Slashdot Mirror
10-Day Gentoo Installation Agony
lisah writes, "The Linux distribution Gentoo has a hard-core following, and with good reason. Gentoo is known for its configurability and choices. It's not known, however, for its easy installation. NewsForge's Joe Barr outlined his painful installation experience with Gentoo in an article that explains why, after 10 days, he finally gave up and went with Debian Etch. From the article: '[B]ack in the day, Gentoo users first had to rip the source code from the bone with their teeth before compiling and installing it, but now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it... I exaggerated the ease of installing Gentoo.' And: 'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'" Slashdot and NewsForge are both owned by OSTG.
What about the 100-day agony of using Gentoo?
My install experience with gentoo took less time than that and I spent 3 days figuring out that my motherboard was defective.
... if you're too dumb to follow the instructions.
If it's too strong, then you're too weak.
I don't want to learn!! It's hard to read the documentation!
This guy wants everything handed to him, and there are plenty of distros for that. What I don't understand is that he complains about having to RTFM, then he installs Debian. I could have sworn they were the worst offenders for telling noobs to RTFM.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
I've installed Gentoo several times now and have never had a problem when I FOLLOW the DIRECTIONS. I've known two other people, one professional Linux developer who could not get it installed because he refused to follow the directions step by step and another, the VP of marketing at my company, who installed it easily after following the directions.
It's really not complicated, just tedious.
I Do C++
After one day of partitioning my Windows hard drive, and an hour reading through the installation manual online, I managed to install Gentoo without any problems after figuring out what exactly to do. (Except for having to download ndiswrapper manually from Windows to port over to Gentoo, because my wireless router doesn't have any native Linux drivers for it, so I couldn't download any updates.) This was also the first time I installed any Linux distro.
Just because one guy can't install it successfully doesn't mean the entire thing is flawed.
Yes the installation can take a while depending on from which stage you want to do it but considering the documentation available it isn't that difficult. Maybe he should try openbsd next?
that no one yet has made an OS that is trivial to get working in a reasonable default configuration, and then infinitely (and relatively easily) tweakable.
(I'm sure someone will suggest that someone has...)
I BT'ed Xandros and had it running in a partition in about 15 minutes with 0.01% headache. Yes I can't run XGL (yet) but hey its a start.
This is the type of elitist attitude that will keep normal users from adopting Linux. The live CD is one of the best ways to prove Linux's viability as a Desktop OS. I can't count the number of Linux users I know that didn't first try it out on a live CD. "...to the point that anyone could do it...", isn't that the idea?
___________________
Free iPods? Its legit. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here!
Time to install Gentoo: 4 days.
Time to install CentOS: 4 hours.
Time to install Mandrake: Who would do that?
Sorry, when your defense of your distro install is "at least it's not Slackware, go back and RTFM" you've failed to be progressive. You insist that people have to know how to use your very specific tools when there are other distros who manage to automate the same processes, while maintaining configurability. Gentoo package management is ok (I think the etc rebuild is nice), but Gentoo in general sucks for beginners who will learn the wrong way to do things. Do it the Gentoo way or you're out of luck.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
This guy needs to install from the -bin packages if his computer is that slow or he can't stand to use it while it compiles. I never had a problem doing other things with my machine while it compiled...
I can't completely agree with the article. I never had any problems installing it. In fact, the installer was very kewl in that it came with ssh and screen. I even did COMPLETE remote installs for people before. I just call them up and tell them to put the CD in and boot up and set a password. After I'm done with it, call them back and tell them to take the CD out so I could reboot. Done. they were amazed.
:)
Install wasn't my problem.
Maintenance was my problem. As one of the commenters from the article pointed out, you were basically compiling an update constantly. It could be a minor bug fix but if it was in a big package like glibc, it would take a while to compile. You could go about your business, but you noticed it. The next day would bring about another big compile (say, X!?) and on and on it went. The endless cyle of updating. Some would argue that this was a feature of it. Sure, you're always getting the latest of everything. But it was a little bit of a PITA. The worst was when I went away, came back to a LOT of updates. Those updates (during the end of my time on gentoo) started to break things unfortunately. QA went downhill as the distro got too big.
Anyways, I still think gentoo is kewl, with its configurability. However, I've traded some of that control in for maintenance sanity and am currently on Ubuntu for my desktop and debian on my server.
Thanks to the gentoo community for the fun few years. #gentoo was always lively
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
I thought Gentoo had gone the way of BSD... had followed it down that lonely path to oblivion after Daniel Robbins left for Microsoft. This is a crazy crazy world.
