Gentoo 2005.0 Released

mintshows writes "According to Gentoo Planet, the first gentoo release of the year, 2005.0, is out. You can download the 2005.0 ISOs from the torrents at http://torrents.gentoo.org/ . Of course, current Gentoo users can just emerge to the latest and greatest as always."

Comments

Darn it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just finished compiling 2004.999999!

Re:Darn it!

[KidHash]

Using portage, installing app.version.9999 installs the current CVS build

Re:Darn it!

[amirl]

How is it? Should I upgrade? I'm currently using 2004.999998

Re:Darn it!

[Leffe]

Well, that's all good, because all you have to do to upgrade is to change a symlink and maybe recompile a package or two (or none if you check your USE flags).

I've been running 2005.0 for at least 3 months without problems.

compile on!

[qewl]

Has anyone had any experiences with the lengthy compilation having a bad impact on their hard drive? I've long been wondering and considering trying Gentoo. And to those who are very experienced in Gentoo, has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end?

Re:compile on!

[lachlan76]

It's not gonna screw with your hard drive, that shouldn't be anything to worry about.

And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

But others may disagree.

Re:compile on!

[nukem996]

Well I havnt done any bench marks but I think learning was very helpful in understanding linux. One of the best things about gentoo is portage, it is many times better then any other package system ive used (rpm deb apt etc).

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

It wont hurt your hard drive, but it might try your patience.

Re:compile on!

[atrader42]

I'd shift those around a bit. The only real liability I've found is the compile time (which can be pretty drastically reduced with the use of some tools. Gentoo has tutorials). I would absolutely move learning and tweaking into the power/cusomizability category (though I haven't found much of a speed improvement over pre-compiled software in most cases, so that probably isn't the best reason to try gentoo). I started out with redhat 9, and although it did what I wanted for the most part, when I had a problem, it was usually pretty hard to fix since I didn't really know what was going on. Now that I've done a couple gentoo installs, though only stage 3, I must admit, I know much better what causes certain problems. In addition, I love being always up-to-date and not having to worry about cruft.

I'm a computer science student, and love learning all I can about computers, so maybe some of those are not advantages for you. However, if you're into experimentation and the latest and greatest, gentoo is a great way to play with it all.

Re:compile on!

[BigBuckHunter]

Why would "compilation" impact a hard drive? It has no more impact than watching lengthy porn videos (normally done during the compilation).

BBH

Re:compile on!

[John Hurliman]

I don't know, I use binary packages for just about everything unless I want the latest bleeding edge stuff or it's just a small trivial package. Gentoo doesn't MAKE you compile everything, it's just the default option.

But to answer your question, I've had a fully compiled system started from stage one, and didn't have any hard drive problems. Also didn't notice any visible performance difference, but the customizability has kept me with Gentoo for a long time now.

Re:compile on!

[mstromb]

Let me say that I'm not a very experienced gentoo user. Not a very experienced linux user either. Oh, I've tried dabbling for the longest time, my interested started long, long ago when I found some RH5 CDs someplace.

Forward to now. Now, I'm building a media center-ish pc. Also acting as a fileserver. Uses wireless, with WPA encryption and all that cool stuff.

Now, I could have gone with some other distro and saved myself quite a bit of time (I'm reinstalling it for the 3rd time as I write this), but honestly, gentoo is just plain fun to set up and I've learned way too much for me to just put it down now.

There are tons of ways to get it started. I've always opted to use a minimal livecd, but bootstrapping from knoppix or another livecd works well too.

Portage is just awesome, the most package-specific setup you'll ever really need to do is edit a new config file. There's even a tool to let you easily merge old config files when new revisions come out. And while I don't know how much speed I'm getting out of compiling everything from source, I do know what's on my computer, as I compulsively check use flags just to see what I can do with my system. With portage, I've found incredibly useful software I never knew existed, and don't know how I lived without. It's all about choices, choices, choices. And the only penalty for changing your mind is a bit of your time.

My only bad experiences stem from me using insane compiler flags that mess up your system completely. I had no idea it was possible to screw up rm, but I managed to do it. My hardware is also not the best, I went for cheap and older components I had lying around. However, gentoo hasn't told me "no" yet, I've just needed to be clever about doing things, which has taught me a huge amount about how linux, and computers in general, work. I've always been the "computer guy" around here, but I just feel... closer ;)

So long story short, I think gentoo is really, really worth it if you've got some spare time and some curiosity.

And being able to use bleeding-edge everything is just cool.

Re:compile on!

[TexVex]

Are you just being silly? Think about a TiVo, which records video real-time continuously while powered on. DirecTiVo systems can and do record two video streams at times, while playing back a third. All using regular old IDE hard drives.

Compiling some software for a few hours is a drop in the bucket.

Re:compile on!

[pyite]

And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

Yea, it starts out that way, like six years ago when I was grabbing the GIMP from CVS on a regular basis just for fun. Then you discover Debian and recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

Re:compile on!

[iCEBaLM]

Frequent read/write of a hard drive does not damage it, infact the platters would be better off the more you use it. MTBF take into account the circuitry, servos, etc. In other words-nothing to worry about.

Re:compile on!

[lachlan76]

It's not like anything I use is particularly time critical though...I can just start compiling before I go to bed and then 99% of the time it's done by the morning.

Re:compile on!

[Jafar00]

If you compile Gentoo on a slower system (PII, PIII etc) you will notice a huge increase in performance over a pre-packaged system. I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it. Sure, it took 4 days to get everything installed, but in the end the old laptop is now quite usable with a cutting edge, new OS rather than just opting for the recommended win98 ;)

Re:compile on!

[OverlordQ]

I started out with redhat 9, and although it did what I wanted for the most part, when I had a problem, it was usually pretty hard to fix since I didn't really know what was going on. Now that I've done a couple gentoo installs, though only stage 3, I must admit, I know much better what causes certain problems. In addition, I love being always up-to-date and not having to worry about cruft.

Yes because it's always easier to diagnose your custom compiled programs yourself instead of getting help from the 10k+ other users who use the exact same software package.

Re:compile on!

[ThJ]

I agree very strongly with this. Although I'm a geek, that doesn't mean things *have* to be as complicated as possible.

Re:compile on!

[bonch]

Unfortunately, benchmarks show that there is no marked performance boost compiling everything. Mostly, the things that affect performance most from compilation are the kernel and libc.

Re:compile on!

[dmayle]

has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end

I'm an avid Gentoo user, and I've got to say, if you're only considering Gentoo for the speed/power, you might as well put some stickers on your case, because you'll probably notice a bigger speed improvement like that. Gentoo is really useful for the following reason:

• Relatively bare-bones linux (like Linux from Scratch) but with excellent documentation. - Fantastic for learing about linux
• Customizability - if your distro maintainers chose one route with a package that doesn't meet your needs, your stuck installing from source, and maintaining version upgrades yourself. (Being sure to keep track of config options every time) - with Gentoo, you set the appropiate config option (called USE-flags) and you're good from then on.
• Support community - no matter who you are, sometimes you will have problems. Pretty much every problem I've ever had on Linux took a simple search on the Gentoo forums to find the solution in less than five minutes. (Even when my problems aren't on Gentoo Linux, I always search the Gentoo forums first, as they're usually more likely to contain a useful answer)
• Available packages - Everything under the sun (and I mean, just about everything you could want) is already packaged for Gentoo. Meaning, unlike with some other distros, you won't have to go searching for someone else's packages to install what you want. It's already there, with just one line to search and install.
• Support community - oh wait, did I mention this already? It deserves a second mention because it really is fantastic. I've never been more impressed with the amount of community help available.

Re:compile on!

[Monkelectric]

I have extensive experience with gentoo, it will not harm your HD in any way.

And as far as tweaking, to me it is noticably faster then pre-compiled distros. Its also a hell of a lot of fun to mess with. If you don't care about speed, don't have to have the latest pacakges, and don't really wanna mess around -- then use mandrake or whatever people like nowadays and dont bother.

If youre like me and you wanna control exactly what gets onto your system, you cant stand knowing your programs could be going 10% faster, then gentoo is the only choice :)

Re:compile on!

[geminidomino]

Err... how is gentoo the "only" choice when I have the exact same control with Slackware?

Re:compile on!

[iamacat]

In my experience, there is much more learning/tweaking on redhat side than for gentoo. For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde". With a pre-packaged Linux distribution you would have to worry about installing countless packages missing or out of date on your system. Later you get to fix everything that broke because you upgraded its dependency to an incompatible version

With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really have to make you install cron, syslog and dhcpd, or make you deal with fstab or grub.conf.

The real problem though is configuring the kernel. Building a custom kernel is a very good idea, because you don't want your notebook to autodetect drivers for several minutes when booting, or to waste CPU cycles on compiled-in SMP support or multi-homed webserver. But Linux configuration screens are insane. Do I need an "HPET timer"? Who the hell knows?

I think the solution is to make Linux kernel modular, with drivers and subsystems that can be downloaded and compiled separately. Then we can start with a minimum kernel and emerge, say, quota support in the same way as kde.

Re:compile on!

[atrader42]

That was only true for me as far as official redhat packages went. As soon as I started looking for packages that weren't from Redhat (ie XMMS that plays mp3s, proprietary ati drivers), I was at the mercy of the various rpm repositories and my machine got ugly pretty quickly. Certainly this has gotten much better with Fedora and yum/apt-get, but, as I said, it's not just about having the same packages if you don't have a good idea of where your problem is or some reasonable steps to take in order to solve it.

As an aside, the best computer support I've ever had for any problem has come from the gentoo forums. I think there's an atmosphere that everyone is learning and so should be helping each other along.

Re:compile on!

[hdparm]

No issues with HD. And don't worry, here is the quick howto, it's pretty straight forward.

Re:compile on!

[Feztaa]

Though I agree that you can get better support for something well-tested like a commercial distro, there is something to be said for building a distro from scratch, if your goal is to learn how the system works.

Personally, I think everybody should build LFS at least once (at least everybody who wants to learn how linux works anyway). Gentoo makes it too easy, you don't learn nothin' ;)

Re:compile on!

[tempest303]

THANK YOU.

This isn't said enough. The Gentoo "ricers" are covering up the real benefits of the distro, as you've mentioned - lots of docs, a broad community, and a great repository of available packages.

I'd probably never use Gentoo myself for anything other than poking at it out of curiosity, but I can see why some people like it. They can have my Fedora CDs when they pry them from my cold, dead hands, but I have to say the package availability on Gentoo (and Debian, for that matter) makes me jealous at times.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because LFS has bad documentation, seeing how it's a book instead of a distro...

Re:compile on!

[ztwilight]

Well, I'm happy that you have a fast computer. Compiling the average Gentoo package takes THREE DAYS in my shared computing environment instead of what would normally take 3 MINUTES with Ubuntu. Gentoo has its uses, but a productive desktop is not one of them.

Re:compile on!

[Mancat]

Your laptop was seriously fucked up if it couldn't play movies with a PII-366 CPU. I still have a PII-266 with Win2k on it, and while it probably won't decode a DVD streams realtime, it plays any other video format.

Re:compile on!

[lachlan76]

What exactly do you consider your "average Gentoo package"? Are your users each building their own copies of packages? If they are, you should get people to make binary packages.

Re:compile on!

[MyIS]

records video real-time

There is a big difference between sequential stream writing (as when recording video) and random access to small files (as when compiling). Constantly accessing different files may cause a lot of switching between HDD cylinders, which may wear out the head movement motors. Writing out a stream of blocks requires a lot less head shifts (in the order of 10-100 times probably).

But anyway, I actually agree with the overall point of the parent. Compile time is only a fraction of overall day-to-day HDD usage. And a good filesystem will optimize away a lot of direct HDD operations.

Re:compile on!

[dn15]

Exactly. I love "do it yourself" stuff but really didn't feel that I learned anything by installing Gentoo. Debian wasn't *that* different, but took much less time. Heck, as geeky as I think I am, I am actually running CentOS right now (a third-party ISO distribution of RHEL.) It's fun to learn about stuff, but past a certain point I want stuff to "just work." Meaning Debian on servers, and Red Hat / Mac OS X on desktops.

Re:compile on!

[vadim_t]

Quite improbable.

In case you've never taken a hard disk apart, the heads aren't moved by a motor. They're moved by a voice coil, which is basically a coil of wire that interacts with a permanent magnet attached to the drive. They don't touch each other. Here's a picture

Now, I suppose that the bearings could wear out, but compiling software isn't very likely to make a lot of difference. Especially since it's not such a disk intensive operation anyway.

Re:compile on!

[mattyrobinson69]

With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really have to make you install cron, syslog and dhcpd, or make you deal with fstab or grub.conf.

How do you propose they setup fstab or grub.conf (everybody's partitions/kernel setup is different)? You mean you want them to create an installer program for you?

What if you dont like a particular cron deamon? what if you like a particular logger? What if you dont use dhcp (i dont)?

Re:compile on!

[headLITE]

I usually compile on a tmpfs on those machines that have enough RAM (though you better not try that with OOo :D)

Re:compile on!

[amcguinn]

To my mind, the big advantage is that the dependencies are more fuzzy. I can run a stable distribution, with stable, tested, software, but if I need, say, the latest Abiword, or mplayer, I don't need to upgrade my whole system to get it. That is what I always wanted with Debian, but couldn't have.

The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.

Re:compile on!

[Tim C]

I can't be bothered to google to see if my memory does serve me, but I seem to remember that MTBF for hard drives is generally quoted at around 100,000 hours. Like you say, compiling a few (or a few thousand) packages isn't going to make a whole lot of difference, even if it does all come off the hard drive the whole time.

Re:compile on!

[Knuckles]

From my experience with Gentoo from 2 years ago:
If you like a particular logger and don't use syslog, you find that many packages can't log with the logger you chose. I guess that's what you get if xou think you can circumvent Debian's lengthy test cycle by pulling in random projects' sources into a huge distro.

Re:compile on!

[BenjyD]

For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde"

I'm not sure what you're saying: how is that different from:

• apt-get install kde
• pacman -S kde
• yum install kde

Re:compile on!

[dpilot]

Second.

No other distribution has made it so easy to install what I want, with so little fuss. So I have to wait a bit for compilation... Some stuff (OpenGL Hexen 1 port with networking, for instance) I never got running on another distribution, and came right up under Gentoo.

While you're mentioning the community, I need to get out there, again. The last BDB update broke OpenLDAP. Good thing I'm only fooling around with it, but it would be good to get it running, again. I need to find some time.

Re:compile on!

[gusmao]

I used to have Mandrake installed, which took care of all the gory details for me, and now I've just decided to give Gentoo a try. So far, here are the bad aspects of gentoo compared to my previous distribution:

* You have to be willing to spend a big amount of time tweaking with your system. There's a lot of gotcha's (the USE flag, for instance), and not everything works as you think they would.
* the portage directory (which contains data for the portage system, the package manager of Gentoo) takes up a lot of space. If you running out of space, or have a small hd, or have a dual boot system with a limited space for a linux installation, that's something to consider
* Some aspects of the system (such as the boot file organization and scripts) are set differently from other linux distributions. It's not particulary hard to grasp, but you have to learn it anyway.

On the bright side, what I see is what many have said here before, such as up-to-date packages, good forums, learning opportunities, etc.

My advice is, if you've got the time to spare and the willingness to learn, install it. On the other hand, if you just want a more friendly distro and get things working right away, maybe Gentoo won't fit you that well.

Re:compile on!

[Taladar]

Actually Gentoo is relatively good concerning productiveness. It takes a relatively low admin (person) time and a high computer time to keep it up to date which is much better than systems that need a medium part of my own time.

Re:compile on!

[Taladar]

Slackware as a binary distro doesn't offer choices concerning compile-time-options and related dependencies.

Re:compile on!

[paranerd]

... has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end?

0.02, YMMV, IMHO, etc: The costumizability [sic] (hey, that may have been a typo but I like it! It's appropriate :) is not the "cost" for me but the "added value". I'm a control freak: I want it my way. Gentoo let's me indulge that appetite. If my Gentoo isn't exactly what I want I only have myself to blame.

Whenever something goes kerflouey on me (nsert alsa here) I cuss and swear I'm switching to knoppix or slackware or... but I always end up fixing the problem (gentoo user support on their wiki is awesome!) and sticking with the distro.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

I feel somewhat obliged to point out that with Gentoo you don't need to know what those special cases are since you just set the USE flags for your system and then let it take care of everything. An example: When I used Debian I tried to get lirc working with xine and no matter how I tried to configure it I couldn't get it to work until I finally discovered that the Debian package was compiled with lirc support disabled - despite the fact that if you download lirc and compile it yourself it's enabled by default (I looked at that and couldn't believe that any package maintainer would compile a package with such default settings off). Now I have lirc set as a USE flag and never need to know whether it's set as default or not since everything just works.

Re:compile on!

[ben_rh]

I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it.

I don't understand how this myth continues to propogate. There are no end of benchmarks all over the net that show beyond any doubt that -march=pentium4, -fomit-frame-pointer and -omg-optimised don't have an appreciable impact on performance.

Sensible compiling employs the old faithful -O2 (or -Os to optimise for binary size if you must). This flag enables all optimisations that are considered stable and suitable for general use. Enabling all the 'leet' options has such a small effect (in the realm of 2%), and with some codebase / architecture combinations, it actually causes a slowdown.

The current operating state (system load, disk activity etc) has a far greater effect on the speed of execution of any application.

