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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."
http://porthole.sourceforge.net/
http://www.nongnu.org/kportage/
If I understand their strategy correctly, the idea is to keep a 'stable' CVS tag in the manner of FreeBSD, and to distribute that to the enterprise portage tree. The same CVS repository would still be used for all the files, it would just be pointing at a different tag. And as long as it's using Portage, it's Gentoo. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
We've been using Gentoo exclusively on both servers and workstations for well over a year now. The reason we chose Gentoo?
-- Stability
-- Scalability
-- Flexibility
-- Customizability
-- Support
We had a mixed RedHat/Mandrake shop before that. From our point of view, we hope other businesses share your opinion. It gives us the competitive advantage.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
I just did this using the gentoo CDs.
I did a netless install. I install the basics from packages on the CD (KDE, compilers, etc). I got back to work (I just did't have to time to sit and wait).
While working I did "emerge sync; emerge -fu world" which updated the versions and downloaded all the source code.
Then at the end of the work day I logged out (just in case upgrading KDE in-place would screw it up), and did "emerge -u world" at the console.
Voila, my gentoo system was transmogrified with the latest updates.
Pretty cool and I hope they explore this further (i.e., let's have "netless install", "net with precompiled binaries", and "net from scratch").
You must try distcc - it has saved me tons of time!
www.distcc.org - they even offer a link to Gentoo.org for information on how to install and configure. It is so simple I am still amazed that more people are not using it.
distcc offloads compiler jobs to other machines over the network. My PIII 700 laptop now has a little help - the Athlon XP2100 and the PIII 600 perform alot of the work now.
Another thing I use is ccache - I don't exactly know how it works, but it supposedly adds 20 -40% faster compile times.
I also read somewhere in the forums that it is possible to set up a server internal to compile the packages once for the target machines (if they are all the same) and then perform a binary install to each machine from there.
Use distcc to have all the machines compile the packages once; use the binary package emerge to install locally! *SWEET*
Good Luck!
Birukun (here and on the Gentoo forums)
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
There is already a binary flag for emerge, emerge -k. Certain packages (large ones like GNOME, KDE, Evolution, Mozilla, etc... and their dependencies) are provided by what's called GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform). All you have to do is set your PKGDIR in /etc/make.conf to point to a directory where you have these prebuilt packages (which you download an .iso of off a Gentoo mirror), and you're set. Although emerge currently has the capability to fetch prebuilt packages from a mirror that provides them, there are no public mirrors which do so. If you had a bunch of computers that you wanted to run gentoo on though, you could set up an ftp site with prebuilt binaries, point emerge to the ftp, and use emerge -gK to automatically fetch/emerge the packages you want. Otherwise you have to do what I said before, which is to get an .iso with all those prebuilt packages, and simply mount it.
So he'd use apt-build instead.
If Debian zealots rant and rave like children, Gentoo zealots assume that they're the only distro that can compile things from source.
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!
Actually, that's not strictly true. Look for the symlink called /etc/make.profile and you will see that it is pointing to a 1.4 profile (probably /usr/portage/profiles/default-x86-1.4) unless you changed it. The default-x86-1.4 and default-x86-2004.0 profiles are almost identical, but not quite.
Of course these profiles may diverge more in the future.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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).
We have 3 packages. Which really only need a reboot generally on one (and 2 others in very specfic cases), not to mention: Gentoo has a concept of slots, and I am pretty sure that is used to allow multiple glibc versions to exist, so nothing stops working, just new things get built against the new library. In this case, it takes a bit of extra room, but what do you think the compat-* rpms do?
And lets face it, people are still running systems from before the current versions, so this has been handled already. Not to mention, generally there are more bleeding edge gentoo users than other distros, so bugs get found out fairly rapidly.
I've gone through several glibc and gcc upgrades on gentoo. Including the imfamous gcc 3.0 to 3.1 upgrade which wasn't fully binary compatible. Gentoo (and plenty of other distros) easily figure out the depedencies. Also Linux does not stop you from running two versions of glibc at once. So you don't have to migrate everything over at the same time unless you can't afford the RAM.
FreeBSD and NetBSD both cope with this as well. I'm sure Debian and SuSE do too.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of a bus to never-ever land.
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
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.
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...
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
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In soviet russia gentoo compiles you!