own: GENTOO IS A LINUX DISTRO!!! omg!!!!!! I bet you DIDN'T KNOW THAT!!!
Now give me my fucking karma.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Wait!
root@gentoo ~# emerge newlines
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy "newlines".
!!! Error calculating dependencies. Please correct.
That crap your parents told you about "people who pick on you really just feel bad about themselves" - it's not true. Seriously, that was a LIE to make YOU feel better. YOU'RE the one with the self esteem problem because YOU'RE the one everyone kicks around.
Projection is ugly, you should stop doing that.
speaking of karma whoring, thats not the first time ive seen that exact post somewhere else. am i missing out on an inside joke or are you trolling?
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
I've used Gentoo briefly as a workstation OS, but one thing I've wondered is how stable is it?
Is anyone using Gentoo in a server farm in a production environment? That's always been one of the strengths of Debian's stable release. You can run your servers for years at a time and never have an update break ANYTHING. Has Gentoo reached this level of stability yet or is it more of a bleeding edge kind of distro?
I have used Suse since version 5.3 and RedHat since 5 and have tried many distros. I also run FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Not once after three tries have I ever gotten Gentoo to work on a server class machine from Compaq/HP or Dell. After all the wasted time I spent I went back to one of the real distros and had it all running in minutes and ready for production. Just my two cents. If you have time to mess around for hours just to get your machine set up then thats cool but a lot of people have work to do...
Some Gentoo developers just seem to release stuff without thoroughly testing it out. Here's some examples just from my own experiences over the last 2 months:
Gentoo can be a very cool distro if you're willing to put up with the annoyances of (IMHO) a somewhat muddled and slipshod update-release process.
I tried the Linksys and D-Link cards and both were a pain and I could not get them to work. All the modulating and rigging etc did not make them work. So as a helpful tip, go get yourself a Cisco Aironet 350 off Ebay. Support is built right into the kernel. It worked first try. Do that and leave your XP days behind.
Informative, but it sounds like you copy and pasted a press release.
Hmmm... I have no problem with my digital camera. Plug it in, run gtkam, copy pictures. In fact, I can only get the pictures on my Linux box since Kodak refuses to release drivers for Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
The only thing I miss about Debian now that I'm on Gentoo is the easy ability to clean out the install. With Debian I could always go into dselect and walk through all the crap I had installed and remove it selectively, with full dependancy checking. It was tedious, but I was glad to be able to do it every now and then. As far as I can tell, Gentoo has no comparable functionality.
The original poster has valid point. If you are installing Gentoo on the underwear covered machine at foot of your bed than the current install procedure is fine. You have the time to spare. For production, one does not have the time to duplicate the tedious steps of the Gentoo install procedure for every machine.
Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.
That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Does Knoppix make a boot floppy? I'm only aware of Knoppix CDs.
I'm looking for a boot floppy specifically because I have several
machines that have floppy drives, but either don't have a CD drive or
can't boot off of it.
*sigh* back to work...
In short, here are some negative things to keep in mind:
In turn, here are some more (and some repeated from the parent post) good points from my view:
Gentoo is for the computer user who likes to customize his environment and have control and know what is what. If you just want to 'use' your computer, go get Mandrake or Fedora or Windows. If you like
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Agreed. Portage should handle clean, depclean and unmerge better, particularly for libraries. A good start would be a version of etcat that shows me what version of libfoo appbar is linked against and what versions of libfoo are installed and available on the portage tree... hmmm... come to think of it, sounds like a project for me....
All's true that is mistrusted
And while I am not a linux newbie, I certainly am no guru (yet :^)
And this is one thing I really love about gentoo. Especially if you're a newbie to linux (I wasn't, but I like you, was certainly no master). Following the installation guide that gentoo provides was a very educational experience for me. Not only does it tell you step by step what to do to get your system up and running, it tells you WHY you're doing it. I was very impressed with the instructions. Oh, and when I ran into any problems at all, their forums had the answer, and when they didn't have the answer, someone responded to my post within a matter of a couple hours, and had the solution to my question.
-matt
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
:) I might find them on rpmfind.net, but then I also will have to manually track down a zillion dependencies, and make sure that the RPMs are all built for RH 4.2.
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
Obviously, it's bad RPM Juju to mix and match RPMs from different distributions. As long as you stick with RPMs built for your specific release of RedHat, everything fits together fine. But sometimes you don't have that option.
The difference is that sooner or later, RedHat releases become obsolete, and much harder to find good RPMs for. I imagine it's pretty hard to find the latest KDE RPMs for an old Redhat 4.2 box
And it's not just old versions of RedHat. Newer versions can have the same problems. We recently installed RH ES on a 24/7 database cluster, but needed to use Postgres 7.3.x. The Redhat-supplied Postgresql was an older release, where the periodic VACUUM process would basically lock an entire table for up to an hour--in our application, that's unacceptable. We strayed from RedHat's official packages because we basically had to. We went with the PGDG RPMs compiled for our version of Enterprise Server, and they work great, but I'm dreading the day that we need the official RedHat Postgresql RPM to satisfy a dependency. RPM --nodeps --force usually works, but it's also bad RPM Juju.
