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: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: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....