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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.
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!
Why not upgrade every week like most of us do?
emerge -uvD system
emerge -uvD world
etc-update
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.
"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...
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.
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?
----
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.'"
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
Gentoo emerge -UD world FUCKS UP configuration files.
/etc/._cfg0000_gentoo-release while keeping the original /etc/gentoo-release untouched.
/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'
um..if you knew anything about Gentoo then you would know that it doesn't touch configuration files, if there is a new config file it will rename the NEW file as something like
After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:
find
will give you a list of the config files that need updating. Yes. Gentoo even informs you how to find these files. and nice big fat: "use 'emerge --help config' message is staring you right in the face if any new config files need updating.
This isn't something you can just bypass. Nice try. But please, give us a little credit if you're going to make something up!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'm on 56k dialup, if I update weekly then the update remains doable (I actually use -fuvD with emerge then re-emerge without -f). If I leave it a month then it turns into several days of downloading packages before starting the compile.
Gentoo on dialup means regular updates unless you want to end up in download hell.
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.)
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.
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!!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:
/etc -iname '._cfg????_*'
find
Actually, you can also do:
'etc-update'
This will walk you through the config files that need to be updated, and let you decide whether you want to accept the changes wholesale, discard the changes, or manually merge them in (it will even show you the differences between old and new).
- 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.
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
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.
qpkg -q libfoo sounds like what you are looking for.
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."
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.
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.
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:
you can also prune (emerge -P) to remove all but the latest versions of packages
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
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.