2) A lot of the recent headaches (incuding #1) come from the fact that the project is just too damn big. It was a blast during that year or two when Gentoo usage skyrocketed, but the whole developer/support/user system hasn't scaled well.
3) *The* key to installing Gentoo -- unless you really know what you're doing, you need to install some other distro first and copy the xorg.conf, fstab and grub.conf files to use, or at least reference, for your Gentoo install. I can write an fstab by hand, if necessary, but there's no way I could do that for xorg.conf.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
And this from a guy whose installed every HP-UX since 6, multiple IRIXs and XENIXs, RedHats, Mandrake^H^H^Hivas. I don't for a minute subscribe to the "makes a man of ya" or even funnier, "learn Linux" crap. What I love it for, plain and simple, is Portage. I get a versionless, always close-up-to-date system, and I don't spend all my time on patch management. The crazy dependancies of RPM and HPs patches are just ugly memories.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If you want a "one size fits most" distro that installs out of the box, gentoo is NOT for you!
go install your Fedora or your Ubuntu and leave the hard-core pipe-hittin linux to the gentoos.
-DB
... To be honest, the main reasons I like Gentoo are because it's relatively free from political hassles (you want easy NVidia XOrg drivers? MP3 playback? Win32 Codecs? Go nuts!) and Portage is pretty good enough. Also, KDE is pretty well supported and USE variable settings can catch ./configure flags that I might forget if I were to not use ebuilds.
However, installation really is a bear, and AFAIK the ill-publicized alpha GUI installer is still not stable or reliable (don't want a crash while repartitioning a drive that has a WinXP part to wipe my table). Also, Ubuntu beats it on stuff that Works Right Out Of The Box(tm).
Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.
I went through the same thing a week ago and gave up when it wanted me to set each parameter for the kernel (the auto configure kernel failed)..there we like 500 options and I have no idea which ones my IBM T42 supports or not. It was hell. I think proceeded to run back to familiar Windows XP.. /me hides his head in shame
linux is great for servers, i wouldnt want anything else. however in general i think we still have a ways to go..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
That man is a stupid whiner.
I'm hoping I won't have much difficulty since I've been using Linux since 1993 and have done my fair share of source compiling, even back when half of the sources were hackjobs from HPUX or AIX or [insert UNIX here] that required you to get an alternate version of make or Imake in order to compile. Somewhere I still have a textfile on building modelines from scratch that I used to use to get fixed frequency monitors too display graphics modes with PC video cards.
But why the switch?
I've been using Fedora Core and before it Red Hat since version 5 (when I swtiched away from Slackware, for good, it would seem). I like it a lot. Fedora Core, in particular, is a no-brain-necessary sort of Linux. I haven't had to touch a configuration file in god only knows how long.
BUT... It's slow. I've had the inkling that it seemed to make my PIIIM 1.2GHz machine just a bit sluggish for my tastes. Gentoo has tempted me for several years as a result, but I always thought to myself: "Well, for a 10% increase in speed as the result of recompiling an entire system, it's probably not worth it..." I've always built my own kernel with proper CPU optimizations and just left it at that.
Then the other day I stumbled on to Swiftfox (do a Google search), which is basically a set of precompiled Linux Firefox builds for specific CPU architectures. I downloaded the PIII Mobile version and launched it in place of the Fedora Core 5 Firefox build.
WOW. The speed and interactivity benefits sure feel like more than 10%. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but my subjective impression is that Swiftfox is maybe 80% faster than the Fedora Core Firefox build on my personal machine (a Thinkpad T23). It's not just obvious, it's the sort of thing that will make me want to gnash my teeth if I have to go back to the standard Fedora Firefox build.
And now I'm thinking to myself: that's just one app. What about glibc? What about kdebase? X.org? Could I be missing out not on 10% speed gains, but on 40-50% speed gains, or more? I don't know, but I think maybe it's time I dust off my inner geek and find out, and Gentoo seems like the place to do it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Damn, the gentoo installation is really simple, stage 1 without documentation without errors on first boot! (75 install's total about now). Booting to single user mode, what is this morron thingking? just boot the cd and chroot it!
Free yourself use open source.
It refuses to install if the user isn't smart enough properly understand and
maintain the distribution.
Seriously, though, all he does is say that things failed to emerge properly
or that he was too scared to try to fix his X resolution. He says he's used
about a 1/2 dozen distros, which I guess is supposed to mean that he understands
this kind of thing.