With Gentoo (and Debian), you also have the best results if you stay with the packaging system. However, this much easier to do so, especially over time, because your base install never becomes obsolete. You never need to search for a package that's built for your specific release of Gentoo / Debian--if it's in the packaging system, you'll be able to install it on your machine, regardless of how long ago you did the base install.
My machine at home was originally running Gentoo 1.2, and it's been painless to keep it up to date as new packages become available.
If RedHat and the other RPM distributions were to standardize on their RPM package naming and layout, and provide an easy and reliable upgrade path between releases, that would go a long way towards getting rid of the RPM Dependency Hell problem.
...is that I don't have to reformat and reinstall with each new release. You pretty much have to with other distros if you want a sane system, which, amusingly, is completely insane. I don't want to reformat every year.
There actually isn't a new release of Gentoo, just a new release of the installation CDs. You're always up to date with Gentoo, and there's no way to determine a "version number" since you upgrade what you want.
That's news to me! Seriously, though, Gentoo doesn't really need an installer because part of the point is to build your system from a minimalist base.
Still, quite a few of us would appreciate being spared the pain of setting up XF86Config
Funny, I thought Portage DID do 99% of the work for you. In my mind, it's an automated LFS. That's what initially drew me to Gentoo.
Linux systems play games better than windows, there just aren't as many of them. Try playing America's Army, Unreal 2k4, or WolfET on both windows and linux (on the same hardware) and you will see that performance under the 2.6 kernel kicks the shit out of the Win2k kernel. Graphics and gameplay is so much smoother... I have no reason to reboot into windows now.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
- Incredibly short release cycle obsoletes software too quickly
- Currently no way to only get security updates
- Poor package maintenance and broken builds are increasingly common
- Compilation is stressful on hardware but performance benefits have not been proven
- Quality assurance leaves much to be desired, especially compared to that of Debian or the commercial offerings
- USE flags have limited flexibility and are more of an annoyance than a benefit
At work, I run Debian stable. I will soon be running Debian stable on my dev server and Suse or Debian testing on my other systems. I appreciate having the choice of using Gentoo, but its advantages are primarily cosmetic and have little benefit for a system that is being used to get real work done. If I do have a need for a ports-based system, I will be running FreeBSD which has more trustworthy quality assurance as well as more refinement and experience. Thanks for your time!Gentoo is the distro that has made me most happy with Linux.
Well that, or deciding to install OpenBox as the Window Manager, and then having pure simplicity itself on my desktop as opposed to KDE or Gnome.
It has brought new life to my old HP Omnibook laptop, now 6 years old at least. Of course it was hell installing it, even with a Stage 3 install. The laptop was previously running Mandrake with Blackbox, and would run out of memory all the time (160MB installed) even without running much. Gentoo, by being custom all the way, means that I have memory spare, enough to run Apache and Postgresql and have a little portable web development machine.
The only thing that is scaring me is that I have just emerge -DUu world, and something has downloaded the kernel 2.4.21 headers when I have kernel 2.6.5 on my machine. I did emerge -pv world first as well, and this was not indicated, grrr.
I only tried gentoo briefly before going back to NetBSD and Debian with a bad taste in my mouth. I know that they had a plan to "eventually" offer binary packages of the various programs (presumably a mirror of their cds or something) for downloading online (similar to apt-get or pkg_add $URL)...
So my question is: did they ever get around to implementing that, or do I need to stick to more serious distributions and operating systems in order to have that functionality?
Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones.
For the first one, Gentoo also offers pre-build Mozilla binaries for you to use. dont know what compile flags it uses but you can just emerge the binary mozilla, then emerge -B mozilla and when thats done you'll have your own mozilla package in /usr/portage/packages/All
For library changes in programs, use revdep-update (im 85% sure that is the name). it does back tracking in package dependencies to see what needs to be updated.
kportage is pretty nice :) there is also a gnome version i hear.
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
May have something to do with your tone?
It's very new, not popular like Gentoo, and it's based around binary packages, not source, but it has many strengths:
-everything comes i686 compiled for speed
-pacman package manager makes installs quick and auto-resolves deps, like Debian apt-get except using a different repository(admittedly a much smaller one, but it stays near the cutting edge, unlike Debian).
-Initial install is very light and gives you the opportunity to learn how to build up your system "from scratch," so you'll never be wholly dependent on any distro-specific tools.
The main disadvantage, that scared me away for a few days, is that you'll have to be willing to edit a lot of configuration files, which is tricky for a beginner; but I managed and I only have a few weeks experience with Linux. There is a port of the Knoppix autoconfigure, but it will only tell you what your hardware is, and it's up to you to use the information. But the documentation, while sparse, hits on most of the necessary points, and the forums were extremely helpful to me.
I have not tried Gentoo, but neither do I see a compelling reason to switch. I don't want to bother with compiling everything(compiling is a "dirty" process in my opinion; too much can go wrong), and I'm comfortable with what's offered using pacman.
(If you indeed mean that, I think it is a startup service that can be disabled as any other. Anyway, did you try asking in the gentoo forums? One thing I loved while using gentoo was the forums and community, there isn't a better one)
So use Catalyst to build a stage3 for your other machines.