So, since -totally-go-fast and friends are gratuitous and have negligible effect on the overall speed of the system, the compiling can either be done once by the package maintainer, or ten thousand times by hackers all around the world. Why not let the maintainer do it, and save yourself the time and trouble? It's a much more efficient setup.

I used to run Gentoo myself, and quite liked parts of it (e.g. the nice clean init script setup). But seriously,

• A significant emerge world: two hours
• A significant apt-get update, apt-get upgrade: ~ 1 minute (the biggest I've ever seen took around 5)

There's not much of a decision to make as far as I'm concerned.

And don't even get me started on the people that insist on writing -O8 or something like it. A quick RTFM would reveal that options above -O3 don't actually have any impact anyway. In fact, the relevant code within gcc is something like

if (opt_level > 3)
opt_level = 3;

Can't argue with cold hard C. ;)

Re:compile on!

[vasqzr]

Customizability, Support, Available packages...

Linux, defined.

Re:compile on!

[displaced80]

I just wanted to expand on the 'learning about Linux' point...

It's obviously not suitable for all occasions or people, but building a Gentoo system from Stage 1 is an excellent way to learn about Linux's structure and how packages, libraries and tools fit together. It's like a guided tour of the workings of a distribution.

It takes time, but installing a Gentoo system has helped me get a handle on a few of those 'how does that work?' thoughts that have been bothering me since I first started out with Linux (RH5 CD's from CheapBytes IIRC).

All your points are excellent. It's sad that the vocal /. Gentoo crowd seem to be so... well, you know what I mean. Everyone please bear in mind that for every "I compiled gpm with -O3 and now I can select text twice as fast as I could with Fedora on the same system!" person, there's a dozen people who use Gentoo for much more sane reasons.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just acquired an ibm thinkpad a21m. Yep, pretty old, but that's what I was able to afford here in .ar - It's a 750mhz-p3 with 256mb ram.
I've installed Gentoo (2005.0 rc5). It is amazing how fast this thing goes, even with KDE.

Anyway, it worked just a little bit faster than UTUTO-e XS for pentium3 systems.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've installed Linux over BSD using slip on a old laptop without any working floppy or cdrom drive.

dd some data into a file mount a file as loop format as a compressed filing system and copy all you init stuff across..

Then emerge world and build the whole system on a 468 with 16meg of ram over slip...

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, having tried both, I find the community support for Gentoo to be far better. For something like Fedora, you might find 1000 posts that all say something like "I reinstalled and it went away", or "someone told me they heard that installing an NPTL kernel fixes this". In Gentoo, you'll instead find 10 posts that describe the problem exactly, each including a complete and correct solution.

This isn't custom-written software we're talking about here; Gentoo's packages are built from common recipes. If the recipe's fucked, it's fucked the same way for everyone.

Re:compile on!

[Egonis]

If compiling were damaging to your hard disk, how about Virtual Memory / Swap?

Hard Disks are designed to be used, if the life of the drive were lessened from extensive use, 256MB RAM in an XP Workstation would be catastrophic.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha-WHA?! By "average Gentoo package", do you mean KDE or OpenOffice (the two biggest offenders for compile time)? My hardware hasn't been called "current" since 2000, and most emerges just take a few minutes.

Furthermore, OOo has a binary distribution, and KDE is in the process of changing to split ebuilds (so you only have to compile those programs that have actually changed).

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

"if piracy is a "gray area," then so is violating the GPL. Please, for the love of God, stop being hypocrites."

I'll bite.

1: If the GPL violator was giving the software away for free I wouldn't mind so much (or at all)

2: piracy is a "grey area" when compared to 'theft' because noting is 'taken' only copied.

3: I'm not going to sue someone for making as many copies of my GPL software as possible.

4: Piracy is a "grey area" for consumers *cough* customers *cough* what if I already 'own' a copy of xyz, downloading the mp3 of if over the Internet is more efficient than making an mp3 myself.

5: Piracy is a "grey area" for customers who wish to 'try before you buy', you can try my GPL software before you buy it.

6: You mentioned the G word, you loose the argument, either that or show me a single peer-reviewed paper with an equation such as Newtons: velocity = gravity * time + GOD

Re:compile on!

[4of12]

It takes a relatively low admin (person) time and a high computer time to keep it up to date which is much better than systems that need a medium part of my own time.

From what I understand, though, the low marginal costs of maintaining a Gentoo system are offset by the high initial cost in learning how things work, setting things up, etc. compared to other distributions.

I'm inclined to try Gentoo one of these days when I get several days free to do this, till then I'll limp along with Fedora Core and yum.

Re:compile on!

[ickoonite]

Amen to that.

And to think, all those CPUs could actually be doing something useful instead. If it's just about taxing your processor once a week (or maybe more frequently; I've never had the dubious pleasure of a Gentoo install) then surely Folding@Home or SETI@home can provide more than enough exercise for even the most voracious CPU/geek combo.

But, no, of course, that's not l33t enough. I half wonder that if SETI and/or Folding had their clients scroll dummy compile messages across the screen whilst they run, all these die hards might run them instead.

(Though I suppose not a few of them are specifying -O8 just so that they can run SETI at supposedly "breakneck" pace...)

iqu :P

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not refuting what you say, but do you have any links to benchmarks which show that -march doesn't do much? Now that's all relative of course (2% sounds about right), since 99% of code falls into the realm of the 486 instruction set, but my impression was that you can get some performance increases with i586, and i686 - and pretty much worthless after that.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a gentoo user for almost a year now, and I was equally mistified by all the kernel compile options. One thing that helped me is to use "make xconfig" instead of "make menuconfig" (assuming you aren't just tweaking .config manually). "make xconfig" brings up a nice GUI for selecting kernel options. While GUI's in and of themselves are more of an annoyance to me, this particular one includes a nice description of each option. The GUI's were different, though, when building 2.4 kernels compared to 2.6, and I only got the description in the 2.6 version.

Re:compile on!

[Binestar]

Why not let the maintainer do it, and save yourself the time and trouble? It's a much more efficient setup.

2 words: USE flags. USE flags affect the ./configure script to enable or disable features. Have a program that likes to be compiled against GPM, but you are never at a console or your machine doesn't have a mouse? -gpm in the use flags and your software will never compile in support for gpm. There are dozens of examples, and while optimizations in gcc don't do much, library support *IS* useful for both keeping out what you don't want/need and for making sure you have what you do want and need.

For the record: My USE flags are:

USE="-3dfx 3dnow X acpi aim apache2 -apm arts bash-completion bzlib cdr cdparanoia -cjk crypt dvd dvdread -emacs -emacs-w3 encode ftp -gnome java kde mbox -maildir mime mmx mozilla mp3 mpeg mysql ogg oggvorbis oscar perl png qt samba ssl vcd -voodoo3 -xinerama xmms sse"

And my cflags are: -mcpu=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe. As you can see, my USE flags are much more specific than my CFLAGS. Have you ever tried portage? It is the reason I switched to gentoo in the first place.

Re:compile on!

[iamacat]

How do you propose they setup fstab or grub.conf (everybody's partitions/kernel setup is different)? You mean you want them to create an installer program for you?

Why not, do "they" have some religious prohibition on writing custom code that parses output of fdisk? Even then, they can just assume boot == hda1, swap == hda2, root == hda3 and most people will be happy.

What if you dont like a particular cron deamon? what if you like a particular logger? What if you dont use dhcp (i dont)?

Then of course you can unmerge them and install components of your choice.

Re:compile on!

[kesuki]

-march=pentium4
Apples to oranges... He's talking a pentium-2 which is a glorfied Pentium MMX reneamed as 'pentium 2' and give some higher clockspeeds. the difference for a Pentium 4 user is going to be negligable. However, for users of slower processors, there is a hell of a lot of performance tweaking that can be done, that many distros completely ignore. a lot of code has been added to make programs run better and faster on MMX2 and MMX3 cpus like the Pentium-4 all that codebase, slows the program down greatly when running on a legacy MMX CPU. So in short, there is a ton that gentoo maintainers can do to make their system run cleaner and faster ona pentium 2, and all resulting binaries will run tragically slower on a pentium 4. (some over 200% slower) so you see, it's not something that 'mainstream' distros can do easily without forking a whole Pentium MMX version, while all gentoo has to do is set some options because it detected you have a pentium-2. I realize there are other distros that specilize in older hardware too, but not everyone has a pentium 4 class cpu.
Myself, I have an athlon XP, and gentoo might run faster, and certaintly would be easier to keep programs up to date with, but the compile time isn't worth it to me, binaries download much faster.. although nowhere near the 5 minutes you're talking about I've got 3 mbit cable service, and installing from the net-install disc took about 2 hrs all told. (including reboots etc) compiling an entire os would have taken me more along the line of 4 hours plus (I have a lot of games installed)

Re:compile on!

[mattyrobinson69]

Why not, do "they" have some religious prohibition on writing custom code that parses output of fdisk? Even then, they can just assume boot == hda1, swap == hda2, root == hda3 and most people will be happy.

Without meaning to sound elitist, if you cant manage to partition your disks with cfdisk (not fdisk) then you shouldn't be using gentoo

Then of course you can unmerge them and install components of your choice.

Alternatively you just follow the instructions and merge them yourself - its not hard and it doesn't take long (emerge vixie-cron syslog-ng)

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

Setting things up is a breeze. You won't find any config files outside of /etc (usually in /etc/packagename) except for the ones in /etc/conf.d that specify startup flags and the like. Gentoo is very consistent, much moreso than most other distributions, even if you don't like the way it does everything. On a fairly fast machine with plenty of memory it only takes a couple days to build gentoo with KDE and Gnome, honestly. Even on a slow machine it shouldn't take more than a week and most of that time you can be doing something else :)

Honestly, the gentoo base installation goes very quick. I suggest starting from a stage3 install, as you can actually be using the system while you upgrade it. Install the portage tree from the CD and don't upgrade it until after you install binary packages from the packages CD. Then emerge --sync to update portage, emerge -u portage to update portage, then emerge -uD world to update the entire system. I think the single thing that takes the longest is probably either building gcc, or X.org. Everything else is relatively short.

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

Because the thing you lack with slackware is control. They don't have the portage system that allows you to tell the system to compile things for you in a consistent and preconfigured manner. I like slackware because it generally works and it's the linux I started with (how could you not like a name like slackware) but I don't like to run it now that I know better.

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

The difference? First, it's one command. That should be pretty obvious. Second, it's going to build KDE based on your USE flags. The difference? The binary package for KDE on debian is compiled with a specific set of options. By setting your USE flags, you determine which options are supported. That means you are also in control of which dependencies are necessary. In other words, by turning off everything you won't use by changing your USE flags (possibly with ufed) you can avoid installing things you don't want, and install support for things that the maintainers may not have thought was important.

This is the most important aspect of self-compiled packages. ports has it, and portage has it. I don't see this much resistance to the idea of ports on FreeBSD... But then again most people avoid thinking about BSD, myself typically included.

Re:compile on!

[BenjyD]

In what way is apt-get install kde not one command? Those are three commands to install kde from three different distros (Debian-based, Arch and Redhat-based).

It just annoys me that so many Gentoo users seem to think that dependency resolution is only present in emerge, when in fact pretty much every distro has it as well.

Re:compile on!

[drinkypoo]

I don't think that emerge is the only system with dependency resolution. I think that emerge is the only system (well, alongside BSD systems) that has the dependency solution. Granted, some people are not willing to compile all the time. They would rather their computer sat idle, or their computer is genuinely too busy. For those people, there are binary distributions. Fine by me.

Re:compile on!

[gorjusborg]

Support community - no matter who you are, sometimes you will have problems. Pretty much every problem I've ever had on Linux took a simple search on the Gentoo forums to find the solution in less than five minutes. (Even when my problems aren't on Gentoo Linux, I always search the Gentoo forums first, as they're usually more likely to contain a useful answer)

This is the biggest reason I use gentoo.

An example:

• Built-in microphone and microphone input doesn't work on my thinkpad... hmmm...
  
• Search the gentoo forum for 'thinkpad x31 no microphone'
  
• Move from devfs to udev as described in forum.
  
• Microphone works!
  

I have used slackware, redhat, and debian (and I loved them). The community support in gentoo far exceeds anything I had seen for the others. (granted, it could be that all the users were hiding in IRC or Usenet or something, and I just didn't know) I don't think gentoo is the best thing since sliced-bread, but this is the reason I've used it for 3 years now.

Re:compile on!

[alw53]

Even a week is OK if you are positive it will be done and working at the end, but in my experience, it took 72 hours and it was broken at the end.
Fedora was broken at the time -- maybe it has improved. SUSE wanted to reformat my entire drive.
I went back to Slackware -- fast and tranparent installation and management.

The boot manager that Gentoo uses (forget what it's called) is better than LILO, though.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

But reading and writing 3 video files means that you're accessing 3 files at the same time, all accessed sequentially, so the cache is going to take care of a lot of data. You could get the hard drive to seek maybe 10 times a second? I'd have to do the math, but the number of seeks can be easily reduced.

Compiling, on the other hand, requires hundreds of header files on every compilation, which are not all laid out sequentially on disk. Disk cache will help you a bit, but different compilations will require different files (at least one new input and one new output each, the C and o files). And $DEITY help you if you're on a multiprocessor and making in parallel. Additionally, you end up creating and erasing a lot of temporary files (you do erase all the .o after you link, right?) which will increase fragmentation very quickly.

I'm not saying a full gentoo build will decrease the drive's life significantly, I don't have numbers on that, but comparing it to a video recording/playback is just silly.

Re:compile on!

[Alakaboo]

Not to quibble, but the Pentium II is actually a glorified Pentium Pro with the MMX extensions tacked on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

Re:compile on!

[dillweeds]

It's obvious you don't know what you are talking about. If you don't even know the names of the boot manager maybe you should stick with windows.

Re:compile on!

[TelJanin]

With other distros, you have to learn how it works very fast when it breaks. With Gentoo, you have to learn at your own pace when installing.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you wander into Off the Wall, then you're an Evil Commie Pig who wants to kill puppies.

Re:compile on!

[cloudmaster]

"emerge system" or "emerge sync;emerge -u world".

Man, I don't know how it could get any more complicated than that.

Re:compile on!

[mushroom blue]

or, you stick with Gentoo, and just start using Project Chinstrap, which downloads binaries of the most popular packages in the distribution.

nice troll, though.

Re:compile on!

[cloudmaster]

What? When you update debian, you sync the package list and run a command to update the packages on your system. When you update Gentoo, you sync the package list and run a command to update the packages. Except, remember that weird PHP setup you use, where it's linked against the beta mysql that you installed a while back? When you update with Gentoo, the new PHP is automatically built against that same mysql on your box. With your Debian binaries, your update just broke PHP, and you've gotta try to remember what you did before when you rebuild it again.

No, it's not an entirely accurate example with respect to the specific programs involved, but the point is totally valid. A general-use distro with binary packages simply can't do what a locally-built source-based distro can, with regards to package functionality and interoperability.

Never mind that there's no bullshit about which release you're running with Gentoo. You're either running stable, unstable, or a mix selected on a package-by-package basis (somewhat like Debian, except without the distro versions). New packages *will* work on your system, regardless of what snapshot you installed from. With Debian or any binary-based system, updates are only released for specific, recent versions. Gentoo's build-from-source scheme allows one release to update all Gentoo installs, even if the user has replaced GD with an older version and built a threaded perl interpreter linked against the newest sleepycat DB.

People get all hung up on "what, I have to compile everything" - when compiling is just a side effect of updating with some nice, easy-to-use update commands. Then they get all hung up on the comments from the idiots who say that Gentoo teaches them lots about Linux. No it doesn't - not any more than Slackware, Debian, or any other "hard to use"/"minimal install by default" distro would. The real benefit of Gentoo is the incremental upgrades, wide package support, and apt-like package selction abilities.

If you have to build *anything* from source on your machine, and this is not only directed at the OP, it'd be worth the time to learn how Gentoo really works. The ebuild system could seriously save you some time. There's more to Gentoo than the ricer "I'm so leet" kiddies tend to realize (catalyst, anyone?). Unfortuantely, those 31337 kids are also the loudest proponents, and so they're the ones everyone hears.

Re:compile on!

[mushroom blue]

And my cflags are: -mcpu=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe.

perhaps you should look into changing that to -O2, or maybe -Os. you see, -O3 actually makes binaries a tad larger than the other two, which will only give you a considerable speedup if you have a lot of RAM in that system. otherwise, doing -Os would be your best bet.

I've been berated on multiple occasions for using -O3 without knowing the true benefits and setbacks. they were right to berate me.

Re:compile on!

[cloudmaster]

-O3 trades space for speed. It results in larger image files, some of which can be too large to fit into available memory. The memory swapping can very quickly negate any gains of the minor optimizations.

You probably should use -march (not -mcpu) to optimize for a specific CPU (that'll enable things like mmx, 3dnow, etc), and you'll probably get an overall speed increase by building with -O2 or -Os, because your images will be smaller and therefore more of tehm will fit into physical memory (and the various levels of cache).

Yes, that's what I do on my athlon-xp (and other) systems. It's subjectively faster (defined as GUI responsiveness combined with program load speed) than SuSE on the same hardware with similar software.

Re:compile on!

[cloudmaster]

Thank you. The PPro was a big step above the Pentium. I've got a 233MHz PPro and Pentium MMX, actually (I wonder why the grandparent forgot that the Pentium with MMX was a socket 7 processor sold as a Pentium with MMX, not a Pentium II), and the PPro is noticably faster. My P-II and Celeron systems run at higher clock speeds, so I can't meaninfully compare them, though. :(

Re:compile on!

