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Gentoo Linux Musings
ChaserPnk writes "Gentoo has been in the news recently. First with the news that Daniel Robbins leaving Gentoo and then with Gentoo Linux 2004.1 being recently released. Have you ever wondered how Gentoo got started? An article at IBM DeveloperWorks explains how. Get to know the history of Gentoo."
darthcamaro wrote in with a related story that suggests that Gentoo is preparing to change directions soon: "Is Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro? That's what an article running on internetnews.com points to. They talked to the head of Gentoo's enterprise efforts. For those that think that Gentoo Enterprise is far off, Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months."
There is something very appealing about a distro that is so source-code driven (for lack of a better tem). It embodies all the best things about open-source software.
I have been extremely happy with Gentoo. It's rock-solid stable, and its the speediest of any distro I have tried (no doubt due to all your applications being optimized for your specific system).
If they came out with an "enterprise" version I think I would give it a whirl, I can see it easily being a great fit in my server room. I wish them all the best.
bash: rtfm: command not found
no.
I first looked at the install procudure, and freaked out. After moving on from mandrake, and instlaling debian a few times, and getting the hang of linux a good bit more, I actually gave gentoo a try. The install, although tedious and quite slow, was straight forward and somewhat enjoyable. Finally, I had a bootable system. Unfortuneatly, I couldn't get it to detect my network card, so I tried to get the network driver of the live cd. Next, I couldn't find my cd-rom. Finally, I found that (it started with s instead of cd something like I expected), I got the network working. I than gave it a try. Its a great system, but I got annoyed at the compiles and such, and I thought that if I was just going to use binary packages I might as well use debian. All in all, if you like the advantages of compiling, use it, but if you hate compiling, no real reason to install it in the first place IMO.
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When I used linux, I used gentoo. If I had a choice now, I would probably use debian, but the "emerge" command and portage tree in gentoo was just awesome and really made linux a lot easier, which for me was nice because I was using linux soley as a development environment.
I've been a Gentoo user for about 9 months, and it certainly has a promising future regardless of direction.
The portage system takes one of the best features of FreeBSD and actually *improved* on the idea rather than creating a poorly ported system. Decided you want to try out a few optimizations to see what your server likes best? Just 'emerge -e world' and you've got yourself a freshly recompiled system. Dreading the release of 2004.2? No sweat...Gentoo isn't like other distros (read: Redhat/Fedora) where upgrading remotely is a nightmare...just update the system through portage and it's essentially the same system. No need to worry about how you're going to upgrade your hosting servers to the newest release or worry that it will come to an EOL and you're no longer getting your juicy security patches.
It seems the most common complaint is the time it takes Gentoo to compile anything. The flexibility this system provides is well worth the extra few minutes rather than installing *.deb or *.rpm files and entering dependency hell.
Yes, yes...let the distro wars begin.
I started playing with Gentoo a few days ago... and I'm in love. I've been using computers for a while (DOS, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD primarily), and this is the first Linux distro that I've come across that I really like working with. I think part of it appeals to the elitist inside me that wants to compile everything heavily optimized, but it also just feels... right... to me. So, thanks to the Gentoo developers.
Who are the first two major ones? Red Hat and SuSE? Red Hat and Mandrake? SuSE and Mandrake?
;) )
(No, I'm not stupid, I'm just a diehard Debian partisan. No jokes, please.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
First, I'd like to start off by saying that I currently don't even have gentoo installed on any of my systems. I am not a gentoo zealot.
That being said, while I was reading the article posted earlier regarding Linux Useability I actually asked a few friends: Does Portage have a GUI browser/installer yet?
If it did, Gentoo could instantly be turned into the single most user-friendly distro on the planet. The primary problem with Linux (besides game support, etc.) is the ease of program installation. Imagine how easy it would be to code a pretty GUI to allow you to browse the Gentoo Portage Tree (which is already split up into intuitive categories) and install whatever you need.
Gentoo is a phenominal distro. It would take very minor amounts of tweaking to make it incredibly user-friendly.
Sig.i>
I believe however, that Gentoo is even better suited to this task. A fix in the source is a fix for every distro, where as a fix in a package fixes only a single release of a single distro.
With the recent release of catalyst, gentoo makes even more sense in this role.
I guess there are two knocks against Gentoo as a 'distribution base distribution': installation, and packaging. Honestly though, packaging -- once the source has been compiled once -- now works great. That's what the knockoff distros would be doing. Installation, they've left somewhat open-ended. Every distro seems to make an installer though, so I can assume it'd be easy to make one for a Gentoo knockoff.
Gentoo's source database is simply of the highest quality. I think it is the distro to watch, but because it is so useful as a technology to create truly customized, useful distros.
Actually, it's kind of odd thinking of Gentoo in an enterprise setting. It's always billed itself as a "meta distribution" in the sense that it's something solid distributions could be culled off of.
Due to it's ever changing and rotating nature, it's about dead opposite the rock solid Debian distribution. While it *could* be a Enterprise distribution, it'd be easier to create a solid locked branch built off Gentoo and kept clean of the nasty problems that tend to have (often) entered the portage tree in the past. And then it wouldn't really be Gentoo proper.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Businesses want support, stability and a minimum of fuss, not exactly areas where Gentoo enjoys advantages over other Linux distributions such as, say, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and Debian.
At the moment, it's not positioned to compete against the major distributions for a share of the business market. It may be so at some point down the line, but it certainly isn't so right now.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I suppose the other valuable lesson, though, is that he did make it that far not just because of enthusiasm or hard work, but because he had a good idea (ebuilds). I see a lot of knock-off distros--yet another CD-based router, for example--that just don't have any great ideas behind them. Sure, that's the point of Linux--I've got no complaints with people doing what they want, but it strikes me that the valuable lesson here is that a good idea can go far--but without that idea, you've got nothing.
(That's the best I can come up with--just trying to focus the freakin' discussion on something other than ``I like Gentoo'' ``I don't!'')
I'm pretty new to Linux in general, but am not afraid of trying out something difficult or heavily CLI-based. I started with Mandrake and Fedora, but found them too bloated / Windows-esque for my taste, and am now relatively happily using Debian sarge, and have been eagerly awaiting its release. However, due to, er, some recent stuff, I'm getting slightly annoyed with Debian, wondering if the wait for Sarge might in fact be quite long, or indeed, interminable, and am looking at trying another distro. Gentoo looks rather appealing--it seems well-documented and so on, and looks like it might be pretty fun to set up. One thing, though: I have a dial-up connection. Is it possible/desireable to easily install Gentoo this way? I've got a fast connection at the University, and it seems [from reading the docs] that one can download ISOs containing binary packages built for Gentoo. But, er, doesn't that entirely defeat the purpose of installing Gentoo? Should I take the plunge? Is it a good idea to use Gentoo over dialup? I'd be interested if anyone has any thoughts on this.
