Gentoo Linux 2004.2: What You See Is What You Get

editingwhiz writes "Jem Matzan has a cogent analysis of the new Gentoo Linux 2004.2 on Linux.com: "Gentoo Linux is the BSD of GNU/Linux distributions; it's elegant and customizable and you know exactly what you're getting when you install it. No mystery programs, no packages that you have to deinstall because you'll never use, no clutter, and everything is customized to your needs. If you do it right, Gentoo is also faster than your average GNU/Linux distro because everything can be compiled with higher compiler optimizations." (Linux.com is part of the OSTG network.)" Jem also has some criticism of the current version of Gentoo's AMD64 version.

Comments

WYSIWYG

[alatesystems]

What you see and what you get is a bash prompt on the cd boot. It is worse than slackware on the install, unless you get that new-fangled(yes I know red hat uses it and has forever) Anaconda working, but who does that anyway?

Gentoo is great though because you can send a friend a cd and have him pop it in and forward port 22 and do /etc/init.d/sshd start; passwd and then you can remote in and install linux for them, or in my case, on a colo that had a bad hard drive.

I like gentoo, but to set it up right takes quite a while and a lot of patience.

Chris

Re:WYSIWYG

[sbennett]

What you see and what you get is a bash prompt on the cd boot. It is worse than slackware on the install

I'd have said "better than slackware on the install". I realise I'm in the minority here, but I like a simple, text-based install process. After Gentoo's, my favourite installers (of those I've used) are Debian's old-style one and [Free|Open]BSD. They do what they need to, and don't get in the way.

Oh, and the other major plus with Gentoo's install: you don't need an install CD to do it; any Linux system will do. I haven't yet found another distro or OS that lets you do that.

Re:WYSIWYG

[3) profit!!!]

But you learn SO MUCH about how your system works. Afterwards you're able to use your computer so much better, since you know how it got that way in the first place. The documentation guides you very well through the process, too. If you aren't capable of installing from the command line, you won't be able to fix any problems from the command line either.

Re:WYSIWYG

[Boglin]

I've heard this argument before, but it's never quite worked for me. I think there's two ways it can be interpreted and both have flaws. Another (supportive of Gentoo) poster has already said that Gentoo simply requires that you can follow EXACT instructions. That makes me nervous, as it sounds like it's not really learning, but rather just memorizing a bunch of commands. If that's the case, I don't think Gentoo really leaves you all that better trained than the ape at phone-tech support who flips through a manual and tells you to do whatever the book said without and actual cognitive thought.

Conversely, though, it might be that Gentoo actually has good documentation that tells you WHY things work as opposed to just a list of key commands. If that's the case, however, why do I actually need the distro? Can't I just read the Gentoo documentation, learn about Linux's innerworkings, and then just apply that to whatever distro I see fit. After all, if I can edit an XF86Config file by hand under Gentoo, I can edit it by hand under RedHat. The GUI tools may change between distros, but the important stuff is always the same, so the Gentoo docs should be universal, making Gentoo a doc project that just has some sample software attached to it.

Re:WYSIWYG

[ComputerSlicer23]

Anaconda can be run from the command line.

Start by fetching a couple of files off of the RedHat boot disk. From the images directory, you'll want to grab the boot floppy you need (depends on if you plan on doing a network or cdrom based install).

In my example, I grabbed bootdisk.img, and I put it in tmp. You'll also need RedHat/base/stage2.img also.

cd /tmp ;
mkdir bootdisk
mount -o loop bootdisk.img /tmp/bootdisk
cp /tmp/bootdisk/initrd.img /tmp/initrd.img.gz
gunzip initrd.img.gz
mkdir initrd
mount -o loop initrd.img /tmp/initrd
mkdir stage2
mount -o loop stage2.img /tmp/stage2
mkdir install-root
( cd initrd ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd /tmp/install-root ; tar xf - )
( cd stage2 ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd /tmp/install-root ; tar xf - )
mount -t proc none /tmp/install-root/proc
chroot /tmp/install-root/ /usr/bin/anaconda --method http://pub.whitebox.mirror/whitebox/3.0/en/os/i386 --text

That starts the installer running, and is attempting to do a network install from whatever website you replace "pub.whitebox.mirror" with (you probably have to adjust the rest of the URL, but it's the path I use on my local whitebox mirror).

