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."

Comments

I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[Anonymous Coward]

I mod this story (Score:-1, Troll). "Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed." What? Because it's source-based? What's the disribution I'm using right now based off of, pixie dust?

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, and if you DO have a 4 GHz computer, a few -O3 and -funroll-loops optimizations aren't going to amount to much.

Gentoo is a really nice distro if you have the system for it, but stop with the silly arguments. A few optimizations aren't going to amount to much, and if you want to learn how to put a distro together read the LFS book.

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[Anonymous Coward]

Distro flamewars = retarded. Use what you like. :p

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[molnarcs]

And because it is notorius for its userbase. Well, some of it of course, but unfortunately they are very vocal.

I remember this guy (one of the optimization freaks) that tried to convince folks that you need to rebuild the toolchain three times to get it properly optimized - and there was no way to convince him that what he sais is nonsense.

Then I was reading freebsd-question mailing list, and there was this fellow who wanted to install freebsd the gentoo way. People were genuinly bewildered - not because they had anything against gentoo, but because they didn't know how it works, so they had him explaining it. He basically said that he wants everything built from source optimized and all from the ground up. They told him to install the OS and then rebuild everything. He said no no no, he wants to build the kernel before installing, he wants to build the toolchain before installing and so on. The idea was so ... well, how shall I put it ... strange, that poor folks at first thought that they don't understand the bloke properly. And if you come to think of it: the guy instead of wanting to have a sytem with basic functionality (xfree, a wm, a browser, networking, email, whatnot) up and running in ten minutes, and then rebuilding everything from source in the background (while posting gentoo roxorz messages on ./) he wanted to have an unusable system for hours if not half a day - for what reason?

I was always stuck by the sheer senselessness of the install procedure (even starting from stage3) - it seems to me that gentoo has it backwards: instead of installing the damn thing and have the ability to read your emails in 10 minutes while having the choice to optimize when it suits you, you are (or you were, I'm not aware of the current status) forced to fumble with the system for hours just to get it installed.

Don't tell me this helps newbies understand linux better. It doesn't. I had this friend who came from a brief mandrake background to gentoo (I recommended it, for he wanted linux, and I thought gentoo must be cool because of portage - since then I changed my opinion seeing the deficiencies of portage like skipfirst kinda hacks, worldfile instead of proper reverse dependency lookup, useflags and its interdependency hell, etc.). He spent a day installing gentoo (I know, I know, it takes you only a few hours, but for a complete noob, it was a day) than almost a week configuring it (and rebuilding kde when it turned out that nspluginviewer is missing because he forgot a useflag). At the end of it, he was no closer to understanding how linux (or generally a unix-like operating system) works. He just followed the documentation, and succeeded, b/c the doc. is good. I had to explain the most basic things (like file permissions) after he had a more or less (it must have been another useflag that prevented kpdf from opening pdf files) working system up and running!

The problem with this is that I think this senseless install procedure might give some users the (false) sense that, yes, I did it, I built a linux manually - I must be geek. These users, as they build and rebuild their system from day to day, trying out more and more compilation options will grow into those arrogant fanboys who can't resist posting a "yeah baby, I will emerge whatever today, gentoo is so cool" kinda messages in all news regardless of how related or unrelated that is to the topic at hand. Oh yeah, and they will they you to rebuild your tool chain at least 3 times to make sure its properly optimized.

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[DavidTC]

What are you talking, using more CPU but running faster? What the heck does that mean?

The measure of how much CPU a program uses is how much time the processor spends on it. Hence, all other things being equal, something that runs faster has to use less CPU.

Now, there are other things that affect performance, like speed in pulling it off the disk, but you said 'code execution' would be faster, which is just crazy talk.

Unless you're trying to make some point about how much of the CPU is in use at a certain time. Yes, optimizing for a certain processor does mean that branches and caches and whatnot will be optimized for that process, but there's no way you can be seeing that unless you're running programs through some sort of CPU simulator step-by-step. And I don't know what the point of talking about that would be...it's a good thing.

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[donscarletti]

Yes, that article will do a lot to reinforce the stereotypes about gentoo users. As a two year gentoo veteran, I had a chuckle at that headline. I have visited funroll-loops.org multiple times and and probably am more amused by many of the quotes there than those who have not used gentoo extensively, since I have seen just how silly a good amount of my fellow users are.

