Gentoo 2005.0: A Live CD And [No] Graphical Installer

Sunsetbeach writes "zdnet.co.uk reports in this article that 'The next version of Gentoo, 2005.0, will also include a graphical installer that will allow users to automatically install the same set-up of Gentoo on multiple machines, according to Gianelloni.' " The article distinguishes the upcoming live disk from the (available) Gentoo Live CD; the new one will contain a fully functioning system ala Knoppix. Update: 11/30 23:09 GMT by M : Gentoo now has a clarification posted; the next Gentoo release will not have a graphical installer, although it is planned for the future.

Comments

Boot-up time

[KiloByte]

Ouch... While compiling everything to a ram-disk is technically viable, I somehow fail to see it working in a long run :p

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worked for 20 years of AmigaOS, it's not going to suddenly stop now because you fail to see it.

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not considering amigados stopped about 10 years ago.

Re:Boot-up time

[Jaruzel]

Really? What's This then?

Re:Boot-up time

[mr i want to go home]

In Korea, only old people use Workbench!

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

Still in beta after 8 years.

In other words, vaporware. I called it vaporware in 2000 when it wasn't released, I called it vaporware in 2002 when it wasn't released and I call it vaporware now it's still not released. I still say we won't see it for years, if ever.

Re:Boot-up time

[tonsofpcs]

So what if its not being developed? Many video postproduction houses and even Networks use the Video Toaster/Flyer (from NewTek, who is now making PC NLE systems with live switching capabilities) switcher/NLE which run on the Amiga. I personally have 2 Amigas on my desk over there (one of them is down right now as my toaster card needs to go out for recalibration). Without Amiga, there would be no LightWave!

--
Let it be, let it be, my Amiga works for me </SIG>

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

If they're so desperate for an alternative OS they should create a linux derivative, a hybrid. Would be nice to see a *nix desktop running in 1MB :)

Re:Boot-up time

[Macrolord]

I have heard rumors that the next AmigaOS GUI will be based on the Duke Nukem Forever EngineTM. Keep that to yourself though, as I don't want to run up the 3dRealms stock price quite yet.

Re:Boot-up time

[amigabill]

> So what if its not being developed?

Just because you slashdotters have left it for dead does NOT mean it's not being developed.

AmigaOS 4.0 is currently in development. I have a Beta copy at home. A non-final "prerelease" version has been shipped to people who bought the AmigaOne motherboards based on PowerPC CPU, of which there are now a few versions including both ATX and mini-ATX form factors. The mini-ATX one (strangely named the micro-AmigaOne or micro-A1, which makes the planned micro-ATX board name probably confusing as well)

Sure, most of what you can run on this OS version is ports of open-source SDL games, (there are a small number of other things already though) but this OS rev entirely finished yet, so what can you expect? It's still "under development"... :)

Re:Boot-up time

[Ziviyr]

AmigaOS compiled its OS to RAM before running and my grandfather used to hunt gophers on the moon.

AmigaOS is one reason I am big on open source software. Version 3.5 was unstable, nothing I could do to help, little I could do to even draw attention to the bug. Thats also why I don't like paying for software. Free software does nothing to ensure I don't get burnt by bad software, but at least I don't have to pay for the privledge of a year of unstable computing.

Re:Boot-up time

[amigabill]

That's an out of date web page is what it is, dated August 7, 2002 yet "last updated" on Oct 15, 2003.

There's been a public beta release, and then a public update to same since then. You can actually go buy a PowerPC motherboard today, and I think the first public beta ships with it on CD, then you can register and download the public beta update. Today. For real.

http://www.forefronttechnologiesinc.com/Products /? category=165
http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/ Web_store/web_ store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/amiga/amigaone.htm l&cart_id=3467961_14353
http://www.compuquick-ami gadirect.com/cgi-bin/shop /shop.cgi?keywords=_new_amigas&cart_id=6539029_267 1

And those are just the USA dealers I'm personally aware of.

To the Duke Nukem Forever guy from another comment, can you get a public beta of that game??

Re:Boot-up time

[tonsofpcs]

By not being developed, I meant the original Hard/Software, not the new AmigaOne and AmigaOS 4/Pegasos/etc. BTW, How'd you get a beta of OS 4?? I have yet to see any updated info since KMOS has taken over (although in interviews, they state that work is in progress).

Related Links:
http://www.kmos.com/
http://www.amiga.com/
http://os.amiga.com/products/one/

Re:Boot-up time

[amigabill]

Does slashdot have a way to send private messages to other users so we don't fill up this stuff with somewhat off-topic stuff??

Anyway, All AmigaOne buyers during the long-term Earlybird promotion should have received a CD by now. If not, call them up and ask about it... That was a public release, and I don't think many people have bought an AmigaOne after the Earlybird offer stopped. The first public update to that public beta CD is available for registered owners via download, I don't know the exact web adress to the update though.

I myself have it as I'm part of the ATI Radeon driver development group, and thus need access tothe newest stuff and to the betatesters to find our bugs.

Re:Boot-up time

[drinkypoo]

AmigaOS neither compiled nor even copied its entire OS to RAM without the user making it do so. You had to install additional software to do either on any machine other than the A1000, because half (or more, depending on version) of the OS lived in the Kickstart ROM. If you had an Amiga 1000 then you loaded half of the OS (the ROM, which could be installed as a... ROM... and which contained the kernel) into memory from a floppy and then you loaded the rest into memory from another floppy, except most of it like all the CLI commands stayed on the floppy unless you changed the startup-sequence to copy the contents of the floppy to a ram disk, or recoverable ram disk, the latter of which is a better option of course. Any other Amiga had the ROM in ROM by default and you had to use some kind of special software (I forget the name of the most popular software which stored the rom in memory, I seldom have owned an Amiga with enough memory to seriously contemplate doing so... fastkick maybe? That sounds wrong) to move it into RAM.

But you're part right, in that it worked pretty well if you had enough memory to create a recoverable ramdisk, which would hold its contents between reboots, and copy anything you needed fast or frequent access to into it at boot after mounting it, if you couldn't find it. Since (like most operating systems) you could change the paths for locating most (basically all) items while the system was running without breaking anything this was a workable strategy for caching basically anything. Being able to assign FONTS (or was it FONT?) as well as C and SYS and so on and so forth was very convenient. I miss AmigaDOS a lot and I might even consider running it again someday if I could have an Amigatized version of Firefox and Thunderbird :P

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

we could post in each other's journals (or just one of them, i started a thread for Amiga discussion/comments in my journal -- to get there, just click my name and hit journal)

Re:Boot-up time

[Jaruzel]

All totally accurate AmigaBill, I just couldn't be arsed to explain it to all those anti-amiga people out there.

My Amiga is a BlizzPPC Souped Up A1200, running AOS3.9, btw.

Re:Boot-up time

[Anonymous Coward]

Your previous comment linking to AmigaOS4.0 is undermined by the fact you do not and can not run it on your machine, because it doesn't exist.

No further explanation to anti-amiga or amiga-agnostic is really necessary.

This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

It really is a fantastic distro and this will allow it to be used by many many more people.

I pretty much started my Linux experience with Gentoo, which was difficult to say the least. This way though it can be setup easily by the inexperienced, while everyone else is still free to do a Stage 1/2 install

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[maekke]

I am not really sure if this is *really* good to have many more people... I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro, you have to spend time to understand it and able to use it. So I hope, that they will find a way that everybody will be happy :-)

greetz

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[KingDaveRa]

It'll be great!

I like Gentoo for its customisability. All the other distros are hell bent on throwing in everything which is great, but uses up so much RAM. I've seen SuSE use a full gig before just running KDE. With Gentoo I can leave all the little things I don't want out.

It'll be fantastic to have the scripted installer too. You can only write the fstab and grub.conf so many times before it becomes less fun.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[oexeo]

I am not really sure if this is *really* good to have many more people... I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro

You don't actually provide a valid reason why it's not a "*really* good to have many more people" use Gentoo. The explanation I see implied from your condescending post is that you're afraid you won't look "1337" if too many people start using your distro of choice.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Zork the Almighty]

I first switched to Gentoo because the bloody fonts "just worked". How sad is that. On a serious note, the user base is one major reason to stick with Gentoo. There is always excellent help and support in the forums, and snobby attitudes are kept in check.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[adam.skinner]

You'll see pretty much any Linux distro use a "full gig" of RAM just running KDE if you let it sit long enough. It's how linux manages memory.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[fireman sam]

5hhhhh, and you spell it "93|\|700"

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Jugalator]

I like Gentoo for its customisability. All the other distros are hell bent on throwing in everything which is great, but uses up so much RAM. I've seen SuSE use a full gig before just running KDE. With Gentoo I can leave all the little things I don't want out.

No.

Distros to fill in this gap has become more and more common lately. See also Knoppix, Mepis, and Ubuntu. It's almost like a new generation of Linux distros taking form, and I personally like those better than the Lindows abomination. :-S I like distros to have a goal to be only on one CD. Usually stability and user friendless come more easily from that as well, since there's less that can go wrong and less options to confuse the user.

I'm now using Mepis as a Linux amateur and it's great! :-) I can choose to run it off CD and get an excellent rescue disk that way with on-the-fly NTFS and SATA support, and also automatic network configuration. And if I like it enough, like I did, I can just install it on disk and it still has everything I can ask for from a basic OS as a normal user. It felt funny to install the OS from within the OS. :-)

And if I need more, it's an excellent Debian-based distro I can use simple apt-get commands or even simpler installer GUIs if I like it that way. Has been rock solid so far, as opposed to Mandrake 10 after around 5 days of regular use. :-P

Suddenly, multi-CD (or even multi-DVD *gasp*) distros feel so... yesterday.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

When Windows does it, it's called a memory leak. When Linux does it, it's a philosophy.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[flacco]

Boycot linuxtoday.com RE: Linux Reference Center Sponsored by Microsoft

yeah, i did this. linuxtoday is pathetic.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Jugalator]

Oh, and by the way, I realize Gentoo offers greater customizability, I was mostly just commenting on what you said about being hell bent on throwing everything in. I think these new distros are great for people who don't really care about spending time to customize every little detail and is just looking for a package without a lot of junk inside so one can download it from the internet instead, if one really needs something. Like you do with most other operating systems besides the Linux-based ones. :-)

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's called filesystem cache.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[BenjyD]

I would guess the grandparent is a troll.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[gilesjuk]

It is long overdue. Even a more niche distro needs to have the option to simply and quickly install the base system.

Now if I was installing it everyday I'd remember the steps required, but I do an install every 6 months to a year. As much as I like control, as long as I have the option to quickly remove the cruft I don't want (or not install it in the first place) then I'd prefer a good installer.

Anyway, rather than re-invent the wheel maybe they could look at Anaconda? (Fedora/Red Hat installer)

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[21chrisp]

I use KDE on gentoo and have a gig of RAM. With several windows open KDE uses 10% (100MB) of that RAM. I have another machine that uses KDE with 512 MB of RAM and KDE hogs a little less on that (60-80 MB). I hardly ever hit swap on either machine. Application data often sits in RAM after being closed, and will just get re-allocated down the line if RAM is needed.

Actually the worst memory hog (by far) is Java. Java seems to be the only thing that makes me hit swap on a regular basis.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[stinky wizzleteats]

You don't actually provide a valid reason why it's not a "*really* good to have many more people" use Gentoo.

Yes, actually, he did:

I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro, you have to spend time to understand it and able to use it.

Because installing Gentoo currently is about 2 steps away from installing LFS, you simply cannot do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a very low level. If you want to install Gentoo, you MUST invest the time to learn how everything works. This frankly provides an idiot barrier to the support community. The only people who can ask questions about Gentoo are those who have made it through the installation. As of right now, you can ask a question on the Gentoo forum and get a useful answer usually within minutes. If you ask a question on the Mandrake forum, it disappears into a black hole of untold thousands of forever unanswered posts. Once the number of utterly clueless users exceeds the ability of the community to disseminate knowledge, support goes underground - with answers only trading hands among people who've made contact with the gurus by some means beyond simply showing up and asking questions.

Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:

• How partition and disk structure works
• How GCC actually functions
• How the kernel is installed and configured
• At least something about runlevels and init scripts

I don't think it is unreasonable for this to be minimum knowledge to access support.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, as strange as this may sound to USian ears, some of us prefer quality over quantity.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[leonmergen]

Except that under Linux it's because of caching and gets freed up as soon as it's needed.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[oexeo]

In response to your comment: have you actually read (even just) the title of the article in discussion?

Secondly, he provided a reason why incompetent people should not use Gentoo, not a reason why "many more" people shouldn't use it, unless you both assume that the only people with any intelligence are already using Gentoo, which would make you very arrogant.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[skiman1979]

Exactly. I've been waiting for a graphical installer for Gentoo for a while now. I've installed older releases on a few machines before, so I'm not new to it, but a graphical install would be much easier, especially to those who are new to linux. Some people may not like this because too many people will start using Gentoo and it won't look 1337 anymore. But if that's the case, why even brag about using it in the first place? That gets more people wanting to use it too, which IMHO would be better than those people using Windows. :-) I eagerly await 2005.0

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[oexeo]

By your reasoning the quality of Gentoo degrades when more people use it, as if it where some sort of tangible object which needs to be broken up among its users.

Secondly, I'm not from the US.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I was referring to the quality of the people, not Gentoo. Ever heard of the Bell curve?

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[BlackHawk-666]

Yeh, that install procedure is definitely "teh suck". Ok, it keeps the newbs from the forums but t is also agravating for people who have lots of Linux experience. I was completely unprepared for how similar to LFS the Gentoo install was (and yes, I have done a LFS build before). It took quite a few hours to do the first install on my machine, but I was happy I could enjoy it from then on thanks to Portage. Not so. I dual boot Windows (for games, and stuff not yet working under AMD64) and Windows crashed one day taking down not only the boot sector and itself, but also the partition table of the second hard drive with Gentoo on it! Barely a month after install and I had to do it all over again. I for one welcome our new graphical installer overlord.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[CestusGW]

2 steps away from LFS? Hardly. Having installed both systems, and actively maintained my LFS system, I can tell you right now that Gentoo's gotta be about 5 steps away at the very least.
Gentoo: No checking source code for errors, no manual patch application, no having to write your own initscripts, no having to tweak your /dev entries, the list goes on.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[jdowland]

The explanation I see implied from your condescending post is that you're afraid you won't look "1337" if too many people start using your distro of choice.

Gentoo has a 1337 reputation? Am I living on a different planet?

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[dema]

Because installing Gentoo currently is about 2 steps away from installing LFS, you simply cannot do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a very low level. If you want to install Gentoo, you MUST invest the time to learn how everything works.

You might want to check out this comment and the reply by Chris Gianelloni.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[rnd()]

Not really. You can print up the Gentoo instructions and follow along with exactly what they say to type in.

The danger is that people who set up their systems by typing the install directions in verbatim will actually not configure those systems optimally due to a misunderstanding. A GUI installer would help avoid the perils of people getting in a bit over their head and failing to accomplish something simple, such as installing to a hard drive that does not happen to be hda.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[jdowland]

If you've got X amount of RAM, then you're getting value for money if you are using it all! What is important is that the right app has it at the right time.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[rnd()]

That's how linux is supposed to manage memory! It makes file access faster for frequently accessed files.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, everything has a 1337 rep when it uses numbers!

Gentoo 2005.0 is zoos.o, and that's the bomb homedawg!

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[oexeo]

Yes I have, but please give me your perspective, and how it is applicable here. I suspect your input will be very amusing to the ./ community.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Deusy]

"Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:

* How partition and disk structure works
* How GCC actually functions
* How the kernel is installed and configured
* At least something about runlevels and init scripts"

That's utter rubbish.

The partitioning / disk structure is basically a 1-time following of the Gentoo manual. You can get through it without knowing anything other than the simple fact partitions reside on a single hard disk. That's hardly knowing how it all works.

How GCC functions? Don't make me laugh. "emerge foo" does not induce an in-depth understanding of GCC. Copying the basic CFLAGS from the documentation doesn't either. I'd wager the majority of Gentoo users (bearing in mind I'm a Gentoo user who has accumulated >2600 forum posts) don't really understand GCC at all other than knowing it's a tool that compiles.

As to how the kernel is installed and configured, most people somewhat bumble through that and a little thing called 'genkernel' is making said bumbling a lot easier to do.

As for runlevels and init scripts, again it's just a case of following the docs rather than knowing what they are and how they work.

Please, do not confuse "being aware they exist" and "understanding", with the term 'knowing' implying the latter. And Gentoo is a MILLION miles away from LFS. Aside from the fact (almost) everything gets compiled and they are both Linux, there really just aren't that many similarities.

I would suggest that it's more the time taken to set up Gentoo rather than the difficulty of it (which isn't that difficult for the majority whom the docs serve well) is what provides the entry barrier. Don't get me wrong, for the willing it can be an invaluable process that does introduce them to the fundamental Linux concepts. BUT the majority of users who get through the installation process are still woefully short of the knowledge needed to maintain a healthy system and you get a lot of silly posts in the forums as a consequence. I should know, I've made a few myself.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[billh]

If you ever run into this problem again, keep in mind that you can repair a partition table without a reinstall. 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' and mail it to yourself just in case. I used to have to do it all the time when dual booting with OS/2 and Slackware.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[tgbrittai]

Agreed. I started using Linux about 7 months ago. The reason I chose Gentoo is because it was a do-it-yourself kind of distro but also had a lot of supporting documentation and some great forums. I also like the opt-in strategy for including packages. It's not really that difficult for a beginner to learn providing they actually read and follow the documentation.

--The difference between and hacker and a guru? The guru reads the manual!

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Nurseman]

If you want to install Gentoo, you MUST invest the time to learn how everything works

As an "experienced newbie" I disagree with that statement. If you have a basic knowledge of computers, and can read the VERY good install guide on the homepage, you too can install gentoo from stage 3. If, on the other hand, you want to understand and run gentoo, well, that takes alot of work. Takes me about a day to get it running, and about 2 -3 hours to mangle it enough that I want to try again :-). there is no better way to learn than to destroy what you have spent a day building .

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny because on SuSE fonts "just worked" for me, but Gentoo seems to give me problems with asian fonts whenever portage updates almost anything dealing with X =/ I think that really points out a weak spot with linux. There should be ONE place where fonts are, not sometimes in /usr/local/fonts , /usr/X11/fonts /usr/share/fonts or god knows where else.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[slashmonki]

You do not necessarily need to learn a lot. Unless things go wrong, you can cut and paste almost everything from the Gentoo Handbook.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[srussell]

I agree with most of what you said, but I don't understand this:

How GCC actually functions

On what do you base this claim? If you're talking about the GCC options in make.conf, that's entirely optional. I just use the default options -- I did choose the correct architecture as suggested by the comments, but this in no way imparts knowledge of how GCC "actually functions" -- I'm entirely clueless about GCC, and I get along well with Gentoo.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Sir_Stinksalot]

Thats funny because I was new to linux and started gentoo because i heard it was easy. Once I got it installed it was so easy that I made it further with gentoo than with SuSE Mandrake Redhat and JAMD. Yet I:

Learned how to partition disks with other distros (trivial and the docs tell you step by step how to do it)

Still don't know how GCC actually functions

How to install the kernel is trivial just copy it to the right directory and learn grub (easy) and as for configuration you just have to know what your system has in it and since most linux dudes roll their own comps thats not an issue. make menuconfig then find your stuff and wham

And I still know nothing about runlevels and very little about init scripts but I am typing this from a old 750 mhz intel laptop that I installed gentoo on from a previous knoppix installation.