The installer starts to run at that point. I had to run it from the console, and I was intentionally in run level 3 rather then 5 (I should have gone to single user mode, but I was lazy). I get a nice curses application at this point. It got all the way to the part where it wanted me to repartition my disk. I have no free partitions to actually attempt an install. However, I'm fairly sure I could have finished the install (if I couldn't the heavy lifting was pretty much done with, it would have been a series of small problems to overcome).

It's a bit of pain, and there's probably an easier way to do it, but that's how I figured out how to run the installer in less then 30 minutes after reading your message. (I remember reading on the WhiteBox lists that it should be possible to just start a remote install via an SSH session, but I've never actually seen the procedure written up). I figured it couldn't be that hard. Anaconda is nothing more then a python script that runs. It needs a bit of runtime support, but nothing special.

Kirby

Re:WYSIWYG

[Phleg]

I, as a former Gentoo user, used to believe this. And then I realized how ludicrous it was to believe that typing "emerge world" somehow gives you any insight into how the operating system itself works.

Yes, you become familiar with some aspects of BASH. Yes, you learn what chroot does. Yes, you could have learned all of it by simply picking up a book and reading, or just looking around in /usr/bin on a clean system.

Gentoo doesn't make you a knowledgeable Linux user. Spending time actually at the command-line does.

Re:WYSIWYG

[lsmeg]

Conversely, though, it might be that Gentoo actually has good documentation that tells you WHY things work as opposed to just a list of key commands. If that's the case, however, why do I actually need the distro? Can't I just read the Gentoo documentation, learn about Linux's innerworkings, and then just apply that to whatever distro I see fit

From my small experience with gentoo, this is actually the case. The docs are really good, in that they tell you what to do, why you're doing it, and what effect it will have.

And with regards to just reading the doc and applying it to another distro, it's really more of a walkthrough of manually installing gentoo. I guess theoretically you could read it and get just as much benefit without doing anything, but by the same logic, you could become college-educated by simply buying the books for all the classes and reading them yourself...

Re:WYSIWYG

[GimmeFuel]

I've heard this argument before, but it's never quite worked for me. I think there's two ways it can be interpreted and both have flaws. Another (supportive of Gentoo) poster has already said that Gentoo simply requires that you can follow EXACT instructions. That makes me nervous, as it sounds like it's not really learning, but rather just memorizing a bunch of commands. If that's the case, I don't think Gentoo really leaves you all that better trained than the ape at phone-tech support who flips through a manual and tells you to do whatever the book said without and actual cognitive thought.

Installing Gentoo isn't a magic rite of passage that turns anyone into an experienced Linux guru. All Gentoo does is force you to use command-line tools like mount and mk*fs. Compare this to other distros where the option is there to use the command-line tools, but it's easier to use the shiny GUI app. It's like the difference between a High School Spanish class and taking a foreign exchange trip to Spain for a few months; you will learn a lot more (assuming you want to learn in the first place) if you have to immerse yourself in a unfamiliar environment where you have to learn if you want to get anything done.

Of course, this path isn't suitable for everybody, which is why things like High School Spanish and RedHat exist. To each his own.

Conversely, though, it might be that Gentoo actually has good documentation that tells you WHY things work as opposed to just a list of key commands. If that's the case, however, why do I actually need the distro? Can't I just read the Gentoo documentation, learn about Linux's innerworkings, and then just apply that to whatever distro I see fit. After all, if I can edit an XF86Config file by hand under Gentoo, I can edit it by hand under RedHat. The GUI tools may change between distros, but the important stuff is always the same, so the Gentoo docs should be universal, making Gentoo a doc project that just has some sample software attached to it.