I've been using Gentoo for about 4 months now & I really like it. After using RedHat, Fedora(rpm)...Portage is something that is really amazing. In fact this is kind of freaky since I'm giving a seminar in my college on Gentoo today & I did look up the exact same IBM Article a few days back. Really nice to know how it all started off. Thanks to the chap in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net for giving me the link a few days back ;)
With a name like KrispyKringle, you just GOTTA be a KDE user, right? :-)
(BTW I use KDE too, I'm not trying to flame you)
Pros of Gentoo:
Customizability.
Speed.
Perfect for that old system you want to keep using.
If you are clustering, it probably would be the way to go.
Easy to update.
Cons of Gentoo:
Installation- un-believably frustrating.
Ever even seen Red Hat's system? Its SIMPLE and it WORKS. RH and Mandrake both can get my system to boot with grub on first install and boot, but nooooo, not Gentoo.
Too tweak-heavy.
I'm sorry. Gentoo is a great special-purpose distro. If it wants to go mainstream, it must have a better install system.
Go take a look at woody's(Debian) installer, and compare with the Gentoo install scheme.
Gentoo installations are crap.
I've done Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat 8, and Mandrake 10 installs.
Gentoo is the most difficult to install.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
Let me say that Gentoo is great. I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, and recently Suse. But now that I've tried Gentoo, I wouldn't go to any other distro, at least not for personal use.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
From the "what-I-would-like-to-see" department :)
/rant mode :)
What I would love to see in Gentoo, or any other distro that is source-based really, is a way of setting up the system from binaries and then have the system transmogrify itself.
What do I mean? Well, after the initial install the distro could start to compile the optimised packages with a preset set of flags and "replace" the existing pre-compiled binaries as it finishes the optimisations.
Why? Well I think this would offer the absolute best of both worlds. It would allow you to get a Gentoo-based system up quickly without waiting hours and hours for compilation. It would then take advantage of unused CPU cycles (and lets face it, I doubt most machines use a large amount of resources more than 5-10% of their operating lives) to compile optimised packages, thus giving the benefits that everyone loves about source-based distros?
Is it possible? I have no idea. Frankly, I don't use Gentoo or even Linux all that often, but it strikes me as very neat solution for the one weakness present in distros that have to be compiled from source.
I think it might also be quite useful in getting acceptence in the business world. Being able to get a system up and customised quickly could be an important selling point, particularly in SME business where there is a diverse range of hardware (and thus ghosting is not necessarily a good option). It such a networked environment, it might even be possible to use a distributed compilation system.
Anyway, that's my little suggestion. As I said, it may not even be practical let alone possible, but it might stimulate further ideas that make Gentoo (and perhaps linux in general) an even better solution. Again, I don't even use Linux (well, only very infrequently) but I strongly support the underlying philosophy behind much of the OSS movement.
"People can get ugly" is a headline.
And this comes as a surprise? I mean... come on... we read Slashdot. We don't need to be reminded of our own physical failures HERE.
On the desktop end, I prefer gentoo because it is more lenient with accepting non-free packages and packages with potential legal issues. I also like the optimization abilities of a source based distro. As a java developer, Gentoo is simply the best Linux distro for Java developement. The major jre's are integrated in to the packaging system and the java-config utility allows me to easily switch from multiple jres on the fly.
On the server side, debian provides stability and quality control. Contrary to popular myth, there are quite a few pay support options available for debian.
So? What's wrong with not using Linux?
Need to upgrade to a new version of some server software because there is a vulnerability?
Actually I almost always compile key stuff from source anyway, because I want to know that features I want are compiled in.
Need new software now? Ok, wait an hour for a compile
And if you, as an admin, take less than an hour to test your rpm (or whatever) software installation, on a mission-critical server, you're not doing your job. I will give you that it takes a long time to compile most things, but in my book, it's time well spent.
bash: rtfm: command not found
We're already using Gentoo on about a dozen or so production machines. Its been great. Setup time takes about two business days (system over night, bootstrap overnight), but who cares? We have the installation procedure we use down to the point where we don't even have to look at the screen, our self-made guides have everything written down. All the machines have a common configuration this way too.
I'm currently working on a web based system to very easily keep all these systems up to date and allow us to choose which packages we want to upgrade, so we don't have to get the newest if we don't want.
I hope they do release commercial support for it, we'd be one of the first on the list to purchase!
But in the server room? Sadly, I don't see this happening. What sells there is support. And for people who don't know, when we talk about someone providing support, we talk about someone to *blame*. "Hey, the server is down, wtf? Well, I'm paying RH $XXXX, I'll let them figure it out." And for the most part, they do.
The whole philosophy of Gentoo seems to go against this though. Red Hat can support it, cause they know you are running RedHat 7.2 with the 2.4.9-31MPT-SP kernel, cause that's what they shipped with. If you buiild your own they'll have one word for you: Unsupported.
Now look at Gentoo Linux, they are at the other end of the spectrum, 100% custom. Who in their right mind is going to support that? How could they? I just don't see it.
Having used gentoo for near 2 years now and always hearing people complain about the time it takes to compile everything, Ive often wondered why they havent just added some kind of flag to emerge/portage which would specify installing a binary package instead of compiling from source. It would def. be handy for huge compilation tasks like KDE, GNOME, etc...
Nothing, as long as he's now using the HURD.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I think it's insane to reformat and reinstall a Linux distro every year a new version comes out.
The way Gentoo is set up, you never have to do that, ever. You upgrade as you go. Gentoo 2004.1 came out, but that's just the installation CDs...I installed using 1.4 CDs months ago, and I'm up to date as one would be if they installed this weekend (I love doing "emerge -upD world" and seeing what's new).
Speaking of FreeBSD, I'd love to see Gentoo's Portage ported to FreeBSD. I know about ports, but I just like how Portage works. Feels more elegant to me.
It seems the most common complaint is the time it takes Gentoo to compile anything. The flexibility this system provides is well worth the extra few minutes rather than installing *.deb or *.rpm files and entering dependency hell.
Not to mention that Portage readily installs binary packages just fine if you do a Stage 3 install.
Enterprise users do not want to compile anything. A Redhat install can be done in under 10 minutes on a fast machine with a fast network. An install that takes two days and requires manual work at every step is simply not reasonable.
Enterprise users do not generally care about performance to the extent that a different compiler option tailored for their CPU will benefit.
Enterprise users do care about the software being tested with the exact same compiler and compiler options and libraries that they are using.
Gentoo will never have widespread enterprise use. The idea is just silly.
What admin needs new software now? You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them! Which is why you have a TEST machine, on which you can do any compiling you may need to. Moreover, it really doesn't take that long to compile most programs on modern hardware. Ok, maybe it takes a while on that old 200MHz machine in the basement, but barring that... and its not like you build KDE every day (or at all on a server).
