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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."
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.
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>
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
I have installed gentoo on numerous systems including several vmware virtual machines, a network engines roadster lx (slightly weird PC), a compaq presario 1692 laptop (k6-based, I wanted to compile everything to get k6 optimizations), and an SGI Indy. In none of these cases did I need to do any major tweaks. Follow the build instructions, edit the /etc/conf.d/net to suit, and that was it.
Gentoo is the most difficult to install of these, but with a little knowledge it can be done without help.
RedHat has refused to install on many systems I have tried it on. Gentoo has failed on none. Both of us can present only anecdotal evidence but gentoo's lack of an installer means there's no installer bugs :) Plus their initial kernel is fantastic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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).
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 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.
What you actually mean is that left to install grub on your own you can't make it work. Personal problem? I think so.
Gentoo's install is unbelievably frustrating? [...] Unless you're a setup.exe jockey, and/or you can't read, there is nothing hard about it. 75% of what is on the page is code snippets that can be copy and pasted right into an SSH session.
Uh, thank you for proving his point. No matter how you cut it, copying and pasting code snippets is a pain in the ass (well, not to mention it's fairly difficult to copy and paste to a system that doesn't work yet...). The first time I installed Debian (Woody), I selected "medium" as the question level to use, figuring that I'd like to maintain somewhat strict control over my system. After about the 20th dialog asking me some stupid assinine question, I just started pressing enter to pretty much all of them, accepting defaults, with the reasoning that it would be easier to fix what was broken once I found out it was broken, rather than sit and read through pages and pages of crap I don't really care about or that doesn't even apply to me (of course, you have to read it before figuring that part out).
How hard is it to make a script to do all those actions on that page? Not very.. Though granted, it is a bit more difficult to make a nice installer that recovers from errors and can handle strange situations -- but it's been done before. Debian's new installer for sarge is great. Set it to high question level, and you barely have to touch it and end up with a working system.
Enterprise speaking (or any business, for that matter), it's not worth the performance benefit of compiling cpu-specific code (vs generic 386 code or whatnot) if you have to spend a hell of a lot more hours setting it up. Those hours cost money - and moreso if it's taking away from billable time. On the other hand, hardware is cheap. If it costs more in time than it does to throw a faster CPU or more ram at it to get more speed in the system, then you've lost the benefit.
Speak before you think
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 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.
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
A better version of emerge would detect that glibc is depended on, and warn you that you're about to break almost everything; at a minimum, a better version of emerge would prevent you from getting into a state where you can't emerge new stuff.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
I don't think you understand the unbelieveable feeling you get when you follow the instructions, line by line, and everything works the first time. Really. I still can't believe it. It makes me want to go back and reinstall just to relive it...
There's a reason we're called Gentoo Zealots. You will be assimilated.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
<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
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)
I'm aware of this.
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.
Being able to specify arbitrary kernel locations has been handy. The problem is that the above guy was getting yelled at for being turned off by Gentoo because he didn't get grub the first time through, which is ridiculous. Maybe he should have used lilo -- beats me.
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!)
Oh, that's absurd and you know it. Having a configuration utility set things up intelligently initially does not preclude you from going through and understanding something. It just means that you have a working system while you learn things. I have used Linux heavily for five years, including as an administrator. If I had waited the at least two that it took to get a really good handle on things to have a usable, fully-set-up system, I'd be a grouchy old codger. Furthermore, there are some things that I use occasionally that I have *zero* interest in understanding. I've had to specifically use sendmail as an MTA before on a single system, but I have no interest in ever learning the entire sendmail syntax.
There are times when you must give up power if you want ease-of-use. RedHat/Gentoo is not one of them, though. Linux is Linux. I have my custom emacs and sawfish environments, my custom print filter, and a number of servers that do all sorts of neat things. Just having a GUI config utility available is no requirement to use it. The idea that people should use Gentoo if they want to know what they're doing is absurd. There are many excellent reasons to use Gentoo -- you may like its package management system, may dislike SuSE's focus on KDE or Red Hat's refusal to include useful software it doesn't consider Free enough (valgrind, a JVM, XFree86, etc). You may even just like the name. Using Gentoo because you want "control" , however, is like using Slackware because you want "control" -- it's just plain nonsensical.
May we never see th
Rriigghhtt. No doubt, any self-respecting business just has to love a system which takes 2 days of compiling to get running.
Gentoo provides GRP - Precompiled binaries, and anyway for a headless server this is a much shorter time.
You know, just in case that hard drive fails.
Ever heard of BACKUPS? And this applies to all distros. Get your server tweaked exactly as you want it is most of the time spend.
They'll love the whole goddamn site being down while you recompile with portage.
I really don't know where you got this from. Why is the site down because of a recompilation done with portage?
For that matter, no doubt they'll love every single patch and upgrade involving hours of compiling on their production machine. Yeah, noone needed those CPU cycles anyway.
Compiling can take place on a different machine (with all the customization you want) and installed as a binary on the production server.
Oh, and I'm sure they'll be delighted to run their server software compiled with your custom flag mix, which occasionally core-dumps, rather than something tested and stable.
So don't be so aggressive about your compile-flags for a production server, of course. All up to you.
Server uptime is for lusers, anyway. If you can squeeze 1ms out of the 500ms taken to serve a page (mostly database time), surely that's worth running an unstable and untested home-brewn compiler flag mix.
Care to show where you go these numbers? I didn't think so.
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
The difference? What if you don't want X support in any of your applications? With gentoo you set the USE flag to "-X" and all those applications that will work on the command line (but also have X support) will not include X support, and thus also not require you to install X. I've done this on more than a couple machines I don't ever intend on having X run on (email server, router, etc).
There are other flags that are extremely useful too (alsa, crypt, ipv6, kde, gtk, gtk2, etc.) that control what options are available to applications. This is another type of 'optimization' most people don't think about.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.
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!
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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.