I also installed gentoo on my home computer amd Athlon 2000XP+ that i built myself. Both systems run KDE. One boots directly into KDE and the other goes to a login prompt. I have installed MythTV and MySQL to make my home system into a PVR.

i am curious if you have ever tried gentoo since 1.2 came out. 1.2 is old yet was very easy to install. As a matter of fact I even wrote my own installation manual that allowed me to install a working gentoo system with kde in 1 hour flat using the GRP packages for version 1.4. If you think gentoo is dificult to understand then you have not read the manual as it is step by step as easy as setting the clock on your VCR.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian may be a "not easy to handle distro" but i've found that they have *excellent* manuals for installation and configuration.

My forays into Debian is where I actually learned what makes Linux tick. I may still not have adopted it as my OS of choice (lazy 'doze user here) but it was a great learning experience and i'd certainly get back to it in the near future.

Unless I make my next computer a Mac of course.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched to Gentoo because it was the only distro that had all the programs I wanted "natively"--i.e.: without having to go to unofficial repositories.

When no other distros provide a reasonably full gamut of linux applications, the choice is rather a simple one for me.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[antiMStroll]

I started my Linux experience with RedHat 5.1. It took me three weeks to figure out how to mount a CD. It's a difficult call to make in hindsight, but I'ld guess Gentoo's much superior install documentation and forum support would have made it easier.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[BlackHawk-666]

Damn! I will be mailing that to myself. Thanks!

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[cloudmaster]

Actually, you'll see any linux system that *accesses files* do that if you leave it up for a while. That memory usage, as noted by some others, is file system cache. I've got a 42MB 486 (ok, it's an AMD 5x86/133) that handles moving >8K messages/day as an email server, filtering them through spamassassin, and routes connections to a small http, IMAP, and POP server while serving as primary DNS for several domains. The load average (10 min) is .01 right now, and it's using 37MB RAM. 28MB was programs at the time of sampling, including the 1.5MB sshd, the 1.5MB bash shell, the 2MB of perl and ps used to generate that statistic, and a 5MB named process. Named is caching DNS results in memory, too.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not running KDE on that machine. I've got a gig of RAM in a machine that is running KDE though, coincidentally, and it's presently showing 927MB in use. Only 511MB is attributable to running programs, though, and about 125MB of that 511 is due to me running Win2K and a Gentoo setup under VMWare. That's what, about 400MB of file cache? It's nice to have that, since I've only got one IDE hard drive in this system. :)

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[atriusofbricia]

If you think Gentoo is two steps away from LFS, I suddenly doubt you've done LFS. A stage 3 gentoo install may take longer, and require more knowledge than a Mandrake install, but LFS it is not. However, I agree with what you say about the forums.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[stinky wizzleteats]

Having installed both systems, and actively maintained my LFS system, I can tell you right now that Gentoo's gotta be about 5 steps away at the very least.

I consider that opinion to be pretty authoritative. My real point was that Gentoo is a LOT closer to the underside of the system than something like Mandrake is. I probably could have made that point without using an invalid comparison.

No checking source code for errors, no manual patch application, no having to write your own initscripts, no having to tweak your /dev entries, the list goes on.

Well, I've had to do 3 of the 4 things you listed. It could be that Gentoo doesn't force you to manage the system at that level, but simply the fact that it allows you to. If you go messing with /dev entries on a RH box, you'll offend six integrity checking programs that will change what you did without telling you, and break 14 system management utilities that run at least 8 nested levels of scripting to do things. As soon as I had a system I could manage at the lower level, I proceeded to do so. Perhaps I took for granted that the average user would follow that progression.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[stinky wizzleteats]

Yeah, bad comparison on my part.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[amigabill]

>>You don't actually provide a valid reason why
>>it's not a "*really* good to have many more
>>people" use Gentoo.

>Yes, actually, he did:

>>I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle
>>distro, you have to spend time to understand it
>>and able to use it.

>Because installing Gentoo currently is about 2
>steps away from installing LFS, you simply cannot
>do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a
>very low level.

Uhm, might not this graphical installer be an attempt to improve this situation???

Why would the Gentoo people NOT want to make their product easier to use, and thus more likely to be used by more people??? A graphical installer doesn't mean it's going to stay as "challenging" to get it working as it was before. After going through the Gentoo install process myself, many times to finaly get it right last week after months of on-and-off trying, I'd be very happy to see it get easier, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[stinky wizzleteats]

I seem to have touched a nerve here. Allow me to make a summary reply to the following summary of responses I've received so far:

• The idiots DO get into the Gentoo community
• I use Gentoo, and I am an idiot!
• You are an arrogant prick!

Okay, so you can stumble your way into a stage 3/genkernel setup that works without knowing anything I listed. It has never occurred to me to use anything but a stage 1 installation - basically because it was possible and gave me better access to the system's innards. I assumed that most users who would want something like stage 3 would go somewhere else, and so that other Gentoo users were more like me. That was an assumption for which I hope the reader doesn't hold the overall community responsible. I don't speak for Gentoo - I speak for myself.

If I am an arrogant prick, that must mean there are other reasons why support on the Gentoo fora are currently so accessible and helpful -- that the rest of the community are NOT arrogant pricks. Given the choice, I rather like the idea of being wrong about that, and so will accede to the, uh, optimism of those who point out that the Gentoo community is already overrun with idiots and functions well in spite of it. After all, I don't seem to be arrogant enough not to need support from the community every now and then, and hope that that doesn't change when Gentoo gets easier to get into.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[stinky wizzleteats]

Well put. Please see my summary reply.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[NecoX]

The same "idiot barrier" works as a gateway for "OMFG I R I L33T YET?!"-kiddies.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[isometrick]

Java generally has a constant memory overhead for the JVM + the heap. Unless you are using heavy server apps, Eclipse, or something similarly heavy, the footprint should sit around 64mb for the Sun implementation (which can be changed with -Xms and -Xmx JVM args).

It is generally pretty efficient for the JVM to GC on the heap and keep a constant memory overhead. Eclipse takes up as much or less memory than similar IDEs for me. Efficient GC can beat simple programmer-driven memory management in many instances, and it is definitely handy for running untrusted code. The obvious shortcoming here is in real time systems.

If you are running a bunch of small apps in separate VMs, then the footprint will be too big. Change the heap size with the command line args. Other than that, I don't see it as a big problem.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Matheus Villela]

you simply cannot do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a very low level.

In my first Gentoo instalation i was using Linux only for one month, i had no problems, it was annoying but not hard.

Now, one year before, i still can't say i know a LOT about GNU/Linux.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[teval]

Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:

* How partition and disk structure works
* How GCC actually functions
* How the kernel is installed and configured
* At least something about runlevels and init scripts

This is definitely very untrue.

I've seen friends install Gentoo who have barely touched Linux. They've worked on a shell before, but that's it. Some of them don't particularly know what gcc is, much less how it works.
Do you? Do you need to know what a CFG is? or how lambda calculus and formal semantics work? No.. most people who use gcc have no clue about formal languages and compiler concepts.

I can assure you, nothing is needed in the way of runlevels or init. If you'll note, the guide tells them to use 5 for updating init scripts and it says they get run at startup.

For that matter, genkernel handles kernel installation and configuration. You don't need to know that either.

Getting a graphical installer is a great step for Gentoo. It's a very easy to use distro all in all. Save for some of the merging problems (etc-update should really not touch fstab unless there's a very good reason, but then again you can just say no)

You're doing the same thing that the grandfather post was complaining about. Just because more people use it doesn't mean everyone will dumb down.

Installing Gentoo right now goes something like this, get x86 install guide, follow to the letter, done! It requires very little knowledge all in all, so your point is invalid, all it does is scare people at this point. Not only that, it's a great candidate for automation.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[cayenne8]

That's not necessarily true. Yes, if you do a stage 1/2 install, you do have to know a bit or learn a bit. But, if you're doing a stage 3 binary install...it really about the same as any other distro...no compiling (except for kernel I think).

It appears this new version will simplify even this...

"Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:

• * How partition and disk structure works
• * How GCC actually functions
• * How the kernel is installed and configured
• * At least something about runlevels and init scripts

Hmm...now grant it, it has been awhile since I've done other distros...RH and Slackware, but, on even those, you had to learn how to partition your drive...especially if you wanted to keep MS stuff and do dual boot. I don't really know how GCC works, never stopped me from Gentoo installs. Again, on most other distro's, if you wanted to re-roll your kernel, you had to learn a little about what you needed. I don't know much of anything today about runlevels or init scripts...but, I've been able to easily install Gentoo on a number of platforms (x86, pps, sparc64).

The instructions for Gentoo installs is great...very clear, very step by step..and lately, they even give good explanations why you do things certain ways (like why ip addresses are the way they are)...

Maybe it has been awhile since you checked it out....give it a look, and read briefly through the install guide.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you back up this anecdotal claim?

What kind of memory management continously takes up more and more memory the longer you run it? That sounds like a memory leak.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Taladar]

FYI there are lots of people using Gentoo simply because they hate the graphical configuration tools screwing up their config files (not to mention the rpm hell). Gentoo really is easier for a certain type of user (mainly the one not afraid of config files)

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[WhiteDragon]

I was always puzzled by the idea of installing gentoo by following the step by step directions in the manual. Since they have step by step instructions already, why don't they use those same steps automatically. I mean, instead of saying, if you want to use stage one, type the following commands, say, which stage would you like to use, present a choice, user inputs something, and the script runs the same sequence of commands. Hopefully this installer would do that. It is not that I don't like getting to know the internals, it is just that the whole point of using computers is that they can automate tasks. I can follow the instructions in the manual pretty well, but I might make a mistake. The shell, or perl, python, whatever, on the other hand, when given the same sequence of instructions will always follow the steps exactly. On the gripping hand, I understand about corner cases, what do do when something goes wrong, etc. that a script might not be able to handle.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Crudely_Indecent]

I personally don't want anyone to be happy unless I've touched their machine. Graphical installer for Gentoo is blasphemy to me. When my customers decide to watch over my shoulder, I'm comfortable doing anything I need without fearing that they'll cut me out of the loop next time they need a machine because they learnt enough to do it themselves. They simply CANNOT understand what I'm doing, even if I explain it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for progress....I have often thought that with all of the other amazing features built into Gentoo, why isn't there a graphical installer? The answer was always plainly, it doesn't need one.

Now, I'll get to repair borked graphical gentoo installations instead of building a system properly from scratch.

Really, how long ago was it that you stopped explaining what swap was for and told your end user "Because you &%#@*! need it!"

Powerful tools don't make good administrators....it works the other way around.

I've been called elitist before.....thank you very much.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[aichpvee]

They're going to stop making Gentoo???

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[aichpvee]

Not to mention an idiot, since everyone knows that all the people with intelligence are already running Slackware.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[electrofreak]

I hope that this graphical installation process is optional. There is a certain level of coolness in installing Gentoo manually with the command prompt setup they have now. Either way, I don't think they will please everyone because compiling everything takes for ever, and the impacient will not be pleased. I know you can install precompiled packages, but then you might-as-well install another distro.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[agrippa_cash]

I am apparently also an arrogant prick and I learned Linux by installing Gentoo. Though it is possible to learn nothing while installing Gentoo, it is almost guaranteed with a GUI install. That is great if you don't want/need to learn the internals of the system, but I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting most members of a community to have about the same level of interest. Currently most of the people who manage to install Gentoo (more intimidating than difficult) have at least a WILLINGNESS to learn how things work. The community is great right now because of it and currently it resembles a dialogue more than end user support. An easier install may well change that dynamic, adding thousands of users who want Gentoo to 'just work' and don't want to know why. I think that is when we will see the elitism that people decry in Debian. For the record: it is no worse recommending Gentoo to people who are fed up with RPMs (etc.) than it is to suggest a bicycle to someone tired of walking.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[mscnln]

A distinction needs to be made between knowledge and initiative. The current installation process may not require you to know that much about linux; however, it certainly keeps out the people who have no ability to RTFM.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[JofCoRe]

The story seems to overstate things a little bit. Apparently the 2005.0 release will have an experimental installer, and it won't yet include support for multi-machine cloning, although that is planned for the future.

Read it from the source here: Gentoo Linux 2005.0 Story Clarification

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[shadow255]

You make an interesting point, but one of the things that the Gentoo designers stress is that it's about choice. Making choices based on a thorough reading of the outstanding (IMHO) installation handbook is a very different thing from making choices based on an interactive installer.

Am I interested in seeing what the interactive installer does? You bet! But I don't believe it's easy or necessarily even possible to translate the process of installing Gentoo from CLI with handbook to installing it with a graphical automated process.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

"but please give me your perspective..."

I will: 90% of anything is crap. That is true for the Gentoo forums as well as for the world as a whole.

*But* current "gentooist" are not a "fair sample" from the world, but they are selected from those enthusiastic enough to go through the boring and a bit (for non-geeks) scaring install process so even the 90% of crap from the Gentoo forums results quite standable when compared to the 90% crap of the world as a whole.

Take that barrier out, and "gentooists" will be more alike to the "usual crowd", and that makes sure it will be more crappy too (as per the 90% rule over a bigger set).

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[xsbellx]

Elitist, DEFINITELY NOT.

Pompous and bombastic, ABSOLUTELY but definitely not elitist!

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Xabraxas]

Why would the Gentoo people NOT want to make their product easier to use, and thus more likely to be used by more people???

There is a very simple answer to that. Gentoo is not a product. Gentoo is a community. There isn't a profit to be made by increasing user base. If anything, more users, especially inexperienced ones, could cause the gentoo forums to collapse into a blackhole of unanswered, and often duplicate, questions.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[BigWhiteGuy_27]

So was I the only one who read "Stage 1/2" as "Stage one-half"? I immediately thought "Geez, there's something slower than a Stage 1?".

Gentoo becoming user friendly

[b0lt]

Over the years I've been using gentoo, I've noticed that it has become MUCH more userfriendly. The documentation has improved dramatically, and now there's a graphical installer. Will this increase gentoo's install base?

-b0lt

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[Zork the Almighty]

At the same time, portage has bloated to 100,000 files and it takes 20 times as long to update the caches. I miss the "small" Gentoo.

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[M51DPS]

Of course it will increase the install base, it's just going to be a long time before those people finish compiling.

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[phobos13013]

it's just going to be a long time before those people finish compiling Assuming you WANT to install KDE...

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[btrapp]

I just switched a few months ago and (although I don't know what the docs were like a while ago) the Gentoo install documentation is excellent even for non-gentoo users interested in how things work.

I'd recommend people looking for something flexible and easy to keep up to date give it a try, I've been very impressed.

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[Zork the Almighty]

If they're programs I don't use, then yes :)

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[Dan Ost]

The gentoo developers realize that the size of the portage tree can be painful
to work with and have implimented a band-aid to ease your pains some if you
know what you're doing. You can use RSYNC_EXCLUDEFROM to identify parts of the
portage tree that you don't care about and when you sync, it will ignore these.

This can be dangerous since it means that not all parts of your portage tree
will be updated to the same level, but if you're careful, this can dramatically
reduce the amount of time you system spends syncing the portage tree.

Re:Gentoo becoming user friendly

[Taladar]

AFAIK there is a way to exclude parts of the tree (whole categories, not single programs) from the rsync update if you don't use programs from that parts. You should search the Gentoo Forums for it.

In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

In Korea, only old people use graphical installers.

Re:In related news,

[yobbo]

And an Australian Microsoft employee says he's never used Gentoo.

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms it, in Soviet Russia old people are dying.

Re:In related news,

[Zork the Almighty]

The problem is, you have to make the filesystems, compile a kernel, and emerge the graphical installer in order to use it. Oh well, there goes that idea :)

Re:In related news,

[Zork the Almighty]

That's why in America we have Botox... oh wait.

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Korea, live CDs install YOU!

Re:In related news,

[big ben bullet]

If I see one more of this In Korea.... I'm going to add it to the slashdot subculture on wikipedia!

In fact it's already available on wikipedia ...In Japan

Profit!

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms it, in Soviet Russia dying old people are you.

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

In Korea... old people don't use Gentoo because they die before it's finished installing

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just recently been seeing this Korea, Old People thing. What's up with that?

btw, do a google for

site:slashdot.org korea "old people"

and there are 19 hits right now, so it must be a very recent phenomena.

Re:In related news,

[Dave2 Wickham]

This article, maybe?

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

hehehe that one was actually funny

Re:In related news,

[mvdw]

...from hot grits in their business plans?

Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[neomage86]

One of the best things about Gentoo for me (the performance difference was negligble) besides portage, was the bootstrapping process. I know it took forever, but you actually are learning more about linux. Redhat (my first *nix) hid everything, and slackware (my second love) gave me a little more access. Only gentoo allowed me to see (and attempt to understand) a true view of the install.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

Not only the install, but honestly having to compile your own kernel, just makes things work better. Everything about Gentoo is right, you know whats going in, and you know whats coming out. I don't run lsmod and see about 20 modules just floating there, like I did with mandrake, I know whats going on, I pick the modules that will be there. Its not just about access, its about actually using a pc, after years of submitting to MS's craptacular tendecies of hiding everything and sticking you with the bill, its liberating to actually know what module does what, and what program is running what service, etc. That is the true power of linux.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[onesandzeros]

I often see this written. With the exception of a few lines in various /etc files, to be honest, I didn't learn so much about linux from Gentoo. I learned "scripts/bootstrap.sh" and then "emerge world" and the whatever else I wanted to install.

That's not to say I don't like it. I do. I think it's great. But, the last time or two that I did an install, I used Knoppix to do it. I think it's great that they might have a full GUI available during the build. And, I think we can expect them to have the CLI type install available as well.

I use it because of the clarity and thoroughness of the documentation on their website. I'd like to try Debian, but I can't find a single, succinct install doc like Gentoo's.

Chris

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[BenjyD]

Gentoo users say this so often I thought I'd give it a go. I'm sitting here watching the compiler output from building X.org, but I don't seem to be learning anything.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong - any pointers for me on how I should be learning from compiler output?

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to know what's going on with your computer, I suggest you try constructing your own motherboard. Once you build a motherboard from scratch, you no longer have these random transistors lying around that you don't know the purpose of. Its not just about function, its about actually using pc hardware, after years of submitting to Asus and Epox's tendecies of not labeling everything and sticking you with the bill, its liberating to know what every piece of metal and plastic does what. This is the true power of not having a girlfriend.

Next project: building a monitor!

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Zork the Almighty]

I think the point is that while you are stuck watching compiler output, you will have nothing better to do but switch to a different tty and read man pages.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that. Theres nothiong worse then blindly using something with the hope that it'll be alright.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[iyliki]

You wanna learn something about the GNU/Linux system. You should try out Linuxfromscratch (lfs) http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/! But somehow I think it doesn't really do the job either. Still the system contol in gentoo is nothing compared to lfs.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[jdowland]

Not only the install, but honestly having to compile your own kernel, just makes things work better. Everything about Gentoo is right

funny that. I'd say being able to recompile the kernel is good, rather than being forced to.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[oexeo]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong - any pointers for me on how I should be learning from compiler output?