I see the future of Gentoo not only as a meta distrobution, but also as a comunication method between developers and users
The biggest thing about Gentoo for me hasn't just been the fact that I can get anything (fresh out of the oven), but the fact that I can report bugs, and get feedback within hours....I can go to the gentoo forums and get answeres within minutes
It's because I feel the future of linux is in its ability to progess, to find new way's of doing thing s, to find new......on a five year mission to .... well you get the idea.
Gentoo is just plain FUNNN!!!!
once more into the breach
If I had "the" money, I'd be up and running with it now!!
We will take some random people in the following magnitudes and administer an OS test to see who's really king. Now I agree that Windows has a greater advantage because of market share, HOWEVER that's the real world and the one we play in.
30, 9th graders selected at random
30, Fresh high school grads
60, members of the general population
30, persons age 30-60
30, persons age 60+
30 small business _owners_ not in IT
FYI this is 210 people.
We will have them attempt the following tasks Using the latest versions of
WindowsXP,
RedHat,
Gentoo,
Linspire
OS X
Participants will be timed and rewarded with a prize if they succeed in their tasks, say a candy bar (to simulate a work environment where they would get money)
There will be two tasks to do 1/2 of each group will do each
The first half will have to complete the tasks without any documentation other than what is provided standard ON SCREEN.
The second half with a full printed manual including screen shots and detailed step by step instructions
Our tests will be
Install the OS (I realize this isn't realistic cause every Mac already comes with it but it'll have to do)
Create 5 users
Log in as one of the users and complete the following tasks
Write a complex document with some formatting and colors and save it as a HTML document
configure e-mail and send that HTML document to someone
make a spread sheet and save it to a location and upload it to a website
Users will have to find and install all the software to do these things either durring the OS install or from the Internet, they can make 2 phone calls durring the test
Then we'll see what OS is really easiest and fastest and cheapest, we'll assume these people all cost $0.002 per second... Meaning that the commercial OSes already start with quite an expensive handicap.
I'm sure with some more time and thought one could make this more fair but I personally expect OSX (Followed by Linspire) to win the on screen only event by a wide margin even considering the heavy price tag of the OS (we'll just assume a PC that costs as much G4 to level the feild) Most of us have seen a newbie use OS X and it's almost like they know what their doing..... For the well documented test I would expect Linspire to win followed by RedHat.
Now test could be expanded to setting up a small office network typical to a small business, I once again expect OS X to clean up
Wow, so you mean I can upgrade Slackware 8 from Slackware 9 with no problems? How about Red Hat 7 to Red Hat 8?
Yeah...
You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them!
:-D
Apparently you are not employed by Microsoft
Microsoft admits major flaw in critical Windows 2000 security patch
As a side note, you mentioned building KDE. I built KDE using konstruct right after 3.2 came out, and it took the better part of 8 hours on a 2.4GHz/1GB RAM workstation.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I was a little surprised by the internetnews.com article about Gentoo being used in the enterprise. Kurt Lieber (of Gentoo) even claims that "Gentoo is being widely used in corporations today", although his definition of "widely used" may be different than mine.
As great as Gentoo is, it's not high on the list of distros that I would have guessed the business world would embrace. Granted, Gentoo's flexibility does seem to make it well-suited for certain enterprise-level applications; and if Debian can be adapted for commercial consumption in the form of distributions like Xandros, then I suppose Gentoo could as well.
Lieber's target market is a niche market. While I certainly agree that Linux' future shouldn't be arbitrated by one or two vendors, I'm not convinced that the enterprise niche Lieber describes is best served by a commercial version of Gentoo. Regardless, it's unclear from the article whether or not he would actually commercialize Gentoo given the chance.
But the popularization of Gentoo's approach could have other connotations. It's easy to relegate Portage to the realm of Linux curiosities that never could have mainstream appeal. On the surface, it seems that way. But this is exactly the sort of system I would expect to see standardized once our network infrastructure and home computer technology matures to the point at which package acquisition and build time are negligible.
But for the time being, we're still a point at which we're trying to establish some solid standards in the Linux world, and as much as I want RPM to go away, it won't any time soon. So while I don't foresee Portage triggering any revolutions within the next few years, the concept will evolve and its day will come.
PHBs and Small Business owners tend to be a more interested in flashy marketing than anything else.
Have you ever successfully attempted this? I've tried it before, RH 6.1 --> 6.2 & 7.1/2 --> 7.3, and have NEVER had a successful upgrade. And I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution.
I've used Mandrake, Red-Hat, SuSE and now Gentoo. Gentoo was by far the most difficult one to install.
It also taught me more about linux than any other distro I ever tried. Now, that's great for me and anyone else who has the *time* to learn, but bad for someone just wanting a desktop they can uber-customize. The answer is, of course, an installer that is easy and painless. I think there should be 2 ways to do this with a gui installer:
1.) The advanced option to install everything from source using either the ~x86 or the stable lines.
2.) The option to install everything from GRP, or the already previously built packages that Gentoo already offers for all the major software. If you need it quick, there is no reason in hell this gui process should take any longer than mandrake, red hat or suse. Plus, once it's installed you can still either emerge the stuff you need or even go back and compile the entire friggin thing in the background with just ONE command. I can see this being the most used option.
Either way, what Gentoo needs is a graphic installer and it needs it BAD. The funny thing is, there is a whole other class of Gentoo zealot that would rail against this and proclaim from the top of the mountain that it is unclean and an offense against God himself. You can still use the CLI guys, just because a gui exists won't mean you'll be forced to use it.
As for using Gentoo in the enterprise enviornment, that would take some balls and someone confident of their abilities to do so. But if they can do it, why the hell not?
emerge -u giant balls
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
the most common complain (and mistake) about gentoo is that it "takes forever compiling" etc etc yadda yadda....
:)
:) i would never, ever trade it for other distro....
this is BS....
first: I have like 20 servers running gentoo, the oldest of them is a pentium3-1ghz...
even on this machine mostly everything compiles just fine (doesn't take long).
2nd: for the things that WOULD take a lot to compile on this hardware, I can always resort to the binary packages (emerge -k)... kde/openoffice/gnome/etc gets installed in seconds....
3rd: most my servers don't need kde/X/gnome/etc...
4th: if there is a package i use often, and it's not avaliable as a precompiled package... i can just have emerge "create" one and store it on the network... if i do an emerge things get compiled from source... if I do emerge -k , the portage will first look into my packages dir to see if it finds a precompiled version, and if it does... use it...
5th: distcc is your friend... i have 5 xeons 3.06ghz on my distcc farm... talk about fast compiles
6th: gentoo rox
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
I hate KDE, but kportage is a decent app, and lets you merge, unmerge, inject, clean, prune, and depclean.