If Gentoo was only about teaching people how to use the console, then it probably would just be a pile of docs. However, Gentoo is about much more, which is why it is a full-fledged distro.

Re:WYSIWYG

[strikethree]

It would probably be easier if you just booted with a Knoppix cd and mounted the drive you want to install to under /mnt/gentoo. You can then start from stage 1 in a chroot environment. Do dmesg | less to see what kind of drivers you will need. Gentoo does come with a LiveCD that is perfect for installing from... but Knoppix has Frozen Bubble and Mozilla to keep you occupied while it compiles.

strike

Gentoo is for learning/inaccuraces in doc

[oldosadmin]

The key feature most people miss about gentoo is that it's a great LEARNING DISTRO. I learned many times more in my 5 months of using gentoo than I did in using RHL/FC for a year. Not to mention the great docs/community... anyone who can follow EXACT directions, has some patience, and basic linux knowledge should be able to install Gentoo.

One thing (big thing) it missed about 2004.2 was the move from XFree default to XOrg...

Also... by slow development... I don't know what they mean? Portage is gaining features (try one of the pre-releases), and the ebuilds still fly out fast after new software is released.

Whenever I run linux (I move from Win/Linux often), Gentoo is my distro of choice by a long shot.

Gentoo.

[rincebrain]

I run three Gentoo boxes, and I must say, Gentoo is, by far, the most convenient Linux I've installed...when you already know what you're doing. =)

If you don't know what you're doing, and something is slightly off-kilter...you're better off in Debian or some other distro with an easier installer which won't give you a scary cryptic error message.

Also, Portage is the single best software management I've ever encountered, bar none...though occasionally, user error means you wait awhile for packages to become stable.

When you run stable, though, you very rarely have a problem with a "required" upgrade due to a bug...relatively rarely, of course. =)

In addition, Gentoo is second to none in documentation and error repair...the mailing list sends out documentation of a bug, along with complete list of affected versions of a package, and fixes.

Finally, 2004.2 fixes a few nasty bugs in the installer LiveCD, so, in my experience, it's far more stable and reliable for certain hardware configurations.

Note: I've only done x86 installs myself, so YMMV. =)

Re:Gentoo.

[josepha48]

"If you don't know what you're doing, and something is slightly off-kilter...you're better off in Debian or some other distro with an easier installer which won't give you a scary cryptic error message."

I'd suggest if you don't know what you are doing to use fedora or SuSE or Mandrake. Debian is still more for the 'geek' than fedora or SuSE.

I'd have to say that having used FreeBSD, NetBSD, RH/Fedora, and Slackware, Gentoo is a refreshing change. It gives me all the drivers in GNU/Linux, and the BSD minimalism ability. So I can install and configure the system as I want.

Only thing I haven't yet been able to do figure out is how to emerge world from packages and not build the whole world. It takes to darn long on a p233.

I'd like to see that quantified

[martinde]

Can someone show me benchmarks that real programs are really faster on the same hardware than some other distro? I've seen benchmarks that say the opposite, but I've never seen any that support this common claim.

I do realize that optimizing for the "correct" CPU should provide improved performance, but I wonder how much improvement you really see with gcc in this case.

Re:I'd like to see that quantified

[GimmeFuel]

Easy. Just specify CFLAGS on the commandline. If your CLFAGS in make.conf is "-Os -pipe", but you want mencoder with -O2, just run

CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe" emerge mencoder

The specified CFLAGS are used for that emerge, with subsequent emerges using your unchanged make.conf settings. The same works if you want to override USE or any other option in make.conf for just one emerge.

easy fix for that...

[oldosadmin]

echo 'net-www/mozilla-firefox ~x86' >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

or if you care that much, just run ~x86.

Kernels

[keesh]

I don't think the author understands gentoo's kernel naming system... gentoo-sources is 2.4.x, gentoo-dev-sources is 2.6.x. The only reason they've not been merged is that portage is rather too happy to upgrade slotted versions. The -dev- part doesn't indicate that it's any less stable.