[cloudmaster]

You beat me to it. But you forgot about the various levels of cache between system RAM and the processor - it's rather difficult to add lots of cache to a typical system, and just saying that "-O3 is bad unless you have lots of RAM" lets someone with 1.5GB think that suddenly -O3 is perfect for them. It's only perfect in specific situations.

Now, if you want some obscure optimization flags, check into "-fsched-spec-load -fgcse-lm -fgcse-sm" and "-momit-leaf-frame-pointer -fomit-frame-pointer" to shrink down dinary size a bit more, at the expense of losing debugging info - when's the last time *you* ran strace? :)

Re:compile on!

[Binestar]

Well, I do have a gig and a half of memory in the system. But that said, the make.conf that I started with had that as an example, and I went with the default, only changing the CPU type. That said, I have changed from O3 to O2 in my make.conf, that easy. =)

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

not if you're watching those on a VCR

Re:compile on!

[Bobke]

Funny, I'm a gentoo user, and I use the same argument against a friend of mine, who is a LFS user.

Re:compile on!

[apoc.famine]

But for gods sake, emerge openoffice-bin, not the straight, uncompiled version (emerge openoffice). That is, unless you're up for 19hrs of compiling, for no real advantage.

I'm jumping into my first gentoo install, and managed to screw a fair amount up, and I had some wacky hardware issues to fight through. With that being said, as long as you can read, know about http://forums.gentoo.org/search.php, and have a friendly gentoo expert available to answer the occasional odd question, you should be all set.

The longest part of the install for me was emerging kde and openoffice-bin. I started at 10pm, and kde was still compiling when I left at 7:30 the next morning. Both were done by 4:30pm. FWIW, I'm running an XP1900 with 1/2 gb ram.

Oh, and the ultimate gentoo resource for new users?
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html
Drop "gentoo forums" in the box and click the resulting link. ;)

Re:compile on!

[Rhone]

Then you discover Debian and recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

Recover what time? The vast majority of the compiling I do in Gentoo happens at night while I'm sleeping.

As for "then you discover Debian"--I discovered Debian years before I discovered Gentoo, and Debian was my favorite distro for a while. I actually find Gentoo easier to maintain than Debian (fewer upgrade problems, and when problems do arise they're easier to fix). I'm not saying Gentoo is necessarily better, just that I have had a better and less painful experience with it.

Debian is still my second favorite distro, though.

Re:compile on!

[ben_rh]

-march=pentium4

Apples to oranges... He's talking a pentium-2 which is a glorfied Pentium MMX reneamed as 'pentium 2' and give some higher clockspeeds.

That's not the point. The 'pentium4' flag was an example. What I'm saying is that no matter what architecture you're on, the performance gain you get when you specify -march=foo as opposed to -march=i386 a) is negligible compared to varying system loads etc, and b) isn't big enough to justify massively redundant compiling that wastes a lot of time and energy.

the difference for a Pentium 4 user is going to be negligable. However, for users of slower processors, there is a hell of a lot of performance tweaking that can be done, that many distros completely ignore. a lot of code has been added to make programs run better and faster on MMX2 and MMX3 cpus like the Pentium-4 all that codebase, slows the program down greatly when running on a legacy MMX CPU.

This is all anecdotal, and greatly exaggerated. Do you have any benchmarks showing this quantitatively?

I do. Here's the results of compiling some code (it's a part of a project I'm working on, it does some HTML generation and is written in C). Base flags are -g -std=gnu99 -W -Wall -pedantic -I../include, and I added some others and benchmarked each change.
The times below are the result of running the code ten times. The machine is a dual-CPU Pentium MMX @ 166MHz * 2.

real / user / sys
none: 0.360s / 0.127s / 0.245s
-O2: 0.342s / 0.116s / 0.234s
-O2 -march=i386: 0.348s / 0.113s / 0.245s
-O2 -march=pentium-mmx: 0.355s / 0.113s / 0.248s

I ran each binary several times and used an average reading for each run. Note that the variation in each run was around 0.02 seconds either way, which is more than the difference between every run. So -O2 has a small but maybe noticeable impact, and the -march flags, in this case, have no noticeable effect.

Of course, they might have more of an impact with certain codebases than with others. But I hardly think the impact is going to increase by orders of magnitude.

realize there are other distros that specilize in older hardware too, but not everyone has a pentium 4 class cpu.

Again, it was an example. I'm not comparing my CPU to yours, or someone else's; I'm comparing any arbitrary CPU running binaries compiled for its revision (pentium-mmx, pentium4, whatever you like), compared to binaries compiled for generic i386.

binaries download much faster.. although nowhere near the 5 minutes you're talking about I've got 3 mbit cable service, and installing from the net-install disc took about 2 hrs all told.

Well that seems like an awfully long time. Last time I installed Debian the downloading took around 10 minutes, and apt-get spent about 5 minutes installing everything.

And don't confuse the time it took the whole OS to install with the time the package manager spent working. That's a completely different kettle of fish.

Re:compile on!

[EvanED]

And to those who are very experienced in Gentoo, has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end?

No, but it lets me point at the screen and say "I compiled that", even though I just typed in "emerge kde".

Re:compile on!

[AndyFewt]

I just finished compiling 2005.0 for the 30th time this week... 29 of those were on an old 2ghz laptop and that failed many times at random points. The final compile was on a 1.2ghz desktop machine and it went fine. Shame I loaded the wrong nic card in when I compiled the kernel but lucky for me the box was on my desk.

Also I just had to name the box this so a friend can try to hack it heheh.
andy@gibson andy $ su -
Password:
gibson root #

Re:compile on!

[alw53]

Not really sure why the informative comment gets modded down while our civility-challenged friend here remains unchanged; but in any case Grub is a really good piece of work.

Re:compile on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Plain openoffice has one advantage (maybe not for you), and that is i18n

That's what I like about Gentoo...

[lachlan76]

...rather than have 'releases', there's just a whole lot of software which can be used in any combination from the get-go.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Zork the Almighty]

That's fine for a dedicated machine, but for a general purpose desktop it's a nightmare. I honestly think Gentoo is best suited to hobbyists.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Trejkaz]

Actually, it's far from a nightmare on the desktop. I got sick of a few other distros mostly because of their philosophy of reinstalling every new minor release.

On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally. Since I did my last world upgrade a day after KDE 3.4 came out, I'm probably pretty up to date by chance.

Well, I guess there is a slight difference between the releases, though. The later profiles will specify more modern default packages than the earlier ones. That doesn't have too much effect once your system is already installed, however.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[vdboor]

That's fine for a dedicated machine, but for a general purpose desktop it's a nightmare. I honestly think Gentoo is best suited to hobbyists.

I agree on this. Having used Gentoo for one year, SuSE is a refreshing experience for me. First I fell in love with Gentoo's continious stream of package upgrades, but I realize that SuSE's releases scheme has it's advantages.

Each new SuSE release I have a fully tested and integrated system. No longer do I have to worry about some upgrade breaking something else. And worth mentioning, I have have Xorg 6.8, KDE 3.4, gcc 3.4, udev, and awsome hardware support, all for free from FTP. and without any nightly compiles.

(in the time I need to compile KDE 3.4RC1, SuSE had their packages released!)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Bitsy Boffin]

On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally.


With Debian...

apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade

no fuss, no muss, gets what is needed no more no less.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[richie2000]

apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade

emerge packageyouwanttoupgrade

So Gentoo saves wear and tear on your keyboard. Hooray! :-)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Trejkaz]

I thought dist-upgrade was for upgrading the distro, though...

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[arcanumas]

How can you integrate commercial software in the package manager in Debian?
With Gentoo i just emerge maya or emerge nero or emerge cedega or most any commercial software out there.

Unreal Tournament, doom3 , neverwinter nights and many others are easily managed by portage.

Can something like that be done with apt-get?

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[stinky wizzleteats]

apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade

I keep trying that, but it hasn't worked since 2002.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Cyn]

Someone builds a .deb that does essentially the same thing that whoever built the (port) script for the emerge does. They've had packages like this before - there was one for Quake2 that had you insert the cd, for e.g.

Quake3 installed just fine from the CD on my Debian box, and on the whole - I don't see a reason to be managing my games from within my distributions packaging system... it's not like there are things dependant on them, nor will updates ever be particularly integrated with anyones (upgrades for games tend to be .zip anyway, not a huge painful process)

and about the whole 'speed' nonissue - any official Debian package also has a source package that you can download and compile and install yourself, all with simple commands - to set whatever optimizations you want.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[shutdown -p now]

Yeah, but you don't have aptitude. And third-party repositories. So it evens out =)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[drinkypoo]

with gentoo, you can make sure you're running the latest versions of all your packages any time by just doing an emerge -uD world. The entire [outdated] system will be downloaded, built to your specifications, and installed. The -D means deep and it means that the dependencies will also be updated. Easy peasy. Changing release versions is a matter of making a symlink, and then updating.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[richie2000]

I don't suppose attitude and suppositories count? ;-)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[hpxchan]

Everything is up-to-date, and re-installs are rarely - if ever - necessary. Fedora Core users must wait for FC4 for KDE 3.4 and Gnome 2.10; Gentoo users just have to wait for the rsync update.

If (like me) you're runnning a personal computer (i.e. not a production server) and want the latest and greatest as soon as they come out, Gentoo is worth it.

Chandler

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[cloudmaster]

and about the whole 'speed' nonissue - any official Debian package also has a source package that you can download and compile and install yourself, all with simple commands - to set whatever optimizations you want.

That doesn't make Debian better. That makes it "as good as". Except that it's harder to find Debian packages, and building the source packages on Debian is more difficult.

Anyway, managing all package files on your system with a package manager is good practice. Just because it "probably" won't cause a problem doesn't mean that a game won't try to overwrite libc with a different version, etc... You can get by with lots of bad practices. :)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[cloudmaster]

Each new SuSE release I have a fully tested and integrated system. No longer do I have to worry about some upgrade breaking something else.

You've never upgrades SuSE, have you? Every time I upgrade SuSE, some config files are changed, and there are some packages that I'm using that aren't in the new system, have been renamed, etc. The big thing with RPM-based distros is the config file management. Sometimes you get a new one in .rpmnew, sometimes your config file gets moved to .rpmbak. And where is that recorded? Where's the nice tool that lets you know what config files were messed with? Amusingly, I moved from SuSE to Gentoo on several of the servers and workstations here because I was tired of having to take the machine down to do mass upgrades that would semi-randomly change config files around, causing me to waste an extra day or so fixing broken configs.

Default setups are fine for some people, but I don't know any of them. BTW, SuSE by default is an open relay if you allow external SMTP connections. So don't run a default configuration on your public SuSE mail server. :)

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Bitsy Boffin]

Except that it's harder to find Debian packages

???

Almost everything you could possibly want is in the Debian repository. Very seldom to I ever install something locally (stow'd without deb).

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Bitsy Boffin]

emerge -uD world.

apt-get dist-upgrade

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Bitsy Boffin]

If you want to upgrade everything that can be upgraded, yes dist-upgrade.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[vdboor]

You've never upgrades SuSE, have you? Every time I upgrade SuSE, some config files are changed, and there are some packages that I'm using that aren't in the new system, have been renamed, etc. The big thing with RPM-based distros is the config file management. Sometimes you get a new one in .rpmnew, sometimes your config file gets moved to .rpmbak.

You have a valid point here. I have most of my /etc stored in subversion, in case YaST breaks something I don't want (or I'm not careful enough). Guess that was a very good choice afterall.

Because it's very ironic, I've moved from Gentoo because my system broke too often, and upgrading took too much time. (having a machine compiling all day doesn't make your system fast). The argument "packages get moved" also apply to Gentoo unfortunately.

BTW, SuSE by default is an open relay if you allow external SMTP connections. So don't run a default configuration on your public SuSE mail server. :)

Thanks for mentioning. I didn't notice this before, because I changed my postfix config imediately. I'll keep this in mind when helping new setups.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[Cyn]

I didn't say it made Debian better, but if you want to go there - yes, I can match your ports point for point, and in addition I have other advantages. Guess I'm still falling short with Debian.

more to the point ...

Obviously you want to handle things through your package manager - it's a little unfair to compare the 3rd party installer to a script written in response to the 3rd party installer that "plays nice" with ones system, when someone could easily write such a script for another ones system.

If you wanted to go the proper route:

So your script written by a human maintainer couldn't possibly overwrite your libc, but my script written by a human maintainer couldn't possibly prevent it. Behold the power of Gentoo.

Drive through please.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[cloudmaster]

ebuilds install into a chroot then move the files from the chrooted dir to the real directory. So yeah, the maintainer of the Gentoo script would have to really foul up to overwrite libc. With apt, you're writing a whole system, wheras portage's designed to do this kind of thing.

My point is that it's easier to do with Gentoo's package manager, not that everyone who uses Debian made a poor choice. I personally dislike Debian (the system organization, the monolithic system updates, and the myriad of package repositories), but that's based on using it for a reasonable period of time, not on reading a few misinformed rants by the most clueless of its users.

Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...

[cloudmaster]

I've had better luck with renamed packages in Gentoo than SuSE recently, but then, I haven't had a huge set change names yet. The newest KDE is set to move from a few large packages to a bunch of smaller packages, though, so we'll see how that goes when it's marked stable.

Keeping /etc in subversion is a really good idea. I've used CVS for a long time, but have been meaning to migrate to svn eventually. I like svn's versioning system a little better.

Bye bye Gentoo users!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have fun compiling! See you when 2006.0 comes out!

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Gentoo Circle of Life.

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[mu-sly]

Bye bye Gentoo users? Sheesh, we don't even need stop using things while they upgrade. Just emerge and forget about it while carrying on as normal.

All this hot air about learning stuff from Gentoo is partly true, but the main reason I use it is because it's stupidly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Compiling certain things takes a while, and I don't bother to compile OpenOffice because it's not worth it. Still, it's not like I even have to stop using the computer while it's going on - I just fire, forget, and get on with my work.

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[21chrisp]

Comments like this crack me up. For some reason people think that compiling Gentoo only involves sitting in front of a black screen watching compiliation lines scroll by. Actually, the system is quite usable while compiling. Occasionally (when I get the itch to play unreal or doom) I even suspend compilation, go play a few games, and then restart compilation (ctrl-z is your friend). You can even ctrl-c out of compilation and restart w/ emerge --resume. It really is that easy. Waiting for things to compile does not have to be painful at all. Pretty much anything other than playing heavy games can be done while compiling, and you can always resume your emerge if you get the gaming itch. If you do the install w/ something like Knoppix, you can even do almost anything during the initial install.

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[phoric]

> Have fun compiling! See you when 2006.0 comes out!

Wow, so 2006 comes out this afternoon??

Re:Bye bye Gentoo users!

[Lobo_Louie]

Curious, can you ctrl-z, power down, power up and resume compiling? I don't know, I'm asking.

Woohoo!

[Tarcastil]

Maybe this will silence the fanboys. It's wishful thinking.

Gentoo users need to do more

[BigBuckHunter]

Don't current Gentoo users have to change the symlink of their /etc/make.profile to point to the 2005.0 profile under /usr/portage/profiles? Then emerge sync, then emerge -uD world? Then fix_libtool_dependancies.sh... Then revdep-rebuild... Then Emerge --prune some of the old slotted apps that they don't need anymore?


Sincerely Yours
An "Actual" Gentoo user.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Anonymous Coward]

Sincerely Yours
An "Actual" Gentoo user.

So you do more with it than compiling and recompiling all day long?
.
.
.
.
.
.
(I'm just kidding! Really!)

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Zork the Almighty]

Then watch your system break if you were using a much older profile.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Stalyn]

please check here.

just sub 2004.3 for 2005.0.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Mornelithe]

I have no fucking clue what you just meant.

I'm not sure he does, either.

And you wonder why people in Windows world stay happy with their lot!

Because, clearly, Gentoo is the only Linux distribution and therefore the only alternative to Windows is a distribution largely oriented towards enthusiasts and tweakers. Brilliant logic.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to get all feisty, bitch. If you couldn't get my drift its probably easier for you to keep it schtum.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Mornelithe]

Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your masturbation.

Your joke was very funny. You should be a stand-up comedian.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[tommyth]

Yeah, but last time I did the neat voodoo dance I sprained my ankle.

Re:Gentoo users need to do more

[Zork the Almighty]

The mods appearently think this doesn't happen, even though I know it does from first hand experience. Be careful changing your profile.

Gentoo liveCD?

[Dancin_Santa]

Anyone ever thought of putting Gentoo into LiveCD-type format, ala Knoppix?

You could have custom-tailored Linux installation on any hardware with little more than swapping in a CD.

As they say in Robocop, I'd buy that for a dollar.

Re:Gentoo liveCD?

[lachlan76]

Uhhh...what?

Gentoo is already on a livecd, which you boot from. Then you chroot into your hard drive for the install. Is that sort of what you meant?

Riceness

[Nmcsween]

Ricers Start Your Engines. No in all seriousness gentoo has a great package manager except when dealing with revese dependencies it's great. rice http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309752.html

Re:Riceness

[Knuckles]

From the linked page:

CFLAGS="-09 -march=s6000 -pipe=65536 -funroll-every-loop -mrice -mabi=rice -omg-optimized --disable-all-instructions -DREENABLE_FAST_EXECUTION"

-O9!!! -funroll-every-loop!!!