But if he understood Linux and compilation of software, he'd be able to tell
why zlib wouldn't install, and he'd be able to figure out how to set his monitor
resolution without fucking up his computer. So, really, he's just a dumbshit
that likes to bitch about shit he clearly doesn't understand and has no willingness
to learn about.
Stop posting this crap. Or do you need the eyeballs to boost ad revenue?
sounds to me like: NewsForge's Joe Barr is a freckin noob. i can install gentoo in one day :). yup, one day. and that includes modular x, compiling my kernel, and starting kde (minimal).
Fifty-odd installs later, I never met a desktop, laptop or server that didn't love teh Gentoo.
The instructions have been tested by hundreds of thousands of people. They work.
you had me at #!
The Gentoo documentation is extensive and very useful.. RTFM. I can do a Gentoo install in about 2-3 hours, minus Xorg.
They have stage3 tarballs, which contain everything compiled already. You just have to partition the drive, install the stage tarball, compile the kernel, and install syslog, cron, and grub.
It's been a while since i've last used gentoo, but when I last did an install I had to boot off the livecd and do the stage1 2 or 3 install by hand from the shell. I assume this is still possible, I remember reading some time ago that a GUI installer was in the works.
:). now mod me down for posting AC (I don't have an account, I could make one I guess, but .. meh) or whatever.
Personally, I _enjoyed_ installing it by hand. It gives you both flexibility to change whatever you like and also the advantage of knowing exactly what the install process is doing, and learning a little something along the way.
I really hope that whatever the developers decide to do, or have done (I admit I haven't looked at gentoo to see what has changed, so pardon the ignorance), they will keep the option of installing from the shell. A slick gui would be nice I guess, on the side, but i'd much rather have to work my way through it. The gentoo documentation was always thorough and explained every step of the way. Infact Gentoo probably has some of the best documentation of any distro i've used. Combine that with IRC and forums, the only damn excuse you've got to bitch about the installation process is either a) not knowing anything about linux (you probably should be looking at another distro) or b) you're too damn lazy to RTFM or ask for help.
To me, gentoo is a distro made for the knowledge linux geek who wants to have as much flexibility as possible, while still providing some guidance. I especially liked how the ports system worked, it reminded me of using freebsd's ports collection, and it gave me options to optimize compiles, add patches or whatever I liked (or use alternative versions of a port).
The only reason I stopped using gentoo is that my linux machines are getting a bit old and compiles were quite slow. I use debian or ubuntu for most of my machines, because I like apt and binaries work just fine for most uses. That being said, Gentoo is still a very nice distro, and I hope it remains 'tedious', I enjoyed installing Gentoo and setting things up exactly the way I want them to be. Most distros will install a pile of crap you don't need, which is great if you have no idea what you are doing. But if you've been using linux for years and are familiar with all the common applications, you'll know what you want and what you don't want. It's that simple. If you don't like gentoo's install method, use something else.
well, i'm done ranting
Gentoo provides a useful way for linux powerusers to configure their packages without lowering themselves to level of downloading and matching up source tar balls, and compiling them in the right order. Process of package building and installation is flexible and anyone with mediocre shell scripting ability can do great things with gentoo. Gentoo after all is very personal distro. Everything you have installed on your computer is going to be be fit exactly the way you like it to be.
Clearly they guy doesn't have the true grit to do gentoo. Gentoo is *NOT* rolling your own distro. Have you ever tried compiling mplayer with all these extensions and libraries? You do need to know your own stuff, but you don't need to get mired down in downloading your own packages and matching them up and compiling them in the right order with right compiler, and have the right kernel branch with proper patchset.
So the guy has it installing, and thinks it is not fast enough, going to try to reinstall it? How clever is that. Yes gentoo is overly flexible, downside being that sometimes you really have to know how things suppose to work. Like configuring Xorg. I was in similar position, but I'll never give up flexibility of gentoo for power desktop.
Gentoo is a hobby, some tell and I agree.
Good night and Good luck,
2c.
I'm posting AC because I don't want to deal with the fanboyz and the blowhards who tell me to RTFM. Been there and done that.
Linux and BSD are both needlessly hard to install and configure -- even for basic tasks. Want a webserver with PHP/Apache/MySQL? Everyone says it's easy, but there's dozens of different ways to do it, some right and some wrong. Want to add SSL? Dozens more. Want secure e-mail with anti-spam and anti-virus? Triple the time for the install to do it the safest and most-secure way. The right way. I've spent weeks in endless cycles of configure,make, make test/check, make install. If anything goes wrong...back to Google and, gulp, the rudest user forums on the planet.
