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Graphical Gentoo Installer In The Works
JonLatane writes "Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain. And because of its "install system" (if it can be called that), it's notorious for scaring off potential users before they even get to try it. Well, that's all going to change, because there is a graphical Gentoo installer in the works. It can run with a dialog frontend that bears a striking similarity to Ubuntu, or for faster systems a GTK+ frontend is available."
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Won't Gentoo lose all of it's coolness factor if anybody who can click a mouse can install it?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
There's already a project out there with a graphical installer for Gentoo...Vidalinux. I've not had much exposure to it, but i've heard good things. They ported the anaconda installer and stuck in it there.
I wonder how this graphical installer for Gentoo will compare.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
If you want a binary-based, Gentoo-based distribution with Desktop users in mind (but, being Gentoo based, really cool for servers), check out UTUTO-e, specially the XS (2005.0) version, downloadable from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu+linux-distros/ututo-e/ or from their main site, at https://e.ututo.org.ar (spanish and english available).
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
Some of the things I learned:
1. My time is better spent doing things other than compiling basic system utilities.
2. My optimized Gentoo system does not run faster enough to make up for the time lost building it from source.
3. Turns out there was nothing to learn from installing Gentoo from stage 1. I already knew what goes into a system at the most basic level, but I got this from 10+ years of Unix/Linux experience, before I ever saw Gentoo.
Going to try MEPIS now. 'Sposed to be easy and painless.
Edith Keeler Must Die
You need to learn the difference between a troll and a fanboy.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
No... You don't need those requirements... Distcc helps nicely and can cut the compile time for a base system by one third... Sometimes to get the biggest gain in anything you have to be willing to do a little work (in this case - research).
You don't have to compile anything with gentoo to get up and running if you RTFM and download the packages cd along with your install image. You can have a system up and running in a few hours. Then if you wish you can rebuild all your packages over a weekend while you are out fishing.
Insert clever sig (here)
I purposely designed the GTK frontend to not be dumbed down. The purpose of the installer is not to make Gentoo easier to install but faster. Please direct all complaints to /dev/null.
Or do a Stage 3/GRP install and cut out the compile time almost completely.
I think most people are "scared off" because they don't have the 4 GHz computer with a gig of RAM required to compile the entire system under a couple days
This is just as bad as the intro. I run Gentoo, and compiling most apps is very reasonable. There are a few packages that DO take a LONG time (KDE and OpenOffice.org are commonly the worst offenders). However, for somebody who runs a light desktop like I do (Fluxbox) it's perfectly fine. Additionally, many packages are available in precompiled binary packages to speed this process up. I know a few people that compile everything except OO.o, for example.
Just my $0.02.
You can take any distro and compile whatever you want and turn it into something "notorious for its speed" by compiling things for your system.
No, you cannot. First of all, almost all modern distributions are pretty well optimized for the target hardware. The CMOV instruction (which separates i686 binaries from i586) doesn't give you a huge speed boost, but you can optimize your instructions for i686 whilst still keeping the binaries i386 compatible. If you really want to see a speedup, try turning off all of the services in a stock fedora or debian installation. You'll reach pretty comparable speeds that way.
That being said, "lighter" distros like crux, slack, and lfs are much easier to admin because they're kept simple. The overhead in complexity gui config tools seem to bring is ridiculous.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Then you didn't configure correctly. The main optimizations in Gentoo come from compiling code specifically for your setup. For example, I know that I don't really care about Gnome support, since I'm a KDE user. I can tell Gentoo this, and it will configure and compile accordingly, i.e. leaving out support for Gnome, and therefore making the final binary smaller, or at least hook into fewer libraries.
Ditto for any number of different flags: arts, dvd+rw, theora, qt, kde, cups, whatever...
The end result is that your binaries tend to be smaller (and therefore faster loading) because they aren't genercially compiled to run everywhere, and don't have hooks into all the KDE and all the Gnome libraries, for example.
This applies even more if you remove GUI support for certain programs by setting the flag "-X" - this will provide a very clean, small compile meant for the command line only. This is useful for someone like me who does most everything at the command line, except surf the web (I like pretty pictures).
As far as "wasting time", I'm constantly amazed that people complain about this. Gentoo COMES with a CD that is their reference snapshot, and is all binary. You can be up and running with VERY little compilation, and then just run emerge in the background (either using at Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] term, or even in an xterm, although for X related stuff, it's nice to be able to quit X and know your compile is still going). So, you run pre-compiled binaries for a couple of days while you emerge, quit X, fire it back up, and you're running under your newly custom-compiled setup. I've done this on 7 computers, including a P3 700, Pentium M 1400, Athlon XP 1700+ and an Athlon64 3000+, with RAM going from 256 MB to 1GB. It's never been a problem, and in all cases, I've been up and running in a couple of hours.