Oh, and there is no default kernel on gentoo. You install whatever you want :)

Re:ebuilds still fly out fast

[keesh]

That's because mozilla source tarballs don't compile when shipped. The last three mozilla/firefox releases have all been either broken or incomplete from a compiling-from-source perspective. The current bunch doesn't compile properly with freetype+gtk2 enabled.

The GLSA is getting there, but it's kinda hard when upstream don't release working tarballs... Debian et al have it easy, they only have to make it build on one box with one set of configure options. Gentoo has to make it compile anywhere with any set of build settings.

Re:what you get: no vi, ...

[maskedbishounen]

What I ended up with a system that had no vi (or similar), no inetd, no finger, no telnet - none of the many tools that make Unix systems just the fine place one wants t live at.

That's actually the entire point. No clutter, unless it's your clutter.

And worst of all it came with an editor that broke lines of /etc/fstab without mentioning - lots of fun for novice users trying to find out why their fstab is busted.

Nano? Did you read the documentation (or man page, for that matter)? It specifically mentions you need to use the -w switch, or it will break (wrap) lines.

It's init.d. ;) And there's some fine documentation that goes along about how to use it.

And here I thought the BSD crowd was the "RTFM" one. :O Then again, anyone still using telnet.... x.X

Learning vs. Getting It Done

[TheMeld]

Learing how your system works is great. But I already know. Most of the time when I want to install linux on a new system, I just want to get it installed. Not having excess packages is great, and control over the install is great, but extra typing and waiting is not. In that vein, RedHat's installer is tolerable, but not optimal in that it's hard to get as minimal an install as I'd like. Debian's installer is pretty good, though it requires doing a bit more manual work than I'd like. Anything more manual than Debian's installer is just too much for me.

When it comes to Linux newbies, install time isn't the time to learn about the system. You want to learn about the system when you have all the emotionally-satisfying and high usability eye candy and applications installed. If people have to read lots of documentation in order to install the system, they are likely to get frustrated and possibly give up. Of course, there's more motivation to learn how the system works when you need to do so in order to install it. On the other hand, if the goal is world domination, you don't want to limit it to only the die hard techies.

And as much as I'm a command line junkie, I don't think joe user should be required to to be one too in order to do the basic stuff with his computer. Expecting joe admin to be savvy about the commandline is well and good, but not joe user.

Re:Learning vs. Getting It Done

[Directrix1]

If its the wasted time you dislike, here is what you do:
1) Setup a gentoo system as a template for each role of computer you would to set up.
2) tar.bz2 relevant partitions
3) script partition creation, and extraction
4) burn to CD

Now installing is as easy as running a script. Simple.

I love Gentoo, but does it have a future?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

When I first started using Gentoo back in 2001 or 2002, I did it on a lark and figured the system would just fly apart into a thousand pieces right in my face after a few weeks. I mean, I'm supposed to keep every package in the system updated every few days? Surely, at some point, something will go wrong, and I'll find myself in the unsolvable dependency hell I find myself in so frequently in with RPMs. Yet I ended up staying with that very installation until just recently I started over again with 2004.1 because it seemed like the easiest way to upgrade from gcc 2.95. And, up until the point that I couldn't find any packages that worked with gcc 2.95 anymore, I was always up to date with almost all software I ran on the system.

I've thought about switching to Debian a few times, because I'm really not particularly fond of linux configuration as a hobby (it gets old after 5 years or so, you know?) But it's always so disheartening to drop back a few versions on all the packages I'm running. And in the meantime I've gotten used to Gentoo's strange world, and now I guess it's a habit.

Still, hats off to the Gentoo development teams--for something that probably appeals to such a limited demographic, it works far more fantastically well then I ever would have thought.

My only wonder is--if .NET (mono) and Java really take off in the future with Just-In-Time compilation, will Gentoo become less interesting. Essentially, EVERY computer is going to start compiling optimized versions of its code for its particular needs. In fact, since the optimizations are at run-time, we can expect JIT to be even more machine-specific than Gentoo's optimization and USE flags. Like, if I install another Gig of memory future JIT compilers might gradually recompile all the bytecode on my system to unroll loops more often or something.