How do you do that on Windows or a Mac? Double-click. Wait. Configure a GUI. Sit back. Enjoy. Sure, you pay for the privilege, but the software actually works when the installer says it's finished.
Remember, the majority of us want solutions that work best. The tools work best on Linux/BSD/Unices, but they're such a pain in the ass.
I have a wife that I love to spend time with and a son who's growing up too fast. I don't want to fuck with your software all day -- I want solutions that work. I am willing to pay for your products (and I have), but I want my time to be worth something to the developer whose software is causing me discomfort.
I speak for the majority: guys (and gals) give us tools that actually work. Give us installation instructions that actually work. And, give us the opportunity to tell you that the software is actually broken and could be fixed to make our experiences a little easier. Stop screaming at us on support forums, stop telling us to read documentation that isn't there (or is so incomplete/out-of-date to be of no use), and stop making excuses for the cost of your software.
My $0.02 cents from a sysadmin that's been doing this for eight years on Solaris, Open/Free/NetBSD, Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Your turn...
Gentoo's a bit harder than other distros I've tried, for sure. But I'm not exactly a Linux expert and managed to get it installed. Heck, with nothing more than the default install instructions I managed to dual boot it with my Windows install. It did take a while my first time through - 3 days actually sounds about right, but I could do it again in probably a few hours, not counting compile time.
In fact my biggest difficulties installing Gentoo are pretty much common to all Linux distros I've tried. The xorg.conf is an awful sore, and of course none of the config programs will read my monitor's information properly. Ironically, Linux leaves me whishing I had a static IP, becuase that's easier to configure than DHCP. Installing video drives for my ATI card is difficult, requires I do further editing to the xorg.conf, and generally crashes X with really crypic error messages when I don't set it up right. Then there's sound, making hotplug work for USB devices (USB DVD burners are kinda hard, actually), and all those other little pieces of fun.
As a noob, I hate hearing the people who know this stuff (Slashdotters especially) say "it's not hard, rtfm noob!" But in this case, the install is harder than a "normal" Linux distro, but this noob got it installed, and all I did was follow the manual pretty much word for word.
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
Am I the only that thinks this submission is a lame non-event? Do nerds even care about Gentoo anymore? Some tech-writer couldn't follow instructions to install an operating system and that is a surprise? Why am I writing in questions?
Last night I had the joy of installing Red Hat 7.3 for my Unix Administration class with a two-disc set provided in the Thompson book. Everything was fine until it asked for a third disc. Needless to say, after 25 minutes of loading, I was so screwed. Rebooted, tried to recover, so out of luck. Worst, the hard drive was hosed. I haven't had that much fun since when Red Hat 7.3 was current.
It is much easier to just buy the Compaq on sale at Best Buy rather than build your own computer too. Some people are willing to invest the time to get what they want, however.
The last I heard the Gentoo Graphic Installer sucked bowling balls and ate existing partitions. To be fair, I found the newish Ubuntu Graphical Installer to totally suck also. It seemed to require more than 256 Meg otherwise it would slowly and painfully grind to a halt.
Putting a graphical installer in front of Gentoo is sort of like putting a two-speed Hydroglide automatic transmission behind a 409 engine.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Yes, you can do it in 10 minutes and almost everything is autoconfigured out of the box. OpenOffice.org 2.0.3. installation with PBI installer took 1 minute. Multimedia video codecs- 30 seconds. Wifi set up for WPA encryption is no brainer- less than minute- with one single command- if you know what you are doing. Then you can install mooooore than 15000 applications from ports- similar to gentoo installation method "emerge"- no dependency hell or whatsoever. Enjoy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like gentoo because it's the only distro (that I know of) that allows me (nearly) complete and total control over what I install.
Said differently, it doesn't include packages and programs and other stuff that I don't want or need by default.
Try downloading Slackware images onto a huge pile of diskettes from a shell server via ZModem over a 14.4 modem and a shitty analog line.
Then having a bad disk, rebooting into DOS, re-dialing the server, and getting that disk again. Not to mention the actual install time.
I would have given my left nut to have that done in under 10 days.
(Having said that, I'm a big fan of Gentoo for single-installation environments. And it took about 3 hours to do my first Gentoo install a few years back, and that was on a Powerbook.)