All's true that is mistrusted
ya, sure 9th graders, doing spread sheets, I wonder what those two calls will be about?
once more into the breach
it looks like they have a really good idea down. profiling and a nice set of options based on the current plan. If i werent too busy right now with school and a diskless cluster im working on id probably be helping develope it. I have yet to here anyone who has used gentoo that doesnt like it. (just thought i should note this) With regard to the enterprise i can definitely see it going their especially if they atleast provide the option of using a official central binary repository (the infrastructure is already in portage and chinstrap provides a partial tree). A master binhost could be set up fairly easily for a few use/cflags "profiles". This would atleast help with the "so slow to setup" argument because u could install recent pure binary then recompile nicely in the background.
I love gentoo but still wouldn't run it on a critical server because of the compile demands.
I feel an enterprise version of gentoo needs some sort of master compiling server that can build binary packages (perhaps optimized for each arch in the company). That way, every 90 days (or whatever period, the IT department can build a 'cutting-edge' stable release and subject it to their quality control procedures.
Once it has passed, they need to produce the binary packages, and every system in the company can then emerge those (binary) packages on a nightly basis.
It doesn't make sense to have all your workstations and servers compiling everything for themselves.
Not that I don't love Gentoo or anything, but mind you, adds more than just an "extra few minutes" to the installation process. In all, the first couple of times I installed Gentoo on my laptop (stage 1 and then stage 2), it took nearly a week before I felt OK about disconnecting it from the Internet to take it with me anywhere.
>> So? What's wrong with not using Linux?
> Nothing, as long as he's now using the HURD.
Or GNU/kFreeBSD.
This is *exactaly* how I always install Gentoo (done a dozen+ servers now). Install from stage3 and then recompile the system with optimized CFLAGS (--emptytree option).
Someone else already had your idea and implemented it!
And yes portage builds in the background with customizable nice level too.
Is that really the point of Gentoo though? Gentoo is a META distro, NOT a full distro. If you read the handbook, there is a lot of emphesis on making Linux YOUR way. What's to stop an IT department from taking Gentoo as a basis, and implimenting it to the demands you specify? Gentoo already has a way to lighten the compile burden through distributed compiling, you can already set up your own portage system in a corperate style intranet for easy, fast access to packages, that, surprise surprise, can be hand picked by the head IT guy.
The bottom line is Gentoo is about CHOICE, thats why the things so damned hard to install for newbies, (even with the wonderful Gentoo Handbook).
For myself, I've tried other Linux distro's and have run into a lot of frustration when those distro's don't follow a regulated norm, (IE they liked to make up directories not specified in a program original make file, or other stupid things like that.) Gentoo is the closet you can come to a LFS (Linux From Scratch) system, except with Gentoo you have a way to deal with installed packages in a semi-organized fashion, (instead of having to remember every little tid bit about where every single file, etc is stored, so you can hunt it down to delete it so you can do that upgrade you want).
"slpv6 development was going well and all the senior developers were happy with my progress. But unfortunately, two lower-level Stampede developers wanted to control the slpv6 project. They didn't like the direction I was taking, and they spent most of their time insulting the new slpv6 system. Though I spent hours in heated development discussions defending the proposal against their attacks, we weren't able to resolve anything. Eventually it became clear that they were just naturally argumentative and wouldn't be happy until they had their way. Fortunately for me, my project had the approval of the senior Stampede developers. But these discussions began to wear on me and made Stampede development very unpleasant. Ugh!
I couldn't avoid these guys since I had to hang out on #stampede to chat with higher-level developers. And every time I was on the channel they became combative, trying to undermine my work. They'd use devious techniques like calling for development meetings (really just an opportunity to insult my work in front of the senior developers). They'd also try to call for votes, attempting to seize control of Stampede. Of course they'd only call for a vote when they thought they had convinced enough people to agree with them. Throughout all of this I continued my slpv6 development. Needless to say, the senior development loved my work and wanted me to continue (without their support I wouldn't have been able to stick it out). "
That seems a bit paranoid to me. He managed to deduce this all on his own, that people were plotting to undermind him in devious ways?
How about I put forth my own theory of what happened here.
A couple guys, who were probably twits, wanted to have more/all influence with the project. They called meeting and things because they were worried about where the project was going and their lack of control to "fix" it. Many people honestly think they can do a better job than someone else, it's not "devious" for them to try and get votes(hey that's democracy) or to to have heated and passionate arguments about things they believe that needs to be better/different.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Ever sense I made an attempt to install Gentoo a year ago, (that time I just didn't have the time to learn it, so I gave up on installing it, though, I am now writing on a computer that is 100% Gentoo ;-) ). I have pondered and wanted to start a project that would write a GUI installer from scratch. I love doing an install from the command line, its taught me a hellva a lot (more than ANY other Linux distro) the thing is, even though I could possably do another Gentoo install from the command line in my sleep, I've done it that many times, something as easy as a GUI installer would be nice.
That being said, I would almost prefer said installer came from outside the core Gentoo Developers, (the guys at gentoo.org). If a group where to focus SOLY on an INSTALLER, then that group could tweak it, and make it better, better than it could have been if it was combined with a true distro project.
Perhaps in future of said, hypothetical installer, it could be ported to not just install Gentoo, but Debian, slackware, or even LFS.
I've upgraded from slackware 7.2 all the way to slackware 9. There is this amazing program that comes with slackware called "tar". You use it to install slackware packages.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think we should level the playing field just a tad. First of all, if you're taking that broad of a selection of people (well, it's not THAT broad but broad enough for testing), you have to consider that a decently high percentage of said people have trouble installing a program on their computer and that's with propmting, so, I would personally ditch the OS installation idea right off the bat.
Next up, creating the users. I can count on my hands how many people on their home based computers actually have more than one user created on their systems (and this is regardless of OS), let alone 5 users. If we're going to keep this real world, we have to look at real world situations.
Third. The setting up of email is a good one. Everyone basically has to do that at some point and time (except people using AOL basically) so that is a good test. Another good one would be setting up the internet connection, and I am talking about making the people setup a dialup connection. Broadband is cheating in some respects and a bit more difficult in others.
Fourth, navigation of the OS/GUI. Make them find various programs and give the location. Nothing really obscure, but make them have to use the search functions of the OS/GUI. This will test how well the various OSs handle searches and how intuitive they are to people (if you're wondering, I'm looking thoroughly and only at usability here).
Fifth, ask the users to create a folder in a given location, create a document to put into it, save this document to the removable media of your choice, and hand it to another person to open. This will test interoperability between platforms/programs. It is cheating to put the same Office Suite (hell, leave out the office suite, just use supplied text editors) on every system, regardless of availability.
I can go on and on with this and I am seriously going to try and carry out these tests in the not too distant future. Some of these things I would use to gauge how well students were comprehending what I was teaching during Linux and MCSE courses. Others are jujst ramblings off the top of my head. hehehe Anyways, it's time to eat and I'm hungry...
CliffH
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I've tried it before, RH 6.1 --> 6.2 & 7.1/2 --> 7.3, and have NEVER had a successful upgrade. And I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution.
