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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."
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?
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
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
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?
please check here.
just sub 2004.3 for 2005.0.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
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.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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
Please help metamoderate.
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.
: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.
/etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Try using dispatch-conf instead of etc-update. This does exactly what you're suggesting.