Try:
# strace -f ./configure
# strace -f make
# strace -f make install

Then go mildly insane deciphering assembly instructions at high speed

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Sentry21]

While this is certainly a neat feature of Gentoo, I found it more of a pain than it was worth. The benefits of Gentoo, I have to admit, are notable, but the fact that the install process is basically copying and pasting from the on-line manual to the command line, hoping you didn't miss a step along the way, is pretty sad. If it's just a basic 'run all these commands' installation, why couldn't it do it on its own? Download a file with the commands and just run them. The installation would have taken less than half of the time with this simple step.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[oexeo]

Correction: I meant system calls, not assembly instructions.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[JFitzsimmons]

Here's something for you to learn today: you aren't looking at compiler output. That's actually the output from make. Unless there are errors or warnings (which you will see), gcc is silent.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[wolf31o2]

Nobody is ever forced to, as there is genkernel, which does it for you, and is an option during install.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[wolf31o2]

I often see this written. With the exception of a few lines in various /etc files, to be honest, I didn't learn so much about linux from Gentoo. I learned "scripts/bootstrap.sh" and then "emerge world" and the whatever else I wanted to install.

Parent is really right, you know. You only "learn" what we want you to learn, which isn't much, admittedly. For someone with no Linux experience, or minimal Linux experience, or someone who has been using one of the hand-holding distributions, they might truly learn quite a bit, but if you really were wanting to learn how and why Gentoo does soem of the things it does, I would suggest one check out Linux from Scratch and really try to understand why things are done how they are done.

That's not to say I don't like it. I do. I think it's great. But, the last time or two that I did an install, I used Knoppix to do it. I think it's great that they might have a full GUI available during the build. And, I think we can expect them to have the CLI type install available as well.

Exactly. The idea is to have a complete environment to allow you to use your computer while installing Gentoo, even if you wish to install from stage1, or perform a completely binary installation. The whole point is to add choice for our users and potential users. The installer is also designed to give some important enterprise features to installing Gentoo, but don't expect to see them even near ready come February.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Anonymous Coward]

this is Gentoo's way of handing you your diploma and kicking your geeky ass out the door...

school is over, now go west young man...

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Moloch666]

Or open a web browser and read /.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Gulthek]

What if the GUI installer was explaining things as you went along? Like having the Gentoo Install Guide on the screen.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[skiman1979]

I've heard a lot of Gentoo users talk about the "learning" process of the bootstrap process. Although I use Gentoo, and love it, I don't really see how you learn anything more by doing a stage1 or stage2 install that you can't learn from a stage3/GRP. Really, the only thing I can see that stage1 gives you, besides a (often small) performance increase, is

# scripts/bootstrap.sh

# emerge system

Then between each step, you stare blankly at the compiler output for hours, or go watch some movies.

Even sticking with a stage3/GRP install, you can still learn a lot, using tools like lsmod to see what processes are running, and also configuring/compiling your kernel. As an added bonus, you get a working system in 2-4 hours instead of a few days. How does stage1 give you so much more knowledge?

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[wolf31o2]

It doesn't.

The only thing installing from stage1 allows you to do easily is to use a non-default profile or to do things like boostrap with nptl. It doesn't teach you anything more, simply because we made a bootstrap script to do it all for you.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that it could have been done easier, and IF you get through an install and don't really care what the commands do, then yes you will learn nothing. It took me about 10 tries of messing stuff up before I finally got Gentoo to install the way I wanted it to. I can now say with confidence that with a gentoo CD (or any linux cd for that matter) that I can fix my system as long as the hardware still functions.

Grouping everyone into "they learn nothing" or "become instant gurus" isn't correct. True you have both, but most learn quite a bit about Linux, while not knowing quite a bit at the same time. Gentoo is basically a patchwork system of nice install scripts, and doesn't really claim to be any more. portage is about the only thing that really makes Gentoo what it is. You don't have any special settings for KDE, you don't have any special Gentoo GUI configuration tools. If you expect more of Gentoo, then you're probably using the wrong distro.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[skiman1979]

I understand that. I can see the benefits of bootstrapping the system, compiling every last piece from source optimized for your particular hardware, even though it may only be a small performance boost. To be honest, I don't know what nptl is.

As you've said, executing 'scripts/bootstrap.sh;emerge system' does not teach you anything more. I'm sure if someone wanted to learn, they could study the bootstrap.sh script and execute the commands in there manually to understand what's going on, but I'm sure not many people do that.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Anonymous Coward]

How does watching GCC output scroll past constitute learning the bootstrap process of Linux?

People, Gentoo is still several steps away from building an actual LFS system, where you really do have to go through the bootstrap setup process. Gentoo has automated scripts that do things for you. What are you learning other than how to run the script?

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[runderwo]

I'd like to try Debian, but I can't find a single, succinct install doc like Gentoo's

Sigh

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Taladar]

I built a LFS System but after a while it was to much maintenance work. Then I tried Sourcemage and finally found Gentoo which is exactly the amount of work I want which means it might be a bit of work when I change some config but if I don't have time for that I can still have an up-to-date system.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[dn15]

I'll also add that the installer walks you through the process pretty well. It does assume you know some basic stuff about Linux but if you can handle a Gentoo install I'm sure you could just dive in and install Debian without any manual. Just find out what "apt-get does and you're pretty much set.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[Reteo Varala]

*chuckle* Funny part is, the same (to a lesser extent) also applies to the Linux from Scratch distribution.

On the one hand, you did have to compile and install all the programs by hand.

However, like Gentoo, all the scripts, device files, configuration files, and so on, are all included in an all-in-one file provided for convenience, and the LFS book did not go into detail as to how those various scripts, config files, and so on actually worked with the system. *shrug*

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[drinkypoo]

I'd like to try Debian, but I can't find a single, succinct install doc like Gentoo's.

What? It's called Knoppix :)

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[drinkypoo]

The only way you'll learn from watching compiler output is watching when it breaks and then figuring out how to fix it - not just in the fixing, which usually teaches you something, but also in what the compiler output looked like. It lets you know when you're dealing with a similar problem. Otherwise, while it's compiling, go do something else. You could always be reading the docs for whatever is compiling...

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[onesandzeros]

>> I'd like to try Debian, but I can't find a single, succinct install doc like Gentoo's

>Sigh

Sigh, take a look at your link and compare its singleness and succinctness to what you find at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml . From that page, you can click on your architecture and start going through their handbook. At the bottom of each page is a link to the next, and if you complete what's necessary on a page, they provide links to the next relevant part.

Your page appears to link to .deb packages (it is at packages.debian.org, afterall), which are very nice, but how am I going to use debs *before* I have a debian system installed? I looked at the 'list of files' link, wading through that isn't realistic for me, or practically anyone else, I suspect.

This is the point, damn near exactly, that I was making in my original post. Thanks for illustrating it for me.

Chris

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[runderwo]

1. A .deb is simply a tarball. If you didn't know that, then you could simply download the package's source tarball.

2. The distribution of Debian using the new installer is not released yet. Once it is released, the documentation will be placed on the main web site.

3. If you really want to read the installation guide for the old installer even with the upcoming release pending, you could go to the amazingly hard to find link http://www.debian.org/doc and click on "Debian Installation Manual".

Of course

[gowen]

the real hardcore Gentoo users won't consider you a Linux guru until your self-starting Linux system begins its bootstrap procedure by constructing your PC and CD-ROM drive using a desktop matter fabricator.

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

That is cheating! To do a proper gentoo install first you must recreate the big bang...

Easy guys it is a joke and I'm gentoo user.

Re:Of course

[Zork the Almighty]

What is the compiler flag for that ? -O4 ?

Re:Of course

[oexeo]

> What is the compiler flag for that ? -O4 ?

No, -42

Re:Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom.

Re:Of course

[Compenguin]

Using -O4 is silly, all -O's greater than or equal to three have the same effect but future gcc releases my add an -O4 that includes more dangerous flags and breaks things. No one should use -O4 until his compiler actually suppoerts -O4. I learned about the non-existanxe of the mythacal -O4 from gentoo.

Re:Of course

[Ann Coulter]

With all seriousness, die-hard Gentoo users use catalyst to build their own ISO images and then use that as a LiveCD to install Gentoo. Catalyst allows the user to create LiveCDs with anything on it provided that the portage tree has the proper ebuild, or the user can create an overlay filesystem to insert arbitrary files into the LiveCD. Catalyst can allow anyone to install X onto an LiveCD. Even though there is no easy to use installation program in the entire portage tree, you can still provide scripts that will automatically do things such as execute

/usr/portage/scripts bootstrap.sh;<br/>
emerge -e system;<br/>
exec install-kernel-config;<br/>
cd /usr/src/linux;<br/>
make bzImage;<br/>
make modules'<br/>

This script is ran after the user has created and mounted the filesystem.

The user can also just create a custom LiveCD with specific applications for a specific purpose. For example, the user can theoretically make a LiveDVD with Unreal Tournament 2004 on it and distribute it to players in a LAN party.

I'm currently working to create a LiveCD that I can use to make other LiveCDs using crossdev. I have already created a reiser4 LiveCD that I used to build my system almost from scratch.

All in all, catalyst is an extremely useful utility for those wanting to create custom Gentoo installations.

Oh, oh, I can see it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Dozens of post making oh so funny remarks that they are still not done compiling the old version before the new one comes out.

At least as many posts telling us that gentoo is the best and only distribution real man can use and that their boxen run so much faster now.

Half a dozen links to funroll-loops posted.

Anyway, I think this is great news. Imho gentoo really is a great distribution for what it does but there have been a few things missing that now seem to fall into place.

Kickstart like functionallity was one and a really stable (not in that it does work, but as in install and then have a stable system that will not be updated but only receives bug fixes) is also on the way.

And portage will finally get reverse-dependency checking when uninstalling, at least some gentoo devs are working on it.

Go gentoo!

Re:Oh, oh, I can see it coming

[natrius]

In Korea, only old people make oh so funny remarks that they are still not done compiling the old version before the new one comes out!

Must... kill... meme... or else someone will add it to the slashdot subculture page on Wikipedia before the day is over...

No, it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

You still can use the "old" method of installing gentoo, so where exactly is the problem again?

Re:No, it doesn't

[wolf31o2]

Parent is 100% correct. Even on the new CD, one would have to type "setup" to load up the installer and use it.

isn't this what vidalinux does?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://desktop.vidalinux.com

this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is just like BSD, but a million times better:

1. With Gentoo you can choose what version of software to install (tested or not very)

2. USB actually works

3. Ext3 is much better tested than UFS2 (and all Ext2 tools work with it too)

4. Portage works much more reliably than BSD ports system (because Portage installs in /var first and then moves stuff to /usr, wheres BSD ports aren't smart enough to do this)

The only thing that was keeping Gentoo behind BSD was the rather tedious installation (you have to follow some steps from the How-to). Now, with this automated, there will be absolutely no reason for anyone to use BSD

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHHHAAH and maybe like, keeping BSD if security is an issue? Seems to make sense... considering Linux is now rated MORE insecure then windows.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you would have the slightest clue as to how ports actually worked, you would've noticed it has WRKDIRPREFIX, which achieves the exact thing you're saying ...

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it won't.

If you really want a rock stable system FreeBSD is still the way to go, as great as gentoo is, it can't compete in this area.

You'll also still have to compile all the software for your system, something you don't have to do, but can do using FreeBSD.

And of course there are many people that think that the BSDs have some security functionality gentoo or linux in general still lacks, e.g.: jails.

Finally, it is simply beyond me why you think that anything killing FreeBSD is a good thing. If gentoo fits your needs better than FreeBSD, use it, but what do you think gentoo or anyone else would gain from destroying FreeBSD?

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[carnivore302]

I still have no idea why this would totally crush BSD. Gentoo is a linux flavour, so unless gentoo adds something not standard to linux, nothing has been gained. If Linux didn't already crush BSD before, I don't think it will do so because of gentoo. It is the quality of linux that moves people away from [insert your OS here], not the distro (which in the end are all the same plus some extras that set them apart from eachother)although I must admit gentoo is a very nice distro. I use it myself and am very happy with it, but wouldn't want to give it to linux newbies.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[tunah]

And with -march=i666 -fomit-instruction-pointer, it's dying 110% faster!

(pity, I quite like it...)

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

And perhaps with some glue on the side of the cd it will install without requiring a license key, unlike satanware which needs permanent marker.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[ryanmfw]

Gentoo does add something not standard to linux: A ports system. That is the whole point. One reason to use BSD is now available in Linux, something that was not available before. I have to say, I like it too. Cheers, Ryan

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[ViolentGreen]

You'll also still have to compile all the software for your system, something you don't have to do, but can do using FreeBSD.

No you don't! Have you used gentoo? "emerge -k" installs the binaries if they are available. For most packages, they are available.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Dalroth]

I'm not trolling. Please enlighten me. What does a FreeBSD jail offer that Linux + chroot does not?

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I am assuming by jails, you are speaking about chroot jails. If that is the case, this article may help you to break free of your ignorance about the support that Linux systems have for this device:

http://www.linuxsecurity.com/feature_stories/featu re_story-99.html

If not, there's nothing for you to see here..

I do entirely agree with your point about *BSD though - why on earth would anyone think it's a good idea to kill something else, just because what they use they like better? That's an attitude that smacks of the worst arrogance and ignorance combined. It's the same as all the 1337 k1dd135 clamoring about killing off the evil and abominable M$ Winblows. It will die on its own, as more and more people realize that it is not meeting their needs. It doesn't need some grand champion to come along and destroy it.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I've been using gentoo for a long time now and no, grp packages are not a valid alternative to precompiled bsd packages.

There is no official repository, all you can do if you want to avoid to compiling things is wait for the new gentoo release with the accompanying package cd coming out. Of course you will miss all updates, including security updates in the meantime, so this is not really a viable option for anything other than a private desktop installation protected by a router.

So yes, you are right, portage can handle precompiled packages but though this give people the opportunity to install a working gentoo system pretty fast it is not an option for day to day work.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[teslar]

Two things:
1) I simply don't see Gentoo (or indeed any other Linux distro) and any BSD system as playing in the same league.
2) All the advantages of Gentoo over BSD you list also apply to Debian and most other Linux distros.

So... what's your Gentoo-specific point again?

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[takev]

The only thing that may happen in the long run, is that it may replace the port system of BSD. I right now run Gentoo (the portage part) on top of OS X. Not every package is there yet (actually most aren't), but I do see the possibilities.

Next on the list:
Gentoo on win32

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[archen]

chroot basically changes what a process sees on the filesystem (changes the root seen). Jail goes a step farther by imprisoning and restricting what processes are allowed to do. I think jail also requires binding to an ip address, but I'm not sure about that. Most people I know using BSD (including myself) just use chroot since it's easier to configure.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason to use BSD is now available in Linux, something that was not available before.

If you think there's only one reason to use BSD over linux, then you've never really used BSD much. BSD is a SYSTEM - not a package managment system, not a kernel. BSD does quite a few things better than Linux, just like Linux does a lot of things better than BSD. To some extent this is a trade off and you can't have it both ways and make the "best of both worlds".

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[pantherace]

What advantages does this have over 'hardened' Linux?

Also: http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3823

(I don't know which subset of BSD's jail it doesn't implement. Anyone care to share who knows both?)

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

1 and 4 are mostly true (BSD ports is reliable in practice, but not very advanced).

2. Huh? I run FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux, USB works on both, in some ways better under FreeBSD.

3. Huh? UFS2 is an incremental (minor) change from UFS (actually FFS, but pretty much all UFS have been FFS since the 80s), which is probably one of the most widely used filesystems in existence.

Oh, and the unsafeness of ext2 was for a long time a reason to avoid Linux for serious server use.

Like I said, I run FreeBSD and Gentoo, and both have their positive sides and negative sides. Here are a few where FreeBSD is, IMO, a clear winner - better documentation (the handbook is good, every command in the base system has a manual page), kernel configuration and installation, system source code organization (the Linux kernel is a bit of a mess).

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[cloudmaster]

A Stage3 install of gentoo is an install of binaries, and there are x86 binaries of most all the packages that can be installed once you're in a running system. You don't need to compile anything on Gentoo. So you get a choice. You actually get more choices, as you can compile or install binaries for the base system, and then you can compile or install binaries for the additional packages.

The BSD jails are a better kernel-leve enforcement of chroot. Linux doesn't have *as* good of a chroot, but it's fine for most cases. Gentoo is differentiated from most ofhter Linux distros by supprting the selinux stuff, though. Check out the hardened Gentoo and the subprojects within.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[ryanmfw]

Well, I haven't used BSD too much, but that doesn't change what I said. You quoted it yourself. *One* reason to use BSD is now available in Linux. One of the things BSD did better than Linux is now done by Gentoo. I never said that Gentoo's gonna convert all of the BSD users in the world, I just said, essentially, that Gentoo made the choice a little tougher.

Cheers,
Ryan

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[0racle]

Most of the major distros have support for SELinux additions either in their base packages or as a subproject, and SELinux was designed to work with Fedora, not Gentoo.

SELinux for Distributions

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Elshar]

It will never relace the ports system of BSD.

Well, I'll rephrase that. No BSD user will ever install portage on their system, especially if they already know how to use it.

Gentoo Linux people using BSD might, but then.. Well, they should probably just keep using Gentoo. ;)

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that if you do a stage3 GRP install you dont have to compile anything except the kernel right?

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Adam Avangelist]

Wrong Linux has multiple features to implement to functionality of BSD jails. User Mode Linux, the v-server project, and the newly integrated kernel-level BSD style jails. http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3981

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[drinkypoo]

If you really want a rock stable system QNX is still the way to go. As great as FreeBSD is, it can't compete in this area.

As sibling says, you don't have to compile anything, unless you want obscure point releases that probably will not affect your life.

BSDs have jails, linux has chroot for light duty and user mode linux for the high end. Using kernel-level autoconfiguration you could run multiple virtual systems as user processes and isolate any service or group of services you wanted, using either separate filesystems (optionally loopback filesystems) or network filesystems to access data on the host as required. A virtual mail hosting service would be an excellent fit for this, storing user mail on a filer or on the host through nfs, intermezzo, andrew, ncp, or coda (mail is safely stored on remote filesystems using maildir format, or you could put it in an rdbms) and using the netfilter to handle directing traffic around the system through both physical and virtual network interfaces.

Killing FreeBSD is pretty pointless, but I can't imagine that it has much of a long-term future compared to openbsd or netbsd, which both have niches that no one else fills adequately. It will be interesting to find out if linux scales down as well as BSD, especially netbsd. So far, it certainly scales up further. I'm interested to see what will happen with selinux, as well. In my opinion you could build just about the ideal computing environment using selinux, openmosix, user mode linux, and hammer-based PCs, if you could just combine them all reliably :)

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[runderwo]

No, he's talking about BSD jails which are a better chroot. But it's a pointless comment anyway, since linux vservers do the exactly same thing and even better.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

People were using BSD because its ports collection is more flexible than most, if not all, binary linuxen. Gentoo offers the same advantages, and it is also far ahead of BSD in many other aspects, including security (SELinux is much more powerful than 'jails'). Linux is not out to crush BSD: BSD userbase is too small to make any difference for Linux, even if all BSD users switched at once. Nevertheless, it's a fact that FreeBSD users migrate to Gentoo en masse.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD people often say that FreeBSD "is a system". Actually, it's a real disadvantage. In the Linux world, the kernel is decoupled from Binutils and from the compiler. This is a definite win.

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[cloudmaster]

Well, the discussion was about Gentoo, and the page you linked to says that SELinux was developed for Debian and that the work for Debian + Gentoo is most complete. Clicking the link for "other" gets me a page not found, and the links for the specific distros mentioned there say stuff like "info coming soon", etc.

