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

Posted by timothy on from the are-those-things-even-legal dept.

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.

24 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. This is exactly what Gentoo needs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs by maekke · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    3. Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs by Jugalator · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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. :-)

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
    4. Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs by Sir_Stinksalot · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

      --
      "We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
    5. Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs by isometrick · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

  2. Oh, oh, I can see it coming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  3. this will totally crush BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:this will totally crush BSD by carnivore302 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Please login to access my lawn
  4. not just the graphical installer. by deathazre · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Karma: Negative (Mostly affected by dorm trolling)
  5. Seems great by DeBaas · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.....

    --
    ---
  6. CLI good by darin3200 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Star Wars Characters by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    --

    In Soviet America the banks rob you!
  8. Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool by iyliki · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  9. Gentoo Install Flexibility by Brian+Blessed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  10. Re:Boot-up time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  11. Some advantages of an installer by tmk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.
  12. Am I missing the point? by GuyFawkes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    --
    http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
  13. Re:Boot-up time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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 :)

  14. Re:Boot-up time by amigabill · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > 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"... :)

  15. Re:offtopic rant by antiMStroll · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

  16. Re:gentoo can't have it both ways by Taladar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Linux is not Windows
  17. Gentoo mini-review from non-fanboy by bender647 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  18. Current gentoo install is awful by lakeland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 ;-)