So, in the future, I think we'll be sitting somewhere halfway in between Gentoo and binary distribution--sending diffs of the bytecodes for my applications out instead of binary or source.

And while I'm dreaming, why don't we make those bytecodes proof carrying code. Like, for every piece of code executing on my system, I want to see either the automatically checked proof that the code won't explode my system, or the name of someone who signed the code claiming it won't explode my system. If neither of those are found, I want Future Gentoo to issue a big flashing red warning "WARNING THIS CODE WILL EAT YOUR PARENTS DO NOT INSTALLL!!!!!!!" Man, the future is going to be so awesome.

Re:I love Gentoo, but does it have a future?

[Stevyn]

Well it's not going to take over the world. But for a small amount of people (myself included) it be prefered. I don't think their intentions were ever to make it the number one linux distro. But I think it will stay alive for a while as distros keep trying to struggle with required packages and bloat.

Re:what you get: no vi, ...

[Stevyn]

You're completely missing the point. If you don't need the package to boot, then it's not on there. If you want it, then compile it and put it on there. I don't want packages that someone thinks I should have but not needed. If I want them, I'll emerge them.

Gentoo is looking for feedback

[viniosity]

Looks like the Gentoo folks put up a survey intended for current users asking for feedback. I hope posting that link here doesn't result in flames or bogus responses.. they have enough work to do without trolls so please answer responsibly.

Re:I ran it for a while...

[Directrix1]

gcc isn't as much of an issue for breakage (at least as far my experience has been) as glibc.

Only if you prelink will it be faster.

[BrookHarty]

Yes, compiling with optimizations will make it run faster, but not the fastest. A prelinked system will outrun a non-prelinked system. This is why Mandrake would boot faster than normal Gentoo install, and KDE was faster in launching applications, etc.

So...

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml

There are lots of speed tweaks, someone should start a webpage.

Installers for Gentoo Do Exist - sort of

[langles]

This is touched on a little bit in Jem's review, but I thought this would be a good place to add a few more notes:

Gentoo's Install Documentation Lives here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index .xml

Many people, though, wish Gentoo had a more automated install.

There is an "Official" Gentoo Installer Project.
They are taking their time, with the hope of getting it right, making it useable for nearly everybody.
Project Roadmap:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/ins taller/
Mailing list archives here:
http://news.gmane.org/group/gmane.linux.gen too.ins taller/
Code snapshots:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~tseng/installer -snapshots/

Two altenative installers that people have actually used to get working Gentoo distributions:
http://www.cs.luc.edu/projects/naj a
http://glis.sourceforge.net/

Other Gentoo Installer projects on Sourceforge that have actually released some code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/geninstalle r/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/glbf/

Some prototype code from Sridahr R., who since has switched to Debian:
http://cs.annauniv.edu/~rsridhar/pub/proj ects/gli/

Finally, here are four Gentoo-based distributions with their own installers:

Vidalinux
http://www.vidalinux.com/
http://dis trowatch.planetmirror.com/table.php?dist ribution=vidalinux
with a Anaconda-based installer:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/gentooin staler/
http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/ 35
Not sure if they survived their financial crunch:
http://www.linuxbeta.com/index.php?page=a rticles&r elease=84

Jollix
http://www.jollix.de/en/en_about.html
" a LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux Jollix boots directly from CD without touching the hard disk...
Once jollix is installed on a hard disk, it can be updated via portage, the packet manager of Gentoo linux. In fact, jollix IS gentoo at this point (somehow preconfigured)."

Navyn OS
http://navynos.linux.pl
"Navyn OS is the completed system build from Gentoo. It is also a live-cd so you can boot and run it from the cdrom drive. Since version 2004.07 there is a user friendly installer on the cdrom, and with only a few mouse clicks you can install the system onto your hard drive."

Gentoox
http://gentoox.shallax.com
Installable Gentoo CD for the MS Xbox.