Even on the assumption that all 6 distros up there have full support and come with useful security policies - which is not the case - there's still a *whole bunch* of other distros that don't have nice integrated support. I'd go so far as to say that *most* distros don't have easy SELinux support, and most distros don't make it terribly easy to install those packages. Gentoo [basically] just requires appending a string to a variable in /etc/make.conf and then either building or rebuilding the world, depending on whether it's install time or later. So, I still feel good about stating that SELinux support differentiates Gentoo somewhat.

It's cool that most distros are finally integrating tha stuff, though. Mandatory Access Controls are cool. Thanks for the link.

reiser 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if this proposed livecd kernel will support reiser4, and does the livecd come with the necessary tools for reiser4?

Re:reiser 4?

[grover_99]

It depends on whether reiser 4 makes it into the vanilla kernel in time or not. Gentoo no longer patch their kernels with large patchsets that are likely to breaks things.

Inexperienced

[nemsan]

I'm in experienced you insensitive clod!

Re:Inexperienced

[deimtee]

He was talking about inexperienced with linux.

gentoo already has a graphical installer

[DAC1138]

ummm, vida linux is gentoo with a graphical installer. i fail so see how the next 2005 release will be any different from vida.

http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[sbennett]

Last I knew, Vida used a hacked up version of Anaconda to install the gentoo base system. The Gentoo installer will install with portage. That's quite a difference.

Disclaimer: I haven't used either, so I might be slightly inaccurate on the details.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[Anonymous Coward]

What you mean apart from the small fact that vidalinux sucks ass and its actually quicker to do a Gentoo install from scratch than fix all the problems in a vidalinux install after its finished.

I get the impression from the artical when they say graphical install they don't mean anaconda.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[dema]

i fail so see how the next 2005 release will be any different from vida.

I wonder if that's because you haven't seen the final 2005 release (:

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[IamTheRealMike]

Well I'd hope they did reuse Anaconda as much as possible, there's a *huge* amount of effort gone into that program and it'd be a crying shame to reinvent the wheel.

Still, I fully expect them to do exactly that because it's always cooler to write your own than reuse somebody elses, and especially because Red Hat wrote it and it's associated with RPM.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about Suse's YAST installer. Last I checked it was slightly more user-friendly that RedHat's Anaconda because YAST can resize NTFS partitions using ntfsresize, while RedHat has opted to leave out that functinality, citing safety concerns (which I admit, are warranted, but it doesn't make Anaconda any more user-friendly).

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably has something to do with Vida Linux being nothing more than an anaconda-based installer that has little to none of the capabilities that the official Gentoo installer will have. Not to mention the fact that it is not an official Gentoo project nor are they supported by Gentoo in any way. Essentially, they are riding on the coat tails of Gentoo and giving nothing back in return. While this is completely fine thanks to the GPL, why bother using the second-rate knock-off, when you can use the real thing? After all, we don't ask for $30 so you can get a non-crippled version of someone else's work. Even the stuff sold at the Gentoo store is identical to the CD images put out on the Gentoo mirrors.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[wolf31o2]

Anaconda has nowhere near the flexibility that the Gentoo installer has, nor is it as modular and extensible. The Gentoo installer is essentially a group of modules designed to work together to perform a task. This can be anything from acting as a guided installtion, to doing a full-blown automated install from a network boot.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Vidalinux:
All of the Gentoo you could have gotten for free but paid $30 to get
None of the support from the excellent Gentoo developers and community since you're using a non-Gentoo product!

Just some clarification...

[sbennett]

What's planned for 2005.0 is an experimental test release of the new graphical installer. It'll be there for people who want to test it, but don't go relying on the thing.

Re:Too bad it needs to be COMPILED first ;)

[oliverthered]

Like, so your telling me whatever application your runing isn't compiled? That would mean your eitehr using a mainframe with interpreted cobol or using the only browser written in bbc basic.

not just the graphical installer.

[deathazre]

I actually did the majority of my stage 1 install and system setup (x.org, kde, OO.o, most of the programs I use) from knoppix, partially because for some reason the gentoo CD I got from one of the other guys here wouldn't boot, partially because I wanted a working system while I installed (so I could still idle on IRC and such). If the graphical installer can be made to run inside the knoppix-like part of the new gentoo CD...

nice.

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[sbennett]

so I could still idle on IRC and such

You know, the 2004.3 livecds (or at least the x86 and amd64 ones) do include irssi for that...

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[JFitzsimmons]

irssi has also been available on quite a few of the earlier releases of the livecd as well. I'm not positive on this, but it may even have been on the 1.4 livecd (and every version after that).

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[antiMStroll]

"...partially because for some reason the gentoo CD I got from one of the other guys here wouldn't boot ..."

A major and uncharacteristic gaff on that release, the installer didn't pre-load the ide modules and hence users couldn't see their hard drives without first issuing a 'modprobe ide-somethingorother' command.

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[deathazre]

no, it actually dumped me into grub.

Even after I disabled booting from hard drive, for some odd reason...

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[Reteo Varala]

Perhaps. However, Links isn't much for myself, whose primary timewasting entertainment is looking over webcomics and playing the occasional game of Frozen Bubble. And browsing is like FPS games: Without a mouse, it just doesn't feel right. ;)

Which is why I used Knoppix itself to do the level 1 install. Hey, it works. ;)

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[NamShubCMX]

I agree that Knoppix is probably the best way to go to install gentoo, however in some case you're stuck with the gentoo CD (installing AMD64, for example).

In that case, you should boot in a FB console. When starting links, use the command: 'links -g' it will start in graphical mode and you'll be able to enjoy graphical web. :)

Live-CD

[Uukrul]

Live-CDs aren't only good for test Linux, but Live-Cds are wonderful rescue Cds and make Linux-boxes where only windows is available.
I usually use Slax because it fits on a small 8cm CD-RW.
Gentoo it's another Live CD to add to the list whatever I can i'm goint to test this one.

Re:Live-CD

[XpirateX]

Let's not forget the other great uses of Live CDs (and one that I believe Gentoo pioneered even): GAMING! Although they're hard to find, RTCW:ET, Americas Army and Unreal 2003 Demo (requires NVidia card, sorry ATI kids) were also great for bringing to work during lulls.
I remember how these LiveCDs were polished and reliable - I'm excited to see what they come up with.

Unreal 2003 demo - Gentoo LiveCD

Seems great

[DeBaas]

I think this is great. This weekend I installed 2004.3. I had to keep my laptop on the desk as well to read the install guide (handbook) and do other 'usefull' stuff such as browse the internet ;-) (Links for me is a little too bare)

I hope they include Open Office as well and a decent email client. That way you can boot of the disk, set the thing to install and, whilst installing or compiling, stay 'productive' the whole time!

Great when installing Gentoo on your office workstation ;-)

The graphical installer seems to me as best of both worlds, the control over your system as Gentoo users are used to as well as significantly reduced time spent on installing. If I get it right, the install time itself won't be shorter but it will be more of a 'setup what you want, press go, and wait' rather then, type command..... wait......type other command....... wait....... wait some more.....

Re:Seems great

[Anonymous Coward]

Although you could just install Gentoo from a Knoppix CD... No different from normal apart from you can play frozen bubble!

Re:Seems great

[jdowland]

When I last installed my operating system it was over so quickly I didn't have time to do anything else, except maybe make a cup of coffee.

Is this installation thing going to make you rebuild all the packages then, is that why doing something productive at the same time is so important?

Re:Seems great

[lachlan76]

If you know exactly what you want to install then you can cut down the number of commands by quite a lot, by just putting all the packages on the end of one emerge command.

Re:Seems great

[bhima]

you must be using BeOS or Haiku :)

Re:Seems great

[jdowland]

Nope, Debian/sarge. The installer really is that efficient. Give it a go! http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Re:Seems great

[bhima]

Sorry Man, I'm a devoted Mac OS X user now. Well that and NetBSD on my cube, and SuSE on my x86 laptop

Re:Seems great

[cloudmaster]

Try "links -g" - you get a mouse and nifty graphical browsing if you're using the framebuffer device for your console (which is what the gentoo installer does by default). There's a flag that turns on javascript support, too, though it escapes me just now. It's probably --javascript or similar...

Re:Seems great

[DeBaas]

Thanks, I was looking for a graphical browser that can be used in the framebuffer device. I had no idea Links could do it

CLI good

[darin3200]

When you install mandrake or suse, do you learn anything? No, you just click next, next, next until you are done. With gentoo you are forced to use command line which some say is too hard. But it really isn't, with the Gentoo Handbook the installation is all laid out for you and by actually installing it by hand and reading an entire manual to make sure you don't screw up you learn a lot and get a ton of command line expierence. Hopefully Gentoo continues to be innovative so its GUI installer doesn't end up like the rest.

Re:CLI good

[jdowland]

But what is it? An installer or a command line tutorial? I like my installers to be good at their primary focus, as is the UNIX way.

Re:CLI good

[Anonymous Coward]

While I like the way gentoo is installed now and I really learned a lot about how linux works using gentoo I just have on little question for you.

What about people that don't want to learn but just set up a working system as easily as possible?
Isn't that a valid wish?
Should those people not be allowed to use linux?

Re:CLI good

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo is good due to the command line interface install, I agree with you there but the use of a GUI install is good for those who can't be bothered messing around with a command line install or when you can't be bothered to RTFM.

I've changed wagons a long time ago from Gentoo to Slackware as for one, I don't have the time to do compiles from source and also I just wanted something that worked and allowed for my hands to get dirty and configure my machine how I want it.

Re:CLI good

[Anonymous Coward]

But I don't WANT to learn anything. I want a system that works, works stable, and more importantly works fast. My laptop is a 700mhz pentium 3 with 256 mb of RAM. I used to have SuSE 9.2 (I think, it may have been 9.1). This worked OK, but it took 57 seconds to boot, then another 3 to start X, then another 15 or so to start KDE, then another ten or so to start OpenOffice.

Now it's Windows 98. Boots in under twenty seconds (plus three to start Wordpad), doesn't crash (albeit only because I only need to use the thing for word processing), and doesn't get hacked (because I don't connect it to the Internet). In addition, it plays DVDs and other media files perfectly. I want to run linux on there, but in 90 seconds an awful lot of information that I needed to tkae note of can go in one ear and out the other.

Re:CLI good

[Anonymous Coward]

why you should be interested of learning OS internals instead of being interested doing your work & being creative? i don't get it.

--"Mac OS X user" :)

Re:CLI good

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have SuSE 9.2 [...] Now it's Windows 98. Boots in under twenty seconds

Gee, a seven-year-old OS boots faster than one released this year. Alert Ted Koppel.

Hey, maybe you could put CP/M-86 on it and have it boot in under ONE SECOND! After all, a lot of shit could pass between your ears in that 23 seconds it takes to start Wordpad.

Re:CLI good

[Krunaldo]

Maby you're interested in knowing how this work and that work. And it's highly likely your work requires you to know stuff like that.
Oooooooooh sorry you're a Mac user ;).

Re:CLI good

[Zardus]

When you install Gentoo, do you learn anything? No, you just copy-paste command after command from the install howto until you're done. With other distros, you're forced to use the graphical installers which some say hide too much of the system from you. But they really don't, compared with the Gentoo install which just involves copying stuff from a web document. Hopefully other distros will continue to have decent installers and don't end up being boring hours-long sessions of copying text back and forth.

OH MY GOD!

[templest]

*glee* Oh.. My.. God. Life is good again!

*throws out all old --failed-- gentoo cds and eagerly waits for a download*

Not that it's too difficult to install gentoo linux. But one has to agree, installing gentoo is a good long weekend project. Granted, you learn a lot about Linux while intalling it. But I just found that it was too counter-productive to install gentoo when I could just pop-in a slackware CD, go get a tasse-de-café and come back in 15 minutes to be greated by fluxbox. I did get it working once, but it was so unstable that I just weant back to slackware (Not that gentoo is unstable, just that I was too nub to install it properly).

I must admit I didn't rtfa, but if this thing can do a stage-1 install that gives you the option of customizing your kernel... I'm in.

Re:OH MY GOD!

[AchilleTalon]

Maybe it's time to decide once in your life if you want to be a serious sysadmin or a professional coffee drinker...

Please, don't talk about something you were too lazy to install properly.

Re:OH MY GOD!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't do a stable stage-1 install from the commandline, then you're probably not gonna get a stable stage-1 install from an installer. And a GUI isn't gonna make stuff compile any faster.

Re:OH MY GOD!

[templest]

Yes, but it will help someone get along the installation a lot smoother. Even if the only thing the installer does is provide you with on-screen instructions. It's a turn off to have to print out a 300+ page manual of the installation.

Note, I wasn't too lazy to install it properly. I just didn't _get how_. Because unlike someone that does this as a profession, I use linux as an alternative to using Microsoft products. I know that a gentoo install would be the wisest choice for a system-admin, but for someone that only needs OpenOffice.org and Quake3, it's pretty much useless to install something that might only give the system a few more free cycles to work with.

I'm not giving my opinion from a developer or power-user's standpoint. I'm saying that someone that knows nothing of linux, might be more able to install this _better_ system without having to resort to the bloated, 3+ CD, distros like Fedora or Mandrake.

I think we can all agree that a big part of selling (if not literally for money) your product is it's ability to function properly, efficiently, and ease of use.

My point? Perhaps now, us non l33t folk, might be able to install it and get it working, without having to become gurus at linux. Because, you know, there's people out there that wouldn't mind using a superior product without having to get a BS in Computer Science.

PS: Even if nothing compiles faster, that doesn't mean it won't _help_ the user get it done better. I'm saying that even if it doesn't do any of that now, it's a step in the right direction. Wasn't there an article on here not too long ago, that focused on the advantages of making a better user interface for your programs; perhaps, a better (note: easy to use) graphic environment for an aging command-line-based installation?

rpm's?

[Anonymous Coward]

when are the .rpm available?

Re:rpm's?

[MrEcho.net]

Go back to RH little boy...

Re:Star Wars Characters

[Zork the Almighty]

Gentoo is the name of a very fast type of penguin. George Lucas has no claim (he's too busy making turkeys).

Gentoo rocks!!!

[OldGuyNew]

I've been through a lot distros over the years. But Gentoo was the one that stayed installed on the hard drive. For me, it is all I ask of an OS. One of the best things that I absolutely love about Gentoo is the active and highly professional developer community. They really get it. Go Gentoo!!!

offtopic rant

[Zork the Almighty]

Don't you just love it how first posts are always modded redundant. I mean, all you did was make a comment. You expressed your opinion. I wonder, what is it that the moderator expected ?

I've noticed a lot of redundant mods lately, and negative mods in general. I think Slashdot should attach statistics to each story showing the percentage of positive versus negative mods. I would also like to see these statistics for editors, who have unlimited mod points. We should get to see how they were meta-modded as well. On one final note, Slashdot needs a forum to discuss issues like this, so that people don't have to resort to offtopic posts.

Re:offtopic rant

[Cereal Box]

I think what a lot of moderators do is mod topics "Redundant" or "Offtopic" simply because they disagree with the poster's point of view, but don't want to be seen that way in metamoderation. I always find it funny how one post can spawn a completely unrelated thread of discussion, and about five levels deep, a comment that is related to the new discussion gets moderated "Offtopic". Really now, the discussion was "Offtopic" long before that. Mods, if a discussion gets off-topic, moderate the post that started the discussion "Offtopic" and moderate all subsequent replies according to the new discussion at hand. Is this really that hard to understand?

And please, if there are two redundant posts, the post that occurs first should never be moderated "Redundant".

Re:offtopic rant

[sbennett]

OTOH, the comment in question was a fairly useless one that added nothing to the discussion... Not to say that this one is any different, of course.

Re:offtopic rant

[secolactico]

Don't you just love it how first posts are always modded redundant. I mean, all you did was make a comment. You expressed your opinion. I wonder, what is it that the moderator expected ?

In my glass-is-half-full view of the world, the post was modded so because mods believe Gentoo (and emerge) to be way cool, and stating so in a post is actually redundant. ;-)

Man, I should get a job as a spin doctor.

Re:offtopic rant

[AlanS2002]

Useless and adding nothing to the discussion sure. However it is impossible that it was redundant unless the sentiment had already been expressed prior.

Re:offtopic rant

[Fig, formerly A.C.]

Prior in the same thread, or prior in general? That might have been the first post in this thread, but it's unlikely that sentiment has never been voiced on Slashdot before. It's like labelling any first post "Redundant" that contains the same old same old, be it M$ bashing, SCO bashing, RIAA bashing, etc....

Re:offtopic rant

[antiMStroll]

I always thought a way to handle this is:

issue two IDs to all users, one their publicly visible 'normal' ID and a hidden second 'moderator' ID

identify all acts of moderation with the hidden ID

allow all users to see a moderation ID's history

provide an avenue to report abuse, or alternately auto-disable mod points for a period if they consistently exceed a set up/down ratio

Moderation still occurs anonymously, but now with a trackable history. This identifies moderators who target individuals, people using multiple accounts to self-moderate, or those who tag on-topic first posts redundant.

Re:offtopic rant

[Reziac]

That's an excellent idea. Might also get rid of the "every time I see a foe post ANYthing, I gotta mod 'em down" types. I and others I've talked to have noticed spasms of 5 mod-downs at once, which tends to indicate a troll or foe following one about.

My own pet peeve: Being ancient of account and excellent of karma, my posts start life at +2. Every so often someone mods one down as "overrated". How can it be overrated if it's at the default??

Myself, I only mod up, never down. There are already enough morons who live for the chance to make a snappy mod-down. In fact, I've even been known to mod up one of my freaks (who happens to be an unmitigated linux bigot, but nonetheless occasionally has something worthwhile to say).

(Come to mention it, why isn't he here trashing the excellent concept of a nice installer for real people? :)

Re:offtopic rant

[AlanS2002]

Prior in the same thread, in general. A sentiment may of course be twisted to suit the topic, making it unique. Stuff like 'Necraft confirms BSD is dead', is redundant because of the sheer repitiviness without any modification whatsoever.

Re:offtopic rant

[alib001]

Every so often someone mods one down as "overrated". How can it be overrated if it's at the default??

And the FAQ says:

As a good poster, you earned a bonus: you are allowed to speak slightly "louder" than other people. In most cases, this is because you've earned it. But with that right comes a responsibility - you have to justify that bonus score. The louder you speak, the more likely you are to be moderated down, unless you're sufficiently interesting to prompt the moderators to let you keep your bonus score. This is how the system is designed to work: you can't just rack up karma, and then post nonsense.

Personally, I mod' things as overrated when I think they are just that. Chances are that _if_ I'd have seen the "emerge is cool" post early on and _if_ it had a value of 2 I'd have thought that was overrated. What does that one-liner add to the discussion?

Somebody, somewhere thinks something is cool. Well... great. No explanation why they think it's cool. No insight offered. No interesting snippet of information imparted. There's a place where people can log their unqualified opinions and every waking thoughts: blogs.

Re:offtopic rant

[Reziac]

While all that's reasonable as far as it goes, it's also a complete waste of mod points (and in my observation, "overrated" is used entirely as "punishment", never as genuine evaluation of what someone wrote): For every "overrated" or "redundant" post you mod down from its default score, you've sacrificed your ability to mod one more worthwhile post up from the depths.

Personally I think a better reaction than modding down "Emerge is cool" as overrated, would be to forego modding in favour of asking the poster to elucidate why they believe this, which might well generate worthwhile posts that you and others would not have otherwise thought of.

As it stands, we don't have a clue why said person believes that, and instead are arguing about the (de)merits of moderation methods. *sigh*

Okay, why IS Emerge cool? (And for that matter, what is it? :)

Re:offtopic rant

[alib001]

I see what you're saying. It'd be nice if someone always had the patience to ask "why?" but I think the onus remains with the poster to elaborate.