Despite the amusement value, I am mildly annoyed at a little hypocrisy in that site. Gentoo users are being portrayed as closed minded, elitist gits by them. The site seems to suggest that gentoo users have a strong belief that they are far superior to others because of the distribution that they use. This is sadly often true in many Gentoo users I have met, however this is not universal. Some gentoo users do not believe their distro is the silver bullet, a sign of manhood or even a badge of honour. A surprising number of Gentoo users, myself included, simply use it because we find it to be a pleasant and productive experience, yet we seem to be hit with this image of the proud and ignorant 13 year old who doesn't really know why he is using gentoo other than it is 1337 time and time again as the "gentoo user". According to netcraft, Funroll-loops runs Debian and I'm not judging them for that; in fact I run a debian based server down the hall in the lounge room and I am very satisfied with it. Despite this, I feel like I am being judged for my choice of software by that website, they are smearing me by implication and they have the gall to call my demographic the elitist one?

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[Afrosheen]

"check out UTUTO-e"

Man, who the fuck is naming distros these days? Did I miss the LSD train or what? First gentoo...which as we all know is some kind of crystal meth fueled penguin, but still sounds weird. Then there's ubuntu..which makes you feel strange even mentioning it. Worse still is kubuntu, now there's mandriva after the perfectly reasonable sounding Mandrake merged with connectiva. And try telling someone about soo-suh and having to spell it every_single_time.

People, if you want your distro taken seriously, name it something a little less retarded. Try something manly like 2x4 Linux or Nitroglycerin Linux. Even Greasemonkey sounds better than ututo-e.

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[molnarcs]

Well, all depends on your motivation - do you want to learn how a unix-like OS works or not? Some want just a quick replacement for windows. You did not learn linux because of gentoo, you learned it because you had the motivation and curiousity to learn it :)

There are pros and cons against both portage and apt. Portage last time I tried it had no proper reverse dependency lookup, but used something like a worldfile as a workaround. As a result, sometimes it was really hard to completely remove a package (all its files and installed libs). APT doesn't have that problem, however, dependencies are fixed. Portage handles dependencies more flexibly, that's a +. However, it does it in an unnecessarily complex way: useflags. Without configuration portage is brain dead (installing xfree as a dependency of mc?). However, to configure it properly, you have to know the interdependencies of 300+ useflags. I think a much better approach is the original ports, where you have to remember one thing: if you don't want to accept the defaults (which are more sane than with portage), you can check the makefile for additional options. Not only that, but before a port is built, you can choose additional dependencies from a menu. Your choice will be saved, and next time you upgrade, it will be remembered (ie. no user interaction is needed) See this for example.

What I don't really understand is why they didn't clone the damn thing (I mean ports) instead of inventing their hodge-podge of a ports system. They would have the best of both worlds (source based and debians apt). I mean the package management of freebsd doesn't care about the origin of the package. In fact, you can create binary packages from an installed port with one simple command: pkg_create -b pkgname. And that's not a simple binary - it has all the functionality of a .deb package: it knows of the dependencies, and if you move it to another machine, it would fetch its dependencies from either the place you specify or from the net. pkg_add -r mplayer has exactly the same functionality that apt-get install mplayer has. Same thing with deinstallation.

The linux distribution of my dreams would be slackware with ports (the original one, without modification)! I would love that!

Re:I Dub Thee, "Sir Troll"

[Afrosheen]

Just for that, you get to install Sparkle Pants Fandango Linux. Also, in case you didn't notice, my post was kinda tongue-in-cheek, but you have to agree that names are getting ridiculous these days.

Notorious for its speed?!?

[spun]

Is that its installation speed, which is notoriously slow, or the speed at which it runs? Any system that takes a weekend to install just HAS to be faster, right?

Re:Notorious for its speed?!?

[minginqunt]

Also, it may be "notorious" for being easy to maintain. However, this just isn't the case.

Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.

That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.

And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.

I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool. Wrong. It's just a tossing nightmare!

This weekend, I'm returning mr rig to the warm, welcoming, bosomy folds of a certain Hoary Hedgehog.