Hehe :)
Our optimizationism (tm) also has some constructive consequences: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=108718 (gets more interesting towards the end) is a nice example.
Since we all want to have the latest and "greatest" these fine developers (I am sure other distros have em too...) are squishing every bug they see on their way to get a full GCC 3.4 - compiled system.
I'm sure some of these fixes will find their way to all distros.
Corporate Gadfly
Jonathan Archer: the most beaten up Enterprise captain in Star Trek history
revdep-update (im 85% sure that is the name) :)
Make that 50% sure and you're right: revdep-rebuild
I'm beginning to suspect that the author of this particular troll is a Windows user. Microsoft, WISE, InstallShield, etc., have cultivated in Windows users the notion that installation prohibits multitasking. Most every Windows installation program I've seen since the 3.1 days runs in either a maximized window or--in the case of a lot of games--fullscreen mode. Also, they pretty much all include a message on the first screen to the effect of, "Please shut down all other programs while Setup is running."
And I don't trust many people to manage packages for me, at home or at work.
Portage is great, I am working on getting Gentoo running (again) on my Sun SparcStation 20 at home for kicks. It's fun to play with new stuff, like Gentoo.
However, all of my other Linux machines are Slackware. I trust Patrick V., and I prefer to work with software packages myself. Slackware is proven, stable, and doesn't have the fluff most other distros have (Gentoo is good about this too. Another reason I'm looking into Gentoo).
When I am satisfied with where Gentoo developers are taking the distro, I'll add it to my list of "trusted" operating systems. Right now that list has one entry: Slackware. I'd love to make a second entry, though.
By the time these guys compile there base system Sarge will be out for debian. Stupid Gentoo weenies
Err? Compile your kernel with supermounting, set up your /etc/fstab to mount any drives you want supermounted. Then 'emerge hotplug'. Am I missing something?
:)
Second point, having a stripped down system after installing is one of the focuses of Gentoo. You have the ability to customize what you want. This would have been very helpful to me when I was a Linux newbie as half my problem was that there were 3-4 programs installed that all did the same thing. (I was confused)
I agree about the "partitioning with fdisk" thing. I have no problems doing it, in fact I prefer it over the more graphical disk partitioners, but it's not newbie friendly.
I'm not going to say that Gentoo is right for a Linux newbie. Just that it's right for me. Clean, easy to install, and easy to maintain.
:wq
The bottom line is that it is still Linux. You are closer to the core/spritit of Unix (distributed with source code). Does compiling it for YOUR machine make a big performance difference? Maybe it was a little snappier...hard to tell. Does the "if you do not need it, it will not install" make a big difference? Nope, it is just disk space in many cases that you are wasting? You are no longer dependent on .rpm files to get new stuff but you are now dependent on the portage tree. Is there anything that I couldn't get working on Gentoo? Nah, not really. Am I going to go forward with my migration with Gentoo? Not sure, I have a HW problem to resolve on my T30 and after that, I may go to Fedora Core 1 because there are more resources out there and the company I work for software is being ported to support RedHat AS line so I will have better luck getting my Demo's working on a RH O/S. Picking a dist these days is really just a bunch of littler minor subjective decisions and feelings. I'll probably keep Gentoo around on a harddrive and punch it in every now and then. It has been fun and good for me.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
I recently switched some of my boxes to Gentoo.
Up until then, I'd had some control over 7 boxen running RedHat, mostly RH8. I never moved to RH9 because I didn't like the emerging direction. Starting to cast about for a new distribution, I began to realize that I was thinking of support for family, etc, and not *fun*.
My dual-boot work laptop now runs Gentoo, as does my second (up and coming) server. Other systems are waiting for me to get more comfortable, and for the various nForce2 patches to stabilize and hopefully get into the mainline kernel.
Gentoo has been a mixed bag. Package install is a breeze, far better than RedHat, as long as you don't mind a minor wait. Configuration is 'a learning experience.' (not all bad, but slow)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Perhaps the best part of Gentoo.
It's bad enough that RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and the various other RPM-based distributions have diverged enough that their packages are largely incompatible. But then you get into RH7.x vs RH8 vs RH9 vs Fedora, and the same with the others.
With Gentoo, update really means update.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That may be true, I don't have any games on my system except kasteroids and the like ...
But my overall point is that the gaming environment on linux still lags way, way behind Windoze.
On the related point of hardware compatibility, thats never a problem I have personally had with linux, but I've never owned esoteric hardware either.
Maybe someday I'll try out some of those games you mention, but I'll have to upgrade my POS videocard.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Certain things don't allow you to do that (ut2004-demo being the worst) because they are writing to the disk a whole lot, or something else. However, the things like that are rather few and far between.
I don't know if I did something wrong but do they have an automatic install?
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
You call that karma whoring? Gosh I thought it was a tootin' good "Junior Achievement" sales pitch.
I have found out for myself that the "strengths" of Gentoo have been exagerated. Its portage system is NOT more stable than RPM, at best it is no worse.
Now for my own karma points:
During Feb/2004 I tested the latest version (then) of Gentoo against Slackware 9.0.
Slackware won hands-down AND easily in every category of interest to me:
1 - speed of NFS transfers
2 - overall network transfer rate
3 - launching openoffice+mozilla+gimp at the same
time (stuff I use all the time)
4 - ripping+encoding a CD to mp3 (using RipperX
which does both in parallel).