Well, this is my first serious post on Slashdot. I have been reading the comments every day with much interest, and I think it's time I contributed something.
/dealing/ with the updates themselves. You can't blinding run emerge -uvaD world and hit "Yes" then go back to your buisness like it was no thang...
I have a Love&Hate relationship with Gentoo. I switched to it from Redhat a rather long while ago, on my server. Ran it that way on a Pentium 200mhz for a while -- it was painful, but I wasn't really tired of it yet, and I could stand it compiling junk for days, it was only my personal server.
Then I got it on an old Athlon Tbird, and that was better.
And one day, it reached my workstation. And then all of my servers, including that strange, obscene HP LH4r. Quad Xeon machines can have scary clock issues.
I still like it immensely, portage is awesome. But, but but, compiling things got tiring after a while.
I fixed that by buying an Athlon X2. Dual core, MAKEOPTS="-j3" made compiling a breeze, and made me happy. Samba in three minutes was impressive to me.
But then, the quality of packages went to hell, upgrades begin breaking things more and more frequently. Circular blockers, if you felt bleeding edge and tossed a modular xorg in. Unexpected changes in configuration files that were only being mentionned on mailing lists, forum posts, and places where you wouldn't look.
Portage made it so easy to miss something important. Changelog entries are now sloppy. (I.E. "version bump" or "Added stuff from upstream").
And then, there are the slotted packages, that you don't really understand why they are slotted. There are the modular, split ebuilds for KDE. If you don't want the whole shebang, good luck trying to get 3.5 installed and also sucessfully rid yourself of 3.4 easily.
One Gentoo would have been fine. But I now had five. So I set up facilities. Central internal portage mirror (sync server), distfiles on NFS, to save bandwidth. distcc, for distributed compliling.
But I still have to spend the time to keep them updated. Let a gentoo linger in for too long, and it's going to be discouraging, and look more and more like a complete reinstall.
And somewhere in there, you'll do a quick baselayout. But then things will get depreciated and break on next reboot. Why change standards to be fancy?
There's also the -R283 syndrome, which was mentionned earlier by someone else. You get glibc, install glibc, live happy. It takes a while, but that's fine. Next week, you get glibc-r1. Ebuild was sloppy. You get to remerge it.
Then, there's -r3. Fixes an obscure Sparc bug. You still get it on x86. Remerge. ccache becomes your best friend. But it's still time consuming.
And then, there are the serious bugs that get marked as WONTFIX, or the part of the software that you're having a problem with that will just get removed until upstream fixes it, which is rarely done due to the crazy compiling flags one might have.
I now run Kubuntu on my desktop. I welcome updates, they're easier to manage. Also, my primary server will most likely turn into a Debian Sarge box. I haven't decided yet. I'll leave the Quad Xeon running on gentoo. But it's sad how quality lowered.
I really want to still like gentoo, if it wasn't so... time and ressources consuming, once you get more than one.
And these are my home machines. I also have my work machines to support and administer, and god knows I haven't become a network guy just to spend my whole life installing patches.
My problem with gentoo is not that it takes a long time to configure, it is that, if you aren't uncareful, you'll spend way to much time just
I miss when gentoo was a little less hectic.
- Faulty Hardware
- An inability to read
Any guesses which it is this time?There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
I had a choice to install something like Gentoo or Debian Etch or etc on VMWare player.. I choose Debian Etch due to the stuff and issues described and very little problem in getting Debian GNU/Linux Etch operating.. ..and that is from someone who has not really touched Linux in about 7 years
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
It is silly to bitch about Gentoo not being an easy-peasy install. That is not Gentoo's mission. If Gentoo-ites spent all their time making Gentoo all soft and cuddly it wouldn't be Gentoo any more. Likewise, if Ubuntu was as configurable as Gentoo it would be a bitch to use and would no longer be Ubuntu.
Be thankful you have choices. In MS land you get exactly no choice at all.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I ran into this too on a number of occasions but eventually found how to avoid it. The solution is simple: Do NOT run emerge sync. If you restrict yourself to syncing once a MONTH at most, then you will get a) a largely up-to-date distribution and b) a stable system that isn't changing every day.
Just because gentoo gives you the ability to update daily does not mean you should. In Debian daily updates won't cause many problems since the packages are quite carefully tested but gentoo is another matter.
I used gentoo almost exclusively for all my computer useage for about a year, and dual booted with another os for another year or so. The only linux distro's I had used before then were slackware (my first), and ed's xebian, a fork of debian for xbox.