Re:Notorious for its speed?!?

[Joseph Vigneau]

Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.

That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.


The only time this has ever happened to me on four Gentoo machines was when I did

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -u foo

which is a Bad Thing to Do.


And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.


emerge mozilla-firefox-bin is pretty quick.


I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool.

That's not in the documentation; you've got to work that out on your own.

Re:Notorious for its speed?!?

[pilot1]

Probably because emerge -u system is the wrong way to do it.
Try emerge -uD system.

Boring correction...

[Mr. Spontaneous]

It's not the 'emerge system', its portage.

Also I would only recommend the graphical installer for people who have used gentoo before, because there's nothing like doing a stage 1 install to get you acquainted with your system and linux in general.

Re:Boring correction...

[wolf31o2]

This is something that really pisses me off. As a Gentoo developer and user, I can't stand seeing these fanboys spouting this utter crap.

Watching GCC output scroll by will not teach you a damn thing about Linux. Doing a stage1 installation teaches you exactly two things:

/usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh
emerge -e system

Nothing else.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is completely full of crap. Also, there is no difference in a system compiled from stage1, and a system built using a stage3 tarball and GRP, then customized and recompiled. The only difference is that I can get a system up and running in an hour or so (only because of the kernel compile) and then I can use my system while I recompile with my specified USE flags, while the "stage1 is so 1337" asshats are still staring at a console of scrolling text.

While I definitely think that the Gentoo community is one of its greatest assets, I also firmly believe that these vocal minority of fanboys are one of its greatest liabilities.

But what about the 1337 Gentoo users?

[jZnat]

What about my bragging rights for being able to install Gentoo using only a bash shell and minimal *nix tools? What about the learning experience from installing it this way? The docs are simple enough to follow...

Feh @ GUI

Re:But what about the 1337 Gentoo users?

[Joseph Vigneau]

It doesn't look like this new installer will prevent you from doing that. Because we all know "bragging rights" is what it's all about.

Re:But what about the 1337 Gentoo users?

[poofyhairguy82]

What about my bragging rights for being able to install Gentoo using only a bash shell and minimal *nix tools?

Don't you see...that the best part. Gentoo users will no longer think they are special because they can follow directions and stand a large amount of pain to put together an OS. Now Gentoo can stand on its real merits.

A step in the right direction, but...

[DeathPenguin]

If they include this in the official release, than they should also include some other graphical stuff such as Porthole to manage Portage graphically. It doesn't do much good to help a newbie through the install process graphically and then expect them to use a Portage from the command line.

Still, it's a good thing. Even people who have been doing Linux-related stuff for a while can miss or screw up some steps in Gentoo installation. Anything that can simplify the process should be welcomed.

gentoo - a bit overhyped?

[sloth jr]

"because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed" - so what, no other distribution uses source to compile its distro?

Re:It's notorious for its speed

[zr-rifle]

>its optimizations

You probably mean whos optimizations. Gentoo doesn't offer , or better suggest, any specific cflags out of the box for stage 1 installs. It's up to the user.Stage 2 and stage 3 installs come with very safe cflags for gcc, such as "-O2 -pipe", but with a "-march=foo_processor" that's hardly over aggressive.

So what you're referring to is probably the age old debate on whether, say, precompiled binaries offered by the other distros are slower than ad-hoc binaries compiled by the portage user. I'll pass it on to someone who is more tech-savvy, but that's not a real concern for me. I use gentoo for it's up to date repository, awesome customization features, great concern for security and the clear and concise documentation. All these features are time-savers in their own.

"Elite" Gentoo users!?

[Laebshade]

I was going to mod you down for acting a bit like a troll, but I'll reply instead.

The first sentence was arrogant. While it does give me a certain amount a pride to be able to do something most people can't, I don't flaunt it, simply because there are a billion other things people can do better than me (like stay in shape).

The second sentence is insightful. I've gone through several Gentoo installs; it has taken me 4 tries to get a good Gentoo install on my server (i.e., when I reboot the system doesn't fail). Fortunately, after I finished the third, I was able to get Gentoo running on my desktop, too. To say it was a learning experience is a definite understatement; it changed the whole way I think about computers. Above all, what has helped me most in installing Gentoo is having 2 PCs and a kvm switch.