In some benchmarks (such as the one povray uses), gentoo systems are often near the top. In this respect, it isn't unearned. But this doesn't mean every app on the system has been made measurably quicker & that some ricers aren't using ridiculous CFLAGS which do more harm than good.If anyone can find this article, please post a link.
While I've certainly seen poor benchmarks from some systems, the default CFLAGS are '-O2 -pipe'. This is typical of other distributions & is NOT "overagressive."
Users can certainly choose their own CFLAGS, which can lead to better or worse performance than the default CFLAGS. This kind of makes benchmarking a joke: The particular combination used in a particular article will not be representative of all gentoo installations.
I dub you Sir Troll.
To be honest, i don't recommend Gentoo for most users, just ones with special needs. For example:
At local high schools there have been major budget cuts, so we need to squeeze out as much as possible from our machines. I have a p3 (with crappy hardware) running apache, mysql, samba dhcp, netboot (for system repairs), proxy + filtering, and some other junk i can't remember. Now i used to have redhat running this server, but it was laggy, so i slapped on gentoo and performance is better - i know cuz i timed the logins, page loads, etc.
Ok story #2
I also used to run www.archspace.org and performance was a serious issue. Using optimization flags significantly increase performance - again i used benchmarks. Optimizations do go a long way on high demand servers - trust me.
With that said, I wouldn't recomend my grandma using gentoo, mainly cuz its not user friendly. Lack of a graphical installer certainly scares people away, along with source installs. SO ya its not meant for most people - but don't go and say something like optmization flags do nada. -march makes a definate impact. Now i don't go messing around with junk like -funroll-loops and other fine detailed things, cuz in those instances, i found little performance was increased. (funroll loops made the program bigger, so bleh).
The other nice thing about gentoo is the minimalistic attitude. THis is a double edged sword. Personally its great, i like to choose what gets installed, "screw xine, i want mplayer dammit!" etc.. Lastly rpms rather suck (yes debian pwnz in this area)
The problem, however, is that you need to look at one of the most basic rules for optimization: Determine what needs to be optimized, *then* optimize. Otherwise, you waste your time.
Compiling for modern processors with good optimization flags, for example, *does* give big performance boosts. However, most applications are not CPU hogs - in fact, few are. Well, what about small binary sizes? Most disk performance issues are from latency, not speed in reading consecutive blocks (and most binaries don't get big enough for the length of the read to become a dominating factor, because they wisely use shared libraries). We can't forget the effects disk caching. And, of course, there's pesky things that optimization just won't help you with, like the fact that compiling out modules generally doesn't make much of an impact on the memory footprint, core execution speed, or hardware delays.
Overall, I'd expect performance increases in Gentoo, but on average very small ones. If you're running some computational flow dynamics program, build it from source; otherwise, I wouldn't be too concerned.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
Kind of. It's called Genkernel, and is in the installation docs. ;)
I put Gentoo on a VIA based system with 32M of ram. It was the perfect distro b/c I was able to put the very minimal amount of software on it with Cyrix specific optimizations--something no other distro could offer.
Took a while to build, but what do I care.
I could handle emerge. What I couldn't handle was all the constant re-configuring of all the little /etc files.
/etc files based on silly questions that it asks me, and then puts helpful comments in the file so that should I need to change it later, I can.
That's why I use debian. Debian makes the
Config tools, please.
Other than that, I was able to get the hang of Gentoo.
Because if I remember correctly, Linux was born in '93
You don't remember correctly. Linux was born in '91.
Vidalinux is a gentoo-like system but the installation process is that of Fedora's with the usage of RedHat's anaconda installer. It also uses Portage as it's package manager and I've heard many impressed with it, here is a review stating that Vidalinux is Gentoo done right. Here is the review of Vidalinux and you can compare it with a review of Gentoo
- Teja
A weekend? With the installer, you can do a 10 minute (hardware permitting) install using a stage3 and the LiveCD's kernel/initrd/modules. And that was in vmware...
But using the MARCH and MCPU flags for my K6 most *certainly* make it run faster than stock Mandrake or Slackware. Only took a day to compile and works much better.