Sometimes 'overrated' goes hand-in-hand with 'punishment' (of sorts). For instance, today I moderated a post down that had been moderated up to '+4 Informative' (IIRC) as 'Overrated' because it was factually, and therefore totally, incorrect. The poster of that comment was corrected and then asked for their earlier post to be moderated down. I know trying to stop the spread of FUD and untruths on somewhere like /. is probably in wikipedia as a definition for 'futility' but in lieu of a 'Wrong' moderation, 'Overrated' is probably the best alternative for people that don't seeing 'informative' posts at +5 because people moderating don't know any better. That's just spreading stupidity!

Okay, why IS Emerge cool? (And for that matter, what is it? :)

Seriously? It's a Gentoo Linux thing. In simple terms emerge is an installer. AFAIK it's similar to the ports / packages system in FreeBSD (actually, maybe it's closer to portupgrade). It provides a relatively easy way to configure and install stuff (because it handles compilation, dependency checking, installation etc.) It is pretty cool (because it takes the headaches out of installing stuff).

I think what the original poster was saying with

emerge this-is-cool

was: "I'll install / try this (Gentoo 2005) out because I think it's cool."

Or maybe there's something in Gentoo's Portage called "this-is-cool" and the poster flicked between xterms at an inopportune moment and posted to Slashdot. We may never know!

Re:offtopic rant

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I like about being a regular meta-moderator.

With most other moderation values, about 80% of the time I think they have been fairly rated. But whenever I see something moderated as "Redundant", I cringe, open up the original story, set the viewing threshold to -1 with an unthreaded layout, and pore through the entries looking for a possible duplicate. It always takes me much longer to check the validity of a redundant moderation than it does for the others. More often than not, these posts are not redundant at all. They may be offtopic, flamebait, trolls, or simply uninteresting, but not repetitive.

So I get to mod down the moderators, and hopefully they won't be badly moderating as much. :^)

Re:offtopic rant

[edittard]

it's unlikely that sentiment has never been voiced on Slashdot before.

Never mind the comments, it's unlikely that the story hasn't been seen on slashdot before.

Re:offtopic rant

[SoCalChris]

And please, if there are two redundant posts, the post that occurs first should never be moderated "Redundant".

And on that note, if there are two similar posts a few minutes apart, don't mod either of them redundant. Chances are, the first post wasn't there while the second post was being written, and the second post author didn't have a chance to see the first post.

Besides, mods should be focusing on modding up, not down.

Re:offtopic rant

[Snaller]

I say people who mod down are not of use to slashdot. There is so much nonsense you can never mod it all down: Mod UP instead.

Gentoo Install Flexibility

[Brian Blessed]

It's very common for people on /. (who are, perhaps familiar with other distros) to denounce Gentoo for its lack of a graphical installer, but I've always seen this as a good thing. The person installing Gentoo has clear and precise instructions outlining what actions need to be performed, so they can very easily adapt those to a wide range of different situations. E.g. I don't like to have to burn CDs unnecessarily, so I make my kernel first and then network boot into the stage1 filesystem.

I believe that, in general, it's a better design decision not to have an overly intrusive installer for any software because that can tie too much of the software's configuration to the installation process, rather than having a comprehensive way to configure the software post-install.

- Brian

Re:Gentoo Install Flexibility

[slyckshoes]

I agree with the parent poster. I also think that there is another benefit to the non-graphical installer + good documentation: education. After installing Gentoo on my workstation using a stage 1 tarball I had a much better idea of what was going on in my system and how to configure/tweak various things. The documentation is very well written (not flawless mind you) and I would argue that your average linux user will be much more informed about how to work with his system after installing Gentoo. I've also used SLES and RHEL, and while the install was very straightforward, I had no idea how to configure the system other than to try and find an item in the menu tree that seemed relevant to what I wanted to do.

Re:Gentoo Install Flexibility

[Anonymous Coward]

The person installing Gentoo has clear and precise instructions outlining what actions need to be performed

Well yes, but it's impossible to have clear and precise instructions that are correct for everyone, as everyones situation is slightly different - taking all those situations into account reduces the clarity and precision of the instructions.

For example, the first time I installed Gentoo, I followed the instructions to the letter, only to find it telling me to insert a network module into the kernel. The module I needed was missing. I looked for different ISOs to fix the problem (it's quite a rare card), I hunted through the existing CD to try and find the module in an odd location, I tried a number of things.

It turns out that the kernel had the driver built-in rather than built as a module, so that entire section of the documentation was meaningless and I could have skipped it. There was absolutely nowhere on the website or in the documentation that mentioned this fact, and plenty of things saying the exact opposite.

So sure, there's a lot of very clear and precise instructions... it's just that they aren't always right, and when they are wrong, they are downright misleading.

Re:Gentoo Install Flexibility

[drinkypoo]

Ultimately gentoo is basically ideal the way it is. It walks the novice by the hand through the installation of gentoo on your ordinary system, and the gentoo community is massive and typically fairly helpful, unlike many other Unix, Linux, and similar communities that you can talk to via that most pathetic but convenient medium, irc. In addition there are seldom major snags, though the assertions about the time a stage 1 install takes are all true, I've installed gentoo many times on many systems and they all took a while, which was not that long on some of them like the dual p3 with u160 scsi and 768mb ram. Took a long ass time on my compaq presario 1692 laptop however. The most unfortunate thing about gentoo is that the machines that need its help the most - K6s and other stepchild CPUs - are the ones that take the longest to build the system, but that's reality.

I would like to see several types of installer - unassisted, assisted, and automatic installs, both graphic (X11) and text. Since a LiveCD is coming it makes perfect sense to do this and you don't need much of X when you do your install. Personally I installed the base system, booted it up, and then built X, GNOME, et cetera, but you could always build all that stuff and then start running your new X clients on the LiveCD's server if you planned to spend all your time in X. I don't sit at my gentoo system so it's not an issue for me.

The unassisted graphic installer wouldn't exist. It's an xterm. The assisted text installer would split the screen, and provide you with documentation for the current step. It would be nice to have a live script that changed as you make decisions or as your hardware is detected or specified. The automatic installer would be like a windows installer, asking you either the minimum questions, or no questions for automated installs.

I have a feeling that many of the pieces of this particular puzzle are already coming with 2005.0. The system already has text-interface programs which perform all the underlying tasks whether you're building from stage1 or running the GRP, and either way it would be (relatively) easy to wrap the installers around them such that the system would come out precisely the same whether you used the textual or graphical installer. Either way you could use parts of the system once they were compiled or installed, just as you can now, and after a reboot you'll be able to come up with your system just as you do now - just with an easier installer. There's no reason only the pedantic should benefit from, well, the benefits... of gentoo, namely excellent package management, frequently-updated packages, and then all that compilation-related shit, aka USE and CFLAGS. I seldom suggest to anyone that they run anything but gentoo for any purpose any more, except for database servers (redhat or suse's professional grade stuff is your best bet here, you have to spend money to make money and database vendors don't heart gentoo) unless they are on dialup, in which case I direct them to debian. True you could fetch distfiles remotely but it's easier to fetch debs. Then again I haven't bothered with the GRP yet so maybe that makes that aspect of running linux easy too, I don't know.

Re:Gentoo Install Flexibility

[theLOUDroom]

The most unfortunate thing about gentoo is that the machines that need its help the most - K6s and other stepchild CPUs - are the ones that take the longest to build the system, but that's reality.

Here's the link you want:
Gentoo Distcc guide

Admittedly I haven't used it yet, but if I ever need to install Gentoo on an old laptop it's a route I would definately explore.

Re:Gentoo Install Flexibility

[drinkypoo]

I know about distcc and have used it, including with a cross-compiler to make binaries for my indy. (Can't build a toolchain right now for some reason, though.) I had only the laptop at the time.

Where's the proof.

[datadriven]

I use slackware. I hear a lot of gentoo users say how much faster their systems are because they're so "optimised". Is there any evidence to this? Is the speed difference in units bigger than milliseconds? I tried to install gentoo once but I quite when I wasn't finished after several hours.

Re:Where's the proof.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how it is, there are probably benchmarks floating around proofing it, as there are probably other benchmarks showing that it isn't true.

From my personal experience I can say that no, you won't notice a considerable speed increase compared to other modern distros, at least not on the desktop. I haven't tried slackware lately, but right now I'm also running Ubuntu and it doesn't seem slower than my gentoo install.

I can only repeat it again and again, if you really want to see a performance boost, get better hardware. ;-D

I think there is a general problem with your question though, gentoo isn't really about speed increase, there is a lot more to it. I know that there are a lot of people running around in online communities like ./ telling people how cool they are and how fast their computers are running gentoo but believe me, they are not representative of the gentoo community and they annoy me as a long time gentoo user as much as they annoy the other people around here.

Finally, if you really want to give gentoo a try, don't do it for the false reasons. Don't do it because you feel provoked by the kiddies I just described and want to prove them wrong, do it because you are interested in trying out a new system and you think that gentoo could be a distribution that fits you needs.

Re:Where's the proof.

[Revellion]

I for one use Gentoo Linux myself and i'am happy with it. but Optimzations.... really can't see much of a difference in speed comparing to other Distro's i've used. But it works nice as my Desktop Distro and i'am fine with that. Any distro that does what i want is fine with me.

Re:Where's the proof.

[datadriven]

Thanks for the insight. What I like about slackware is that it just works. I work on my computer every day, but I haven't worked on my computer in months. I install updates, but never have to make any real changes. Is gentoo that reliable?

Re:Where's the proof.

[AchilleTalon]

Yes.

Re:Where's the proof.

[Gleng]

They are "optimised" in the sense that Type-R stickers "optimise" a car. ;)

I tried Gentoo out once, and I didn't notice too much of a speed increase, other than the fact that it was the first system I tried a 2.6 kernel and ReiserFS on.

Slack with a self-rolled 2.6 kernel runs about the same speed IMHO, except you don't have to wait all day for stuff to compile.

Re:Where's the proof.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo can be very reliable in my experience. Of course if you always install unstable packages and do some other stupid things like overoptimizing with -O9 --ffuck-up-system gentoo will break, but if you use it sensible, gentoo is very reliable.

It probably takes some more effort than slack though, as it is always in flux, which of course is also an advantage if you always want the latest and greatest but still a reliable system.

As I already said, if slack does what you want, by all means stay with it, if it doesn't, or if you simply want to try out something new for the fun of it give gentoo a try.

Re:Where's the proof.

[Stevyn]

I like your analogy to rice burners. I'd say gentoo is like adding a performance steering wheel and lowering springs. It's going to feel better, but probably not give you a real speed increase.

I love gentoo and I use it as my primary OS. I use it for it's simplicity and for portage. It runs faster than Mandrake 10, but that doesn't say much.

This will totally troll BSD peeps

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny 'cause nothing...

Re:Star Wars Characters

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are a bunch of real gentoo penguin pictures.

What about post-install management?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will admit I still haven't RTFA, but has the Gentoo crew fixed what is my biggest beef with their distro, i.e. the regular smashing of un-identified configuration files?

I mean, I can accept that various configuration files get overwritten when you upgrade stuff through Portage, but that you are (ok, _were_, as it has been a few moons since I used Gentoo) kept in the dark as to what has been nuked does not help me to keep a system running smoothly unless I spend time to track down and re-modify what was smashed back into default values or whatever by Portage.

I will admit I am going from memory here, but this is 2004, people, and it should not be a painfully involved process to keep a system running & tuned after it is installed. I should not have to spend time trying to identify changed configuration files and whatnot, I have better things to do with my life.

Or maybe I never understood how Gentoo worked. But having dealt with various flavours of *nix since my Ultrix-on-{micro}VAX days, I think I have somewhat of a clue on how to manage a *nix system. And yet, with Gentoo, I saw my system become more and more discombobulated due, as far as I could perceive it, to bad config. (Clue stick welcome, here, if I am out to lunch about this.)

So, back to my initial question/gripe, have the Gentoo crew worked at making post-install management of the box saner?

Re:What about post-install management?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's already sane, but as you said yourself, you really didn't understand how gentoo works.

If there are config files to update gentoo will tell you to run etc-update and this in turn will give you a list of the files it wants to update. Now you can decide if you want a file to be updated, not to be updated, or to simply merge the two versions. How can you accuse a system like this of leaving a user in the dark?

Anyway, if etc-update isn't your thing (also it works great for me), you can also use dispatch-conf, which is supposed to be much easier to use and more userfriendly.

Re:What about post-install management?

[Eyckelboom]

As far as I know portage doesn't update configuration files for you. It tells you to run etc-update if there are (possible) updates to configuration files.

etc-update allows you to review the changes and apply or ignore them as you see fit.

I believe you can even protect certain files so portage stops bugging you about them, i.e. I'm pretty sure I do not want to revert /etc/fstab to the installation default when I update baselayout (or whatever package fstab comes in), so I could tell portage to just keep its claws away from that file.

Re:What about post-install management?

[AchilleTalon]

There is still a market for Windows...

Seriously, Gentoo doesn't overwrite your config files, it drops updated files with the ._cfg prefix in the directory with a number and the name of the file as a suffix. You simply have to do a find in /etc to find them all diff them to see if something important has changed in latest version. But this has nothing to do with the distro. If a package is changing its configuration files format o is adding or removing important stuff you will always have to modify your config file if you want to use the latest version. So, if you don't want to spend time migrating a package version to another one, just don't upgrade in the first place...

Re:What about post-install management?

[jbensley]

I believe the main problem with the config files is that the documentation recommends a poor (IMO) config update utility, 'etc-update'. I use a different tool, 'dispatch-conf', which has a better merge mechanism and allows you to use RCS to backup previous versions of your config. This makes the update process much smoother and easily recoverable in case the config merge does break something.

Re:What about post-install management?

[jejones]

Hmmm. When I've emerged things, it's told me something on the order of "N configuration files need updating; run 'foo' for information." "foo" (I forget the actual command and options offhand) tells you to run etc-update, which gives you a chance to update the files under your control. Admittedly, I learned about the control part the hard way, when I blithely ran etc-update and let it put in a new /etc/fstab...

Re:What about post-install management?

[SPQRDecker]

Not necessarily. The great thing about Portage is the ability to interactively update config. files using the utility 'etc-update'. This tool will list all updated config. files, automatically merge inconsequential changes like whitespace, allow the useer to compare the differences side by side, pick one version over the other, manually edit the final result, and, most importantly, undo the changes when things go horribly wrong (provided you don't delete the temporary files).

Re:What about post-install management?

[DarkTempes]

well all init and config files are supposed to be in /etc in which case gentoo doesn't overwrite them automatically! it creates temp new config files, and then you use etc-update to update them. it auto-merges extremely tiny changes (things that wouldn't damage your custom configs), and then changes that you have to approve you get choices for , and can even merge them line-by-line or just delete the update entirely. it's a rather decent system, the only thing i don't like is no option (that i have seen yet) to mass delete update config files. i suppose i should note that etc-update doesn't just help update config files but basically anything in /etc that has an update. including init scripts.

Re:What about post-install management?

[NecoX]

Since Gentoo has copied the ports system from FreeBSD they might as well copy mergemaster aswell. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mergemast er&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.3-RELEASE +and+Ports&format=html

Re:What about post-install management?

[mrchaotica]

etc-update is the old way, and sucks. Use dispatch-conf instead.

Re:What about post-install management?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better than that is to use dispatch-conf, which uses RCS to record changes made to config files.

If after updating to the new file, something breaks, simply revert to the last one. I suppose this is somthing that savvy sys admins have been doing it for years but Gentoo makes it easy for idiots like me to keep a well organised system.

Newbies and Gentoo

[fdesibert]

I, myself, am fairly newbieish (a couple of years using linux, certainly no toothy, beared old UNIX veteran); but I found Gentoo, contingent upon RTFM and a little ingenuity, to be the easiest to fully install. When I use the term fully install, I mean install, finalize and gain complete control over. Things that could use improvement: 1) Fonts 2) Stupid, Bloody X configuration. Should be in Installation Docs not Desktop section. Many hours of frustration.


This is a receipt for $0.02 expended upon "My Opinion." Please retain for tax purposes.

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[eofpi]

There's a good reason that the X configuration stuff is in the Desktop section: for some uses, linux doesn't need (or even have any benefit from) a gui.

That said, I do think the install docs should provide a link to the X configuration under a heading like "Where do I go from here?"

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

It was certainly much easier for me to install Gentoo than to wade through all of the packages that Mandrake 9.1 wanted to install by default and to take out what I didn't want.. I gave up on Mandrake at that point. Too many choices beating me over the head, when all I wanted was a solid base system up-and-running.

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[sapped]

Stupid, Bloody X configuration

Couldn't agree more. I managed to get everything working on my PC, including a winmodem, but the X config just wouldn't play along and no matter how much I fiddled it just kept producing garbage. After the third complete reinstall I grabbed some Fedora CD's and everything just worked.

Now, this isn't meant to bash Gentoo as I think the concept of getting source files for all your applications is a good idea (reduced download size and conflicts). Unfortunately for me I just couldn't get it to work and in the end I didn't really want to fiddle around with my system that much, I just wanted to use it. Maybe once this GUI installer is out of beta then I will give it a shot again.

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[Rev Saxon]

Amen to the X configuration. I remember installing Gentoo twice, the second time simply because I thought I had messed up somewhere, and hadnt installed X. It wasnt till much later that I realized that unlike other distro's (debian had been my flavor of choice pre-gentoo), X wasnt installed by default. Even a tag line in the Guide saying "click here for help on setting up a GUI" would have been a huge time saver. (2 stage 1 installs on a P3 500Mhz... ouch)

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[drinkypoo]

Installing/Configuring X11 should a chapter of two books; The desktop section, and the installation guide. You might have an appendix on USE flags for each. Most people installing gentoo will want the GUI whether most machines with gentoo have it or not, if you catch my drift. With that said, there should also be a far better configuration tool for X so you can get up and running. It should detect your card and give you advice on what to do about it, and attempt to do the same with the monitor. X comes with some of that functionality but in general it's fairly pathetic and doesn't work on most of the hardware I've tried it with. Configuring your monitor is probably the hardest part, although for strange monitors it's a necessity. Most people out there have very boring hardware, however, and they should be served as well as those of us who have strange equipment that needs a special touch.

There is only one problem...

[wolf31o2]

Ingrid took the things I said completely out of context and ran with them.

At no point did I ever tell her that we would have a graphical installer on 2005.0's release media. I also did not tell her that the 2005.0 release would be a Knoppix-style LiveCD, as it will, in fact, be exactly like the 2004.3 release with the Minimal, Universal, and Packages CD images.

What I did tell her is that we will have an experimental LiveCD with our first limited functionality beta of the installer, which will most likely be curses-based only and not have any enterprise-ready features available for use.

This is exactly why you demand to have interviews done via email and not the phone, especially when speaking with someone from another country, and be sure to ask to proof read the article for accuracy before it prints.

Re:There is only one problem...

[Zork the Almighty]

Well, don't feel too bad. Afterall, it's Slashdot. It's not like having an accurate article will make the people here any more informed :)

Re:There is only one problem...

[isolation]

Now you should have enough people from this post that will help build a graphical installer .

Re:There is only one problem...

[archen]

which will most likely be curses-based only

ho ho ho, beccoming more like BSD all the time aren't we ;)

Re:There is only one problem...