ROFLMAO. I just hope people doing this don't bother upstream with unreproducible bugs resulting from this

New but better?

[jefedesign]

I have given Gentoo several attempts and have floundered each time because of hardware issues. It would be nice to have a distro that recognized all my hardware with minimal configuration. Gentoo is still a little scary for my Mepis oriented thinking.

Re:New but better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you either have to change your expectations or stay away from gentoo.

Gentoo is not meant to be a distro that recognizes everything out of the box and configures it for you, it is meant to give you the tools to do it yourself.

Whether you feel setting up everything yourself is worth it, or like me think it is a wayste of time is up to you, but it certainly not gentoos fault. Judge gentoo for what it is, not for something it can't be and isn't meant to be.

Re:New but better?

[grishnav]

Ubuntu is really great like that. It's what I use when I don't have the time/motivation to do a Gentoo install (and then normally just wish I'd done the gentoo install when I can't have Gaim+OTR, mplayer+codecs, etc. without grabbing the tgz's, hunting down the deps, and putting it all together myself instead of just 'emerge gaim-otr', 'emerge mplayer'... oh well).

Anyway, Ubuntu has up to date packages, uses a nice interface to apt, and has really excellent hardware detection. It's as brainless to install as Windows and just about as easy to use. I like it much.

Re:New but better?

[traskjd]

Yeah - Windows is great for that - you should try it sometime :-)

- JD

P.S. Begin the countdown to being marked a troll :-D

KDE 3.4

[Zork the Almighty]

I'm reinstalling Gentoo after some time away from it. Is KDE 3.4 in the default tree yet ?

Re:KDE 3.4

[Jafar00]

3.4 is there but masked. The current stable version according to portage is 3.3.2. I'm sure in a few weeks, I will wake up to a new KDE and a smoking CPU after all that compiling. Funny thing is, I use Xfce these days. ;)

Re:KDE 3.4

[sffubs]

Yes, although it's probably not marked stable yet.

Re:KDE 3.4

[lachlan76]

Last time I checked, it's there but masked.

Re:KDE 3.4

[Zork the Almighty]

I've always wanted to try Xfce, but it seems like underkill on a modern machine. What are your impressions of it ?

Re:KDE 3.4

[aconbere]

honestly XFCE 4.2 is one the nicest, cleanest and most stable Window Manager/ Desktop Environments I've found and I've tried them all. It's crisp clean and simple, doesn't come with a whole slew of deps (ie no ancient mozilla dependancies that I'm never going to use).

then to top it off, it has taken a clue from the *box's and the like and made using workspaces more than just an eye-candy toy, making it easy to scroll through workspaces, or to set keys to do so. It doesn't steal key configs as gnome does (F1?). and last but not least it's FAST.

Anders

Re:KDE 3.4

[Kaenneth]

Compiling software on install is OK, but why not...

Compile on Demand!

Every mouse click, keystroke or network packet causes a recompilation of the code module being called!

distcc could be used to make it even faster!

Re:KDE 3.4

[Jafar00]

Ok, I have an Athlon 2800+ with 512mb RAM, but Xfce isnt underkill.
It's nice and lean but has plenty of features without getting in the way of actually doing any work. ;)
In the last 6 months I have gone from KDE to Gnome to Xfce and I think (as of 4.2) Xfce is the best of the lot.

Re:KDE 3.4

[archen]

If you don't want to bother installing it (or risk messing up something in your system) you can check it out using Knoppix. Just boot using "knoppix desktop=xfce" You'll never use Knoppix with KDE again =)

For those of you who want ease of install

[vectorian798]

Try this out:
Vidalinux

Apparently it's Gentoo, with a nice graphical installer that is no longer cruel and unusual punishment...although the install of Gentoo teaches you quite a bit.

Yes, you get the benefits of portage.

Just wait a little for a new version based on 2005

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[Anonymous Coward]

although the install of Gentoo teaches you quite a bit

I hear this a lot, but how true is it? I installed Gentoo through QEmu a while back for shits and giggles, and all I did was follow some instructions. I already know Linux inside out, so I suppose I might not have noticed a few things that actually "teach", but it really didn't seem complex at all. You just had to type stuff, which I suppose feels "advanced" to someone who's used to Windows or MacOS.

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[DarkSarin]

At the pain of sacrificing mod ability, allow me to say that Vidalinux is not perfect. The installer rocks to a certain point, but does NOT play nice with winXP if you wish to dual boot.

If you have NO intention of dual-boot, then fine, Vidalinux is quick. But if you wish to dual-boot, then avoid it like the plaque.

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[littlem]

Just wait a little for a new version based on 2005

FYI, you might like to read this thread: http://forums.vidalinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=2675 about updating VidaLinux versions and Gentoo portage.

My personal advice: don't wait, get Vida today! (besides, that way KDE will have finished compiling by the time VL 1.2 comes out...)

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[Lobo_Louie]

No,Vidalinux is not perfect, but it reduces the install time from days to hours. It installs a bunch of crap that I don't want, but once I figure the pain-to-hour ratio, it's worth it.

My original Vida install left my XP install intact, shortly thereafter I hosed it, but I really don't care since I mounted the hda1 drive and copied it over to the dark side. I no longer have XP installed.

Re:For those of you who want ease of install

[jay-be-em]

What exactly does it teach you?

How to watch endless output from gcc?

If you want to learn *nix read a few books, including the Stevens programming books.

Installing gentoo isn't going to make you any more knowledgable about *nix.

feel teh power of source distributions!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://funroll-loops.org/

Oh, and I just

[Anonymous Coward]

No, really, I didn't just finish compiling whatever. Anyway, as a lot of people still don't seem to understand, release don't mean anything if you've got gentoo allready installed, as you can keep it up to date with emerge sync and emerge -u world, that's all there is to it.

Releases only mean something for people wanting to install gentoo, although it is no proplem to install from an older medium, you'll still get an uptodate system in the end.

However, what is great about new releases is that they mean new and uptodate binary packages, so if you just want to install gentoo quickly and still have an uptodate system, here is your chance.

Btw., wasn't this release supposed to feature at least a preview of the upcoming installer? Any word on that?

Re:Oh, and I just

[stefankoegl]

Yes, TFA says (at the end):

P.S.: What is not in this release is a Graphical installer

Re:Oh, and I just

[Zapdos]

The other thing that is in a release is a portage snapshot and a binaries disk that matches that portage snapshot. Try doing a gentoo install fest without that.

Re:Gentoo liveCD = Catalyst

[yamcha666]

The Gentoo people are already ahead of you.

The software is called Catalyst. More info here.

Re:Hmph

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been deemed insecure (too many BACK DOORS) ------- get it?????????

just about through with gentoo

[SuperBanana]

Pardon a little rant, but gentoo is about to get wiped off all my remaining linux boxen. I've already taken the hard drive out of the gateway and popped in m0n0wall, a CD-based firewall that is the bee's knees and works much more smoothly. Thank god I don't have to deal with the monstrosity that is the webmin "user interface"(aka 5 billion gif images for no particular reason). Oh if only it supported config-on-usb-key!

Last night I updated apache and a bunch of other things (I use the unstable branch because "stable" lags, big time, on many packages I need; yes, I can manually unmask those certain packages, but that wouldn't have solved the particular problem I'm about to describe).

I run etc-update, which absolutely blows chunks and has for years; for example, ALL of /etc is protected. So maybe webmin comes along and touches 70 config files. You're then treated to trying to approve those 70 files along with other files that were also changed by other emerge updates. Attempts to provide better alternatives have been staunchly blocked; cfg-update has been trying to get into portage, but the gentoo team have been sitting on their asses for over two years. Piss-poor configuration management is one sure fire way to get me off your distro, because it's the biggest potential problem maker. PS- not everyone installs X on their servers, guys.

All is well, or so I think. Overnight, the power fails. I go to show someone photos on the server, connection refused. Huh?

Apache's not running. Hmm. 'apache2 start'.

That spits out a big tirade about how my commonapache2.conf file "is present in the old location" and I need to update the current configuration files and remove the commmonapache2.conf file. Then tells me to see this page which tells me about all the internal details, none of which I give a fuck about; I want a simple 1-2-3 migration, and they're yacking about recompiling everything, but they don't actually tell you what versions of everything you need to have at a minimum for that package to "understand" their changes. The page claims mod_php isn't ready for these changes yet (which is not true anymore, I later discover), so I panic and try going back to older versions of everything. More carnage and wasted time compiling.

It then takes me 2 hours to sort out the mess because they've got HARD LINKS to some directories, soft links to others, there's a full configuration file tree in /usr/lib/apache2, there's no clear delineation between the "common" and (???) apache conf files, their migration page claims the server root changed to /usr/lib/apache2 but it really didn't, it's all still in /etc/apache2/...Oh, mod_user_dir for no particular good reason now has to be TURNED ON with a -D option. I spend another 30 minutes fixing all the crap that was in my old apache configuration files, because apache2's error messages consist of "an access directive prohibited you from loading that". WHAT access directive? Or, my personal favorite, an "internal server error". Whee.

It's a unholy mess (at least part of it is apache's fault, for having one of the worst configuration schemes and error handling I've ever dealt with) and I was completely caught off guard- why? Because as portage merges things, if there are extremely important notes printed to the console, but so is EVERY detail about a compile along with all the files that are being merged/unmerged/whatevered...so chances are, it scrolls right out of the terminal buffer. At the end of a multiple-package emerge, there's no one block of text that says "IMPORTANT STUFF CHANGED".

I used to think the compile-from-source stuff was a godsend, but lately, it's nothing but a curse. I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps. Fantasti

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Gentoo has no "unstable" branch in the sense you present it here. You can choose to install software marked as unstable (in the opinion of the individual ebuild maintainers). You claim to say you understand this concept, but you mix up the ideas of unstable and unmasked packages.

dispatch-conf is the sensible alternative to etc-update - check it out (it's been around for a long time now).

Gentoo is, and always has been, billed as a distro for advanced users with time to maintain it.

You are using the wrong tool for the job - SuSE or Debian, or even *BSD seems more appropiate for what you require.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[EzInKy]

Gentoo has no "unstable" branch in the sense you present it here. You can choose to install software marked as unstable (in the opinion of the individual ebuild maintainers). You claim to say you understand this concept, but you mix up the ideas of unstable and unmasked packages.

I've had ACCEPT_KEWORDS="~arch" in my make.conf since it was introduced so am essentially running an unstable branch of Gentoo. I guess that is the unstable to which the grandparent referring. Why he is surprised by breakage when he does so though is whole other story.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Zorilla]

You are using the wrong tool for the job - SuSE or Debian, or even *BSD seems more appropiate for what you require.

I hate it when I see people say this. If he's using Gentoo, I'm sure he's very aware of the easier-to-use distros. You're basically telling him to stop playing chess and go back to fucking Chutes and Ladders. What an insult.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[R.Caley]

I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps.

Surely, if you want to run an `unstable' system, you are going to have to expect things to constantly change.

On the apache front, for real systems (as opposed to random desktops I happen to want a web server on to run SWAT or something), I build apache myself. That way FreeBSD and RedHat servers have everything working the same way. Apache is so easy to build, and so portable, that the ports/packages/rpms/whatever of each specific system don't buy you much. A trivial shell script contianing the call to configure you decide on is effectively a cross-platform package.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

gentoo is teh r0x0r!!1!!11!

w00t!

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, because the stable, reliable, well maintained and intended-for-production-use systems are just children's toys.

Fucking --FOMIT-CHANCES-OF-HAVING-FRIENDS-EVER...

Re:just about through with gentoo

[joaobranco]

So, you want your cake and eat it too?

Sorry, can't be done.

I run gentoo in one machine I have. I however don't run it with ~arch make flags on (you call it unstable).

But I also run a handful of servers. They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough). Again, on the servers I need to have running smoothly I use FreeBSD STABLE, not CURRENT.
In fact, I only run CURRENT on my personal notebook, which I can afford to tinker with when I like it (and that on dual boot, so I can always access my data when I need it)

If you want stability, and ease of configuration, don't use an unstable version of any system thats being changed every day. Even if tools can be found to help management in this situation, you are trying to build a castle in the sand... It will come down, rest assured.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Zorilla]

My comment is more directed towards SuSE and Mandrake - both distros I've used in the past, but have dismissed as being way too buggy, having way too large a footprint for the amount of software installed, and very difficult to upgrade without installing all over again.

Neither are really stable, reliable, up-to-date, and fit for production use either.

At least you mentioned Debian as an alternative. Automated package-level configuration at its finest.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[yem]

Best of luck dude - hope you find something more suitable. I don't have much to add that hasn't already been covered in the replies. Just that virtually every distro screws up the Apache and PHP installs, in one way or another, to suit their particular practices.

I tend to install apache and php from source with --prefix /usr/local/{apache2,php} which installs/upgrades cleanly every time and is guaranteed to work exactly as documented on httpd.apache.org and php.net. That's important.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Gord]

> I run a sync and then emerge -up world

Why? I will never undertand why Gentoo users persist in running an 'emerge -up world' to upgrade all their packages in one go, then wonder why they've got a nightmare of configuration changes to work through.

The only reason to upgrade a package should be that there is something wrong with it such as a security vulnerability or you need functionality from the new version.

If you want to upgrade Apache, then you should do just that, upgrade Apache. It will pull in any updated dependancies it needs, usually just a few or none, then upgrade Apache. This gives you the chance to read through any messages regarding the configuration files and a chance to make these changes, restart the webserver and check everything is working okay, before moving on an upgrading anything else.

Updating 70 odd packages just because there are newer versions out is just asking for trouble.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Hadur]

First off, if you run the unstable (~arch) branch, you are SUPPOSED to run into problems - that is how those things get fixed in the stable (arch).

Second, the apache ordeal is well-documented. The docs were published well in advance and were pointed to severl times in the forums and mailing lists. If you run the unstable branch, you should at least be able to check those two places once in a while.

Third, their are LOTS of etc-update replacements in portage and otherwise. Stop spreading FUD.

Gentoo gives you the tools to shoot yourself in the foot. Just because you do so is not its fault.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[dAzED1]

the only thing I can figure is that we (us gentoo folk) feel like we're not using our computer properly if we don't have it spend at least 10% of its uptime compiling things. I don't know - kind of silly, yes, but...

;)

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for explaining perfectly why I'm still using Apache 1.3 and in no hurry whatsoever to migrate to v. 2.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

The word is "moot" not "mute".

Re:just about through with gentoo

[MooseGuy529]

Gentoo's mangling of Apache is horrible. I just wish they would leave the default config file in one place. I also don't like how you have to edit /etc/conf.d/apache2 to turn on PHP, SSL, and so on...

Re:just about through with gentoo

[FyRE666]

I second this, I always build apache+php from source on any distro to ensure my servers always have the same setup and config no matter which base distro is running under them.

Gentoo is probably actually worse than Redhat (the only other distro I use) at breaking services after an update; especially when libraries change which seems frequent; so I almost always reboot after a major update to see what fails to start up ;-)

I still like Gentoo (use it on my desktop and personal server), but I wouldn't use it on any company server due to the problems with updates leaving the system in an unstable state.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[drinkypoo]

It is really annoying that you have to be compiling constantly when you use gentoo, but it's not annoying that it actually works and I can just make my own installer CD with a miniroot that has busybox and some filesystem utilities in it, and unpack a tarball into place. Bingo, I'm installed. I chroot into it, build whatever I need to get the system going, install grub to the boot partition, and bingo. I'm in like Flynn. On the other hand, I continually have problems getting other Linux distributions to install, even on completely ordinary hardware. I've had problems on very boring systems (that the gentoo LiveCD figured out completely) with Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Slackware. Gentoo generally just works, and it's very easy to figure out how to make my own installer CD if theirs doesn't support my particular hardware. (mkisofs is your friend. you will need a current version of grub if you want to use it, because it supports el torito boot.) I just build whatever kernel I need on another system and I'm done. You could get there with colinux if you had to.

If I were a noob I'd probably be trying to run fedora, but I'm not even going to get involved there. If I can't get white box linux to work on a mailserver box at work, then I'm going to put gentoo there, too. It had SuSE enterprise 8 which actually required an update to 8.1 or 8.01 or something in order to support a megaraid card in a gateway server. I tried doing it with debian, but debian didn't want to read its driver floppies.

I'm pretty well disgusted with every distribution other than gentoo. It features the best part of BSD, namely ports, in a linux-friendly form. Some of the package maintainers are definitely crack smokers, but in general the system works very well. In particular portage itself needs help, especially so that it can recover from problems. If even the cached information is somehow corrupted, even though portage can tell it's corrupted, it won't rebuild it properly. In general some of the most important parts of gentoo, like portage in fact, are poorly documented. Don't even look at the documentation for the installer LiveCD creation tool, it's maybe five percent of what it should be, and even most gentoo developers reportedly don't understand it. Otherwise I've been as pleased with gentoo as possible.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[archen]

shouldn't you be running RELEASE on servers? (Just nitpicking) =)

They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough).

Actually I think you sort of get off track there. Gentoo and FreeBSD are similar but very different in the way they operate. The FreeBSD base (for most people) operates on a tested release schedule. FreeBSD CURRENT lets you live closer to the edge than any other Linux distro ever does, which is why it's sort of crazy to use IMO. But FreeBSD has the base system, and allows you access to software with ports. They are too separate entities. Gentoo being Linux uses portage to update everything including the kernel. FreeBSD doesn't have an unstable version of ports, although you can use bleeding edge versions of some of them.