5 - recompiling a kernel to include XFS
filesystem
Both were on the same machine and hardrive (using lilo as bootloader).
Seriously folks...try it youselves. Get a copy of Slackware and one of Gentoo. Be fair and use the same hardware and everything....then report back.
One thing you'll find out is just how easy Slackware is to install... you'll also find out that Slackware is NOT for gurus only.
Slackware has been the target of a lot of false propaganda coming from the "junior" or is it the "under" achievers club.
When I started using Linux all I knew was how to use windows. I had zero unix background. For no good reason really I picked Slackware to start with. I've had no problems at all using it for 5 years.
You learn what you have to when you want to with
Slackware, and it really is stable, secure, and speedy.
Oh, and buy(!) the way, please buy something from the Slackware store while you are there...
It would really help if the RPM packages tracked with what you get in a regular tarball. I've had too many cases where I installed an RPM, tried to configure it, and still not have it work...only to find that I got a lobotomized RPM package that didn't have everything, and I had to search for a second or third RPM that had the addon to the original RPM to let me do what I wanted. No thanks, I just download and compile the tarball and get everything I want first pass (including on where I want to put files).
Thankfully I have no such problems with Gentoo and their portage system.
I agree with the guy who already responded to you that is currently marked at Score: 0. It may very well have had to do with your tone. For proof that I am correct and you are not, just read further down the thread. Particularly the part where someone asked how to upgrade his system and about 20 or more people responded with how to update. I didn't see one RTFM (there could have been some that had been moderated down, I didn't look). But it still proves that your idea is not typical of the linux community -- at least not when speaking of the Gentoo community. That's the MAJOR reason I use Gentoo myself (and have installed several servers in schools/libraries/businesses that use Gentoo).
=-]
bork bork bork!
Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistakes, and so on) for a base install. Okay, it took me several days on two machines. The last (5th attempt) only took 5 hours to compile because I went from Stage 1 to Stage 3 to save lots of time. The stage 1 attempts I ran at work, went home, came back the next day, and it was done compiling in about 22 hours on a P2/Dual450/512mb RAM. KDE 3.2.1 took 44 hours to install, not including xfree86. Mozilla took 5 hours.
If you don't have a handle on the situation, it might require outside help and research to solve the problem. Which I used. Luckily, Gentoo-loving people seemingly are both educated and friendly. I had a "Gentoo buddy," and he was very helpful with good cheer once he heard I was having problems. "Oh, I know what the problem is! Nano sucks! Do this, emerge vim..."
Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones. This also includes just installing the base system. I had a problem when a package was labeled missing from the ftp mirrors (due to a misspelling. But again, Gentoo forums came to the rescue
You will be using the command line for most administration.The first thing I launch in a GUI is an xterm or something, so this wasn't a problem. What was a problem was nano saved my files only half the time, and it took an emerge vim to get an editor that worked and got my fstab fixed (actually, I used vim from a Slack-LiveCD first to get Gentoo bootable). For a hard core distro like Gentoo, I was a bit surprised vi was not part of the LiveCD, but nano was. I don't mind nano, I was used to pico because I use pine, but the random "not saving" part was irrirtating.
Community is there. Almost any problem can be found in the Gentoo Forums, and most all of them have solutions. A-men! Thank god for those comprehensive, flame-resistant forums. I got my Stage 1 attempt fixed in less than an hour.
Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices. I'd change that to "step-by-step commands for people who know what 90% of these commands mean." So when they go wrong, you can go, "Ah... all I have to do is repeat step 15a."
Because of the way you install Gentoo, you become much more familiar with the way Linux works under the hood. Ater my hassle, I may not use Gentoo. I just don't have the time for all those compiles. But you are so right on your point, and that's why I considered my install process with Gentoo, hassles and all, to be well worth my time simply because even though I knew a lot of this stuff already, I still learned a whole lot. Very educational, very forward, and support's there when you need it.
Some points I'd like to add from a newbie's POV:
yes! i started in gentoo linux because a friend recommended it
... although a moment ago #gentoo had 1013 people, channels like #gentoo-laptop (since I have a laptop) are excellent resources
the more or less manual install, coupled with the very good documentation and guides, helped me grow acustomed to linux more than I had by just using it through shell accounts or on friend's boxes
the full immersion that comes with its install is a learning experience that can't be beat, and when help is needed there are docs, forums, and irc -- and let me say the irc (imo) is one of the best ways to learn
"New" as in a reformat and repurposing of a venerable rack-mount. My email server moved to a new box and this one is becoming a firewall. All of my production machines are running Gentoo.
Yes it's crazy. But I k#0\/\/ w#@t 1m d01#% +0 C##p fr0# 831n% 0wnd.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I don't know what I mean. I'm confused too. I honestly thought that a module is a module, & that if the hardware doesn't change, then the driver itself shouldn't need to be probed. Since I never add new hardware, I thought that relevant information could be kept in a safe place. I honestly don't know what I'm talking about. Even though I searched pretty hard for any clues, I couldn't find anything. That's why I never asked anybody about it.