I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution... NEVER had a successful upgrade.
I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution... NEVER had a successful upgrade.
I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution... NEVER had a successful upgrade.
I'm pretty damned good at admining the Redhat distribution... NEVER had a successful upgrade.
GNU/kFreeBSD???
Sad truth - this looks like an April Fools Joke!
If this project is real (and I guess Debian is known much better for their scruples than their sense of humour) then they really need a name change.
Either that or I should register K-Free-GNU-GKLin-RMS-BSDSpire.org right now.
You know, when they fix a binary package they're changing the SOURCE CODE first. The package maintainer then sends the bug fixes to the developer of the program and they are integrated into the next release.
How the hell did you think these programs got bug fixes all this time?
Seriously folks. The level of naivety is through the roof. The guys that package the programs are the ones that fix it. Just because a script is compiling it for Joe Schmoe doesn't mean he's going to jump in and start submitting patches. We don't WANT everyone to submit patches and bug reports. They must filter up through the proper channels as a matter of course to keep the noise from drowning out the signal for the poor developers at the receiving end.
Damn. I just got my grandmother comfortable saying that I work on "Leenuks". Now she has to learn "gunookfreebisd". Fat chance!
I find it funny that you say gentoo cannot get grub to work on the first boot on your systems when gentoo does not in fact install grub... you do.
/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, etc. This is the same naming convention lilo uses. In Grub, my drives are named (hd0, hd1), etc. This is quite unintutitive to Linux folks.
/boot) that is different from the Linux concept of "/". This was not obvious to me the first time I started poking away.
/boot/grub and a /boot/boot/grub symlinked to /boot/grub to convince things to work properly. This was not immediately obvious to me.
What you actually mean is that left to install grub on your own you can't make it work. Personal problem? I think so.
The question is whether it is reasonable to insult him for it.
I do not consider myself an inept Linux user. I am certainly not the most knowledgeable person out there, but I have been using Linux heavily and exclusively for about five years now. I contribute to a number of open-source projects, have done some driver and other low-level work, and am pretty familiar with how my system and OS work compared to most of the people I know. I've blown away my system pretty severely and repaired it by hand many times. I set up newer kernels, debugged many a nasty problem with diagnostic tools, and learned a lot of the interesting quirks of Linux. This doesn't mean that I'm the greatest tech guru out there -- it does mean that I have an interest in learning how things work and have done so for some time. I would even venture to guess that I probably know my way around a Linux box better than you do.
I started playing around with grub a while back -- I wanted to see what it was like. I could not get it working the first time I started poking at it, and ended up putting it off for ages until I decided to go back and spent several days getting it to work.
Grub is not trivial to learn or use, even if it is "just a bootloader". Insulting someone because they have difficulty using it seems quite ridiculous.
Among the pitfalls I ran into with grub:
* Grub uses a completely different system for naming devices than Linux does. In Linux, my ATA drives are named
* Grub was neither (at the time I first started playing with it) very well documented nor long on good Linux-specific tutorials.
* Grub has a concept of "/" (generally starting in
* Grub does not provide the best diagnostic output in the world. It is a bootloader, so it's not easy to use diagnostic tools on it to figure out what exactly it might be using wrong.
* When playing around with a bootloader (or anything that mucks around with the disk at a raw level) you generally want to be terribly careful if you have anything already on the disk. This makes experimentation even more difficult.
* Red Hat builds grub with a different setup than the default mode of grub operation -- I have a
* I had a motherboard with an old BIOS at the time that happened to hang if it detected a particular hard drive at boot. I worked around the problem in the only way possible -- by telling the BIOS to ignore the drive size and letting Linux detect it on its own way. Possibly as a result, grub worked with an entirely different set of hard drive numbers when I ran it in Linux and when I ran it as a bootloader-initiated stand alone shell (i.e. in a situation where I had essentially no way to troubleshoot problems). Lilo, which uses Linux drive names, cruised right along with no difficulties, unlike grub.
* grub uses many similar-but-different features relative to lilo. My grub.conf contains "default=0", where I number potential choices. My lilo.conf contains "default=linux.bak" -- I name potential choices.
Finally, grub provides some nice features that lilo doesn't, but the functionality that I gained was probably not worth the effort that I put into getting grub working properly on a s
May we never see th
I am a huge fan of Gentoo, having used it for a year and a half on my laptop. When I had to replace the HD after it began the click of death, I decided to look for an i686-optimized binary distro that wouldn't require me to leave the computer on all night, eating away at my battery and HD lifetime. I found on OSnews, ran the install, rebooted, and have been an even happier customer since moving.
Archlinux is, granted, a young distro with a steep learning curve and fewer package choices then Gentoo. I still found it had the most of the benefits that attracted me to Gentoo in the first place: speed, up-to-date software, and a good package manager (a program aptly named 'pacman' which allows me to keep my system up-to-date at all times in a single command (pacman -Syu))
Arch isn't for everyone, at this point I feel it is for those fairly comfortable with Linux, but it shows great potential. If you have time and want to try something new, Arch is my recommendation.
s Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro?
Maybe after they update the install process. Some scripts, a GUI or even a text menu would go a long way towards making Gentoo a bigger player.
I have been using Linux for 6 years and Gentoo was a pain in the ass the first time I installed it.
Then again, so was Red Hat 4.x my first time installing...
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is a dumb experiment. Gentoo is not aimed at the desktop.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Would I be right in thinking that Gentoo would allow me to specify certain sets of binaries to be statically linked? Easily?
I have bucketloads of space. Having critical things like tar, emerge, vgscan et al statically linked is *well* worth the few K or *gasp* maybe even a few *M*
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"There is 43 changed configuration files. Please check them."
Changed files included files like hosts, passwd, etc. WTF.
No war, couse I'm Free as BSD.
<flame>Sometimes I wonder if there are any real sysadmins that support gentoo, or if it's just a distro for a bunch of kids to use at home. Which isn't to say that having kids at home beta-test all the latest stuff isn't useful. It's just annoying when they start telling the real admins how to run the shop. Ok, /. kiddies, mod me into oblivion.
I wonder what the Gentoo guy would do in six months. That is not a very long time when you have to set up a distribution chain, a working support model, hire and train people to make it all happen. You also need to get your platform certified for enterprise use with application vendors, work with hardware manufacturers to certify hardware for your operating system, you name it. I seriously doubt they would be "up and running" in six months if they started today.
The secret to a successful
I fail to see the benefit of gentoo in a work environment. In my experience, it requires nearly as much tinkering to "get working right" (ie, trying multiple package versions) as LFS. emerge simple streamlines some of the steps normally taken with LFS.
Some serious shortcomings in gentoo besides the above mentioned which make it inadequate for such a task:
- It's time consuming to install. Time is money. Companies don't like spending money if they don't have to.
- emerge doesn't do dependency checking when removing packages. For example, if I accidentally remove libc instead of glibc (for example), I've just fscked myself.