To me Free/Net BSD is sort of like having your cake and eating it too. A stable base operating system, and software that is kept up to date.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[iabervon]

because they've got HARD LINKS to some directories

You can't have hard links to directories. They aren't supported, and for a good reason (they would mess up the directory structure). Whatever the problem was, it wasn't that.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[The_DOD_player]

But downgrading a manual build install can be a real pain. Gentoo saved my butt in a supposedly trival upgrade. This happened to me on a production server running some 130 sites in Typo3 CMS. Something broke when were PHP upgraded from 4.3.9 -> 4.3.10. A quick edit of /etc/portage/package.mask, emerge -ku mod_php, and an apache restart, and I was back in business.

To my knowlegde Gentoo is the only distro that allows this kind of easy downgrading.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[drinkypoo]

Some filesystems support directory hardlinks. Some do not. The individual is probably wrong, but not necessarily.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[iabervon]

Not under Linux, at least. The VFS prohibits it; vfs_link() returns -EPERM if S_ISDIR(old_dentry->d_inode->i_mode). The FreeBSD man page for link(2) also explicitly prohibits it. Solaris evidentally lets root link and unlink directories, but that's not relevant to problems with Gentoo. (I'm not sort of curious as to whether you can fill up disks under Solaris with files in directories that have been put into cycles and unlinked)

Re:just about through with gentoo

[R.Caley]

But downgrading a manual build install can be a real pain.

Isn't that what tar is for? One of the reasons I hate the way apache gets installed by packages and ports is that it is scattered all over the system. I always build it so that everything (binaries, libraries, config etc) lives under ~www. Then the whole state can be easily backed up and restored. I don't know if that would work for php, maybe that installs stuff into the perl lib areas.

Another backup for the sanely paranoid is to always keep the previous build so a quick make install may be a fix.

And a manual build lets you install two apaches side by side, which would allow for real testing without a spare server.

To my knowlegde Gentoo is the only distro that allows this kind of easy downgrading.

Of course, you have to be in the habbit of working in a way which copes with the least common denominator system you may end up having to cope with. (Bloody **d *a*!!! :-))

Re:just about through with gentoo

[joaobranco]

Yes, I could use RELEASE (and the security patches). However, I prefer to track STABLE on most servers, since it makes updating them easier (less changes on each update versus more regular updates).

Also nitpicking, the -devel versions of the ports are what I would call the unstable version of the ports :-) .

And yes, to have both the kernel/base system and the ports on the same update schedule is probably not the best idea (I do prefer the FBSD way - which is why I have almost all the servers on FBSD). However, if you care, you CAN also do something like it in Gentoo (you just need to define which ports belong to base system and somehow "freeze them" when updating - its harder to do it, though).

And there are a few ports that do clobber the base system in FBSD also (I would prefer those to be on a different tree on ports, so I don't have undesirable surprises when I make world :-( ).

Re:just about through with gentoo

[The_DOD_player]

Tar is good for a lot of things :)

Scattered files can be a pain, agreed. However I can have Gentoo track both files and dependencies, and build with almost the same flexibility as a manual install. I look upon it as a tradeoff: control vs. maintainability.

The need for a different apache install on the same machine depends very much. I suppose however thats most /.ers have multible machines at their disposal. I have over a dozen, all combined, most at work luckly, to play with. :) (Gentoo, RedHat, Mandrake and FreeBSD)

Of course, you have to be in the habbit of working in a way which copes with the least common denominator system you may end up having to cope with. (Bloody **d *a*!!! :-))

Yeah.. ;) But your configure script wont save you on a Windoze server. :-(

We are in the process of migrating from RedHat with manual apache install to Gentoo with portage apache install. It works good for the purpose, namely webservers serving Typo3 CMS sites.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[R.Caley]

But your configure script wont save you on a Windoze server.

Cygwin is your friend.

Re:just about through with gentoo

[The_DOD_player]

:) Well..

As I understand Cygwin is basically UNIX, running inside Windows, a reverse WINE, so to speak. But the reason most Windows-using people use Windows, is often "ease of use", AKA "we want to use Windows, even if it's totally unsuitable for the task". Using Cygwin would kinda defeat that goal. I havnt asked any of our Windows-using custumors, but I dont think a Cygwin-solution would fit them well :).

Re:just about through with gentoo

[R.Caley]

I havnt asked any of our Windows-using custumors, but I dont think a Cygwin-solution would fit them well

How could they tell if their apache executable was linked against Windows libraries or cygwin ones? It's rally no differnet from, say, running linux binaries under BSD. I only know the difference when something grubby and low level like getting the java plugin to work in Opera rears it's head.

Now, actually, the only case where we run an interesting web server under Windows, we use the native apachie even though we have cygwin on the server (for easy remote access, and because it lets us use the same software fo the application everywhere without dealing with windows APIs). I didn't install that apache:-).

Real Wndows bigots would demand IIS anyway.

i can't wait to read the reviews...

[ralinx]

... in a week when the first person finishes compiling it ;)

Re:i can't wait to read the reviews...

[sabit666]

somebody should make an ebuild for all these gentoo jokes. I am tired of going through /. and bash.org looking for gentoo compilation jokes, I wish I could just `emerge text-humor/gentoo-jokes`.

Re:i can't wait to read the reviews...

[Lobo_Louie]

Then you must really love the "Debian is on life support" type threads. :)

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ability to count astounds us all.

/If I'd gotten here quicker, it could have been five!

Fresh gentoo, old debian

[Fossilet]

Gentoo seems is always fresh, while my Debian is somewhat old ... Despite compiling time, i would have been using Gentoo instead of debian for 1~ year.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[Anonymous Coward]

"Despite compiling time, i would have been using Gentoo instead of debian for 1~ year."

This might just explain why your debian is old. :D

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[EzInKy]

Gentoo seems is always fresh, while my Debian is somewhat old ... Despite compiling time, i would have been using Gentoo instead of debian for 1~ year.

You know I've been running Gentoo since '92 with "~arch" in my make.conf as my main distro while keeping a Debian unstable partition around for the occasional portage borkings and I must say you are so totally wrong. Anyone who uses Sid and a handful of unofficial repositories will be almost as current as Gentoo "~arch".

That said though, I do still prefer compiling free software from scratch and Gentoo is the natural choice. As far as all the compile time jokes most smaller packages don't take much longer on a fast processor to emerge than to apt-get a binary. Large ones like KDE are another story but then again your system is still usable while they build in the background.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[iwbcman]

"You know I've been running Gentoo since '92 with "~arch" in my make.conf as my main distro....."

Really? Gosh I didn't know that either Gentoo or Debian even existed in 1992..... ;)

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[Rushuru]

Anyone who uses Sid and a handful of unofficial repositories will be almost as current as Gentoo "~arch".

However, using unofficial repositories is not as painless as it might look.
*The repository might go offline any time
*The repository might not recompile their packages for a new library in the official repository, making it useless
*The repository probably didn't spend as much time packaging the software as they should have, which can lead to at least 2 things:
- Ugly stuff like debs who installs themselves in /usr/local (I've seen that on several occasions)
- Very painful upgrades when the software from the unofficial repository eventually reaches main (mostly dependencies).

With gentoo I never had such problems with masked packages and unofficial ebuilds. Which doesn't mean that debian sid doesn't have other advantages.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[EzInKy]

With gentoo I never had such problems with masked packages and unofficial ebuilds. Which doesn't mean that debian sid doesn't have other advantages.

Being source based its only logical that Gentoo won't run into incompatability problems due to differences in precompiled libraries. But, if you are careful with the repositories you choose Sid holds its own. KDE-3.4, for example, was available from the maintainers.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think we ran on our Amigas? :D

nevermind

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[jay-be-em]

Yeah, and I have 10 years of c# experience.

You fucking mods are idiots, and you gentoo fanboys invading all these stories aren't much better.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[EzInKy]

Yeah, and I have 10 years of c# experience.

I've apologized for my typo, what more can I do?

You fucking mods are idiots, and you gentoo fanboys invading all these stories aren't much better.

The story was about a Gentoo release, this particular thread was addressing the misconception that Debian Sid was not as up to date as Gentoo.

Re:Fresh gentoo, old debian

[jay-be-em]

My bad, didn't see your reply, figured it was a troll.

Gnome 2.10?

[dcstimm]

And still no Gnome 2.10! Come on gentoo what happened to you being up to date?

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, Gnome 2.10 has been available for quite some time now. It's just masked, that is all.

So if you want it, unmask it (should be 2 minutes or work) and install it, but let the people that want to have a stable system have their stable system.

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[commodoresloat]

Are you saying that gentoo is Slack-ing off?

Re:Gnome 2.10?

[Lobo_Louie]

>Jesus, Gnome 2.10 has been available for quite some time now. It's just masked, that is all.

I'm sure he knows.

fragmented fs

[cryptoluddite]

The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation caused by all the compiling and updating files. I think it isn't so much that the files are fragmented as spread out thin across the disk... that's because you're always compiling something and creating system files with different amounts of space in use.

I've tried different filesystems such as jfs, reiser4 (using -mm kernel), and ext3 of course and none of them really solved the problem. Reiser4 is the best overall, but suffers from several-second long pauses when doing file-io as in rebalances the tree, which can be really irritating when :wq from vi hangs for a while. The best solution I have found is to create a fairly large partition and mount tmpfs onto /tmp then bind to /usr/tmp and optionally to /usr/portage/distfiles or portage cache dir. Creating a loopback device file and putting portage on it helps but the real problem IMO is all the files from compiling. Over time this has a large impact.

Other that that gentoo is awesome. I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts. The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update. Once you figure out the interactive merge and what files to actually care about (/etc/conf.d and /etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.

Re:fragmented fs

[bonch]

I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts.

And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.

1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.

Re:fragmented fs

[szap]

The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation

You might want to look into XFS, particularly xfs_fsr ("filesystem reorganizer for XFS" from the xfsdump package in most distros). Works on mounted filesystems.

Higher CPU and mem usage than other fs, though. YMMV.

Re:fragmented fs

[Lussarn]

I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu

And thats the bigest strengths of gentoo. While other distros "can" function three years from initiall install without distribution upgrades Gentoo has this one nailed down. A three year old install function very close to a newly installed machine. For desktop use thats just wonders.

Re:fragmented fs

[Mornelithe]

1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

I doubt that it's easier to track down packages outside of a repository---in addition to any dependencies they may have---than it is to unmask the ~x86 Gnome builds in Gentoo and have dependencies resolved for you.

I don't know anything about Debian, so I can't comment on it. Is it possible to install only Gnome 2.10 from unstable, and have everything else from stabe/testing (I assume it is, but I thought I'd ask)?

2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion.

There are sometimes configuration issues with Mac OS X, and every other large software system on earth.

For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

Portage has come with dispatch-conf for a while now, although it requires some setting up, so it's probably less used/advertised than etc-update.

3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

Yes, sometimes there are version conflicts in Portage, just as there in every operating system. Perhaps the grandparent was saying that in his experience, there are fewer version conflicts than with other systems he's used. Or that he hasn't encountered any, even though some obviously exist at times, since anything else is nearly impossible. Sometimes people use hyperbole in everyday situations, and not everything they say is meant to be taken exactly literally.

compilation is so overrated

This is true.

and provides no benefits.

This is untrue. I quite enjoy my ability to install mplayer without installing directfb, gtk 1.2, esound, JACK, and other things I'll never use, while other people have an easy way to install mplayer so that it can make use of all those things.

Ubuntu is nice, and maybe when I buy my next computer, I'll use it (or, Kubuntu, rather) instead of Gentoo. However, Gentoo does have advantages over Ubuntu (and vice versa) depending on who you are.

Re:fragmented fs

[Anonymous Coward]

1) And what's your point? It's just come out, many distributions don't want to force it on their users until absolutely necessary.

2) Liar. Anyone who's using Gentoo should know about dispatch-conf, which is a better solution that the dev's are moving to replace etc-update with.

3) And? Practically every packaging system out for any distribution occasionally has blocking packages, conflicting versions, and so on. Gentoo's packaging system tries to reduce this by "slotting" installation of a number of things (i.e. installing multiple versions concurrently and choosing which version you which to use). Seeing as how you're such a Gentoo expert, I would have expected you'd know that.

I realize you're a troll and all, so I probably shouldn't have wasted my time on you in the first place -- but what the hell? Your arguments are so weak that it almost demanded a response.

Re:fragmented fs

[brunes69]

Seeing how Portage's temp location where it extracts it's archives and does all its compiling is /var/tmp, I would think that would be the key area to optimize, not /tmp. Portage doesn't use /tmp for anything important.

Re:fragmented fs

[tweakt]

"The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update."

Then you'll be pleased to discover 'dispatch-conf' It keeps all your CONFIG_PROTECT files in RCS revision control and automatically merges in changes which do not result in conflicts (not by default, auto-merge must be enabled, but it works flawlessly). You'll only be prompted when there are changes to config files in updates that directly conflict with changes that you've made yourself.

Re:fragmented fs

[joeljkp]

"2) Liar. Anyone who's using Gentoo should know about dispatch-conf, which is a better solution that the dev's are moving to replace etc-update with.

I looked up dispatch-conf, since I use Gentoo every day and haven't heard of it.

Basically, it's a replacement for etc-update in a Python script. It exists within the confines of this bug on Bugzilla.

Looks interesting for the future, but hardly something "anyone using Gentoo should know about" or use.

Re:fragmented fs

[joeljkp]

Ok, sorry, I stand corrected. dispatch-conf should be present on everyone system now, since it's included with Portage.

Re:fragmented fs

[Oopsz]

dispatch-conf has one feature i've yet to see in any other conf manager or editor. Saved, revisioned histories. That alone is worth it's use..

Re:fragmented fs

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's something many Unix distro's could be clearer on. They talk about the benefits of partitioning, and usually include benefits of a temp partition. So logically many make a partition for /tmp, only to find that /var/tmp is commonly used for a lot of stuff you set up /tmp for.

I usually just symlink /var/tmp to /tmp, although the annoying thing is that you need execute permissions on the /tmp partition for portage to work correctly.

Re:fragmented fs

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to look into XFS, particularly xfs_fsr ("filesystem reorganizer for XFS" from the xfsdump package in most distros). Works on mounted filesystems.

Higher CPU and mem usage than other fs, though. YMMV.

And god help you if the power goes out with the disk mounted.

Re:fragmented fs

[A beautiful mind]

That's true for for example debian too. FYI, i run debian and gentoo as desktops.

Re:fragmented fs

[A beautiful mind]

I don't know anything about Debian, so I can't comment on it. Is it possible to install only Gnome 2.10 from unstable, and have everything else from stabe/testing (I assume it is, but I thought I'd ask)?

It is possible, but fscks things up on the long term, especially with a large meta-package like gnome

Re:fragmented fs

[deathazre]

~x86 isn't really akin to sid -- that'd be the hardmasked packages and -*

dispatch-conf does exist...

Re:fragmented fs

[Atzanteol]

. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

dispatch-conf doesn't exist then? Crap, what have I been using for the last year???

Gentoo folks use Gentoo because we like Gentoo. If you don't, that's fine. Move along. Enjoy your other OS of choice.

Re:fragmented fs

[Anonymous Coward]

You might get better results by putting the directory where compilation is done on a different partition or disk. This is apprently /var/tmp. This way that partition get fragmented all to hell and then the final files gets copied over in an orderly fashion to you main partition. This would work for the original install, and it would alleviate the problem with updates.

Re:fragmented fs

[mushroom blue]

1) I have gnome 2.10 on my machine. unmasked and compiled. funny how even debian unstable still has gnome 2.8... well, most of it, anyway. according to Jeordi Mallach, not all of 2.8 has been integrated into unstable as of yet. oh, you must be thinking Ubuntu = Debian.

2) there's a graphical version of etc-update that doesn't suck.

3) version conflicts are such a rarity, that it's almost laughable to bring them up. when conflicts are found (i.e. incompatible library versions), they're slotted, so that the version required by $Package doesn't get affected.

Re:fragmented fs

[ceswiedler]

Does anyone know if Debian is planning to do something like this? It's good about telling me when a config file has changed, and providing me with the differences between my version and the new version. Clearly it knows when I've made changes (therefore it must know what the original old version looked like) but it doesn't seem to be able to do a 3-way diff and present me with logical changes. I keep getting clobbered with new versions of files in /etc where I'm left wondering 'which of these changes are reverting things I added for good reason, and which are the new changes the maintainer has added?'

I guess that the Debian Party Line would be: config files don't change in stable (I'm running sarge), so it's not an official Debian problem.

Calm down

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, I agree with some of the things you say, while I personally don't find etc-update to be that hard (It just gives you a list of the config files that can be updated and you can then simply choose the ones you don't want to be updated, that is most of the times the ones you edited yourself and then update the rest automatically), it sure isn't the ideal way of doing things.

Also the important messages scrolling by has been a problem for ages and still hasn't been addressed, which is a shame.

And I also agree that gentoo's handling of web things like apache, php, wordpress, etc. is far from ideal. (webapp-config, how I hate you).

But there is one thing that really makes a lot of your critizism mute, you are running an unstable system and complain about breakage and constant updates. Come on, that's just silly.

