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

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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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)

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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.