- there doesn't appear to be any significant review process as Debian and RedHat has in terms of stability - Debian in particular. For instance: Someone used the fact that gentoo only requires the updating of the source code to update all gentoo machines. This isn't a good thing - it doesn't allow for a sufficient review of the code to make sure that there aren't serious problems with it. Contrast that to the armies of reviewers that debian has - even to the relatively new packages which are currently in sarge.
My personal experience with gentoo is that it's too much of a hastle to install - only marginally more irritating than LFS. The only reason to do LFS, IMO, is if you're an anal retentive control freak, have some sort of philosophical bent, or you're doing it for the learning experience - once.
I do know experienced users that use gentoo, however the majority of them are of the "I used Redhat for a short while, it sucked and broke a lot. Then I used slack, because it's leet, and now I'm using gentoo because it's leeter." Not many of them have even tried debian; several that I've convinced to try debian have started to turn their backs to gentoo to some degree. Nearly all of the people that I'd trust to babysit my servers run either debian predominantly or run multiple distros and have experience with all of them. I'd likely not want to work with someone that's so reckless to put such an untested system as gentoo in a critical role.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"the oldest of them is a pentium3-1ghz"
sounds a bit like "no, I'm not really annoyed by traffic jams when commuting in my helicopter"
GRUB is complex and has different syntax than linux because it's not designed to only be a linux bootloader. It's designed to be able to boot multiple OSs (*NIX, Windows, OS/2, Be, whatever) in a consistant and OS-syntax-agnostic way. It's actually much more like Open Firmware (except that it's soft instead of firm)
Now, if you are just booting linux, then the only real advantage it has is a boot splash screen, and that probably isn't worth the extra hassle. But, you don't have to use it! Last time I checked (1.4rc?), Gentoo supported LILO as well - instructions for it should be in the install doc right after the ones for GRUB.
Finally, complaining that you have to install GRUB yourself with Gentoo when with RedHat it "Just Works" is a non-issue, because if you're using Gentoo, it's because you want to have control over everything, and want to understand how it all works. I personally like it, and also think that having to install manually is worth it for the ease of maintainance ("emerge foo"), but if you don't want to deal with the gory details of your system, just use something else instead (I recommend MacOSX - it's great!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I accidentally posted in this thread already, so I can't do it. :-(
Some pretty strongly anti-Apple moderators we have today. I wasn't aware that being the basis of Mac OS XI was such a bad thing.
"it should be the basis of Mac OS XI in a few years"
As a user of both Gentoo and Mac OS X, I think having Portage on the Mac would be the greatest thing EVER!
Oh, and by the way, they are actually working on that - see gentoo.org and metapkg.org - so you're right; it will be available in MacOS XI - the only question is whether Apple will officially support it : )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you are having touble installing gentoo or does not understand the handbook manual on the oficial webpage of gentoo i recommend you to take a look at the anaconda-gentoo graphical installer that victor padra make just go to: http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/35
The flexibility this system provides is well worth the extra few minutes rather than installing *.deb or *.rpm files and entering dependency hell.
It looks like the time for you to read the APT HOWTO.
I have been using Debian for the last couple of years without having to specify any dependencies or using the deb tool at all.
/wojci
From here:
"[M]y new machine wasn't very stable.
Obviously my first reaction was to go back down to 2x366Mhz. But now I experienced an even stranger problem. As long as my machine kept the CPUs chugging away, the machine didn't lock up. But if I left the machine idle overnight, there was a good probability that the system would lock up completely. Yes, an idle bug -- argh!"
And thus Gentoo was born: as a way to prevent idle bugs by keeping the CPU active 24/7!
Posters recognized by their sig,
Yes, building the big stuff takes a while. Fortunately, big KDE/Gnome/OpenOffice/etc upgrades don't come out all that often. And when they do, its not hard to let them build while you carry on with whatever it is you were doing.
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
Firstly, making your commercial OS' have this handicap is going to mean that your results are going to always skew in favour of the free OS'.
Secondly, getting someone to write a document, set up email and then send something isn't a test of the OS'. Its a test of the applications.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I used Gentoo a few days ago while trying out Colinux on top of Win 2k. I like its approach of distributing sources instead of binaries. Shamit http://shamit.org
And if you, as an admin, take less than an hour to test your rpm (or whatever) software installation, on a mission-critical server, you're not doing your job.
Are you sure you want to say that people should test software installations on mission critical servers? Personally, I like to test them on non-critical machines and, after a successful test, install them on critical servers.
The secret to a successful
Furthermore, with commodity processors, building a compile farm shan't be too difficult.
Although, if I hadn't dallied with Linux From Scratch for a while, Gentoo would've been Genzero for me. It's just not for the FNG.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And if you, as an admin, take less than an hour to test your rpm (or whatever) software installation, on a mission-critical server, you're not doing your job. I will give you that it takes a long time to compile most things, but in my book, it's time well spent.
As much as I love Gentoo, this comparison makes no sense. When you're compiling, you're still not testing your software installation. You're sitting there waiting for the installation to complete. The Redhat administrator can install and test his installation before you're even done compiling.
And who said anything about a mission critical servers? Most people aren't running mission critical servers, especially Gentoo users. They're tend to be more desktop oriented, so you're talking about a niche market. If you're running a mission critical server, you always have a completely seperate box to test new software and there's usually no rush to upgrade, barring security updates. In fact, I'd venture to say you may be more vulnerable with Gentoo on a mission critical server because you need to take the time to compile, leaving your exploitable machine open while your Redhat friend took 15 seconds to install the latest security update.
All that said, I love Gentoo. I use it on my desktop. It's by far my favorite distro. I just realize that Gentoo's approach isn't flawless in itself, and that compiling everything doesn't always make sense. But for myself, I like it.
Most people could probably do with 'emerge kdebase', which is only a couple of packages (arts, kdelibs and kdebase).
At least, that's what I start with, and then somethimes add more kde-packages later.
If you're doing this you probably have a test server which is identical to your production server (at least if you have a lot of servers which are essentially clones). In any case, that is the only way to be sure you won't have dependancy problems when you deploy to production.
In that case while you are doing the initial compile on your test server you do an emerge -b , so that it tar's your binary files. Then just distribute the tar to your production servers once you are happy and do an emerge -k. You can skip the distribution step if you have network mounted filesystems (which would probably be the case in an environment like this).
Gentoo supports binary packages as readily as source-based ones, just not by default...
Woops! So much for posting AC dag nab it. Oh well, now you all know, I'm a raving 100% thouroughly zealous anti-Zionist. There, I said it. Now onto other things...
I wouldn't say "most" things. Certainly, you won't find instant gratification upgrading KDE, but "most" software compiles and installs in just a few minutes. On a fast machine, the significant latency factor is the network, not the compile.