And contrary to what you seem to think, there is no situation that requires you to run an unstable system, especially if this system is a server. If you think you need some unstable apps, fine, gentoo gives you the tools to just install those unstable apps and leave everything else stable, if you refuse to use these tools, don't complain, it is entirely your fault.

add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[rkcallaghan]

paste this block in to your /etc/portage/package.keywords to get KDE 3.4.0

# unmasking kde 3.4.0
=kde-base/kde-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeartwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/arts-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdebase-pam-4 ~x86
=kde-base/kdelibs-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegames-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdepim-3.4.0-r1 ~x86
=kde-base/kdewebdev-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdegraphics-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdenetwork-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdetoys-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeadmin-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.4.0 ~x86
>=media-libs/xine-lib-1.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeaddons-3.4.0 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeedu-3.4.0 ~x86
>=dev-libs/boost-1.32 ~x86
=kde-base/kdeutils-3.4.0 ~x86

Re:add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[Lobo_Louie]

I'm curious, let's say I do what you advise, then emerge KDE3.4. The next time I emerge --sync, will it prompt me to download KDE3.3? (I've never downloaded masked packages.)

Re:add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[oneeyedelf1]

no it wont prompt to reemerge kde3.3, /etc/portage/package.keywords doesnt get overwritten every rsync.

Re:add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not use ~ instead of =?

Re:add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords

[Anonymous Coward]

Its just masked with the ~x86 keyword. Do this instead:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 sudo emerge kde

Improper usage should not be modded up.

[Stalyn]

Its common practice to not use the ~arch flags in /etc/make.conf for ACCEPTED_KEYWORDS. This is basically the flag for an unstable branch. Especially if you are running a server you should stick with stable. I use unstable tho and never really had any problems. Then again I've been using Gentoo since 2002. If there were packages you needed that were not in stable you should have used package.unmask.

Also just doing etc-update then signing off on every file to be overwritten isn't a good idea. I normally do etc-update and see what files its trying to update. Especially if I was running a server I'd backup my config files.

On a side not Gentoo I think isn't that great for servers. I'd stick with slack or debian. However for desktops its pretty nice and clean.

Re:Improper usage should not be modded up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Also inproper use of the non-word Boxen ,please shoot the person who invented that

Re:Improper usage should not be modded up.

[Anonymous Coward]

People who complain about "inproper" use of anything should also be shot.

(Hint: It's improper, fool.)

For those demanding s.th. that does not feel beta

[Anonymous Coward]

An not yet so well known alternative build system is the T2 Project. It is not yet another distribution, but a flexible build kit that allows the automated build includiign optimization exactly for your target CPU. Unlike Gentoo it features cross buidls (e.g. to target PDAs and new architectures) and target defintions to save the way you want you distribution build together for the next turn.

The package format is way cleaner and consist of a clean key/value pair file instead of the code filled ebuild.

T2 is very mature and mainly targetting the professional embedded and custom server security and high performance clustering departments - however it is used to build normal home desktops just fine.

Broken system?

[Billly Gates]

I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u world just a few hours ago.

I wonder if this new release is why autoconf became broken and why I can't compile anything,

Re:Broken system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should it?
I don't think new releases have anything to do with things breaking or not breaking in the gentoo tree, they are just stabilized snapshots of the tree, but don't influence the tree the least.

That said, what's wrong with autoconf, any link to a bug report, forum discussion? And is it broken in the stable tree, or are you running an unstable system?

Re:Broken system?

[Henk Poley]

This could be a glibc problem they had this week.

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85555

Re:Broken system?

[Billly Gates]

Hmm I do wonder.

I get errors from autoconf saying something about headers and not being able to retrieve something. The error messages i get are different.

They usually follow with something like studio.h can not cast because it conflicts with ..otherlocation..studio.h or random.h. Its either not linking properly or something was not unemerged like a previous or conflicting library. My environmental variables could be out of whack too.

I have school and do not have time to fix it right now.

I will probably upgrade to 2005r1 when it comes out.

Re:For those demanding s.th. that does not feel be

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and as I see from the comments KDE 3.4.0 and GNOME 2.10 are "masked" (that is per default hidden) in Gentoo - in T2 they are the shipped out of the box ...

The whole "learning" thing

[bonch]

I used to be a Gentoo guy after rolling my own LFS install. A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning? At most, you learn how to partition correctly. Everything else is handled with automated scripts that you just set flags for if you want to customize. When you install packages, you just emerge it, and it does all the compilation for you. So what exactly is being taught here? Just curious.

For a real good time, Linux From Scratch will actually give you insight into what's going on. No automated scripts there (though there are some available for LFS veterans who don't want to do it all again).

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Lacraia]

I'm a Gentoo user. I don't use Gentoo primary to learn things. Of course you do learn some stuff if you get your hands dirty, but that's true for all distributions. The advantage of Gentoo is compilation for a particular machine, but doing it the easy-peasy way.

Learning things I did when I failed a Linux from Scratch installtion three times.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Taladar]

Actually I use Gentoo to save time after using LFS for a while and now I just want a distro without lots of stupid frontends messing with my config files. That is the problem of most distros IMO. They don't work with the config files in a way that allows you using them yourself at the same time since they regularly kill your comments, order,...

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[phrasebook]

I find Debian works okay for config files. If a package has a new config file it will ask you whether you want to overwrite your existing one and backup the old one, diff them, leave the existing one in place, etc. For major changes (e.g. a recent Shorewall upgrade I did) you will often get a longer message or an email to root with notes about what you have to do next. Some config files have the customised bits put into a separate 'local.conf' sort of file so you can make changes there without touching the main config. I've never had a Debian package kill my comments or silently overwrite my settings.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[shutdown -p now]

Learning to tinker with config files on your own. Distros such as Fedora or SuSE usually provide their own GUI configurators, which, while not stopping you from hand-editing configs, discourage such activity. Debian is much better (or worse?) in that aspect, but even there most packages, once installed, are configured using a simple ncurses-based program which asks you a few questions and writes the config. In Gentoo, you don't have such options, and have to go read the manual and then edit the config yourself. It definitely does help to learn how to do that.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[stinky wizzleteats]

A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning?

Look at it from the perspective of someone who got on board the linux train during Red Hat 5.x. If everything in the world on a linux system were only visible within a menu interface, having access to make.conf, fstab, and a hundred other such system-critical files is really quite eye-opening. All you learn in Debian/Red Hat/etc. is "Do Not Edit This File Directly! Use the poorly documented and inconsistent management utility to control whatever it is you are trying to control. Move along!"

I never learned to FIX linux systems by knowing how to install Debian. When I started installing using a Gentoo stage 1 installation, I learned, for the first time, how to repair a damaged or malfunctioning Linux system.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I rolled out a Gentoo installation a little over a year ago and I would say I "learned" a little too much trying to get the system going:
Recompiling the kernel to get USB Mouse support
Recompiling the kernel for specific filesystems
Manually configuring the bootstrapper (PITA)
Manually configuring the X-Server

Basically, any component that needs to be configured, you have to "learn" it and configure the component manually.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[agraupe]

Well, there's kernel config (because genkernel sucks), X11, ALSA, and any other things of that nature that you might need. I agree that LFS is much more hardcore, but gentoo still teaches people a good deal about what makes a full linux system (i.e. not just the very base install) tick.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[MyDixieWrecked]

it's kinda closer to learning at your own pace.

Sure, everything's handled by automated scripts, but there's still a lot of learning that's going on. You manually set a lot of information that's not there by default (hostname, dnsdomainname, etc) and manually set your internet settings in config files. I know in some X-based distros, there's GUI wizards for all that stuff.

Also, installing gentoo gives you a feel for all the things in the kernel. You can see "holy crap, I can compile in support for this Wacom tablet?!" where as if you install RedHat or whatever, you may not be able to even get the thing working. ...not that I've ever even tried to get my wacom tablet working in linux... just that I noticed there's support for it in the kernel...

also, the thing I like most about Gentoo isn't that everything's compiled for my machine specifically, even though that is nice, but rather the fact that a base Gentoo install is barebones. There's nothing. No ftp command, no hostx. Just the essentials. If I'm putting together a machine that's just going to be an FTP/rsync server, why do I need all that other crap that comes in a standard install?

I've never used Debian. Just Mandrake, Gentoo, Yellowdog, LinuxPPC, and RedHat, and yeah, I know you can tell it to do a minimal install, but Gentoo's installation handbook is taylored to people installing a minimal base system and just gets them started.

Gentoo's learning experience is 'learning by immersion.' Much like moving to Japan to learn japanese, you learn simply by being up to yer neck in the whole thing.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[bonch]

Well, I hate to tell you this, but you don't need Gentoo to hand-edit configuration files. :)

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Inigo Montoya]

The "bare bones" aspect of Gentoo is why I decided to use it, for the first time, on my home file and mail server. I've been using and installing Linux since SLS Linux 0.99 (with kernel 0.99!) in 1993(?), which was installed from floppies. Later I moved to Slackware 1.0, then Redhat around 6.0, Mandrake at 9.0 and finally this year I went to Knoppix on my desktop (installed from the Live CD.. what an awesome distribution!)

For my server, however, I saw that all these distributions installed way too much and wanted to hand-hold my server. I decided I'd try Gentoo there and I'm very happy with it's "back to my linux roots" approach, yet much easier to maintain then my Linux roots were.

Now I get to see if emerge sync, change profile, then emerge world work for me as advertised.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[cloudmaster]

If you installed LFS, you didn't "roll your own" any more than installing Gentoo is "rolling your own". You read the directions and follow them. Just like Gentoo, except that Gentoo has a cleaner system for doing all of the monotonous stuff.

I've rolled my own systems, well before LFS existed. It involved going to obscure FTP sites to find the tarballs for the core utilities, building them (and busybox, of course) on another system, copying the files to a loopback device, and using dd to write the kernel and filesystem image to a disk. Then do it about 100 more times, because something's not quite right. :) All without a handy little unified how-to guide that you follow step-by-step. That's rolling your own. Following someone else's directions is not. That's why an LFS install is LFS, not "my own custom distro".

Or maybe I'm just bitter that no one had written the docs when I needed to do it, and therefore I think it should still be really hard to count. You decide. :)

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[shutdown -p now]

I didn't say you do. I just said that in Gentoo, due to the lack of GUI configuration tools, you are forced to hand-edit configs. Kinda like learning to fly by jumping from a cliff =)

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd like an OS that wont install way too much and wont hand-hold your server, try FreeBSD.

- All the unix-y goodness you've come to love
- Allows installation from source (ports) or binaries (packages)
- Provides a linux compatability port so you can still run your Linux programs
- It does no hand-holding _at all_ (if you want to run a program, you're going to have to learn the config file...)
- Its small/minimal install is reasonably small (installed minimal on a 1GB hard-drive, installed mail server and DNS server, still plent of room to store my mail).
- The community tends to be a little less fanboy-ish.
- Very stable.
- More free than Linux (BSD license vs. GPL)

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[TorKlingberg]

So what exactly is being taught here? Just curious.

As an example, you learn what a kernel module is. When I installed my first Linux (Red Hat) it didn't teach me that, so when all the linux forums around told me to use this or that module, I had no idea what it was all about.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Inigo Montoya]

Thanks, I intend to check it out. I'm surprised (at myself!) that I have not tried FreeBSD yet. My first UNIX OS was SYSIII on an AT&T box around 1983 or 84. I moved up to BSD4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 on Vaxen after that... X and GUI's were only just starting out, the shell and ed(1) is my friend.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[StikyPad]

Also, installing gentoo gives you a feel for all the things in the kernel. You can see "holy crap, I can compile in support for this Wacom tablet?!" where as if you install RedHat or whatever, you may not be able to even get the thing working. ...not that I've ever even tried to get my wacom tablet working in linux... just that I noticed there's support for it in the kernel...

That's not at all a GenToo specific thing. You can compile your own kernel under any distribution, and Fedora has a great GUI for it. (At least, RedHat did.. the last time I checked). IIRC, it will even modify grub/lilo automatically. Or that might be Debian. Either way, most distributions include everything you need to compile your own kernel, which, while involved, is still a hell of a lot faster than compiling the entire distribution from scratch.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[MyDixieWrecked]

Well, my point was that the default installation procedure involves building your kernel from scratch.

Another thing I missed in my OP is Gentoo's USE flags. Where you can have your programs built with or without specific components (yeah, I want ldap support, no, I'd rather not use gif, but yeah, use png and jpg and don't build anything for X).

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Following someone else's directions is not.

So you're saying you were born with an instinctive knowledge of how to get Linus' and Richard's creations to work? ;)

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Makarakalax]

Intelligent opinion. Marvelous. I take back some of the things I said about you. I'll try harder to see merit in your usual comments.

Re:The whole "learning" thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar experience with kernel modules but rather than spend endless hours on what is essentially just minor knob twirling with gentoo, I loaded up a browser, googled for "kernel module" + "howto" and stuck with the OS I was using.... which is.... >>namedrop fanboi object of desire here...

GUI installer - not this time around

[nighty5]

I'm a big fan of Gentoo, I run it on my laptop and my file server, its a shame that the GUI installer didnt make it into this build...

Although the console install process certainly teaches new users of linux new tricks it might help gain some traction into the linux market to help raise awareness of the project.

Hopefully the next build will make it :)

Good work guys!

How Ironic

[Ctrl Alt De1337]

It's always ironic to me wherever Gentoo is discussed on Slashdot because Gentoo has struck me as the ultimate RTFM distribution. Think about that for a second. RTFM required + Slashdot = ...

Re:How Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFM required + Slashdot = ...

Profit?

question,

[pair-a-noyd]

can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

I tried this an 8gb drive once before but it never worked because it was a few years ago, the docs were flawed with bad directions and the pc was a PI/133, after about a week of compiling it just crapped out and I gave up and installed Damn Small Linux..

Re:question,

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be no problem and the gentoo docs are really good now.

Re:question,

[pair-a-noyd]

Good, I don't need much, was shooting for a media player for my garage, xfce and xmms a simple browser and maybe gaim and I'll be happy.
I mainly want to listen to a stream in my garage coming from another machine in the house.

I've already got DSL up and doing it but thought I would torture myself just for shits, grins and giggles..

Maybe I'll try the PIII stage 3 install instead of the suicidal stage 1...

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

A small gentoo desktop install typically takes between 1 and 2GB. That includes the coreutils, linuxutils, X, mozilla, editors, compilers, etc...

As for the ram, ideally you want 256 as a minimum or you're going to be swapping a lot to disk. 512MB is plenty. I know on my laptop at least going from 256 to 768 [two slots, it came with a 256MB board] MB of ram was a nice boost for building stuff.

On my laptop I sit at 3.2GB used and I have tons of other tools installed [Gnome, tetex, debugging tools, gaim, openoffice, etc...].

But even a full desktop build with Gnome or KDE wouldn't top 4GB of space and in that you're getting a lot of free tools.

Tom

Re:question,

[MeerCat]

can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.

I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 2.9G 1.8G 1019M 64% /
/dev/hda5 17M 8.7M 7.5M 54% /boot
/dev/hda7 1.1G 560M 529M 52% /usr/portage



I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world".
Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.

Re:question,

[pair-a-noyd]

okay, thanks, that helps some..

My main concern is the compiling, the temporary space needed to do it. I can't remember from the last time I tried if it asks you what gui you want, that way you only end up compiling a light system, like an xfce box. I see no need for KDE just to listen to MP3's in my garage and thus no need to even compile it in the first place.
I really could do quite well with DSL but it has a few shortcomings that are a little annoying.
I can live with DSL but I thought I would try Gentoo again, just to be mean to myself..

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

Unless you're building KDE or OpenOffice you only need ~200MB of space for temp stuff [Kernel is about 160MB].

Normally I don't make small drives but my friend routines splits his poor laptop drive between windows and linux and often he gives his Gentoo drive ~10GB at most.

Also if all you're going to be doing is playing mp3s you don't need X and mplayer or mpg123 will do just fine.

Tom

Re:question,

[pair-a-noyd]

Nice.... I have a few old craptops laying around, I may put them to use.
I've been wanting to get one going as a lite browser so I can be lazy and lay in bed, browse the web, check status of stuff in the house, look at security cam (from server), etc...

Maybe an ultralite install on a craptop would cut it. I just hope it will handle the fonky pcmcia nics I have.. But, what the hell, I'll try it. Long over due..

thanks!

Re:question,

[pair-a-noyd]

So are you saying then that I could compile it on a P133 with a 300 megabyte hard drive??????
I have several of those. I find it hard to belive that it could be compiled in just 300mb...

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

No, you should take your P133 with the 300MB drive and SMASH IT INTO TINY LITTLE BITS.

Then go get a 50$ duron and an 80$ 40GB drive and be done with [oh and a 90$ mobo and some 90$ ram... might need a new 100$ PSU]

Or just up the drive cuz 300MB is like wicked small and inferior.

And your OP said 8GB...

Tom

Re:question,

[pair-a-noyd]

the 8gb is a PIII tower for the garage.
I have loads of old machines and a stack of old craptops that I want to do something with.
I can't and won't throw them out, I'm too much of a cheap SOB to do that. Fix it, recycle it, but don't throw it away..

Oh, and I found a minimalist linux distro to turn old craptops into digital picture frames, http://www.barwap.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Photo-Ix

Re:question,

[tomstdenis]

Granted gentoo is not for 300MB drives... But most distros aren't either. LFS or DSL are about all you can use for that case.

Tom

Re:question,

[MeerCat]

Maybe an ultralite install on a craptop would cut it. I just hope it will handle the fonky pcmcia nics I have

This is running an old 3com PCMCIA 10/100 NIC without problems (modules pcmcia_core and 3c59x) - the only real problem was that this latop (Acer 312T) has an external PCMCIA CD-ROM and can't boot from it, so getting gentoo on in the first place was a little tricky, but the gentoo installation instructions covered this.