You can know virtually nothing about linux, but if you're patient and read the doccumentation, and take the time to learn what hardware is in your machine, you'll be fine with gentoo. The customization potential of the distro is nearly limitless, and because of that, it can be a headache if you don't know what you're doing. In all honest, I think it's the best distro I've ever used. But I don't use it at the moment, because as nice as having the newest of everything is, or having a custom tailored system, at the moment stability is key for me.
For an old or specialized machine (once it's been compiled), or for something you plan to set up once and be done with it (such as a mythtv box), gentoo is great. However, somewhere betwen 5.10 and 6.06, Ubuntu hit a huge performance increase. No, it's not as fast as gentoo, but the time it takes to maintin gentoo finally reached a point where quick and easy package updates offset the performance increase.
If you ask me, installing gentoo is a great way to teach a person to use linux. Hand them the disc, make sure their data is backed up so they wont lose anything, and tell them to knock themselves out. By the end of the third day, they'll take you literally -- or they're the patient type who actually read the doccumentation, and by now they've got a working KDE or GNOME set up. Slackware works almost as well as a teaching tool, but if you ask me zipslack on a fat32 with windows is the way to go, as it forces them to learn the command line in the process of setting up X, which is how I learned (took a few days, but eventually I got the hang of it, then it was just learning the syntax of the programs I actually use).
Gentoo is a great project, but for the average user, who wants things to 'just work' or doesn't think they're the type to actually read all the output that gets fed to your screen, it's not the right choice. If you really want easy package management, go with something debian based (either pure debian or an ubuntu server install work well, and build upon that).
Gentoo has great documentation outlining the entire installation. If you are incapable of following clear step by step instructions, then I suppose gentoo isn't the distro for you. I attribute almost everything I know about linux to Gentoo. I started out with "easy" distros like redhat, but didn't really learn too much about linux until I did the gentoo install process. You learn very quickly the command line, how things fit together and work. It gives you a good understanding of partitions, the kernel, its modules and such. You see the more advanced side of things, especially if building your system from stage 1. I've since switched to Ubuntu, because I don't have the time to be configuring every part of the operating system, but that certainly is not a knock against gentoo. Anyone serious about learning Linux NEEDS to mess with gentoo for a bit.
Similes are like metaphors
I've been a long time user and fan of Debian. I very much appreciate Gentoo, but it was never clear to me how this differed from apt-build in Debian. In Debian, the user has the option of downloading pre-installed binaries (apt-get) and building them from source (apt-build or apt-get with some special flags, if I'm not mistaken) using compiler options. For example, here is a good 'howto' for apt-building a Debian system.
With that said choice is still good.
I built OpenOffice on my 1GHz Duron machine -- that alone took 10 days. Now I use OpenOffice-bin.
But seriously, Joe Barr:
1. Did not RTFM
2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.
There are alternatives. I have used a chroot approach to building a system while running under another distro. This works well, is low risk and is documented.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Gentoo is a step up from rolling your own distro. You learn a hell of a lot while you do it, and in general, Gentoo is not easy to install or configure. Granted, the install process has come a long way, but IMHO, if you're going to use one of the easier methods, why are you using Gentoo in the first place? The whole point is control. Sorry, you just need to know what you're doing.
The upside to the steep learning curve is that the Gentoo community discussion boards are outstanding. Having come from the BSD world (and subsequently gone back-- more on that later), this was a breath of fresh air (as compared to, say, OpenBSD-misc). There's no "RTFManpages, shithead!" and so forth. Not that you're not going to get called out if you're trying to get someone else to do the thinking for you, but there's definitely a lot of hand-holding.
The reason why I gave up on Gentoo really wasn't Gentoo-specific. I just got tired of the general broken-ness of software in the Linux world. The Gentoo ports system is good, but not that good. Maybe my experience was worsened by the fact that I was running on the PPC arch, but I found that I had to run many unstable packages just to have a desktop system. I moved back to BSD. I may not have the bleeding-edge applications anymore, but I rarely find an application in OpenBSD ports and packages that doesn't work. That's good enough for me. And finding documentation on BSD for the system or apps is a piece of cake (which is why the community is so hostile when you don't bother looking before asking).
Joe Barr must be the type of guy that tries pressing his break paddle for 3 days and then calls his car dealer to complain his brand new car doesnt move
This guy is obviously some kind of idiot. I've installed Gentoo about 3 or 4 times. The last installation took me 12 hours to get the base and after that, another about 12 hours to get my programs installed. Once you do it a couple of times, it isn't difficult. It really isn't that difficult the first time. You just need to follow the directions. Or, as many people here elegantly put it, RTFM!
