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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."
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.
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.
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.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
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 ;)
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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!
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).
No issues with HD. And don't worry, here is the quick howto, it's pretty straight forward.
Try using dispatch-conf instead of etc-update. This does exactly what you're suggesting.