Old laptops make excellent low-use servers (especially if you disconnect the switch that detects when you close the lid so you can hide them away without suspending them) - if this one gives out I'll just hunt round for the cheapest old laptop I can find with a CD-ROM drive and rebuild on that...

Have fun

--
T

Re:question,

[shish]

can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

I've installed it on a PI with 32MB ram and a 1gb hdd... (it took a literal week to install though, even with distcc)

Re:question,

[archen]

If you're running a P133 you should look into NetBSD. My first computer is a P133 stuffed with 96Mb RAM and it's sort of a hobby of mine to keep it going. Basically you are going to get nowhere with a 300Mb drive.

You might consider giving this a try.

Take a fast computer (AtlhonXP or whatever) with the target hard drive (I'd recommend at least 500-1000Mb), install NetBSD then stuff it into the old machine. Now that sounds easy, but I've never gotten it to work with linux. After that you should be able to use NFS for the pkgsrc (like portage) files, to compile the software you need. Acually with NFS you probably CAN get away with 300Mb drives on client machines, and possibly one Uber server with say... a Pentium Pro and a 8Gb drive.

Re:question,

[sffubs]

Yes, I'm posting this from a pentium 266 mmx with 96mb ram and 4gb hdd (running gentoo obviously!). It runs xfce4 no problem at all.

I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before

[blonde rser]

Does anybody else think that the combination of torrent and emerge (or torrent and apt-get for that matter) would be a great match? I mean transfers are pretty quick already but this way the bandwidth loads from updates can be passed around with out a serious security risk. Bah I'm probably just being an idiot.

honest question

[bhima]

I'm a current OS X user and I have recently come into an older PIII box. I've used SuSE in the past but now it's just to big for my needs.

So what's a small distro that I can use? I'm leaning towards Arch Linux can anyone comment on it?

Re:honest question

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've read, arch seems to be a good system, so it is probably worth a try. However it seems to be targeted towards experienced users, which of course isn't a bad thing, just something to keep in mind.

Personally I'd recommend Ubuntu, or, if you prefer KDE, kubuntu. I know there's been a lot of hype around this distro and many people get annoyed by it, but it's still a great distro.

Oh, and if you give Ubuntu a try, make sure to use the new release (hoary hedgehog). It isn't officially stable yet, but it will be released in a week and it really is an improvement over the previous version.

Re:honest question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a current OS X user and I have recently come into an older PIII box.

Thanks for the mental image..

Re:honest question

[Zemplar]

As the other AC suggests, try Ubuntu. OR, try FreeBSD since it's pretty damn good and is essentially the core of Mac OS X. I've used both and like FreeBSD more from a technical standpoint, but when it comes down to just getting work done without a fuss, Ubuntu is better for the desktop. FreeBSD is an awesome server, but you will do more configuring with it than what Ubuntu picks for you (not all bad or good).

Re:honest question

[Anonymous Coward]

Arch linux is pretty minimal and has good package management, but VERY poorly documented. In spite of the total lack of documentation, its one of the least horrible linux distros I've tried.

Re:honest question

[dayid]

Being on the other end of the spectrum, having just switched from being a long-time Linux/BSD user to getting an OS-X laptop at work (to replace the Win XP I was only using at work), I have to say that anyone that uses OS-X "in-depth" - in my belief/experience - would be more comfortable using the BSDs than they would using any distribution of Linux. Thus, my servers are on FreeBSD, with the back-up servers on Gentoo, and all my "desktops" (including laptops - anything that gets a GUI) run Debian, which, as others have recommended, I currently run based off the Ubuntu install.

Re:honest question

[Leffe]

Gentoo runs great on my PII.

Split ebuilds

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't do that, use the new split ebuilds.

Re:Split ebuilds

[Anonymous Coward]

split ebuilds are still crap, the compile is already too long and split ebuilds give you more headache, a longer compile time, and trivial disk space savings on a modern machine.

Using Gentoo since '92??

[Anonymous Coward]

Please say you meant since '02. We hate (ahem, reward) karma whores and trolls around here.

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[gimpimp]

The Azureus torrent client does something like that. All of it's updates are downloaded through the client via a torrent. Makes sense for Azureus, but it'd be a lot of work for gentoo to set up.

What parts do you need to download?

[billstewart]

Suppose you want to install a generic Pentium 4 version of Gentoo. What torrents do you need to download if you want to be nice and do torrents instead of just emerging everythying? I assume you need install-x86-universal-2005.0.iso and packages-pentium4-2005.0.iso, but do you also need all the q3,q4,q5 stuff and the stage1/stage2/stage3 stuff, or are all of those included in the "x-86 universal" part?

Re:What parts do you need to download?

[lachlan76]

Ummm...I think you'd have everything, but you'd do better to download straight from a local mirror (your ISP might mirror it...mine does)

Re:What parts do you need to download?

[drinkypoo]

As the installation documentation can tell you, if you want to do a generic P4 install you need the install-x86-universal, the packages-pentium4, and the stage3 for pentium 4. You don't need anything else, though I also strongly suggest picking up a recent portage snapshot tarball. If you want things to happen quickly, though, you should do an install with binary packages from the packages CD and using the portage snapshot on the universal livecd, and then emerge sync after you get the packages built. That way you can use the system while you upgrade it.

Thanks to the astute posters above...

[EzInKy]

...for pointing out that I yet again have made a typo. Yes, of course I meant '02, not `92. It's an age thing. After you live through enough of them, the decades just seem to start running together.

Re:For those demanding s.th. that does not feel be

[Narishma]

Unlike Gentoo it features cross buidls (e.g. to target PDAs and new architectures)

You can do that with Gentoo. Just set the appropriate CFLAGS and tell emerge to produce a binary package.

Boring article

[bcmm]

Gentoo doesn't have core versions, just versions of each package. This is a new version of the installer, one of the least frequently used bits of Gentoo. Apart from the few prebuilt packages in the version for people without internet, this will produce the same system as any other Gentoo installer.

Please stop reporting new installer versions! This is uninteresting to those who don't use Gentoo becasue it doesn't effect them, and uninteresting to users because they have installed it already.

Re:Boring article

[ananiasanom]

You mean it doesn't affect people who don't use Gentoo.

Other than that, you're pretty much correct. Existing Gentoo users who will be getting new machines will be interested, I suppose...

Re:Boring article

[Mordaximus]

This is uninteresting to those who don't use Gentoo becasue it doesn't effect them, and uninteresting to users because they have installed it already.

Did you consider it might affect users who don't use Gentoo but might consider it?

Just because existing users have it installed already, doesn't mean they won't be deploying more systems, or even reinstalling at some point. It's always nice to have the newest image on hand.

You may not appreciate the news but others do. You're quite free to not read it if it bores you so much. Or would you prefer a dupe in it's place?

Re:Boring article

[bcmm]

The poing I'm really making is that it is NOT "Gentoo 2005.0". It's the installer.

I can't believe no-one posted the Gentoo Rice page

[B747SP]

... so here it is! GENTOO is Rice

Re:"Iso's"

[chocolatei]

Unfortunately english is an evolving language and the new rules of grammar dictate that an apostrophe can be used where ever there is an abreviation. Hence: app's 60p orang's 70p ban's 40p In addition you can use it where you would normally shorten a word but haven't today. Example: Apple's 60p Orang's 70p Banan's 40p Or colou'r. ;-)

Re:"Iso's"

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how people spell it "existance".

Okay, actually I don't; it drives me absolutely postal. Particularly when the offender is trying to correct someone else.

Bloody hell, it's

E...

N...

C...

E.

The halt leading the blind, I swear.

Re:"Iso's"

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of shit, mate.

Quick making excuses and learn to fucking spell.

Thank you.

Re:"Iso's"

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it about Gentoo users being ESPECIALLY bad and ESPECIALLY willfully ignorant when it comes to matters of grammar and spelling, anyway?

Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Gentoo users have probably run etc-update only to find out that 85 files need updating, 7 have been automatically merged, now you have to merge the rest yourself. After working steadily through them, you soon discover that 95% of them are files you have not even heard of, or at least you have never changed them. After a while you decide to just run your eyes over the list quickly, and keep the ones you have edited, then use -5 on the rest. Except you miss one and now your system doesn't work and you have to figure out why.

Here is my idea for a way to solve the problem.

Gentoo should always keep a backup copy of the original configuration files. When you run etc-update it should compare the current file with the backup copy and if they are identical the current file should be deleted and replaced by the new file without prompting the user. Then the list will only be the 5 or 6 files that you have actually changed, and there is much less chance of a user accidentally overwriting their own changes.

Of course the old functionality should still be available too, for those that prefer it.

Comments?

Mark Byers.

Re:Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using dispatch-conf instead of etc-update. This does exactly what you're suggesting.

Re:Proposal for etc-update solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, thanks! I will try it next time I update.

Mark Byers.

Re:"Iso's"

[chocolatei]

Did you mean to type the word "quit" but were so fucked up that you put "quick" instead?

Gentoo and upgrades

[zemoo]

Sure Gentoo is nice if you want the latest and greatest software, because it evolves constantly.
Desktop users don't need support, right? That's for big corporations and reactionnaries.

Well, just two days ago, I decided to update a machine that hasn't been synched in a year (little use, mostly gathering dust), as I wanted to upgrade from a crash-prone Mozilla 1.6.
Well, it turns out my configuration is not supported anymore. I'm out in the cold! I tried doing what was suggested and manually upgrading, but when I try to emerge Mozilla, it refuses because it can't find xorg. Isn't XFree good enough for now or do I have to spend a day reconfiguring everything because of OSS politics?
Am I going to have to rebuild my entire base system manually because I waited too long between syncs?

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

"Am I going to have to rebuild my entire base system manually because I waited too long between syncs?"

No you just have to install xorg, which merely means, emerge -C xfree && emerge xorg, that's all, so why complain?

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[tomstdenis]

Not only that but xorg reads xfree config files and they behave [in that respect] pretty much the same.

Not only that but I've come back from a month abroad and had no trouble updating a gentoo box.

Maybe if the person neglected the box for a couple years there would be deprecated packages but at that point you're probably better off... that's how all these worms/viruses spread anyways...

Ideally Gentoo should have an installer and ideally it should have a "put emerge in my crontab please" mode for the newbs that don't want to toy with it.

But really, to use gentoo you're gonna need to know how to use emerge/etc-update and a couple other tools.

Oh for shame, a free OS that works well, is reliable and decently supported and all you have todo is burn a 50MB CD to start and read a manual!!!

WE'RE ASKING TOO MUCH!!!

Tom

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

Last night I was working on a machine that I figured I'd need to reinstall for some of the same reasons you mentioned above. It hadn't been sync'd in over a year and I wasn't interested in a headache. But for the hell of it I decided to see how it would go.

Updates included moving from XFree86 to X.org, moving from a 2.4 to 2.6 kernel, bringing Mozilla and Firefox up to speed (it was still running Phoenix!), updating Postfix/Apache/PHP/MySQL/etc and a laundry list of other packages. Oh, baselayout and other lowlevel packages were included in there as well.

To my suprise, everything worked great with minor, expected tweakage. Of course, it helps to know what you're doing, know how to prepare for upgrades like this, and know what kinds of things to expect when it's all done. This isn't realy one of those situations where you're allowed to whine about how hard Linux is, or bitch about the distro you chose in the first place.

Some other things:

• "..my configuration is not supported anymore": The only situation I can image you're talking about is fixed by rebuilding your make.profile symlink, which only invloves the use of 'rm' and 'ln' and is explained during sync (I think, I can't remember exactly, but it's clearly outlined).
• "I tried doing what was suggested and manually upgrading..":
• Not sure what you mean by "manually". Unless you're installing the package by hand and not using emerge, you're still within the confines of portage. Also, I don't think a non-portage installation would complain about the absence of X.org.

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[MarcQuadra]

m I going to have to rebuild my entire base system manually because I waited too long between syncs?

No. The message that your configuration isn't valid anymore isn't a death-knell. Change the symlink of /etc/make.profile to a newer target and emerge -u world.

With a system that old, I'd do an emerge -e world too, to recompile the whole system with your new compiler.

Re:Gentoo and upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

Xorg is definitely worth the upgrade. You don't need to reconfigure everything for it, just rename the configuration.

Besides, since recent XFree86 versions, both Xorg and XFree86 pretty much autoconfigure (try just typing Xorg -configure).

As far as X11 configurations go, it has been quite a few years since you actually had to worry about modelines etc.

Or....

[Kjella]

and then normally just wish I'd done the gentoo install when I can't have Gaim+OTR, mplayer+codecs, etc. without grabbing the tgz's, hunting down the deps, and putting it all together myself instead of just 'emerge gaim-otr', 'emerge mplayer'...

...pretend like apt-get is a powerful system (I usually use wajig as a wrapper), add one line to sources (since the win32 binary codecs aren't in the default sources), "wajig install-rs mplayer" -- apt-get install mplayer and all recommended or suggested packages and their deps. Done.

That works out very well, particularly for a few stupid "non-dependencies" like when I install KDevelop without installing Qt-dev (Ok, so it is a working dev environment, so technically not a dependency, but...)

Kjella

Re:I can't believe no-one posted the Gentoo Rice p

[Frankablu]

If Gentoo users are ricers then Debain users must be waiting for a nurse to come and change their feeding tube around about now.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

I just emerged in my pants...twice!

I wish I would of known the release date....

[Yaotzin]

...because I just downloaded 2004.3 yesterday.

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[Yaotzin]

I just realised that I don't have to re-download it...

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had of known it, you wouldn't of had to download all over. Of you started that now? Of patience.

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[Anonymous Coward]

HAVE, HAVE, HAVE!!!

had HAVE known it!

wouldn't HAVE had!!

argh! (aimed at both you and the GP)

the "of" you think goes there is actually 've which is short for HAVE.

had've, wouldn't've

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[nberardi]

emerge -avqkt world

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[Yaotzin]

Thank you for that information. English is not my first language but I do my best.

Re:I wish I would of known the release date....

[XMyth]

Same here...spent a good while installing and configuring it. I know upgrading isn't that difficult, but it would have been nice to have waited and installed the latest and greatest instead.

Ah well....I hope the 2.6 kernel is all they say it is (with the improved response times for GUI apps...I hate the laggy feel of my current install)

Dentists recommend...

[mu-sly]

...not being a spelling fascist in the slightest, but chuckling at your advice to avoid it like the plaque!

Laugh, it's funny! :-)

Re:Dentists recommend...

[DarkSarin]

erm...oops.

You're right it is funny.

Re:Dentists recommend...

[Lobo_Louie]

Hee hee.
This post reminded of an email our receptionist sent one day. It was a note reminding the staff that the water lines were being repaired:
"Today, the water lines on the 2nd floor are being repaired. Please do not use water in the building from noon until 2pm. Thank you, and sorry for any incontinence."

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[polyp2000]

I think that sounds like a great idea. Id be interested to hear what one of the gentoo developers thinks about the matter.

Re:"Iso's"

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, I can't really see what would replace the apostrophe in colou'r, so.... STFU

Re:"Iso's"

[chocolatei]

Okay' then.

that's the learning? Try slack

[Mr. Underbridge]

A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning? At most, you learn how to partition correctly.

I've been hearing about this gentoo junk for a while, but partitioning is really the "learning" they're talking about? Sheesh, things really do come full circle. Slackware's been doing it that way forever. Customizable and lightning fast.

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[Zemplar]

Central repository where (check out code from whom)? I'm downloading files from someone name "Linux Hater Hacker" or "Virus Packager"? Which version is current?

Not to say the idea is completely without merit, only that some technical obstacles need to be addressed first.

Backup .. Backup .. Backup

[Macka]

The one thing that's missing from your story.

Maybe you'll learn the most important lesson of your computing career from all this ... BACKUP BEFORE YOU CHANGE IT !!!!

Then when it f*cks up .. as it just did for you; you have an exit strategy to get back to where you started from.

There's no excuse for not taking backups before upgrading a system. It's basic, common sense, good practice.

Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

Will this version actually compile on my AMD Athlon 64 with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro? Just wondering because the previous versions refused to compile. Or would I be better off buying a new computer just so I can run this magnificent OS?

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[flithm]

Yes it compiles for amd64. Also your video card has absolutely nothing to do with compilation! The only thing that your video card affects is the X server (and to some degree frame buffer console mode)... which is your fault for buying ATI (known for notoriously bad Linux support).

Support a company that cares about Linux: NVidia.

Having said that... many people with ATI cards have Linux running properly (with 3D support). I've heard they've been improving their driver steadily.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[jay-be-em]

I dunno, but I'm fairly sure your video card has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Either you're pretty damn ignorant or that was a thinly veiled attempt at waving your giant e-penis about.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

I know my video card has nothing to do with compilation. However, I was unable to get to a console *because* of my video card. After trying various things for several days (yes, days) and trying to get help on IRC and forums (with most people telling me to "get new hardware," I just gave up. So basically what you're saying is that because I refuse pay $400+ for a decent nVidia card, I can't use Gentoo? Not only that but because ATI has bad Linux support it's my fault? I suppose you're going to tell me next that I should just get rid of my AMD64 and get an Intel processor? Or perhaps I should just buy a whole new computer. Oh wait, I just did that a year ago. I love Gentoo but my free time isn't infinite and I refuse to buy expensive hardware for one OS, no matter how good the OS may be.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

Or perhaps you shouldn't jump to conclusions when lacking information. My video card has everything to do with it when it won't let me get to a damned console due to a video problem. And if the only solution to this problem is to buy an nVidia card, then Gentoo simply isn't worth my time.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[flithm]

Did you even read what I wrote? I did say that ATI support is getting better, and people have been having good success for some time now. Your problems have nothing to do with Gentoo. And you should be fine now! AMD64 is no problem, and ATI is no problem (well mostly).