Installing Gentoo can teach you about partitions, some system services, and bootloaders, among other things. People say "but you're just copying commands verbatim!", but the text actually does give you useful information. For example:Watching GCC output scroll by won't teach you a damn thing, but reading the installation guide will.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Scroll down. "Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain," is already there.
Unfortunately when it comes to gentoo and the hype, everyone talks about the speed and optimisations. Wethere there is any truth behind that or not is for each user to determine on their own.
Gentoo does run faster than SOME other distros, but this is more due to the minimalistic installation approach. You choose what you want on your system and which services you run in the background. Unlike other distros which by default have tons of services running which the average user doesnt have much use for.
I fell the best thing about Gentoo is Portage and USE flags.
Forget the compiler optimisations. Its the useflags that really make gentoo stand above the rest.
Another advantage to gentoo being source based is, you dont have to wait and hunt down a distro specific rpm file.
You can use the author's original source package. An ebuild is nothing more than a simple script which automates the config,compile&install process. Whereby the USE flags serve to pass options to the config process before the compile.
People complain about the compile times, but I got to say, its really not that bad. 80% of all the apps that you use are small anyways, and dont take long to compile. The really huge ones, e.g. gnome,kde, openoffice, have binary alternatives. Setting up the base system doesnt have to take long either if you use a stage3 GRP install. At least to get a system up and running. You can then still compile the crap out of everything if you so desire, while the system is running.
Another thing which I love about Gentoo is how it has a seamless upgrade procedure. You dont have to wait for a new distro release, in fact once you've already installed your system its pointless to do so. Just upgrade your packages regularly and you will be up to date.
I gott say, after using gentoo for a while, it does seem kinda strange when every distro out there announces loudly when a new version is out, and which versions of gnome and kde or other packages this distro release contains.
"Now with Gnome 2.x.x!...."
"New and improved KDE!"
With gentoo you get new versions as soon as they hit portage. Doesnt matter if its a monday, the first of the month, the 6th month of the year, or one week from the apocalypse.
Another thing which people also forget to mention is gentoo's community and forums. Pretty much every issue I've had with linux, I've been able to solve with help of the community and forums.
Even though the install procedure might not be newbie friendly, the community certainly is.
In the end all of that doesnt really matter though. What really matters in the end is wether a distro works for you or not. In my case, gentoo simply works for me. Its the ONLY distro where I have managed to get everything on my laptop working. Winmodem, ACPI with Suspend to Disk, working 3D accelaration on a SIS630, irda, wireless, etc.
How is what he said blatantly false, Oh modded insightful troll? I have mod points but would rather post a counter to your absurd comment.
That constant you refer to does exist, but has nothing to do with compiler optimization. Were you asleep in CS101 or do you enjoy misrepresentation? DING DING DING, WAKE UP.
Two O(n^2) algorithms are only the same speed for sufficiently large data sets such that the (presumed different) constant has negligible effect. For sufficiently small data sets an O(n^n) algorithm may be faster than an O(1), it just depends on the value of the constant. Again, this has nothing to do with compiler optimization -- it doesn't have the option to "use small data sets" or to select an algorithm that is most efficient for a particular data set.
Secondly, where did you get the idea that compiler optimizations give speed increases of "two, three, or four times faster". Compilers *do* have some tricks (e.g., loop unrolling), but outside of forced examples you are not going to get speedups like you imply for large code sets like KDE and Gnome.
Thirdly, do you really think no other distro enables optimization? It may not be "optimized" for "your hardware" but, get over it, "your hardware" isn't somehow magically different than all the other hardware for your platform (x86, PPC, whatever).
So stating unrelated truisms (not getting "speedups related to a function of the data size") is all it takes to get modded insightful? Bah!
I use Win2k with Gentoo, and it works fine. Any problems you'll have will be with grub. That aside, keep in mind that if you have to do a re-install of Win2k, it'll wack your boot sector and you'll have to install grub again.
SuSE is what (finally really) got me onto linux, but I was rather annoyed with it. Deliberatly crippling kaffiene so that it couldn't play DVD's was a big annoyance, and the other major issue was that every update of KDE I tried majorly messed stuff up. The main advice I'd give you is to keep a copy of your xorg.conf somewhere. xorgcfg makes it much easier than it used to be, but it'll eliminate many of your fustrations when setting up X by having the old one handy.
There's a handy little package called cfg-update that does 90% of the updates automatically for you (e.g., if only comments have changed, it'll just update without prompting you), and makes it easier to do the other 10%. I'd go crazy without it. It really should be the default updater.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.