That is, until I suggested this idea of mounting root as read-only on that ROX file manager mailing list. I also mentioned the problem of waiting for modprobe, & a fellow said that we don't need to modprobe each time. This seems to be verified by the fact that I managed to comment out the part of the boot up scripts that run modprobe. I've been booting up without it for some time.
On an unrelated note, I mentioned this to that mailing list, because Gentoo doesn't seem too open to the idea of a read-only root system. I based that opinion of the results of searches for read-only root.
Like I said, I honestly don't know what I'm talking about. I just know that my system has been running quite well without modprobe, & I did do a search on modprobing. I don't recall any manual explaining in layman's terms whether or not it was needed for every reboot, whether or not you have new hardware. From what little I understand, kudzu, udev & hotplug are supposed to take care of new stuff in their respective contexts.
I never tried asking about modprobe in the forums because it never occurred to me. I haven't the foggiest idea why it never occurred to me. As for start up scripts, I disabled as many as I could. I even modified some of them. There is 1 script [I can't remember which], which appears to run modprobe no matter what. Even if you don't have any modules, you'll still run it.
testing out my trending skills
redundant and over played
hehe...
"you will see that performance under the 2.6 kernel kicks the shit out of the Win2k kernel"
Are you sure?
Even when your graphics card has 3D accel support in Win2k but not in Linux?
Surely you are joking, aren't you?
"Yeah, but why do people..."
Because that's open source, my friend. Anyone program what cares *him* (as in *not you*) the most.
You always have the three choices anyway, you know:
1/ Program it yourself
2/ Pay others to program it for you
3/ Shut up!
You just have to choose one.
Sorry, but as a non zealot Gentoo user I have to use the inverse spin-o-matic logic to establish some of the truth that lies inside the goofy lines you extrapolate from:
.rpms...
>>"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
>"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something
My "gentoo-stable" machine runs a nightly cron task. I've never found it still emerging in the morning.
>>"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
>"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school,
This really is a disservice to what Gentoo is trying to do. I find it much more likely that those *capable of doing so* will track down a source bug when the source is there and integral to their installation of the package. I know I have, personally, and submitted those bug reports to either Gentoo or the authors as appropriate. For those that can't do it in the first place, there is little difference between Gentoo and any other distro, they don't do anything.
>>"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
>"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine (etc etc)
I use Gentoo because it does what I need. I have an OpenBSD install I use on my firewall machine...because it does what I need. So?
>>"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 yet for the clueful user there are gains. Flac compiled with ICC and specifically optimized for P4 saved me huge (>20% general speed) and when ripping 400 CDs, you know, that added up. There are more examples, but you'd probably dismiss me as a servile fan boi. shrug.
>>"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
>"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World,
My main server at home is a dual Xeon. It has a 1.5TB LVM2 that is backed up regularly via rsync (scripts I wrote) to a couple of raid machines elsewhere (the main machine is a media server - all of my music, and recent video stuff, avialable from anywhere in the house). It runs my web server, mail config, etc etc. Not a huge deal by big iron standards but a capable server machine. Happens to be running Gentoo quite capably. Just because it's popular to think script kiddies are using Gentoo, doesn't mean all Gentoo users are script kiddies.
>>"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
No, I understood RPM management just fine. It was still more cumbersome than Portage, and still didn't meet my needs in other ways (yes, being up to date was one of them).
>>"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
>"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive.
Gentoo provides you with three levels of edges to bleed on or not, as per your choice. You can use stable, unstable, or completely unverified (emerging a specific package and it's dependents). But why confuse the issue with the facts, it's so much more fun to cut and paste rhetoric.
>"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
Don't know if it is or is not. What I do know it is fits *my* needs better than any other distro I've tried, and I've tried an even dozen if I have one. And from a geeky personal standpoint, it put a little bit of the fun back in *nix that I lost 15 years ago or so.
Ah well, probably be modded to nothing, but I felt like replying.
Debian is Slow, Worse, Expensive
/lib/modules, as you are going to need it.
Open source may be good, but there is one example that sticks out like a sore thumb as a problem with open source. Debian gnu/Linux. It is offically the Worst Linux Distribution ever made.
First of all, Debian has the most out of date software packages of any major mainstream distros. Even in the unstable version, is KDE 2.2 and Gnome 2.0, with Xfree86 4.1 (A version that really sucks). There are literally years that pass between each update of Debian.
Secondly, its a pain in the goatse to set up, first of all, you are forced to use Kernel 2.2, which is horribly hacked with "backports" to get any use on any modern machine (Read, made after 1999). Good luck memorizing all the *.ko files in
Configuring XFree86 is hell! If you don't have a Thick X11 orilley book, and a list of your horizontal sync values from your monitor's intruction manual (if you even have one), BOOM! There goes your monitor.
Even then, good luck getting anything over 640x480@16 colours.
The most common response to help questions on the Debian mailing list is "n00b, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL, you idiot, go back to WINDOWS XP if you can't learn to use dselect", true too, search the archives if you think I'm lying. Other distros give you comprehensive PRINTED MANUALS, PHONE SUPPPORT and/or freindly forums where repling RTFM gets you banned!