[DarkTempes]

maybe you should submit THAT as a slashdot article. heh. thanks though for clearing everything up =)

Re:There is only one problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you love Slashdot for constantly misreporting the releases of yours and other distros throughout the years? I still remember when Taco pissed off that one distro guy after he e-mailed Taco several times not to announce it yet. For such a community website, Slashdot is decidedly anti-community.

Some advantages of an installer

[tmk]

I want to outline some advantages of an installer:

• You can configure the system first and the installer does the rest. No need to wait for the completion of step 1, step 2, step 3. You give just all information needed and the installer makes the rest. You can work something else until the installer is finished.
• The learning effect is low when you have to type a long line of parameters from the manual. This does not mean, you have understood anything. With an installer you can give the lectures right on the right place. 'Learning by doing' instead of 'learning by typing'.
• There is no real need to make the central configuration files by yourself. The normal user has only one set of devices, he will not change the /etc/fstab every week or once a year. Other distributions show that you don't need to know exactly the syntax of an file to know how the system works.

Re:Some advantages of an installer

[drinkypoo]

You do have to understand the syntax of a file to understand what the system thinks it's supposed to be doing, and that's what writing your fstab gets you. I wrote my fstab when I installed slackware 2.0 and it's just as relevant today. Mind you, being able to look it up in the manual is useful, but there have been times and distributions which made it difficult to locate manual pages, and there have been times when manual pages have been woefully outdated. So, it's useful to have some of this stuff explained to you. I think that in an ideal world every user would understand how their system is differentiated from any other system. This will never happen unless computers get so painfully simple and stupid that they're all the same, although in many ways this is true of the majority of computers today. This, of course, is all aside from stand-alone application software packages.

With that said I don't think that it's necessary to understand all that shit or learn a damn thing to enjoy Gentoo Linux, it has advantages other than serving as an educational tool. Personally I'd like to see a distribution of gentoo that would ask you simple questions about how to partition your hard drive (or install into a file, or whatever) and then just go ahead and dump a fairly complete gentoo-based desktop environment onto the system. The install would have a screen with two radio buttons on it, and you could pick either GRP or compiled operation. When something compiled a little status meter would have to roll by. I know that this is not entirely straightforward beyond the granularity of packages but I think the thermometer is a necessity. If you pushed a little triangular button or something, the window could grow to accomodate the compiler output. Later installations and upgrades would be handled by some nice portage managing software which would use the same graphic front end to emerge as the installer to display progress. The user gets as much detail as they can handle (icon in the dock -> time estimate -> thermometer -> compile output) and everyone will be happy. A single operating system ought to be able to handle everyone's needs - doing this will not affect our ability to use gentoo in the same way(s) we always have. Gentoo is the first linux distribution that's never managed to really just piss me off to no end, and I've been using it for some time now. Until it does, I'll keep championing it redundantly.

Re:Oh, oh, you saw it coming!

[Fortyseven]

What the hell! I'm still not done compiling the old version. Well, Gentoo is the best and only distribution real men can use. My box runs so much faster now!

*cough* Actually, I use Knoppix. ;)

Am I missing the point?

[GuyFawkes]

This lappie I'm typing on is running Mepis flavoured debian, I did briefly play with gentoo about a year ago...

As I understood it, the sole advantage of gentoo over the likes of debian (on the assumption that functionally apt-get = emerge etc) was that instead of installing precompiled packages in debain, the gentoo user compiles and optimises everything for their specific hardware, thus gaining anything from a miniscule amount to perhaps a few percentage points in performance boost versus the debian approach.

In the final analysis for me such minimal gains simply were not worth the CPU time and disk thrashing so I walked away from it.

So a GUI led gentoo live-cd installer is either going to be losing all that one area of bespoke compiling advantages, OR, you're going to be running that live cd in ramdisk and compiling the install in what's left until kernel 3x is out?

Is this correct?

Re:Am I missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, u are probably missing the point.. :")
The bigest advantage of Gentoo is not the compilation from source(this come second) but the portage.
At least from my expirience it is more hassle free than apt-get.(may be i'm not too good at debian, but i havnt got it to work in all of the cases)
F.e. try to upgrade nvidia drivers on Knoppix-hdd, agrrh..

98% of the installation on gentoo was "emerge blah"

The gentoo-live-CD will be a real lifesaver to me..
the only thing in the puzzle that was missing, why..

Now as I know the gentoo installation procedure I want to do quick install from the CD, and later optimize my system when everything is running.. the key here is install for 30 min and then fiddle with details.
That will also allow more newscomer to enter... the old manual way will be always avaible for anyone to use it..

The start from source gives gentoo the advantage over other distros in one very key area, think again for nvidia drivers and mplayer f.e.
apt-get search nvidia, gives u several choices confusing to new users, even computer aware (i've seen this :"))

Under gentoo it is piece of cake :

emerge mplayer
emerge nvidia-kernel
emerge nvidia-opengl

All these binary or non-GPL things are much more
easy for installation than other distros which are
not SO source based.

great thanx to Gentoo devs

Gentoo gives much more power in the hands of the power users w/o making it harder for every-day-use, that is the biggest advantage of gentoo.

The only thing still in rought edges is post-configuration, debian is probably better here :")

Re:Am I missing the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me the main benefit is being able to install the newest versions of software packages easily with the dependencies taken care of.

Re:Am I missing the point?

[(H)elix1]

While Debian is nice and stable, it usually has a devil of a time with latest-greatest hardware. I've found the Gentoo crew tends to put a fairly large focus on new kit. When I got a cutting edge laptop, the Gentoo was the first distro that would handle the video card, wireless, and a few other goofy things a good three to six months before other beta builds (SuSE, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake specifically) did. It is also stable enough to use as my daily driver for work (and occasionally wasting a bit of time on /.) while getting incremental updates to chunks of code that are not baked yet, but I wanted to try in the interim.

For what it is worth, I did not build from source each time... I used the stage three precompiled builds to get the initial install up and running and let the emerge compile in the changes when they come up and I'm not using the system. A GUI installer would be a godsend, because most of the install is a series of carefully typed commands just begging for a typo.

Beyond that, apt-get and emerge are pretty close. I'll emerge and compile the changed packages, but I think there is even a flag to pull down precompiled packages. It is with the other distros - like getting hung out to dry with updates to RedHat 8 and 9 - that apt-get/emerge really shine.

Re:Am I missing the point?

[antiMStroll]

Hi. The lappie I use, an AMD64, bombed repeatedly on Debian and Ubuntu 64-bit versions. Gentoo provided the flexibility and documentation I needed to get this 1200x800 beast running.

Typing this from on Debian 64-bit desktop. :)

Re:Am I missing the point?

[drinkypoo]

I think the difference is that the gentoo developers are simply more accessible, if you go to any kind of gentoo channel you end up running into people who are them or people who talk to them every day whether you want to or not. I hope I never have to hide from any of them :)

Re:Am I missing the point?

[Zoxed]

> As I understood it, the sole advantage of gentoo over the likes of debian (on the assumption that functionally apt-get = emerge etc) was that instead of installing precompiled packages in debain, the gentoo user compiles and optimises everything for their specific hardware...

When I looked to move away from SUSE I looked at Debian and Gentoo. I choose Gentoo (rightly or wrongly) based simply on the much more up to date packages available for Gentoo (in the standard repository).

THIS WILL NOT CRUSH BSD PENGUIN BREATHE

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps your should look in the oven, I set your gentoo cd on fire, BSD won't set on fire, it's made by daemons.

Spotting trolls

[BenjyD]

The trolls must love Gentoo stories- their posts are so damn hard to spot mixed in amongst the real gentoo user posts.

Is that poster saying Gentoo uses less RAM because it doesn't install so many packages just clueless or a troll? Does that other guy *really* think typing a bunch of commands verbatim from a manual teaches him about Linux? So many opportunties to troll...

Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[carcosa30]

It's sooo awesome cuz it lets U compile your stuff from source!!!!!

Like u don't need to mess with any packages or RPM database r stuff like that.

Answer me this-- wat other linux distro actually let u compile stuff from source?

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[Revellion]

every distro that has the gcc compiler and automake + autoconf?

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[Anonymous Coward]

either you're trolling.. you want want the trolls to tear you a new one

either way, you're fucked

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[skiman1979]

You're new here, aren't you? um... any distro lets you compile from source.

# ./configure;make;make install :-)

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[dave420]

Do you mean "compile the entire installation from source"?

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[daijo78]

Love when people don't get irony:)

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[mvdw]

Obviously you never tried this on RedHat 8.0.

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[Triffid_Hunter]

all of them.

the difference with gentoo is that stuff compiled from source is still managed by the package manager unlike (say) debian.

i'm a recent convert to gentoo from debian - i found that almost half the programs on my debian box had to be recompiled from source because the debian packages either had options that i didn't need, or didn't have the options that i wanted.

I will still use debian for situations where dirvespace is limited, or the box doesn't need any special compile time options, such as gateway/firewalls, but for servers i prefer gentoo for the reasons stated above...

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[skiman1979]

I've never even tried RedHat 8.0. I've tried 9.0, but that was when I knew nothing at all about linux, let alone how to compile software.

Re:Why Gentoo is SO AWESOME

[carcosa30]

I no longer run Linux. I ran it for years but now I'm totally blown away by the stability of BSD. People told me and I didn't believe them, I still remembered it from 5-6 years ago. But now it's miles beyond Debian, Redhat or anything else in terms of stability and usability.

Also there's /usr/ports.

Wasn't aware that the package manager handled packages compiled from source. So let me guess, it's the worst of both worlds.

weird.

[Leonig Mig]

i read this as saying that gentoo were releasing a linux boot disk which started up a virtual advent calender.

how bizairre. it doens't say anything like that.

Re:Too bad it needs to be COMPILED first ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

no, i think what happens is that you run a BINARY version on the CD which downlaods and compiles the source, and installs the resulting binaries.

something else.

[morgajel]

the real advantage is being able to "turn off" certain sections of the code with USE flags. Did you know bitchx can be compiled to use gnome? when the debian maintainers compile bitchx for you, they decide whether or not to include it. you don't have the choice.

with gentoo, you can use the USE flags
USE="-gnome" emerge bitchx
USE="gnome" emerge bitchx

This allows me to say if I want gnome installed or not if it's just an optional feature on bitchx. Since I mostly use kde, I can do without installing all the gnome dependencies.

to see a list of flags for any given package (and their default status)
emerge -vp bitchx
[ebuild N ] net-irc/bitchx-1.1-r1 -cdrom -cjk -debug +esd -gnome +gtk -ipv6 +ncurses +ssl +xmms 2,473 kB

Then you can choose to enable them or not.

There are a lot of common flags, USE flags which you can set in the /etc/make.conf file. my flags on my workstation are the following:

USE="3dnow amd alsa bzlib cddb cdparanoia curl dnd dvd -dvdr ethereal flash gd glut -gnome gstreamer icq image magemagick imap java javascript kerberos krb4 ldap lm_sensors maildir md5sum mime ming mmx -mozilla mplayer msn jack ooo-kde openssh pdf rtc samba sasl threads type1 tiff usb xvid"

and this isn't even close to all of them.
If you'd like to learn more, let me know. I try not to be a zealot:)

Re:something else.

[ender-]

Did you know bitchx can be compiled to use gnome? when the debian maintainers compile bitchx for you, they decide whether or not to include it. you don't have the choice.

Funny, I seem to have a choice in my debian system [sarge].
------
ender@lucy32:~$ apt-cache search bitchx
bitchx - Advanced Internet Relay Chat client
bitchx-dev - Header files for BitchX
bitchx-gtk - GTK interface for BitchX
bitchx-ssl - SSL support for BitchX
------

Not that there aren't packages that are limited in choice, but I haven't run into any since I started using debian on my desktop system a few years ago. [Former Slackware user] A simple "sudo apt-get install bitchx-gtk" installs it with the gnome interface if that's what I desire.

Ender-

Re:something else.

[DarkKnightRadick]

As a former Debian user, I don't see what you're getting on about? What about the other available options such as cdrom support? What about ipv6 support? What about...?

Also, Debian stable is light-years behind the curve, even unstable is several releases behind. I'm not sure how far behind Gentoo stable (x86) is (they're still using the 2.7 kernel from what I can tell) but unstable (~x86) is right on up there with everyone else.

To be fair though my biggest complaint with Gentoo is the automatic patching of software. It makes it really hard to trouble-shoot something sometimes. "Is it the patch causing this or is it a bug that existed before?"

Re:something else.

[morgajel]

bitchx was a poor choice on my part- it was the only example I could think of of the top of my head.
Perhaps mplayer will be a better choice:

emerge -vp mplayer
[ebuild R ] media-video/mplayer-1.0_pre4-r7 -3dfx +3dnow -3dnowex +X +aalib +alsa (-altivec) +arts -bidi +cdparanoia -debug -directfb -divx4linux -dvb +dvd -dvdread -edl +encode +esd -fbcon -ggi +gif -gnome +gtk -ipv6 -joystick +jpeg -libcaca -lirc -live -lzo +mad -matroska -matrox +mmx -mmx2 +mpeg -mythtv +nas -network +nls +oggvorbis +opengl +oss +png -real +rtc +samba +sdl -sse +svga -tga -theora +truetype -v4l -v4l2 -xinerama +xmms +xv +xvid 0 kB

How are the options for a debian install of mplayer?

I'm speaking as a former debian user here too- it took my friends *months* to get me to try gentoo. When I finally did, I used it for one month. I was hooked. it's not perfect (emerge search packagename is slower than apt-cache search), but it's proven it's worth.
I got nothing but love for debian, but I honestly feel that emerge is to apt as apt was to rpm.

"no offense," says the mouse to the T-rex.

Re:something else.

[Zarhan]

it's not perfect (emerge search packagename is slower than apt-cache search)

Try emerging esearch. The index creation will take a while of course, but then you can find packages at the speed of grep :)

Re:something else.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not perfect (emerge search packagename is slower than apt-cache search), but it's proven it's worth.

Speed up your searches by running emerge esearch. From the programs homepage:

esearch is a small script for the linux distribution Gentoo. It behaves exactly like emerge -s resp. emerge -S. The advantage of esearch over emerge is the search index it uses.

Re:something else.

[manifest37]

You know that you shouldn't do the following:

USE="-gnome" emerge bitchx
USE="gnome" emerge bitchx

But should use /etc/portage/package.use . It's in the portage man page and it's good stuff.

Re:something else.

[morgajel]

I usually keep them in the USE variable in make.conf.

is packages.use the new hotness instead of make.conf?

I normally don't like to put them somewhere permanent until I'm sure they are going to work.

Re:something else.

[Mints]

Still using the 2.7 kernel? I didn't know gentoo had forked its own kernel and incremented version numbers.


Note sarcasm.

Re:something else.

[manifest37]

No. /etc/portage/package.use and package.keywords and package.mask are per package flags. This is usefull because when you go to upgrade a package via emerge -u it will upgrade the package using the use flags in package.use file and not your global use flags. The portage manual has a much better description than I. man portage and search for package.use as well as the other files.

Re:something else.

[ender-]

The only real choices for mplayer, once you add the third-party apt source, are for which cpu you want it optimized for, so there is definitely a lack of choices there.

I did try Gentoo for awhile. I had a hell of a time getting it installed in the first place. I also spent about a year using Sorcerer/SourceMage. I finally went to Debian for one simple reason; I was sick of waiting for everything to compile. Especially when the frequent KDE/Mozilla/X updates came around. [This was before Firefox]. Mozilla was taking almost a full day [24 hours] to compile [plus download time], and I never really saw any noticable speed increase. With Debian, I have the download time, and 30 seconds later it is installed.

Don't get me wrong, I do sometimes miss some of the configurability of having the source based distro, but for the most part, I just want to get my update/install done with asap so I can get on with my work/play.

ender-

Re:something else.

[theLOUDroom]

That's very cool.
Thanks for getting the word out.

Any mods out ther might want to give this one a bump as it's useful info that I hadn't heard until today. I imagine there are a lot of other Gentoo users in the same boat.

Re:something else.

[DarkKnightRadick]

My bad. I meant 2.6.10.

You missed it by miles I'm afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has been using gentoo for a long time now I can honestly tell you that the performance gains are largely a myth, at least when running gentoo as your desktop.

But there are other points that make gentoo great imho.

Gentoo gives you a lot of control about your system but still makes it fairly easy to manage it. Something I wasn't able to get with other distros, at least not as convenient as with gentoo.

Take for example use flags, they tell portage, the gentoo package manager, to compile certain packages with certain features enabled, or disabled. Basically it's a convenient way of ./configure --enable-whatever --disable-something else. Everybody who has run into the problem of a distro providing only packages that are not build the way you want them or need them should know that this can be a great benefit of a source based distro.

Further, with gentoo it's very easy to have an uptodate distro and to easily stay uptodate. With all other distros I've used keeping an uptodate system without reinstalling was a mess.

An other advantage of source based distros and of portage is, it's fairly easy to add new software to portage so the amount of software is simply overwhelming (probably only matched by debian).

So don't believe the hype, but also don't dismiss something because there are a few dumb users trolling on /.

Damn! I just finished compiling everything...

[Anonymous Coward]

... no, really. Unlike the jokers that usually claim that; I really did just finish compiling everything.

Not that I'll technically *need* to do a reinstall... but with a graphical installer available I'll sure be tempted!!

Love Gentoo though--so not really complaining. ;)

gentoo can't have it both ways

[mgkimsal2]

The gentoo fanboy community can't have it both ways.

1. Requiring intimate kernel-level knowledge of a system to install it.

2. Shouting 'use gentoo!' to every passerby who expresses any sort of question about another distro (like, how do I install an RPM? or something similar).

It's like people saying Macs are the bestest most awesomest systems ever, but that they're also cheaper than x86 alternatives. It doesn't work both ways.

Be content with having a difficult-to-install system that forces people to learn more than most people would want. That's fine. But don't shout that as the answer to every single problem as well - most people don't have the time or motivation to do that.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[Kethinov]

It's like people saying Macs are the bestest most awesomest systems ever, but that they're also cheaper than x86 alternatives. It doesn't work both ways.

Actually it does. Mac is cheaper in the long run because the added money you invest in it pays off later because you find your machine lasts longer than an x86 alternative.

That said, I agree with you. The notion that Gentoo's pathetically manual install should stay that way as some sort of right of passage to gain quality support and maintain an intelligent community is pretentious, arrogant, elitist, and the sheer embodiment of what's wrong with the Linux community IMHO.

I've done the abhorred Gentoo install. I ran Gentoo for an entire year. Eventually I got tired of micromanaging shit and switched to binary distros. To me Gentoo is incomplete. A work in progress. Portage is an intelligently designed package manager, but not everybody gives a shit about customizing and optimizing everything. Frankly, Gentoo needs easy installation and stock binary support.

I hear all this crap from Gentoo portage sourceDistro++ fans about how there's no way to compile binaries for every CFLAG combination in existence, but who gives a fuck? Did it occur to you guys that people who are interested in binaries couldn't give a flying fuck about CFLAGs, optimizing, and customizing?

Gentoo was my first real dive into Linux. I mastered the install, participated in the forums, fell in love with the community, then learned to hate everything about it. For all Gentoo's greatness, there's a stain of elitism holding it back. The Linux distro that takes over the world (knock on wood) won't be geared toward a niche. At present, Gentoo is. Hopefully 2005.0 will be an important step toward changing that. Maybe I'll drop Debian back for Gentoo again someday.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[antiMStroll]

"1. Requiring intimate kernel-level knowledge of a system to install it."

