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."

Comments

Re:This has a lot of potential

[Vann_v2]

http://porthole.sourceforge.net/


http://www.nongnu.org/kportage/

Re:Enterprise Gentoo Linux?

[Trejkaz]

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. :-)

Re:Gentoo isn't for businesses right now...

[Gunfighter]

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.

Re:Background source-building

[Anonymous Coward]

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").

Re:Gentoo Usage

[birukun]

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)

gentoo and compile times

[diablobsb]

the most common complain (and mistake) about gentoo is that it "takes forever compiling" etc etc yadda yadda....
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 would never, ever trade it for other distro....

Re:Why it's appealing to me

[whoever57]

and I'm up to date as one would be if they installed this weekend

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.

Re:Why it's appealing to me

[pantherace]

There really are only a few you can't: the kernel, all others can be upgraded with the possible exception of glibc changing major versions (not minor versions). Or the one? occasion where the gcc people broke compatibility.

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.

Re:Why it's appealing to me

[OrangeTide]

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.