Gentoo supports binary packages as well as source packages. I use the Mozilla and OpenOffice binaries myself. Usually, though, I just run "emerge -Uu world" before I go to bed and don't notice compile times.
The two best things about Gentoo, though, is the ability to have multiple versions of the same package at the same time and the lack of dependancy nightmare. On my headless servers, I use the "-X" USE flag and can install packages like ImageMagick without having X installed. Binary distributions have to provide O(N*N) different packages to support all of the different compile time options and dependancies, or you end up either (a) installing a bunch of software you don't really want, or (b) end up compiling it yourself anyway.
--- SER
Dan had a screenshot of his desktop that featured Tux waving an Israeli flag. I guess that can be considerd "on" the Gentoo site.
Somehow I believe if it was something like a Canadian flag you wouldn't have thought twice about it.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Correct I probably would not have thought twice. But then, if it showed Tux waiving the flag of the Third Reich, or Sig Heiling the Fuhrer, you and others would likely not think it so innocent. It's the politics of what that Israeli flag mean that miff be like me so much. (disposition of thousands if not millions, illegal assasinations, house demolitions and razings on property, racist apartheid-like segregations, etc.)
It certainly appears as if this distro will branch into a profit-making enterprise/home edition. I have been using this distro for some time now and am impressed with Portage. I would certainly entertain the idea of investing into them if it went public.
For what its worth, compiling big things like KDE is usually a disk-bound process. That is - the speed of your hard drive is probably much more of a determining factor in your compile time than processor speed or amount of RAM (once you're above a certain certain modest level, which you passed a long time ago on a 2.4GHz/1GB RAM machine). That has been my experience anyway. I compile Mozilla quite often and that is definitely disk-bound. I use a pretty nice PowerBook with the fastest hard drive I could get in it at the time and my compile times are terrible compared to desktop machines due to the fact that I have to use a drive that is slimmed down for portables. I'd much rather use a machine with a slower processor and less RAM but a faster hard drive.
No looking for parts here and there, just "emerge mplayer" and BAM! It's all there, working great with all the codecs in one shot.
Fast and clean. Gentoo rocks.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Why do so many of the gentoo-zealots only mention the speed optimizations as a reason to run gentoo? :). The speed improvement (that atleast I haven't noticed) is just a bonus.
The reason why *I* run gentoo is because it allows me to very easy customize the features of all packages. Also it very easy to apply custom patches and still have the package managed by portage (therefor knowing when there is a new version out
--
In soviet russia gentoo compiles you!
The funny part is, that people make gentoo sound like you are obligated to watch it compile or something. If you aren't immidatly using the software (or maybe even while it's still running) you can let it compile in the background. As long as I can compile any major component in less than 9 hours I can always just start it before I go to work and come home to an upgraded system.
has anyone done any benchmarks conserning the much talked about speed benefits of Gentoo vs (Slack | Debian) ?
-no sig allowed
Of cause because that's the real world and the one we play in it will end up like this:
30, Fresh high school grads will end up doing the Install the OS, Create 210 users steps so all the others can do the other tasks.
The heavy price tag of the OS X will play a rule then, and might disqualify it even as option.
gentoo might actually be quite a good option in this realistic scenario.
Sorry. I just didn't understand that you disliked all Israelis.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
A fix in the source is a fix for every distro,
That's an excellent point.
I suspect that Gentoo and Debian users, per capita feedback more about bugs, fixes to the source application authors than users of other distros. OTOH, those other distro users probably gripe to Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake support and then those gripes are fielded and represented to the source maintainers that way.
But the more layers of communication and representation, the less efficient the communication. The best communication, of course, is when you develop the application that you use yourself ("eat your own dogfood").
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Unfortunately, in the corporate world, it isn't just support, it's liability. If some programmer for Red Hat sticks in a back door and our source code is stolen, we'd sue Red Hat (probably into the ground). You just can't do that with GenToo, because it's not really a business yet (or at least, much of one). That's why my company only supports Red Hat and SUSE at the moment (not a decision I have any input on, so don't bitch to me about other possible choices that would work, if any). They're decent sized companies with enough assets (and probably insurance) that we stand to get something out of a large lawsuit.
Put simply, you and/or GenToo probably don't carry 500 million plus in liability insurance or the assets to make up the difference that a 2 billion dollar software company would sue you for if their software got stolen through a back-door you put (or allowed) in.
As a Jew and a developer of Gentoo, this is not something that was intentional. I signed up as a dev because I love Gentoo and felt that I had something unique to offer to the distro. It was only after I had signed up that I found out there are a few other Jews. You make it sound like every other developer is living in Israel.
What I'm about to say might seem controversial, and that's well adue because the issue itself is controversial. I believe that Daniel Robbins, while seemingly great person, is not really Jewish. He conforms to a group called Jews of Jesus, a group which I believe is trying to systematically destroy the Jewish religion by converting Jews to Christianity. (They, Jews for Jesus, lure Jews into thinking it's okay to both acknowledge Jesus as their "savior" and be Jewish. This completely contradicts the foundation of Jewish faith, thereby the Jews of Jesus have stripped another Jew away from Judaism and added him or her onto Christianity.) For more information on Jews for Judaism, a group which combats the ongoing "battle" against Jews for Jesus, see this website.
I thoroughly believe that the religion of a vast minority in the distribution should not determine anyone's stance on it. It is not as if Gentoo Technologies receives funding from the Chabad or the Union for Reformed Judaism.
However I know there are some people who are just plain anti-Semitic like the parent poster. If a Jew is involved with anything, such people will automatically disassociate themselves from it. They will go on to say that the is part of the Jewish plan to take over the world. Or something like that.
I just hope not everyone is so close-minded in the OSS industry, otherwise our outlook is bleek. We need all the help we can get, from every group, every creed, and every religion.
This is a bit of a pain in the neck, and one thing I'm looking forward to out of the recent X forks. One of the forks seems to be promising a separation of the client libs from the server. Of course you want to build a server without an X server, but it would be kind of nice to have X clients on that machine to run over your ssh tunnel.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Debian has a future (already doing great) for enterprises.
everybody til now insists that "emerge takes care of everything" when fact is, so does Apt-Get. Many threads/replies I'ev seen here go about like this:
I'm a noob that tried mandrake, RH and suse (the 3 "easy user-friendly" distro) and rpm's blow but emerge always does the job!
---------
You people saying that are ignorants of APT. You search for a package, it finds the package with all needed dependencies to run and it sets them up with ease (with questions asked if needed like configuring X-server).
I'm not being in any way a zealot but think about it for a second.
do Enterprises need to have the LATEST of the LATEST in terms of packages? no. A lot of servers still run on 2.4.23-25 kernels using Red Hat ~7-8. That doesn't mean that RH is good. Just means enterprises set their goals and being "UP TO DATE TO THE LATEST DAMN RELEASE" is not their priority AFAIK as opposed to functionnality and stability and time-efficiency. That's when debian kicks in. apt mirrors don't contain the latest packages but they ALL work and it CAN'T be easier than this to install/setup anything found.