Debians support for any decent hardware, including USB mice, scanners, Sound cards, heck even Serial devices struggle. If you can even get 80x25 text mode with PS/2 input devices you are really lucky.
Apt-get has many flaws. First of all it uses a non standard package format (the rest of the world uses RPM, deprecate the DEB format!), has broken respetories, and out of date software to install. All this combined with the kludgey dselect user interface make package management a nightmare.
And if you think I'm joking about this, find out why THOUSANDS of Debian users are switching to REAL distributions Debian is falling to pieces, if it is to survive any market share it will be through its superior forks (Xandros, Lindows, K/G-noppix) and unoffical package respetories.
Of course, while all this is going on, the only thing the Debian maintainers do is argue about politics on the mailing lists. The distribution decays while its creators argue over inane details like software licensing and the virtues of Marxism. Please! Spare me the political rhetoric and just give me a working distro!
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and I'm happily using distros such as Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo and Fedora. But I'm sick to death of zealots that push obsolete Distros on me EVERY FREAKING TIME linux is mentioned. I'm speaking from real world experiance here.
The biggest problem I have with projects like Gentoo or MythTV is that there is no list of hardware (particularly motherboard) that definitely works without tweaking. I would seriously consider buying from the Gentoo store (supporting Daniel directly or the Gentoo brand in general) if it offered a preinstalled system that was known to work, particularly a PVR system.
I tried installing Gentoo on my regular system back before the second hard drive died, but I never got the X settings right so no desktop. Kind of took the fun out of it. On the bright side, it only took my machine about a day to compile. I suspect that the three to five day estimates are with older hardware.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is that after you have a running Gentoo system, you don't ever have to do another install, but you can still have as up to date packages as you want.
I have been running Gentoo on my laptop (stable) and a desktop (unstable) for over a year with no problems worth mentioning. Testing distros and doing installs may be fun sometimes, but other times you just need to get things done!
The other REALLY nice place for Gentoo is a remote server. Need a security update? "emerge sync"; "emerge -v new_package". I supported a schools web/email server with SuSE 7.0 on it for years without fixing glaring Sendmail and other security bugs, because I was too lazy. I recently upgraded the hardware and put Gentoo on it. Now I just ssh in, and update with a level of effort that matches my lazy-ness.
"I do happen to know 2 high level network administrators who are very seriously considering Gentoo for their server farms."
."
They are either not so high level administrators or you are a liar, you choose.
Gentoo, at its current state, is an impossible choice for datacenters due at least to its complete lack of backport support.
"now Red Hat is dropping support and forcing an upgrade. They decided they would like to avoid a forced upgrade in the future
If that's the problem, since they seem not to be dependant on software certifications (like Oracle and RedHat/SuSE) they will be best served -by far, by Debian.
This is not a rant nor a Debian zealotry, but a clear fact.
Oh, yes! I'm a proffesional *systems* administrator myself (why the heck would I want those networking guys, no matter how brilliant, to touch my boxes is something I just can't imagine).
I don't understand why you were modded down as a troll!!!
Meh.
Maybe there would be a torrent for Gentoo if they included shitty japanese cartoons in the distribution.
Doesn't this quote have a second half, something about it being "invariably fatal", or something similar? I think it works better that way.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I have been using Linux for scientific computing since 1994, when I wrote my college thesis using LaTeX. That was within a Slackware installation. I am currently running Redhat 9. While I do compile my own C programs every week, I am no OS expert---I have always used the "out-of-the-box" installation without doing much system administration.
I would like to try Gentoo, but this is what I am afraid of: I don't know anything about vixie-cron, at, or ntp (besides maybe seeing their names on the redhat bootup screen for 5 seconds). I am afraid that I will have to spend a lot of time figuring out which of these very basic, system-level packages to download.
So here is my question: given that I know how to compile things, but don't know very much about system administration at all, will I be able to have a fully functioning system (and I mean fully---I want to use my CD-RW and X11) just by following the instructions on the Gentoo site?
In other words, how will I know which packages I need to emerge to get my system fully functioning?
I have a Linksys WMP11 v2.7 that does not work under Linux. However, I don't blame Linux for that incompatibility, I blame Broadcom for not releasing the farking chip's specs so that someone ELSE can write a free driver for it.
Anyway, supposedly I can use DriverLoader to get it working (use win32 drivers in Linux) but I haven't had the time to play around with this yet.
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
Yes gentoo have an graphical installer based on anaconda from Redhat the URL is http://gentoo.vidalinux.com :) i probe it and works very good.
rpm just isn't comparable to portage; they almost do two different things, except portage is a front-end and a back-end.
portage is great software, it just bothers me when I see {portage,apt,ports,etc} compared to rpm. Who would compare apt to dpkg?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
As long as you use a NVIDIA card, you get performance in the games mentioned under Linux then Windows. Not sure about ATI cards, but I'd imagine its the same.
where flamebait is +5 funny and funny stuff is -1 flamebait
Does anyone know if pcmcia works during the install for 2004.1? I tried using both the universal and unversal-minimal images for 2004.0, and had no luck. (Don't happen to have the hardware to test with in front of me, or I'd answer my own question.)