Look up genkernel. What you say isn't correct.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[Atzanteol]

That said, I agree with you. The notion that Gentoo's pathetically manual install should stay that way as some sort of right of passage to gain quality support and maintain an intelligent community is pretentious, arrogant, elitist, and the sheer embodiment of what's wrong with the Linux community IMHO.

Have you ever been in the #gentoo IRC forum? Very friendly and helpful group. Not elitist at all IMHO. Lets try not to bash the Gentoo folks eh? At least we don't post "Get a Mac!" to questions about "How do I do FOO under Linux or Windows?"

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[Taladar]

I would really like to know who started this "I say I like Distro/OS X so I want it to get 100% market share" shit. Just because I love Gentoo because it fits me doesn't mean I want everyone else to use Gentoo. However the latter does not mean I wouldn't mind if the Gentoo Community and Forums would be replaced largely by the same people that spam Windows Forums with Questions about their "cup holder". If you want to call this elitist I enjoy being elitist.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[dn15]

You're not wrong, but I think the real point was that Gentoo's not going to get any users outside of the existing Linux elite as long as you are expected to even know what a kernel is. I've installed Gentoo myself and it is a nice system for those you know what they're doing. But most people want something that "just works" without knowing anything about this stuff.

They'll want something like Red Hat's Anaconda installer, where all you have to really know is which hard disk you want to install on. If you think the existing install process is good enough, so be it. It is perfectly fine for many people. But we can't expect the user base to grow beyond certain a certain size without it.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[Minna Kirai]

Look up genkernel. What you say isn't correct.

She never said that- it was a hypothetical comment from 50% of the Gentoo-boosters out there.

If you DON'T really need intimate knowledge to get a working system, then their claims that Gentoo will teach users about Linux are incorrect.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

>by the same people that spam Windows Forums with Questions about their "cup holder"

What does the word "spam" mean? I have been seeing this usage a lot. Does spam now mean -anything- the reader does not want to see. I thought it just meant those unsolicited messages that try to sell something and so forth.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[mrchaotica]

You can use genkernel, but you still need to know about fdisk, editing assorted config files, adding users without a GUI, grub (or lilo), rc-scripts, configuring X, etc. (note: the graphical installer may have changed this; I haven't used it yet)

All I really know is that I personally learned a lot while trying to install Gentoo, and I would be sad if that aspect of it went away.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[drinkypoo]

Amen to this. Other channels are also very friendly, for example #gentoo-mips. Like everyone else who wants one, I have an indy. Now admittedly ircers are elitists and if you make a nuisance of yourself by their standards you will typically not be tolerated. This really isn't a gentoo thing, it's an irc thing :) Of course, I'm a regular on two of the least hospitable channels on efnet, so I say all this with a certain amount of both (emotional) distance and familiarity.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[mabinogi]

The original use of spam in this way comes from the Monty Python sketch in which a bunch of Vikings are singing "Spam, spam, spam, spam". and everything on the menu includes spam.

So yes, spam is anything the user does not want to see, but only when they can't see what they do want due to the volume of stuff they don't want.

Unsolicited Commercial Email is not spam if you get one a year, but it is once you start getting many UCEs for every legitimate mail...

So effectively Spam is noise - and if there's a low signal to noise ratio, you're being spammed.

Re:gentoo can't have it both ways

[mabinogi]

> Gentoo's pathetically manual install should stay that way as some sort of right of passage to gain quality support and maintain an intelligent community is pretentious, arrogant, elitist, and the sheer embodiment of what's wrong with the Linux community IMHO.

I'm defintely not a Gentoo zealot - I find them funny at best, and annoying at worst - but I think you're missing the point somewhat in that statement.

Gentoo's existence is the embodiment of what's RIGHT with the Linux community - The fact that you chose the wrong distribution for you is not the fault of the Linux community, and the fact that you don't HAVE to use Gentoo, and can use Debian, Suse, RedHat, Mandrake, or even Linspire or Xandros depending on your requirements is what's good.

It sounds as if you want Gentoo to be Mandrake or Linspire - in which case, why not use one of those, and leave the massochists who are happy to leave their system compiling overnight every time they install something to do that....

> but not everybody gives a shit about customizing and optimizing everything. Frankly, Gentoo needs easy installation and stock binary support.

That's right not everyone does, which is why binary distributions exist. No one _has_ to use Gentoo.
Gentoo appeals to a certain type of person, adding the easy installation and binary support changes the type of person it attracts, and will cause those that want what Gentoo offers, to create a new distribution that _does_ allow them to waste their time recompiling stuff and deciding which USE and CFLAGS settings to use.

Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

your trolling was easy to spot though.

Better luck next time.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I love Gentoo, but...

[robyannetta]

The only one issue I've ever had with Gentoo is the automatic updating of configuration files.

After an emerge, the system would either do no updating so I must manually update the config files, or it would update all the files automatically, overwriting everything, including the users file so all my accounts no longer existed (including root).

Until they can find a way to do an "automatic, unattended smart append" to the config files after an emerge, I won't switch to it on my thirteen PCs and two notebooks.

On the other hand, a graphical installer is, IMHO, a bad idea. This allows any dork off the street to say that he's installed Gentoo and now even know what Linux is. Bad idea.

Re:I love Gentoo, but...

[JoeD]

Yeah, this can be tricky. I didn't trust etc-update, so what I used to do was find all the new config files ("locate ._cfg"), then manually diff them to see what changed.

That got real old real fast, but at least I was sure that I wasn't going to clobber anything.

Then I got pointed to dispatch-conf. It's MUCH better. It can be set to automatically update if the only differences are in whitespace and comments, or if you haven't edited the original file.

And it archives the old versions, so that even if you clobber something, you can go back.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I used Gentoo for the compatibility...

[Knight2K]

not really the speed. At the time I tried it, early in 2004, it seemed to be the only readily available distribution that actually worked with AMD64. Fedora Core claimed to have a distro for it, but I read a lot of horror stories; Mandrake and others only seemed to have commercial payware products for the platform.

I did have problems with Gentoo (when using USB2 the whole computer slowed down, hotplug didn't seem to work right, etc.), so perhaps this was more a reflection of the maturity of Linux distros in general on the AMD64 platform. I also didn't really find it much faster that other distributions I've used on x86 machines.

I guess I'll have to try again soon. I'm currently stuck on WinXP since I needed something that worked, but it may be time to survey the current 64 bit landscape.

Re:I used Gentoo for the compatibility...

[tuffy]

not really the speed. At the time I tried it, early in 2004, it seemed to be the only readily available distribution that actually worked with AMD64. Fedora Core claimed to have a distro for it, but I read a lot of horror stories; Mandrake and others only seemed to have commercial payware products for the platform.

I use an AMD64 box as my primary computer. I tried SuSE 9 with it and didn't care for it. Fedora Core 1 for x86-64 wouldn't even install so I went back to an i386 distro. Fedora Core 2 for x86-64 did install, but recommended a BIOS update which I did. It hasn't given me any problems since, nor has FC3.

I'd recommend trying FC again. It only costs some time and bandwidth so you've got little to lose.

Re:I used Gentoo for the compatibility...

[OhRock]

I'm using Gentoo in a AMD64 that I have as server/HTPC and it works much better than anything I've tried. Is easily 10 times faster than my lappy (a 1.3 pentium M with gentoo), and at least twice as fast as the same machine with MDK 32 bit, which is what I had before.

I'm enchanted with gentoo, but I recognize that it takes a lot of time and effort to keep up. But it is well woth it if what you want is control.

About the requiered knowlodge, well the documentation and help in the forums is something from another planet...I've never seen a beter community: seriously!

Check these out:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbo ok-amd 64.xml?full=1
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic. php?t=216498

Enjoy!

PS: The numbers I gave before are subjective, and base on personal impressions not benchmarking.

Re:I used Gentoo for the compatibility...

[MobyTurbo]

You may want to try NetBSD, it's mantra is portability (over 50 architectures), so it was the first free Unix-like OS with AMD64 support. It for a long time has supported other 64 bit platforms so I assume that it is more likely to be 64-bit safe.

The NetBSD 2.0 release candidate is a lot faster than 1.6, in some benchmarks such as high speed networking surpassing all Unix-like operating systems.

Great News

[ant18322]

I admit I struggled with the install my first couple of times. Having a graphical installer is something that will only help Gentoo get more users. Good Job.

the real question:

[Anonymous Coward]

does it take two days for the installer to run?

Whoopy Do

[cliffski]

I've never run linux to be honest. It just seems like hard work. And apparently someone is now bragging that this version has a graphical installer?
whoopee. About 15 years too late too impress anyone.
Headlines like this only remind me why (for all its sins) I run windows.
This isn't flamebatit, its a non-linux geeks viewpoint. There IS a difference.

Re:Whoopy Do

[The Cisco Kid]

This version of *GENTOO* (a reasonably new distribution, typically used by hardcore linux geeks) now has a graphical install.

Redhat (now Fedora), SuSe, and others, have had graphical installs since.. Well.. I honestly dont remember. Several years, at least. I know Redhat 6 had it, and thats pretty ancient now.

Comparing Linux install to Windows install is a red herring, since *MOST* windows users wouldnt be able to install *EITHER*.

But my telling you about it is going to do nothing for you - you need to try yourself. Find yourself a spare machine (doesnt have to be bleeding new, some old 500Mhz machine would be fine), and grab a copy of Fedora Core2 or 3 (may not be the 'perfect' choice, but for getting an idea of Linux, its probably a good choice), and install it. Play with it. Install some apps. Break it. Reinstall it. etc.

Re:Whoopy Do

[Tyir]

When was the last time you installed Windows? The Windows installer isn't graphical either.. the main part at least.

Gentoo Live

[gumpish]

Well, whether or not it actually happens, it sure would be nice if Gentoo did start releasing fully-functional live CDs - I'd love to have the equivalent of Knoppix for various architectures. (PPC especially. And please don't reply with links to the horrifically old "Knoppix/PPC" project which can't autodetect its way out of a wet paper sack.)

A GUI...erm..curses installer? Thank you

[dspisak]

Okay Gentoo people, here is how you make sure you don't screw up your beta curses/GUI installer.

Make sure that you include ALL documentation from the startup guide on the website on your install CD and make it possible to READ the documentation while going through the install. Sort of a read and install as you go kind of option.

For bonus points you could include third-party site content on correct march flags for proper CPU optimization.

Read the response to the article by the Gentoo Dev

[labradort]

Apparently the article is misleading, according to a follow up response to it by the Gentoo Developer interviewed by the IT reporter.

See: this follow up posting under the original article

Name: Chris Gianelloni
Location: USA
Occupation: Gentoo Linux Developer
Comment: Well, what can I say except that quite a bit of the "meat" of this "interview" was ignored. I did make mention that the full-environment LiveCD would be an "experimental" CD available for x86 and amd64 and that it will have a "limited functionality, beta version" of the installer on the CD. At no point did I represent that there would be a 100% completed installer available by February, but now it appears that everyone under the sun thinks that there will be one.

There will not.

Trust me on this one. The Gentoo Installer project is working very hard, but they are not anywhere near completion and definitely will not be so quickly after the winter holidays.

Also in 2005.0

[bozarthj]

The 2.6 kernel will become the default kernel, not just for the liveCD, (which as been that since 2004.3) but for the distro. Instead of emerge gentoo-dev-sources for 2.6, it will be emerge gentoo-sources.

Re:Also in 2005.0

[bzBetty]

So this change will happen with 2005.0 comes out? as it will pretty much effect everyone using gentoo, i wonder what will happen to those of us with 2.6 installed already.

Re:Too bad it needs to be COMPILED first ;)

[oliverthered]

Was the binary hand written by monkies or did it start out in C and then get compiled?
Hey, maybe the gui is in python and never needs to be compiled

Don't forget:

[Karn]

Gentoo is for Ricers

Laugh, it's funny!

Re:Don't forget:

[jedir0x]

That's a great site (funny as hell), I've seen it before. And being a Gentoo user myself (came from slackware) it makes me sad to see things like that. Gentoo's documentation is very good. It's tools make things that *seem* "elite" easy to do. Possibly the reason for all of the newbies out there claiming to be Linux Gods... making the rest of us Gentoo users that love Gentoo for it's package management, configuration file management, and other things that slackware isn't as good at (IMHO), look bad. All in all, Gentoo is a great distro, and i recomend it to all of my more "savy" friends. Newbies should stick with Fedora or something similar, and graduate to Gentoo. Most of the people that post gripes about gentoo (especially here on /.) have problems with it because they don't bother to read documentation, or man pages... don't knock something because you can't figure it out... that's a huge problem with Linux in general actually. Windows users go crazy because Linux isn't as easy (for them) as windows, personaly i find Linux to be FAR easier than windows.

Re:Don't forget:

[mvdw]

Can I just say a big "Me, too"? I also came to gentoo from slackware (via redhat and then mandrake), hiccupped on a early version I installed on a dial-up connected computer, back to slack, now well and truly committed to gentoo. I love it - have it installed on 3 machines at home, soon to be 4 when I get my act together and install my MAME machine. I love it for all the reasons you cite.

You were modded as flamebait

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha-ha!

It's not like Debian forbids building from source

[tugrul]

'apt-get source pkg' whatever you want configured differently, edit the debian/rules file, and fakeroot ./debian/rules binary.

It's true that somebody hasn't taken the time to figure out the options for each program that match up to a flag like gnome, but I've only needed to locally recompile for odd things, like adding NAD27/83 datum shifting support for proj4.

There is also deb-make, which trivially converts any autoconf based source release into a practically proper debian package. I use that a bit more heavily.

I hear what you're saying, try this on for size.

[GuyFawkes]

I'll assume you have done a virgin install or reinstall of anything from win95a on up to XP, where you get a choice of DOS based GUI for the virgin install and "all the pretty colours" GUI for an upgrade or reinstall.

Let's say you're running a reasonably quick and modern box like my main box, p4 2.6 ghz on abit ai7, gig of good ddr, western digital raptor sata primary disk, blah blah.

WindowsXP install is probably around the 30 minutes mark, then add another ten minutes for sp2, from memory pretty much all the hardware and peripherals will more or less work out of the install cd drivers.

then allow another 2 hours or so to install all your application software.

then allow another 2 hours to clean everything up and run a decent defrag like O&O on "name"

then allow another hour for a full depth spyware / trojan / adware / cookie / anti-virus scan using several apps.

then allow anything from 30 minutes to another hour to re-introduce all your personal data and settings if the install was an upgrade from earlier hardware (eg AMD to Intel, or major mobo change, etc) or after a major crash.

So far you're looking at the thick end of six hours, basically a full days worth of productivity, in exchange you get your pretty simple GUI installer.

OK, the alternative available TODAY that will work on AT LEAST AS WIDE A RANGE OF HARDWARE as windows.

Mepis Linus, www.mepis.org, comes as a download ISO that burns to a single (live)CD
(A Live CD distribution of linux is basically the operating system "installed" onto a regular compact disk. If you have your computer set to boot from the cd-rom then you can run linux directly from the cd using your RAM as a virtual hard drive. I think this is quite and ingenious idea and makes it easier to evaluate a distribution. Most major distributions have a live cd version.)

You take your liveCD of Mepis, at the BIOS make sure your host computer is set to boot from CD first, just sit back... we'll assume an identical spec box as mentioned above.

In the time it takes WinXP to finish booting off HD, the Mepis live CD will just about be finished booting.

If you can use windows you can use linux, the "windows" bit of windows is the "KDE" bit of Mepis, it comes up as default, only differences are different icons and different application names, eg no Outlook Express or "E" icon, but the "Kmail" application name is pretty self explanatory (and it is found under the "Internet" heading in the "start menu") as is the little envelope icon.

So, while remembering that you are sitting at a WORKING and functional system, not a windows installer, but a WORKING system that allows you to go online, write a letter, edit a spreadsheet, play mp3 or movies etc, you select the "Mepis Installation Centre" icon from the desktop.

The choices are easily as simle as the windows ones, with the bonus that if there is something you do not immediately understand, such as linux using "hda" (hard disk a) where windows uses "ide0" YOU HAVE A WOEKING ONLINE COMPUTER to go check it out, unlike windows.

some 30 minutes later, your install is complete.

that's it, NOT JUST THE OPERATING SYSTEM, but a whole wedge of about 1000 applications too. The WHOLE BLOODY LOT has been installed, WHILE YOU WERE USING THE PC.

Total time lost, 0 minutes.

that isn't even the really good bit.

wanna rip out the amd mobo / cpu and go intel, or vice versa? do it, no need to do a reinstall, everything will just boot up with zero fuss.

wanna reinstall user data after a major hardware crash, just do it, ten minutes.. (Mepis specifically offers the choice of leaving /home/user where ALL your personal data and preferences are stored intact when installing)

wanna upgrade every last piece of software on the box to the very latest versions (and all totally legit and free)? simply fire up Synaptic and three mouse clicks (update, mark all, apply) and it's done.

wanna

Gentoo and 2.6

[Mourgos]

Is there a tutorial out there that will guide you to installing kernel 2.6 instead of 2.4 from the beginning?

Re:Gentoo and 2.6

[Anonymous Coward]

What guide do you need? I just emerged the gento-development-sources, compiled the new kernel and added it to my grub config. It worked fine. The only gotcha I think off is that the 2.6 kernel uses a different system for managing device files, udev instead of devfs. Look for some posts on the gentoo forum about that if you get confused.

An installer?

[sik0fewl]

An installer? That's crazy. I better have to compile it before I use it.

Yeah, and guess what, when 2005.0 comes out...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we'll have clueless people here on Slashdot saying things like, "So what happened to all that talk of Gentoo's plans for a graphical installer and Knoppix-like LiveCD? I guess they put it off." Your devs will get blamed for being lazy or not committing to it, and nobody will mention the fact that Slashdot was wrong in the first place.

Re:Yeah, and guess what, when 2005.0 comes out...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair Slashdot was only wrong because the article was.

Re:Yeah, and guess what, when 2005.0 comes out...

[wolf31o2]

Who cares what people think? I mean, really. Do you think I am going to lose sleep over the fact that Rob "I can't spell" Malda's site has given a bunch of trolls one more thing to troll about?

In Soviet Russia, Gentoo trolls you with hot grits down a petrified Natalie Portman's pants being rendered on a Beowulf cluster of Macs.

While it is rather unfortunte that the original story was incorrect, and that Slashdot picked up on it, there really is no concern whatsoever.

Re:I hear what you're saying, try this on for size

[Rev Saxon]

There is only one sligh thing that you failed to remember. Yes, there is near zero downtime (on older systems I remember the knoppix (which im assuming is similar to memphis) installer bogging the system down to a near unusable level. Yes, there is a ton of packages installed, but what if you dont want them all? For example, I remember having etheral installed by default (simply using it as an example, replace package foo here), when in my life I have never used, nor do I ever plan to use it. The same goes for many other pre-installed aplications. On my laptop, I really dont need the whole graphics suite that is installed. I could go on here, but its kind of redundant. The point being you could spend those six hours that you "saved" chasing down software that you dont want/need, and hoping to hell some dependencies dont get messed up (not so sure about the dependencies part, its been a year or so since my last adventure with debian). So before you go off and clame that these live-cd's are the answer to mankinds problems, remember that they can cause more problems than they solve.

Love gentoo for the bleeding edge software

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a gentoo fan. I don't care about the optimizations, I don't think they really help in any measureable way. Processors are just too fast to notice.