I am a former Gentoo user also. I started out running it on a headless personal web server (thus no X), and it performed wonderfully for many years.
:)
I also used it as a desktop OS for a while, but ended up going back to a dual-boot setup with Windows due to lots of unsupported peripherals. Once I got my iMac, Windows and Linux both went out the door as far as desktop OS's are concerned; I haven't looked back. I still ran Gentoo on my web server until I recently decided just to pay for web hosting (cheaper than the electricity to run my server).
I also had a recent bout with the latest Gentoo trying to configure it as a lightweight vmware host OS, but that was on bleeding-edge laptop hardware that isn't supported well by *any* distribution yet, so I quickly gave up on that.
Alas, I don't have any Gentoo in my life anymore, but I do miss it. If you can avoid X, I think Gentoo is hands down the best distro there is. For a desktop OS? Just stick with Mac OS X. Maybe I'll set up a Gentoo virtual machine to get my occasional portage fix.
there was Gentoo. Seriously, check out any remotely Linux-related article on Slashdot from mid2002-mid2004: Gentoo fanboys flooding any discussion with
"Your grandma wants to use Linux? Get her Gentoo!"
"Pfft, I emerged it 2 weeks ago with every flag, and it crashed every six seconds! It must be unstable!"
"I get a 2% speed advantage by compiling X/OpenOffice/Mozilla for 3 days!!"
"I understand linux better because I watched the bootstrap compilation wizz by!"
I used for a few months back then. It has its merits, but the fanboys poisoned the public opinion, like so many Distros/OSs before...
Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
It doesn't ask you what to shoot to make things easier. If you point it at your foot, it shoots precisely and only that.
In case anyone wonders, yes, the nontech friend is the one that started this classic flamewar.
So I'm seriously wondering what changed.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've tried Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.. and I've settled on gentoo as my desktop OS of choice for both home and work. Here's why:
1.) Gentoo has *the best* documentation available out of any linux distro I've used (even most of the conf files are fully commented) http://www.gentoo-wiki.org/ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml
2.) Installing / maintaing gentoo has taught me many things about linux that I didn't know before. (I enjoy learning about linux, and Reading The Fucking Manual). Hell I'd never even compiled my own kernel before I used gentoo.
3.) I dont have to reinstall the entire OS every 6 months (Fedora/Ubuntu) to get the latest version. I always have the latest version.
Yes, it was a pain to stripe my drives with software RAID the first time I installed gentoo. And yes, sometimes its a pain to update/maintain the system... but I dont really mind because everytime I have to fix something I *learn* something.
I love gentoo the way it is, but as with anything else, its a matter of personal taste, if someone else doesn't like how gentoo works, then they should use another distro ;)
I swear; either a user is going to have to setup a dedicated build machine, that regularly updates and builds the update providing binary packages for all his/her compatible equipment, OR gentoo has to provide binary builds for the stage3 install settings.
Frankly I found that if I did in fact choose my own use flags (like no X11, QT or GTK please) I would invariably find some required package would be updated and wouldn't like one of my flag choices very much at all. It's so much easier and probably better to just stick with the generic flags that work for stage3; and as long as people are doing that, there may as well be a generic use flags binary repository maintained by portage where presumably skilled portage maintainers could troubleshoot all the conflicts that slowly killed my machine.
That may work great for you, a person who's used to explicity following directions to the letter. But there's other types of people that'd rather have some flexibility in how they do things, aren't good at "to the letter" directions, or just don't like tedium.
It's a perfectly valid complaint about a product that it doesn't work if you didn't follow the directions TO THE LETTER. Imagine a cake recipe that was inedible if you cooked it for 9 minutes instead of 8 1/2 minutes, or at 420 degrees instead of 425 degrees. It's often difficult to follow directions perfectly, especially when there's
a lot of different and complicated ones.
AccountKiller
...dept.
Actually I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make (The author of the article makes it as well). They write these articles from the perspective of, "This OS sucks because..." or "The BEST OS in the world is [insert OS here], because...". Sorry folks but it really comes down to, "This OS sucks for ME because..." or "The BEST OS in the world for ME is [insert OS here] because...".