The third sentence is an opinion. The docs do not work for every setup; in fact, they are a guideline, and will absolutely work for most setups.

Configuration--not Compilation--is the problem.

[MarkWPiper]

Compiling is always the joke, but there are much more significant barriers to adoption. First let me say that I believe Gentoo is the most powerful distribution available. However, a graphical installer still does not address what I believe are the most difficult aspects of configuring Gentoo.

For example, where in the documentation does it mention starting /etc/init.d/famd at boot? (This will improve KDE's file monitoring responsiveness.) Does a user know to chmod his RTC? How to umask a vfat partition so that users can access it? How to setup multiple sound cards? How to set up your application sound server settings? How to enable the kernel laptop mode? How to setup power management runlevels? Which kernel modules need to be added to modules.autoload? How to make fonts appear cleanly and consistently?

A second major problem with Gentoo is the uncontrolled proliferation of USE flags. The vast majority of flags are for individual packages. A new user would be likely to completely miss the importance of configuring many of the higher level use flags.

Unfortunately Gentoo is plagued by naive users who believe that--just because they have a Gentoo system that boots--they are somehow empowered. The largest reason they feel that way is because their system is 'optimized' for their hardware. The truth is an ignorant user's CFLAGS are more likely to hinder his system's performance.

Gentoo is an incredible distribution; however, it has a long way to go in terms of usability. While I am excited at the prospect of a graphical installer, I hope that these larger issues can also be addressed. These issues are what make Linux difficult, and fun.

Talking of things graphical

[leathered]

Gentoo, the ultimate geek distro and it still hasn't got its own /. icon.

I Dub Thee too, "Sir Troll"

[repvik]

Yeah, you're as much trolling as the story ;)

If you've ever tried comparing KDE or Gnome from Slackware/RedHat/Debian with Gentoo, you will see that the optimizations are very effective. I've used Slack,RH/FC, Deb, LFS and Gentoo. It takes me less than half the time to open Mozilla on gentoo. I like that.

Re:I Dub Thee too, "Sir Troll"

[diegocgteleline.es]

If you've ever tried comparing KDE or Gnome from Slackware/RedHat/Debian with Gentoo, you will see that the optimizations are very effective. I've used Slack,RH/FC, Deb, LFS and Gentoo. It takes me less than half the time to open Mozilla on gentoo. I like that.

I'm sorry to say this to you, but real performance doesn't come from microoptimizations, but from the algorithms and data structures. I don't understand what on earth people smokes these days to think that a compiler switch is going to make gnome, kde, mozilla and openoffice suddenly less bloated and faster, and convert O(N^N) algorithms in O(1) or something.

Mozilla is slow in gentoo, and is slow in other distros because it is the same damned code. If it's really faster (and give me numbers, not sensations, it's very easy to make people think something is faster by just telling him its faster. Quoting Linus: "If we can't measure it, it doesn't exist") I will be pleased to analyze for you what it's making it faster - prelink, who knows.

Usually, only asm paths hand-coded by programmers in the code really benefit from microoptimizations. Forget about most of the rest.

Re:I Dub Thee too, "Sir Troll"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry to say this to you, but real performance doesn't come from microoptimizations, but from the algorithms and data structures. I don't understand what on earth people smokes these days to think that a compiler switch is going to make gnome, kde, mozilla and openoffice suddenly less bloated and faster, and convert O(N^N) algorithms in O(1) or something.

Blantently false. Complexity analysis specifically carries an unspecified constant multiple. It is this constant multiple that optimizations tweak. You can get code that runs two, three, or four times faster with optimizations on the same algorithm. What you won't get are speedups related to a function of the data size.

In the case of gcc version 4, expect a significant constant time speedup for C++ code like, for instance, KDE and Gnome. I bet gentoo users will have gcc 4 before most other distros.

Re:I learned very important things from Gentoo

[bcd]

1. My time is better spent doing things other than compiling basic system utilities.

Gentoo does not force users to sit in front of their computers during upgrades, or force you into single-tasking mode. Plus you don't have to upgrade anything until you want to.