Modprove is simply a driver loader. Say you have a sound card. The kernal needs to be able to talk to the sound card. It does that using a driver. Modprobe loads that driver. It runs everytime you start up your computer, and anytime you run it manually. If you don't need the driver, then you can disable that, and run modules-update. I can explain better, if you let me know what you commented out that was modprobe related.
Ok, a little offtopic, but can't driver problems like this be fixed by using a wrapper with the dlls like Captive? I know that you have to have the original DLL files (download/copy them yourself), and it won't be in the "true spirit" of open source software, but like me, most people just want their stuff to work. And if it's preventing you from something like getting your computer onto a network, why the Hell not?
GLIS
emerge KDE Then go away for the weekend. Come back and "maybe" if will be finished.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Users should tread carefully when updating config files. etc-update is a great assistant to this process, but if you hang out on #gentoo for a little while, you'll eventually hear from someone who's accidentally blown away their working config by using etc-update. Be careful with it!
In conclusion, with great power comes great responsibility. Learn to use `find` and `diff`, you'll be glad later. HAND.
Nope, ATI's linux drivers are utter trash compared to NV's, imho.
I just wanted to toss something out here because I see it happen a lot. Many folks talk about how long is takes Gentoo to compile things. It's a common discussion around the 'Net. However I'd say close to 90, maybe 95% of the time when people refer to "days" or numerous hours for an install they are using far inferior machines. It's not meant as an insult. I see it an awful lot though. People complain about the compile times and yet they are using a PII 350 with 128MB of RAM. That machine is what, 6 years old? Compile times with a version of Gentoo using 6 year old versions of software packages would be admirably quick. People are trying to use compile new versions of software with very dated machines. Anyhow, I see folks make that duration claims and thought I'd throw that tidbit out there. I haven't yet had time to install Gentoo (bought the CDs and even downloaded all 24GB of distfiles). I suspect it will compile quite quickly on either my dual 2400MP or my dual 2.8 Xeon boxes. I don't expect it'll take too terribly long.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
I had similar problems with SUSE. All their multimedia packages were stripped out and broken. The only option I could find was to build from source but that broke a ton of shit.
Thankfully I have no such problems with Gentoo and their portage system.
Amen
Time makes more converts than reason
Is ther eany real reason for me to upgraade from 1.4? As far I see it, no matter the gentoo version you always have the newest stuff. So what's the difference?
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
There is a gtk version called porthole. There is also a java version called portagemaster.
Time makes more converts than reason
"Gentoo really is a great operating system, and maybe even for beginners."
Not for beginners. It took me a long time to install gentoo and it still didn't work. I don't think I've ever been so pissed at a distro. I wasn't pissed because it didn't work, because I didn't pay for it, but because so many people said it was easy. Bullshit. It might be easy if you're used to things like compiling your kernel and editing your fstab file, but for those of us who are used to Redhat, Suse, Mandrake etc it is an incredible pain in the ass. Beginners: don't let this guy fool you, anyone who is not intimately familiar with Linux should stay the hell away from gentoo unless they like headaches and swearing at their computer.
My Blog
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
;-)
The way some bastards react when you do turn on the signal, it is divulging info to the enemy
i feel your pain on that one. the trick, however, is to drive a burly enough machine like mine to be able to handle just such an occasion :-) on the bright side, sometimes this behavior can be used to your advantage. have you ever had somebody just driving in your blind spot? just turn on your signal to that side and they will pass you in no time. stupid drivers are usually at least somewhat predictable.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
it seems that the problem is an IRQ conflict between the inbuilt LAN card (which cant be disabled in the BIOS)
I've got that problem with my Toshiba laptop. My solution was to just not load the driver for the lan card. Everything works fine now.
Joke:
Parent post had an aversion to formatting their text with whitespace / newlines (aka carriage returns)
This man deserves an informative, or at least a (+1, Helpful).
Well, other people already debunked the majority of the BS in this post, but I'll point out something that they seemed to miss.
"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."
Gentoo's installation is all done from the command prompt. I really doubt anybody who has done it would be scared off by a text-based installer.
Have you tried Linux yet?
UNLEASH the people who won't STFU about gentoo zealots. You morons think gentoo zealots are bad? I am hearing people BITCH about gentoo zealots before gentoo zealots even show up. ARG. JUST STFU YOU SFMs.
(my new thing to make annoying is the sheer amount of people who won't stfu about people who won't stfu about gentoo zealots)
If you are, my best advice is to read the install guide. You might not understand it depending on your level of knowledge, but it should at least read like English.
;-)
Or Danish, German, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish, or Traditional Chinese
I have found the command "emerge depclean" is also very handy. First tune the USE flags in /etc/make.conf and the packages in /var/cache/edb/world. The man page for emerge has some good documentation.
Thanks for the great reply! I just want to say a few things:
/boot mounted by default, /boot setup in fstab: ..."
:)
1)
> > Gentoo's install guide is very detailed and geared towards novices.
I'd change that to "step-by-step commands for people who know what 90% of these commands mean." So when they go wrong, you can go, "Ah... all I have to do is repeat step 15a."
Correct -- I should have been more explicit. The instructions are, IMO, enough that the user will know what is going on (we're partitioning now -- this is what partitioning is for... etc) when he copies the commands and runs them.