Gentoo's installation is not the problem. Everybody can READ so anybody can install it. Problem is the time wasted to be optimized. Compiling is not a problem for an amature but it most probably is for a company trying to setup a running server within a laps of time.
oh, right, Do the gentoo users dare to use slackware? heh. IF anything, people should learn how linux REALLY works before going on and bitch about RPM'S WHICH WORK (just select the RMP's made by a known company/group and get it for that specific distro and it should work. always have for me) and then moving onto gentoo and being a lazy bastard.
Actually where gentoo is really nice is on the amd64 platform (few distros have stable amd64 ports). After installing in 64bit mode and playing around with the emul32 libraries I decided that I would rather just have a 32 bit environment embedded in my 64 bit one. There are some apps and plugins that are not ported to amd64 yet.
Since I already had 32 bit emulation enabled in the kernel I simply created a new dir in / , chrooted in 32bit mode and did a full install in the background. Since I am a developer I am able to test 32bit and 64 bit apps side by side without rebooting. I can also just boot the 32bit install if I want. I have even cross mounted my home directory so that I could use the same source tree. Having done the gentoo install only a handfull of times this was still easy.
I know people say they want a good installer but I see this experience as a primary example of why I dont want one. Some people like flexibility others need point and drool. Either is fine but both would be great.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
Dude, of course you test the initial compile on a test server. After you distribute it to your production servers, do you not test it to make sure it works right?
bash: rtfm: command not found
also makes it hard to support by a company? i.e. If I roll my own kernel and optimizations for an app, will the company be able to support that, as well as thousands of other combos?
Gentoo's guy figures if they had the cash they'd be up and running in 6 months
:)
If I had the cash I could be up and running (away) in hours
The only other version of Linux I had used before Gentoo was an old Redhat 4.5 distro. Then my friend got me hooked on Gentoo.
The first time I set it up, I think it took me 2 days because I screwed up so much stuff, and had to do a lot of troubleshooting.
Then I reinstalled it on a new (larger) partition. The second time was much easier. I installed from a stage 2 tarball and had the whole system up and running in about 2 hours. Gentoo really makes you think about your system and how it works. Once you install it, you know a lot more about how Linux works.
What you've described is almost verbatim what you can do using the optional package CD during the Gentoo installation process.
I recently installed Gentoo onto a 1.8GHz P4-M laptop after a hard drive crash obliterated the Debian system I'd cloned from a Knoppix CD. It's quite fast, but not fast enough that I could sit around waiting for X to compile (which is an AMAZINGLY long process, even on a machine like the one I'm using) when I've got coursework to do and no extra computer to work with. As such, the packages cd was a real life-saver.
In addition to the install cd, Gentoo offers a variety of package cds, containing prebuilt packages for a wide variety of applications with common compiler optimizations for different architectures. Using the P4-optimized cd, I was able to get the entire system up and running properly (including X, KDE 3.2, Rhythmbox, OpenOffice.org, Evolution, and a substantial set of other apps) in about 4 hours, which is a heck of a lot faster than the 2 days that people mention as the standard install time.
As for the post-install updating, the best bet is to set PORTAGE_NICENESS=19, as per the AC comment to your post, then run an update world. Voila- quickly full-functioned system, with updates to bleeding edge trickling in as CPU time permits.
Is Gentoo gearing up to be the third major enterprise distro?
Oracle is the litmus test of an "Enterprise" OS. If ou don't have Oracle supporting you, you're an ISP or hobby OS.
And a budget of USD 500 for the systems.
*That* is one huge factor to consider while testing (I can get a PC with 2 years with same day onsite support for that that price).
Price is a major business factor to be considered.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Why don't you just enable sigs, you insensitive clod?
It's funny that I started using CVS and Gentoo around the same time and I decided to put as much of /etc on the Gentoo box I was planning on building into CVS as possible.
/etc after an "emerge system" and see exactly what got changed. Many times "etc-update" prints that it's making "trival changes" to files without bothering to show you. This way you can see the whole thing. Once you are satsified with /etc you can commit the whole thing with one command back into CVS.
/etc/ntp.conf from DHCP server info. I would not have noticed /etc/ntp.conf changing when the system was rebooted if not for "cvs -q diff -u".
I love it this way, I can run "cvs -q diff -u" on
Gentoo is also the first system I used that actually build
Ok, it may not be "mission critical" but I run my servers and my firewalls on Gentoo. It gives me the flexibility and control to know *EXACTLY* what is installed and how it is compiled. I don't have to worry about which services are running or ports are open because the only ones out there are the ones I put there. I don't face any of the cleanup concerns of trying to pare down RH/SUSE/Mandrake to what I want on my system, or to what will fit on my system. They're also a bit more efficient, since I can tune the make options for the specific (read older) hardware. And FWIW, Gentoo is the first distro since RH5.2 (that's five point two) that would install and run worth a flip on my old P90.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
dont forget to export PKGDIR= when using your own binary packages, or else it will look for the binaries on a portage server.
You have to give 9th graders some credit, their smarter than you might think... well sometimes... some of them are just ass end stupid. But mosth 9th graders got Windows down pretty good, they love MSN.
Did you even read it? Honestly? I didn't think so.
I'd say it still has a lot to do with the computer as a whole but you are quite right. The reason for the biz handycap is because in the real world people weigh the cost of something before they buy it. If the test says that Linux costs $50 less than windows but it's not free because of your time then I'll be more incline to believe it. In business time is never free.
Thanks for giving me a huge laugh. I needed it right about now.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Sorry you are not allowed to soil your delicate geek sensibilities buy gazing upon a dissenting view here.
Teenage zealots, meh..
Going back to 1992 is not l33t or kewl no matter how much you insist it is, so why don't you just go compile something (again) & leave those with a life to get on with something more creative.
Gentoo is not for enterprise users. It's not for desktop users. It's a godsend distro for Linux zealots. (and I'm typing that from my own Gentoo box, my free and conscious choice). First off, it's a "bleeding edge" distribution. The packages enter the tree sometimes within hours after release, and they are often from the the beta or even alfa releases. Production environments don't want "more new exciting features, NOW!. They want stability. Desktop users want reasonably well matched and decently stable software, which additionally doesn't takes days to upgrade. It's the zealots (like me) who like to have to squeeze the last MIPS from their CPU, who are ready to risk consistence of their systems, to test new features and enthusiastically greet newly found bugs, cheerfully reporting them to the developers (Yay! I found a bug!). Gentoo is just Slackware on steroids, more powerful, easier to use the power tools, all the gory details at hands of the user properly equipped to mess with them.
Want a distro for production environment? Try RedHat Enterprise or Debian.
Want a desktop? Get Mandrake or Linspire.
Gentoo is a really bad choice for both.
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