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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

In Korea, only old people use graphical installers.

Re:In related news,

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[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.

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.

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!

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]

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.

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/

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: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).

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: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...

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.

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: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).

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.

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.