But what I do like is the fact that Gentoo gets all the new software first. I used to use redhat and I always found it annoying to read annoucements that there was a new KDE release or GNOME version. Yea thats great, I should see those packages in about 6 months.

With Gentoo someone has writen an portage file for them that day. I may have to wait a few hours for the stuff to compile, but it beats waiting six months until the next distribution version comes out.

Gentoo mini-review from non-fanboy

[bender647]

I recently did a Gentoo install for the heck of it -- I happily run other distributions and other OSs too, but wanted to make an educated comparision.

What I liked:

• portage = best feature of FreeBSD added to Linux.
• excellent install documentation = again, stealing a page from FreeBSD's handbook.
• hands-on install: some people say this will make you know something about linux. Perhaps not, but you can go back and re-read the handbook later and figure out what you did. After a graphical installer is done, you've got no record of what happened and no chance to learn. Best feature of the command-line install to me is that you have a chance in hell of recovering from an unexpected error (you know what you typed, you can research it and fix it and move on).

What I didn't like:

• Compiling a kernel on day one. No big deal for me, but it did take three kernel compiles to get it right (unfamiliar hardware plus the default 2.6 config disabled UDEV, then complained on first boot that I needed the obsolete DEVFS). It would be very easy to mess up a config and get a non-booting system. The Handbook doesn't tell a newbie how to recover from that. Having a bloated, precompiled kernel to copy off CD wouldn't be so bad.
• Documentation of ports is horrible -- one line descriptions? Come on! And I still have to figure out how to tell which USE flags affect a port before I compile it.
• Config file wrapper commands -- hasn't bitten me yet, but editing a well-commented config file should be encouraged. No rc-update please! (old Slackware user talking here...)

All in all, portage makes it worth using and I will install it on real hardware someday.

Re:Gentoo mini-review from non-fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

And I still have to figure out how to tell which USE flags affect a port before I compile it.

emerge -pv foo

Re:Gentoo mini-review from non-fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

the default 2.6 config disabled UDEV, then complained on first boot that I needed the obsolete DEVFS

to be fair, the install manual tells you you have to do this.

Having a bloated, precompiled kernel to copy off CD wouldn't be so bad

Genkernel installation in the manual covers this. It's a big fat kernel with everything in it so that it all just works. 2.4 only though, so it's never been an option for me, personally.

I agree about ports though, I read the emerge manual, but not thoroughly enough apparently, as I didn't know about emerge -pv until someone posted it here.

Good luck in the future. I think Gentoo is the best distro I've ever used, and I hope others enjoy it too. I had to install Gentoo about three times before I got it exactly how I wanted it, but trust me, read the manual thoroughly, and you will probably have no problem. The documentation is great. I just wish there was a checklist at the end or something, the first two times I missed setting my clock to local time (important if you want little things like daylight savings to work)

Re:I hear what you're saying, try this on for size

[GuyFawkes]

err, the COMPLETE mepis debian HD install is under 3 gig of footprint.

who cares if there is a load of stuff I wouldn't CHOOSE to install if I was rolling a bespoke system?

not me.

Current gentoo install is awful

[lakeland]

Well, I installed gentoo last week, and I was disgusted at the installer. The current (non-graphical) installer automates almost nothing. It doesn't even automate the things that would be trivial to automate. Let me contrast the installer with the (famous) debian installer.

1: Download and burn the installation CDs (trivial for both gentoo and debian). Boot CDs.

At this point Debian presents you with an installation menu (choose your keyboard or language is first, I forget). Whereas gentoo presents you with a root prompt. Um hello? What is the installer program called? What do I type?

After searching the gentoo CD you'll hopefully come across /mnt/cdrom/doc/handbook/txt/handbook.txt (filename slightly wrong). Once you find it, it is pretty obvious this is the instructions. I wonder how long it takes the average guy to find it?

The first instruction is to type cfdsk, then mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda5. Oh, half a dozen other filesystems are offered. A hint for newbies suggests ext3 might be best for normal computers (though it is hardly written for newbies to follow). No instructions are given for installing if you already have an OS installed. Nothing explaining that hda is the primary master... There is no way this could be followed by anybody without linux experience.

Next we tar -zxvf a tarball. Better not make a typo and install in the wrong place... Next we cd to /mnt/gentoo and type ./scripts/bootstrap.sh. Why don't we cd to /mnt/gentoo/scripts and run ./bootstrap.sh? I don't know...

Now, at this point I'm sitting there wondering why? why do I have to do this? why can't they automate these steps? How much work would it have been to write a little curses program that lets me choose a filesystem, finds which tarballs I have, extracts it, and runs bootstrap for me?

Ok, now we have to configure the network and the docs go down a little sidetrack explaining WEP and ESSID... that's great guys... I'm just trying to install an OS here... automating ifconfig eth0 inet dhcp would have been appreciated, but hey I already knew to type that, so you didn't need to automate anything, right?

emerge sync, emerge world... that wasn't too hard... Again, it could have been automated. Oh, and some progress bars would be nice, the number of files you've downloaded doesn't tell me a lot if I don't have a clue how many files there are.

Next I'm supposed to write an fstab by hand with no assistance except a few sample lines in the docs? Really? No sweat mate! No explaination of the keep/dump flags or what I should put there. No explaination of the order of things... And you better not make a typo.

Now I'm supposed to install a kernel from scratch with no sample configuration file to go off? No wonder idiots never manage to get gentoo installed. _I_ knew that /proc/config.gz exists and so I didn't have to write it from scratch but the docs didn't tell me that... The docs also told me about something called genkernel, which turned out not to be installed (emerge genkernel) and once installed generously informs me I don't have a configuration file. The docs also claim genkernel isn't as good, and they claim they'll get around to documenting it after they've explained the manual way (but then they don't)...

Finally I just have to set up a few symbolic links for the timezone, install a cron program (why didn't bootstrap do that?), install a logger (again, why didn't bootstrap...).

Gee, that was easy! You know, I think a graphical installer might help ;-)

Re:Current gentoo install is awful

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, Gentoo is not meant to be so easy. It's meant for people (like me) who know about partitioning, writing/changing config files, configuring kernels, etc and enjoy doing those things and learning about Linux.

Who does everyone think that all the distros should be newbie friendly? Some of us don't want a fancy gui installer that does everything for you!

I liked the fact that I could do the things that you described manually.. and about the cron and logger programs, I think the reason bootstrap didn't install those by default is because there are several different cron daemons and loggers, and different people might want a certain one.

If you don't like it, don't use it! Nobody is forcing you to use it - there are plenty of distros that automate everything, go use one of those.

I love Gentoo - I think the best things about it are portage, and it's lack of bloatedness. I like how the install gives you only what you need, and then you can install what you want. It's very flexible...

Re:Current gentoo install is awful

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now, at this point I'm sitting there wondering why? why do I have to do this? why can't they automate these steps? How much work would it have been to write a little curses program that lets me choose a filesystem, finds which tarballs I have, extracts it, and runs bootstrap for me?"

Hey, just do it, nobody will hurt you :-)

What happened to the "... in Japan!" meme?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo installs through a graphical interface ...in Japan!

Id normally whine that gentoo releases arent news

[riprjak]

but this bloody well is :)

As a card carrying gentoo Zealot I am incredibly impressed with this new release (or at least its betas).

This takes gentoo one step closer to being the One Distro, IMLTHO :)

Those of you who felt gentoo was obscure and difficult to install, this is no longer true; however its inherent light weight and "only what I asked for" philosiphy is soundly intact. I recommend you give it a shot with this new LiveCD release.

err!
jak

Ok, mixed my tenses...

[riprjak]

"I recommend you give it a shot with this new LiveCD release."; read WHEN this new LiveCD is released :)

Re:Negative mods

[Anonymous Coward]

Your karma "died" because you're a fucking troll. So give it a fucking rest already, you stupid fucking moron!

GUi Installer?!

[jon855]

I believe this can help bring more n00bs like me into the linux world but since it's for the hard core linux user, I feel afraid to even try linux now regardless of many other linux product because of the complexity of the gentoo installer. GUI Installer would be nice for the newbies, tho I am not a linux user and I'm trying to port over to linux sometime soon. Currently I have a barecomputer at home 1.6 Athlon XP - blah, etc... I just would perfer something like Debian Net Installer, where I can choose the distro I want, if I'm wrong then correct me.
Elsewise Linux's really nice but now I bear one concern what GUI Interface should I use?! KDE, Gnome, others?! Gentoo supports KDE, GNOME and others as well I bet. But I don't want it to be bloated or anything. This is where Gentoo comes in, because you have complete control of what you want and what you don't unlike the WIN-XP I'm using currently, so many background apps I don;t even need. Compling from source sounds complex but the benefits sounds nice, faster because it's compiled regarding to your hardware.
Point here is = GUI would be nice regarding helping out some n00bs like me to move into a bit more advance linux experience regardless of past experiences.

unmerging & depclean (Re:something else.)

[wdebruij]

I could be wrong here, but isn't gentoo the only distribution that allows you to experiment with packets in such a way that you can easily remove them and their dependencies?

emerge unmerge [ANYTHING] is great. Coupled with an emerge depclean for removal of packages that were installed purely for satisfying dependencies it greatly reduces the dependency hell.

With rpm/apt you can undoubtedly remove a single package, but what about the depclean feature? is it there?

in any case, this was one of my main reasons for switching to gentoo two years ago. No more need for clean installs because I forgot where all the junk came from.

Oh, another reason was that I had to keep my 200Mhz machine running through my thesis work; the performance improvement could be a placebo effect, but it worked when I needed it :)

Re:I hear what you're saying, try this on for size

[cliffski]

All good stuff. But this kinda enforces my point. If people want to promote linux, thats cool, but they should brag about the stuff that linux does better than windows (like you have done). The fact that there is a graphical installer is just a lame point to labour. the biggest selling points to me as a windows user for a new OS would be:

Faster Boot Time
Less subsceptibility to trojans/viruses/adware etc
Less bloat generally.

As for stability, my windows XP systems never seem to crash. And while most games only run windows, Im loathe to have a different OS just for non game stuff.
I wish we did have a viable competing OS, but for joe user like me, the lack of games support is actually the biggest deal.

Re:Negative mods

[Anonymous Coward]

TerminX?

Back on topic despite ourselves

[Reziac]

Special situation when the poster themselves asks that a bad post be modded down... come to think of it, that might be a useful feature: let posters mod down any of their *own* posts, as a quick and easy way to submerge stupid or wrong comments they wish they'd never made. [I don't think they should be deleteable, tho, as that damages the overall integrity of a discussion.]

Having no familiarity** with Gentoo nor its children, yes, it was a serious question :) [goes off, reads supplied link] Very nice feature set, notably the --pretend switch. And the way it's organized, one can readily imagine a Handy GUI Optional Overlay that would be very easy for even novice linux users to figure out and use. I know I'd never remember all those switches, nor have the patience to RTFM to remind myself, but wrap it in something like TweakUI, and it would be effectively self-documenting on the fly.

Hmm. As to the point of that much-debated post... I wonder what the "this-is-cool" switch does? Maybe it turns on CPU cooling, or fetches beer from the fridge. ;)

**Occasionally I muck about with various disties (tho Gentoo hasn't come my way yet), and keep a Mandrake box, but this is mostly a DOS/Win household.

Re:Back on topic despite ourselves

[alib001]

Posters being able to mod' down their own comments: great idea! That's a good suggestion for that guy who's asking for ideas on how to remake Slashdot.

Gentoo emerge: yeah I like their Portage thing. I've never really used Gentoo but I've had it recommended to me several times - which is when I heard about their ports thing. If I ever get round to it, Gentoo would be something I'd like to try (along with maybe LFS and Slack).

However, FreeBSD makes me very happy - it has the excellent ports collection (similar to Gentoo's Portage) and it's typically a real pleasure to use. Once you get into it, the syntax isn't really a problem. Occasionally I pull up a man page or two (another good thing on FreeBSD) but that's it. The only thing I find is that if I haven't installed anything for a while I get out of the habit of updating things and running checks (but that's just me being lazy really.)

I honestly wouldn't prefer a GUI for ports (even though I use Windows XP on a daily basis too). FreeBSD is just so well laid out in /usr/ports that it's quicker to type. Sometimes I reference the ports page or the relevant section of the handbook. It might look a bit daunting at first but for typical usage it's just cvsup to update the ports skeleton on the local box and then portupgrade (or cd'ing to the directory in the skeleton ports tree) to install your stuff and then a bit of housekeeping. Or there's sysinstall. I'd imagine emerge would be similar fare (the quality of either ports system depends on the port maintainers who keep the ports up-to-date and do any necessary customization).

But hey - if emerge this-is-cool delivered a cold one to my desk I'd have Gentoo up and running by tomorrow(!) and looping that line in a little script!

And with that, off I go; I've still got to rely on sneakernet to fetch my beer :)

Re:Back on topic despite ourselves

[Reziac]

Suggestion emailed to pater@... There's supposedly a suggestion box at sourceforge, but last time I tried that, it wouldn't let me log in, no idea what its trip is.

My exposure to BSD was by way of Apple's Darwin for x86, and even with the download version being kinda half-baked (far as I could tell, it only ran in commandline mode), I came away with the impression that BSD as a core OS is more mature and better thought-out than linux. To an old DOS-head, BSD seemed familiar enough to be usable (a feeling I've never had with linux). If I did something wrong, it behaved sensibly, rather than giving me an urge to smack someone upside the haid. Little things seemed more polished (frex, MAN's behaviour). Next time I inflict a random pile of disties on some hapless machine, I hope to try BSD again, the real thing this time. :D

It didn't bring me a beer, but neither did it pee on my foot :)

Re:Back on topic despite ourselves

[alib001]

There's another guy collecting suggestions too - I saw it someone's .sig - slashdotemail@gmail.com I think. I have no idea what he's going to do with them but I sent him a few and he thanked me for the list. I think I suggested 'Smartdot'.

I think the Darwin thing is coming on and making advancements. I had a skim of an O'Reilly book 'OSX for Unix Geeks' and it had a chapter on getting X up and running... using Fink(?) which I think maybe be similar to Gentoo emerge (back on topic!). Looks like they might have KDE working as well.

As for the *BSDs Free, Open, Net etc. if you liked DOS then you should get on just fine. It can take a while to get to know the *nix alernatives to DOS commands and where things are kept but I found it soon becomes comfortable. And the best thing is that you're soon able to weild the power and then you don't want to go back! I don't know if this works for you - but I've found keeping a notebook can be really handy for esoteric command switches, useful sequences of piped commands, temporary changes I'm not sure about etc. Just a thought - it's saved me a lot of time.

If you do decide to give FreeBSD a whirl I recommend going through the handbook as it covers a lot of Unix basics as well. FreeBSDDiary is well worth a look too. If it wasn't for a few big commercial programs I could happily switch from XP to FreeBSD and KDE. These days it's that good.

No beer, no foul? Think yourself lucky emerge tried to hump my leg :(

Re:Back on topic despite ourselves

[Reziac]

I haven't kept track; has there been another release of Darwin for x86? Last I heard, the one I messed with was the one and only. (Two solid days to download it over dialup...!!)

One thing I liked, tho, was that if I'd type in what seemed to me to be a reasonable variant of some DOS command, it would come back with "Did you mean [whatever]??" and a list of switches. This made the immediate learning curve reasonable, and that's even without a manual. I didn't have to know enough to type Q[uit] to get out of MAN. ESC generally behaved as expected. Little things like that make a world of difference.

[rant type="realworld"]
Personally I don't think one should have to RTFM to run a basic desktop OS. If you're using it as a server, or for a specialised application, yeah, then you may need to RTFM and dig thru esoteric commands and switches -- but not for ordinary everyday use. As a desktop OS, ordinary everyday bumbling around should bring you in contact with whatever you need (presented in a user-friendly fashion), and should NOT dump you into anything too terribly dangerous. Something like the basic chapters in "DOS for Dummies" is the max that any desktop OS should *require* its newbies to absorb.
[/rant]

[goes off, roots around BSD handbook -- thanks for the reminder!] Seems written in a very straightforward manner, not at all newbie-hostile :) Since I see there are One Big Archive versions in ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en/books/han dbook/, I'll have to grab one for handier viewing.

BTW what would you consider the minimum *realistic* hardware for current FreeBSD, if expected to do desktoppish type work? I have Mandrake 7.2 on a P3-450/256mb, and it runs okay, but not exactly crisp. WinXP on my P3-500/768mb is a lot more nimble. :/

Re:Back on topic despite ourselves

[alib001]

I'm not really the best person to ask about the Darwin thing because without ever having tried it out I don't really feel qualified to comment in any depth. Although AFAIK the main development centres on OpenDarwin (OpenDarwin.org) with various offshoots complementing the original Darwin project (fink.sf.net , XDarwin.org). As for the x86 emulating PowerPC scene I think PearPC (PearPC.net) seems to be _the_ place. But I'm afraid I'm something of an Apple-phobe (like the hardware but think it's sold at a high premium; like the concepts; can't stand the overzealous Apple advocates).

Typing 'q' to exit man: yeah I can see what you mean. The thing is man uses whatever pager you have set. So typically you're viewing man pages with less or more. And because I use less to view text files I soon learned what most of the keys do. But I still hit 'h' for help every now and then. It can be confusing. If you really want to drive yourself nuts try using vi to edit something. But don't enter into vi lightly and especially not without knowing to press [Esc] [:] [q] [!] in sequence to exit (without saving) - no, I'm not kidding! Some people make the argument that it's important to learn things like vi because sometimes that's all you'll have to work with. I tend to think it's a cruel and unusual punishment but I can see their point. So I'll learn to use all of it properly one day but stick to something like ee easy editor in the mean time.

One idea I had a while back was to alias *nix commands to their dos equivalents e.g. (off the top of my head)

dir/p => "ls -l | less"
cls => clear
move => mv
copy => cp

but I soon just adapted without this (apart from cls - I habitually flick that in for some reason). Of course as I switch from one environment to another I invariably dir or ls in error if I'm not thinking. But any learning curve is soon offset whenever I need to write a little script to do something and get nasty flashbacks of DOS batch files and monkeying around with weird for loops, errorlevels, and gotos. Using *nix means I've got access to multiple scripting languages and syntax I'm more familiar with.

I'm with you on your rant! The ideal system _should_ shield newbies from that point where you've no idea what to do next or really what you're doing and if it might prove dangerous. Unix has that to a certain extent by being designed as a mulitple user OS where theoretically you need root to really shaft things. But at some point you're always going to have to use that power to make important changes. One thing's for sure: being dumped in a *nix shell with no GUI backup and all the associated help features that that can bring is not always easy for beginners. At the other end of the scale I'm often driven half crazy by some software features that are designed to help and be user friendly. This depends on what I'm trying to achieve, but generally I'd say give me command line options over dialog checkboxes and "wizards" any day! I've done a bit of Human Computer Interaction before and the holy grail is an OS that provides both ease-of-use for newbies and extended options for the more adept. Some say it's OSX. I choose not to comment:) IMO, it's not setting up a *BSD system for the first time - I think you have to really want to learn (but that said, once up and running and if it booted straight into a desktop like KDE that'd be a lot closer to that goal).

Re: handbook. Yeah the handbook is really good like that. Even if you just want to pick up a few Unix basics it's a good read because a lot of the stuff is portable to similar systems. I guess you might find some *BSD users / "gurus/wizards" not that newbie friendly... sometimes I see one word answers (typically a command or man section) and RTFM (where it wouldn't have killed the replier to elaborate a little). Personally, I haven't had that experience but

Re:Negative mods

[Anonymous Coward]

'fraid not.