2. My optimized Gentoo system does not run faster enough to make up for the time lost building it from source.

It seems most people, myself included, seem to love Gentoo more for the package management than raw CPU speed. I've never been obsessed with speed enough to measure it, so I couldn't say if it's faster or not.

3. Turns out there was nothing to learn from installing Gentoo from stage 1...

So you learned that there was nothing to learn. That's deep :)

But I agree with you. As I see it, Gentoo forces newbies to confront all the dirty details of the shell, the compiler, etc. from the get-go, which is a Good Thing, because you're probably going to need them eventually anyway.

The #1 thing I've learned from using Gentoo is how to use the lynx web browser to browse the forums when X is b0rked.

Idiots

[FxChiP]

Watch me get modded down for the sole reason that I like Gentoo and am sticking up for it. It seems to be the current Slashdot trend to stick by Microsoft, too, so I have no idea what's going on anymore.

First off, God, I love how you Gentoo-haters go on about "oh, it's not such a performance increase". While you're probably right, I tend to think it's doing something good for my system, an AMD Athlon 500 with 128 MB of RAM. Oh, and guess what? It only took a couple days of compilation. One weekend, basically. And you're complaining of it taking longer on your 2.6 GHz processor? Are you using a Celeron? ;) Anything runs at a pretty decent speed, actually, though I will be needing a new computer (the time keeps going off by a few hours, I think the battery is beginning to die).

"But... but.. the Gentoo evangelists are so elitist!" Are you seriously seeing a different community than I am? Granted, I haven't looked at the boards in a while, but I haven't seen any leetspeakers or arrogant assholes there. I am seeing quite a bit of that here, though. It also seems that a lot of the Gentoo haters use *gasp* Debian, another source-based distro (if I'm not mistaken). If they were companies in competition, I'd say Debian's got a lot to lose -- I've heard that their branches are really getting long in the tooth. I've also heard that their communities are quite elitist, but to be fair, I haven't been there myself. Debian may die. I know of few people who use it, but I know the people who do use it are kicking and screaming and denying that Debian is growing old. (By the way, I'm getting modded down for saying things about Debian, the average elitist Slashdotter's favorite distro)

All that said, the graphical installer for Gentoo is a good idea. If hardware could be autodetected and used correctly (by *ANY* distribution, not necessarily just Gentoo), it'd be even better. As it stands, there does need to be an easier way. One of the least favorite steps of the installation with me was changing the root password so I could use another terminal to read the install guide as I put in the instructions. Nowadays, I think I can do it blind, but I've never tried. That's how good portage is to me. I can type emerge -u world and know that nearly everything I've ever installed is being updated without me having to check in on it every second. My only problem with it being that sometimes it emerges stuff I *really* don't need (for example, it decided I needed gstreamer when there was no USE flag that specified it, so it was probably required by the new GNOME or something).

My speed problems are related to my computer being old. C'mon, an AMD Athlon 500? Whenever I can save up enough money, I'm going to try and get one of those yummy little Sager NP4750's (an AMD64 laptop), which I will run Linux on almost exclusively (I'll keep Windows around for the few applications that Wine can't take care of ;))

Flame and mod-down away, men!

Re:I learned very important things from Gentoo

[10Ghz]

1. My time is better spent doing things other than compiling basic system utilities.

Then do those other things. Typing in the commands to compile those "basic system utilities" takes few minutes at most. After that, it starts compiling and you can do whatever you want to do. You are in no shape or form required to sit on front of the computer while it compiles.

Usually when I have done Gentoo-installations, I have done it so that I start first major compile (bootstrap) in the evening. That way it can compile overnight. In the morning, I proceed to next major compile (xorg, KDE etc.) and go to work. That way, when I get back home from work, it has finished compiling, and it's more or less ready to be used. And I haven't lost any time waiting for it to compile (since I'm either sleeping or at work).

Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

What I like about Gentoo, and what is never mentioned, is that building the system from source allows me, not the people who built the packages, to choose the dependencies.

For example, if an application can be compiled with or without X11 support, I can install it on my headless server without also having to install X. And all it takes is a "-x11" in the /etc/make.conf USE flags. I do this all the time, with all sorts of flags, and consider it Gentoo's greatest strength. I don't run Gentoo just because it is a little faster than other distros; I run it because I have more choice about what gets installed on my computer.

--- SER