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[jay-be-em]

This has nothing to do with anything compiling on your machine.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

Yes, I did read what you said. This really isn't worth fighting over since I have another version of Linux working flawlessly. I just wanted to know if support for AMD64 and ATI had improved, which you have kindly answered.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

I realize that. However, if you read what I said, you would discover that I also said: "My video card has everything to do with it when it won't let me get to a damned console due to a video problem." Failing to get to the console *stopped* the compilation process. I could not continue because of my video card.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chances are if you've been screwing with it this long, it's probably already not worth your time.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

Which is precisely why I installed another distribution (and promptly removed GNOME in favor of Fluxbox). I would have preferred to go with Slackware as an alternative but I had a similar video problem.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[jay-be-em]

You made a post complaining that you could not get gentoo to COMPILE and mentioned your video card.

You did not make a post complaining that you could not get to a console. Why did you say that the problem was with compilation when you never even attempted to compile anything?

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and I can't seem to run X11 on my p4 with a turtle beach soundcard.

Oh, and the machine is unplugged.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[NeuralClone]

Apparently I wasn't specific enough in my original post.

Re:Will it actually compile this time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go grab Ubuntu then. It worked with my nvidia network controller and radeon 9800 card right out of the box. A decent nvidia card is $150, BTW, and you're going to want one if you want to play games or do any 3D, but you'll do fine with 2d otherwise. No distro in the world can make ATI's 3d drivers not suck.

I've had rather bad luck with the hardware support in the kernels of various install CDs, debian not the least of them. If it were my USB controller or sound card it didn't support, that'd be one thing, but when I can't see or connect, that's a larger problem. The Hoary install CD went just smooth, and I installed everything from the network. Then there was the requirement of creating an XFS root (still needed an ext2 /boot since grub can't handle xfs) which many installers also couldn't handle. XFS is quite nice for 64 bit architectures, since it's all 64-bit internally. Again, no problem with Ubuntu, or even vanilla debian.

Ubuntu supports amd64 as a first-tier architecture too.

Yay for 64-bit gentoo

[26199]

Gentoo on an amd64 is awesome. If you want to run a desktop system on a 64-bit processor... well, I admit I haven't tried the alternatives, but gentoo does the job nicely.

No need for Catalyst

[DnemoniX]

There are loads of people that have built gentoo live CDs. You can use the Catalyst tool, which the developers use to whip together builds, or you can do it from scratch. The problem is that you loose a lot of the small tweaking options that you might wish to try out. I prefer the from scratch approach it suits my needs better and really is no trouble. There are amazingly detailed threads in the Gentoo forum on how to do this step by step in a chrooted env. I reccomend it if you need to make a tools cd, and don't want all the bloat of Knoppix. The one I made is a security/forensics build and it works fantastic. It's a lot of fun to accomplish something like this yourself.

Re:question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I installed it (from stage 1.) on a 170mHz, 64mb ram, 1.6gb hdd PII.

I, however had to remove X when I updated Glib/gcc.

And it did take a while.

Works for me

[DnemoniX]

Funny, but I emerged Gnome 2.10 the same day it was announced here on /. maybe you should learn to unmask a package sometime.

An installation question

[Cro Magnon]

Do you have to print out 100+ pages of install documentation to install Gentoo?

Re:An installation question

[Anonymous Coward]

You can read the on-cd manual in another virtual terminal during the install if you want, or if Internet access is available, the on-line version.

It's still a pain in the arse, however, and even without a graphical installer it would be nice to have a slightly more automated install, with hardware detection.

Re:An installation question

[gorjusborg]

" You can read the on-cd manual in another virtual terminal during the install if you want, or if Internet access is available, the on-line version."

I don't know if they still do this, but I bought a CD set for my machine from the gentoo store about a year ago. They sent printed instructions (10 or so pages) with the CDs in the mail.

I appreciated it, because I don't own a printer, and I have only one computer.

Re:An installation question

[DeathPenguin]

>> Do you have to print out 100+ pages of install documentation to install Gentoo?

I wish. I'd much prefer having too much documentation as opposed to having too little.

Fortunately, the authors of the Gentoo installation guide are really quite good. I used their original install guide to get started. They had examples and walked through every step in good detail (Things like fdisk can be very confusing for a newbie). It has since been made obsolete and it looks like they now have a quick install reference and an extended handbook.

Starting a Gentoo system off right...

[Daedius]

emerge screen screen emerge kde control+c emerge nethack nethack "Go little dog 'd'!"

Re:Starting a Gentoo system off right...

[alc6379]

emerge screen screen emerge kde control+c emerge nethack nethack "Go little dog 'd'!"

...Thus cancelling your KDE installation. I think you were looking for Ctrl+A C to make that new window...

gcc 4.0

[oliverthered]

gcc 4.0 should perform vectorisation of code so more loops will be compiled to use MMX/SIMD/3DNOW etc...

That should give you a 10%-100% boost in CPU/memory intensive applications, especially sound or graphics where there are a lot of
x.1.n = f(x.0.n ) type functions.

Why isn't there a Gentoo icon on /.?

[Lobo_Louie]

Why isn't there a Gentoo icon on /.?

Re:Meanwhile

[agraupe]

Is your brain fully functional? A 400 MHz PPC chip is much faster than the equivilant Pentium. This has been established. Now, you will notice that he said he has a 366 MHz processer. This means that, even if you had a Pentium, your's would be significantly faster. I will point out, now, that my 233 MHz powerbook does *not* play videos, even when using a dedicated X-server+mplayer, with nothing else running.

Re:that's the learning? Try slack

[Egonis]

It's not limited to only that...

If you were to install Fedora for example, front-ends do all of the configurations for you (mostly).

In Gentoo, you emerge each package, and hand configure each .config as necessary.. it teaches you about the interaction of programs, and most of all, how to cleanly get a system up and running.

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[Night Goat]

I think the problem with using BitTorrent for emerge is that people aren't going to want to wait around to seed once they've finished downloading packages. So downloaders would be relying on the mirrors for the most part, as I think they do currently. It might relieve a little bit of the load, since people who are downloading at that specific time would be doing a little uploading too, but I don't think it would help significantly.

Re:I can't believe no-one posted the Gentoo Rice p

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because it's only funny the first time you read it and everyone who cares about Gentoo (either for or against) has read it by now...
Are you an American TV executive? Flogging a horse so long-dead suggests so.
BTW, I am not a Gentoo user. SUSE is working just fine for me, despite their somewhat addled upgrade installation method.

Warning to AMD64 Users - Don't download yet!

[isolationism]

Users wishing to take the plunge and install Gentoo on an AMD64 should wait a day or three before attempting to download an image from the mirror. As described in the thread on the Gentoo Forums, the wrong image has been propagated by accident.

Gentoo's master mirror was staged with the wrong amd64 livecds which don't boot due to a missing bootsector!

We're currently shipping the correct images to all the mirrors.

Not that this will probably impact any /. readers, but I read the AMD64 forums religiously as I have two AMD64 Gentoo installations at my house. I don't go reading the forums before installing though, so hopefully this saves at least one person some time/frustration before installing.

Re:Warning to AMD64 Users - Don't download yet!

[StRex]

The BitTorrent feed seems fine; maybe it's just the traditional download mirrors? I downloaded install-amd64-minimal-2005.0.iso last night and it boots fine.

On the contrary

[macdaddy]

Then you discover Debian and recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.

Quite to the contrary, I've been using Linux since 1997 and compile damn near everything by hand. I have no reason to ever use any company's precompiled binary harshness. It's a timesaver for me to do it myself and do it right the first time. Why do people like myself compile from source? Because the end results are usually faster, more secure, less bloated, and because it's cool. Why else?

Re:On the contrary

[JFitzsimmons]

And I thought RPM Hell was bad... geeze. Your life must be a living hell having to find all those dependencies.

Re:On the contrary

[macdaddy]

Actually managing such a system is trivial if you're an organized admin. Try it some time. It's really not hard.

Re:Meanwhile

[kesuki]

You should try a lower overhead codec like MPEG-2...
MPEG-2 requires only a pentium MMX (120 MHz released 10/97) to decode and playback. (with a fully optomized player) Yeah it takes more space, but the advantage is that it comes already in use on DVD Videos they sell in handy dandy retail packages. Holywood Magic+ cards were so cheap for a reason, they took that 120 mhz of general cpu use and put it to work on a gpu specific to mpeg decoding. They were really only needed in non-mmx era PCs, although low end systems gained the benefit of being able to do other tasks besides playing the movie.

Obligatory compiling joke..

[robpoe]

My commodore 64 just got done compiling the LAST release... ;)

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, bit torrent already addresses these. Don't talk out of your ass.

The "Installer" Isn't Just For Installing Gentoo

[grubber33]

As you all know, Gentoo releases are just pre-compiled packages with on a live CD with an environment for you to work your way around in. This also comes in handy for rescuing any Linux installation, as I've done many times before. If you mess up your kernel config or your FS crashes and you can't acces *.fsck, you can always do it from the live CD. Just a note for those that have had horrid experiences with getting back into their desktops after upgrades.

Re:I can't believe no-one posted the Gentoo Rice p

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

BSD is for people who like their car to get 40 rods to the hogshead..

Downloaded.

[robyannetta]

Where's this graphical installer Gentoo was touting? The x86 and x86_64 install ISOs are still command line.

Re:Downloaded.

[lokisan969]

it was never said, that they would release a graphical installer at this time.
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131174&c id=10951707

Re:I don't know why I hadn't thought of this befor

[falser]

Bittorrent does checksums to validate all blocks, and re-downloads any that are invalid. You can see such statistics in real-time if you use a client like Azureus.

Re:learning

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use linux with any great frequency, but when I do Slackware is my distro of choice. I have learned far far more from setting up Slack than I learned installing Gentoo. For a complete newbie, Gentoo does force you to go through and learn a couple of things (the discussions on fstab and chrooting in the docs are among the best I've come across). However the value of the optimization through compiling and use flags, which is usually advocated as a key selling point, was completely lost on me. I came away with an understanding of how to set use flags, but no concept of what effect they would have as far as speed or reliability. Perhaps the target audience is programmers (I'm not one) who already understand the effects of use flags, but the Gentoo use flag docs seem to be clearly aimed at newbies.

In short, I spent a week installing Gentoo and learned nothing new.

What if the stable packages are b0rked?

[dmouritsendk]

For example, the LVM tools was linked to a lib in /usr/lib. Not exactly cool when quite a few people have /usr on a logical volume(it's even recommended in the gentoo lvm2 guide).

I had to emerge the lvmtools from unstable to get my box to boot, go figure :p

So i don't think it makes his critizism mute at all, since it doesn't really seem too me like stable get that much attention by the devs. It rather seems like hardmasked packages should be considered unstable and ~x86 is pseudo-stable.

Personally, I like Gentoo. It's served me well for about 3 years now, but I must admit I'm keeping a eye out for alternatives since it seems to me the general quality of the distro is not rising.

I blame the extremely high number of packages in portage for this AND the fantazillion different archs they want to support.

Gentoo *NOT* RTFM Distro

[Danuvius]

In my experience SuSE and Debian are both considerably more "RTFM Distros" than Gentoo.

forums.gentoo.org is where I go if I am having trouble that cannot be solved by a preliminary web search. My questions are usually answered either within the hour or within a couple of days; and my problem is generally solved just as quickly.

Re:Gentoo *NOT* RTFM Distro

[mizhi]

You're both right.

Forums = Manual for Gentoo. If I get some bizarro portage error, that's my first stop. If someone hasn't encountered my problem before, that means a few hours of tinkering for me.

Never ceases to amaze me...

[MerlinTheWizard]

how Gentoo generates heat and passion. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Why waste outrageous amount of times explaining to the world that it's stupid and that its users are insane? In the time it took you guys who posted that kind of comments, you could have emerge'd and updated a Gentoo box. ;-)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What is the big deal about compilation?

[DeathPenguin]

>>Why is everyone forgetting that NOTHING is stopping you from installing an RPM. Just "inject" that version number of your installed RPM into Portage and it knows you have it. Nothing is stopping you from installing something manually, without using portage.

I personally like to build my own kernels from scratch without the patches the Gentoo-ized kernels include. To do this I would "inject" as you suggested. Injecting a package is obsolete now, and you should instead place the package name in /etc/portage/profile/packages.provided or some such (I'm not on my Gentoo box now).

I also had a similar experience with RPMs and breaking things. Most distros seem to have that straightened out these days, but RPM hell was still a huge problem back when I switched to Gentoo. Gentoo's Portage generally takes care of things like dependencies exceptionally well. USE flags are also handy for compiling things like MPlayer.

can't believe no one has mentioned this.

[phoric]

In Soviet Russia, Gentoo compiles YOU!

Um, not insightful: Wrong.

[oldosadmin]

This is a new *profile* version. Profile versions change things. Like default packages (one of the 2004 releases changed "x-window-system" to be xorg-x11 by default, for example).

New profiles mean more than just installers.

No release notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for Reiser4 FS support on Amd64, but I can't find the release notes... :'( Anyone know if it's working yet?

Remember this ...

[DVega]

Gentoo is not STABLE. Gentoo is about configurability, speed, latests/greatest packages; but not stability. If you need a stable system you should look to another distro.

Personally I use Gentoo on my home machine, and Debian "stable" (with a few backports) for the servers I admin.

Re:that's the learning? Try slack

[Mr. Underbridge]

In Gentoo, you emerge each package, and hand configure each .config as necessary.. it teaches you about the interaction of programs, and most of all, how to cleanly get a system up and running.

What portion of Gentoo users, I wonder, actually do that?

What about a DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a nice shiny DVD-burner and lots of empty DVD's. It would be nice to be able to download a DVD of Gentoo 2005.0 that contains all package cd's, or maybe one with all architectures (it would be cool, but maybe not as useful).
Hopefully this is the year where all linux distributions offer an DVD alternative.

Gentoo p.u.

[zixor]

My most memorable experience with Gentoo was leaving my Duron 800 (with MSI motherboard) compiling the latest greatest Mozilla over a weekend in the heat of summer (29+ celsius outside, with AC turned off by building maintenance during weekends) and having the mobo's capacitors blow and spew their gooey liquid centers all over. Luckily the drive survived. and my use flags were so vague about architectures that sticking the drive in a P3-600 worked just fine. Still, it kinda put me off the "compile every damned app and the kitchen sink" mentality for good ...

tracker issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure you can have redundancy with bittorrent. With mirrors you can have a list of mirrors and keep trying until you find one that works. With Bittorrent you have ONE tracker that coordinates all traffic.

What happens when the tracker goes down? No more updates! Have multiple trackers? You lose all of the benefits of a tracker by splitting the users.

Besides! There are almost always a few mirrors that consistently give me maximum bandwidth. What is the point of creating extra tracker overhead? It's not like you commonly have people emerge the exact same programs all at once. Also, many packages are quite small. Bittorrent is effective only with larger files.

In summary, Bittorrent is not a "magic pill" that makes downloads go faster. It merely makes LARGE downloads more efficient. Emerge packages aren't large, so they don't use Bittorrent. Installation ISOs are large, so they do use Bittorrent. Right tools for the right job. Right?

gentoo sucks, or maybe you dont know how to use it

[zbik]

there's no one block of text that says "IMPORTANT STUFF CHANGED".

True, this is why the good Lord gave us scripts. You'll find enotice on the front page of the Gentoo script repository. Other posters have suggested alternatives to etc-update. You may not have known there is a nice Apache2 HOWTO for Gentoo. And I bet if you ask nicely on Gentoo Forums, someone will tell you how to protect your bind.conf.

I often see people fuming "$DISTRO sucks 'cause it doesn't do $x!" when maybe they should ask "How can I do $x with $DISTRO?"

PS, Putting ~x86 in make.conf on a production server means you really are a masochist and get off on this kind of thing anyway :)

Redhat 9 had raid autodetect ..gentoo still doesn'

[t35t0r]

RH9 had raid array autodetect built into the livecd, does gentoo 2005.0 have this in the universal x86 livecd? 2004.3 didn't ..can you guys actually put something on the cd that is useful for people in production environments running 500g RAID5's and who want to upgrade their server?

Re:Meanwhile

[agraupe]

Well, actually, I think the problem is that the CD drive, or some other necessary part, is not fast enough for that.

Damn it, I am still waiting for my New CD

[Anonymous Coward]

to arrive, and a hat too.

Re:Redhat 9 had raid autodetect ..gentoo still doe

[Anonymous Coward]

*500G Raid5!!*

It's a poor thing that you had to create a 500G raid5 array just to get enough storage space as I'm currently building a system with (8) 400G Seagate drives and still complaining about not having enough space.

Re:"Iso's"

[Armadni General]

_> -ance is sexier. Whoa, though. I didn't know that. Though I would argue that there is a difference between a small error where both resulting terms would be pronounced, and would mean, exactly the same, and an apostrophe error which would completely change the meaning of the statement.

Re:"Iso's"

[dauthur]

What I think is priceless is that while you don't hide shamelessly behind the Post Anonymously checkbox, he does... and he's the attack'r!