If you run into problems, I am not trying to imply that a novice will know what to do (e.g. repeat step 15a) but will at least know where he stands. Then comes asking for help.
2) the fact the directions don't have
Maybe I'm not understanding you, but I found this in the install guide when describing
"[/boot] shouldn't be mounted automatically (noauto) but
3) As someone else mentioned, it isn't surprising that it took so long for you to build KDE as you were only on a dual P2 450 (I'm thinking maybe about a P3 700 if multiple processors were used properly?). More 'modern' processors like a 2000+ or higher will generally achieve a full system in a weekend (from stage1, no binary builds).
4) Everything else you said I agree with 100%. Your observations on help you got, problems you ran into, etc. are all pretty fitting with my own.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Incidentally, there is no fragmentation in this case. libgphoto2 is the defacto resource for connecting *nix to PTP cameras.
It's kind of a classic that keeps coming up on gentoo stories. The poster isn't trying to pass it off as his own.
"And yet for the clueful user there are gains. Flac compiled with ICC and specifically optimized for P4 saved me huge (>20% general speed) and when ripping 400 CDs, you know, that added up. There are more examples, but you'd probably dismiss me as a servile fan boi. shrug."
Gee. And here I was thinking that physically inserting and ejecting the CDs from the drive, and ripping them, took a considerably longer time than any encoding process.
The original post's point stays valid: aggressive compiler optimisation does make sense in some cases, but they are the vast minority.
WOW!
I can't believe I just read that on Slashdot!
For the record I don't think there's any ground left to cover.
I JUST printed the 2004.0 docs on my color laserjet needlessly, just hours before the release. Now I have to burn MORE paper and MORE color toner.
I wish they would pre-announce their announcements...
My orinoco and d-link cards both work fine under debian. For fun, try putting a knoppix cd in and see if it detects your card. you might be pleasantly surprised.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Wow.
Here you go friend.
Copy and paste these starter snippets of html as much as you need in your next post. Preferably at the beginning and end of a paragraph respectively. My eyes and brain thank you in advance.
:^)
Hey, I'm just being honest. I'm tired of reading source code, man pages, etc., & still having my system break on me.
testing out my trending skills
have you tried using an xp pro/home cd? will those drivers load? I've had to use win98 drivers from the cd in a winme before, because they didn't include it in a newer version, was an obscure onboard audio chipset.. was a while ago though.. drivers are a pain, but if xp came with them, try loading from that, or sometimes, using windows update will actually find them..
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
You know, when a rating system becomes so self-referential, it's time to hide it or ditch it. I see nothing wrong with the parent, and all the noise people make about points on a website is really tiresome.
Dude, don't you know the best way to get help with Linux? You just say that Linux sucks because you can't do x, and everyone will rush to 'help' by correcting you. Otherwise they'll just say to read the manual, and we all know tech guys can't write manuals that are actually helpful.
i've actually had a hard time finding time to tweak various distro's to get my wlan card/sound/sony weirdness working, as i never seem to have enough time between work related activities...
but i've found suse 9.0 to support prism2 cards (i have a ambit lan-express, vaio) and many others very easily. it comes with acpi in the kernel too.
only downside is i hate YasT, but apt-get for suse takes care of stuff nicely and i've always got conf files! (albeit in weird places)
Well, I hope that smiley means you took my post as humorously as I meant it. The stuff I highlighted has a pretty different tone from the usual, "I know blah, blah, blah..." we like to throw about around here.
> "...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
it's "Gentoo Athlon boxen" ffs!
oh yes, very "proffesional". So "proffesional", in fact, that you don't know how to spell....
Well, I guess if you want a FULL, quality distro with good portage/package managers it looks like you get to choose what will eventually drive you crazy:
1. long waits in between releases ( Debian )
or
2. long waits during compilation ( Gentoo )
Love both, got both installed.
Steve
You are right in that there is that usual tone. It's almost rather amusing to watch 2 people, who probably actually agree on something, argue because they didn't bother to hear what the other person was saying. It'd be like you saying that you like oranges & me saying that I like apples. We could argue & argue, but did we bother to ask questions:
- do we both like the other fruit as well as the other fruit or do we just like 1 of the fruits?
- are we arguing about which is best or what we like or what?
These are pretty stupid questions & the list could go on, but they need to be asked if we are to engage in a discussion about Linux vs. BSD or whatever the topic may be.testing out my trending skills
I just got my 2004.0 CDs in today's mail. Damn!
I went & took a look, hoping to take you up on your offer, but I couldn't find it. Maybe I deleted it instead of commenting. That's not my normal tendency for things like system scripts.
Maybe it was actually something else. I just remember a message about modules & calculating something like module dependencies
I appreciate your comments & explanations. Thanks for your time.
testing out my trending skills
I have tried and no, it does not work.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
it would profit the linux community [...] if linux was able to [...] download pictures from my digital camera
Why? Do you have some pictures there that are vitally important to everybody else? Maybe pictures of Bill Gates giving a cheque to SCO to destroy Linux?
If you want to use your digital camera under Linux, you should have bought one from a manufacturer that supports Linux. There are quite a few of them, and they're very well documented. My HP720 (for example) works extremely well under Linux.