I love Gentoo. It's my favorite OS experience (and I've been through quite a few in the Atari, Commodore, Mac and PC worlds) because it gives me EXACTLY what I want: complete control and customizability from the ground up and high performance on old hardware. I don't like having to buy new hardware every few years to use new software. In my world view a ten year old box should still be able to run a modern word processor and web browser at a minimum. And that's what I've got at home... an old dual PII with 768 Megs of RAM that does everything I can do on a P4 that I *WANT* to do. Word processing with OpenOffice, no problem. The latest Firefox and Thunderbird? Absolutely. Including plugins for media? Sure thing. Ripping my CDs and DVDs for my digital music collection? Most definitely. At decent speed? Yes. Editing photos at a reasonable speed with GIMP? Without a doubt. OpenGL screensavers that look cool? (this really has more to do with GFX borads, but.. there is some CPU involved) My wife and I lock our virtual desktop screens with them every day. I have a Linux based Media Center PC based on Gentoo running on a P3 800 with 512 Megs of RAM. I watch DVDs on it, record TV. Pause live TV. Etc... (again, I've got a Hauppauge which offloads the encoding from the CPU)
So, Gentoo gives me what I want. Long life for my boxes with the ability to still run the latest software at decent speeds. It also gives me the ability to do a ton of things I couldn't do in Windows. But that's all me. I'm the sort of person that "gets" Gentoo. If you don't "get it" then you're never going to see the beauty in it. I also "get" Windows, I just don't see the beauty in it because I don't need the hand holding anymore. Not only that, but I don't WANT it. That's the biggest difference between the Windows and Mac users and the Linux users of most flavors (Ubuntu, Lycoris and Linspire excepted). So don't rag on Gentoo. If it didn't work for you, go find another distro. Don't go on a campaign to try and make the shoes fit your feet. If you've got big feet, get bigger shoes!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I started installing gentoo since my job is majorliy using linux of all types , and im a windows guy , sooo i said lemme give this a shot and see if i can get down with the guys at workand at least know what they are doing and all that, and i asked them three what would be the best linux o/s to install and learn at the same time they all said gentooo, sooo ok i get the software and start the installation id dint even get half way and i gave up , theres way tooo much crap to do to get a freaking os up and running especially if u want it to run that same day , who in their right mind has 5-6 10 days to install a freaking os when u can just do it under an hour with a freaking windows disk, fine u dont get hte in depth personal spect but I dont want to be working on an installation for that long period of time either, thats just ridiculous to me, soooo i basically gave up on the whole thing not to meniont there isnt much plug and play from what ive seen either all that mounting crap is cornnnnnnnnny !!!!!
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
Knoppix Live CD - 30 Seconds ;-P
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
Ok either this guy is a moron that doesn't even attempt to read the manual or he had some akward non-linux friendly hardware.
/dev/`. Write down your partition layout so you don't forget (or label the partitions). /dev/` /dev/` and following it up with a `swapon /dev/` /mnt/gentoo and make your mount points inside the root partition once mounted /mnt/gentoo and the portage image to /mnt/gentoo/usr /proc & /dev file systems by using the mount commands in the gentoo installation manual /mnt/gentoo` so you don't get confused by paths and set your environment variables with `. /etc/profile`
/sbin and /usr/sbin do before you try gentoo.
As long as you know what hardware is in the machine gentoo is a very very simple installation procedure.
1) Boot to the minimal livecd.
2) Setup your partitions using `fdisk
3) Setup the filesystems (default to ext3 if you don't know which to choose) by doing a `mkfs.ext3
4) Setup the swap partition by doing a `mkswap
5) Mount your file systems the way you want them to
6) Download the two tarballs, 1) the stage3 tarball from one of the mirror sites and 2) the most recent portage image
7) un-tarball the stage3 tarball to
8) mount the
9) `chroot
10) start installing required boot packages like gentoo-kernel, grub, etc...
11) configure said packages by reading the manual
This process won't work if you don't understand these commands so go back to your automated install and learn what the programs in
... it's just important for you to figure out what you want to do with your Computer. I've been using Gentoo for the past couple years and I learned a lot from it. You have to take care of all the "Details" (like USE-Flags) etc but as it says in the summary: It does what you tell it to do. So the first step for you is to figure out what you want to do.
There have been times when I wanted to trash my notebook because after I did an "emerge -u world" my config files were all screwed up etc. but because I installed Gentoo with the intention to learn more about computers and linux I asked in the gentoo forums or in the IRC-Channels and sure enough somebody would have an answer for me.
I have never recommended gentoo to people that wanted to see what this hole "linux thing" was all about. I told them to play around with Knoppix or install Ubuntu. If you tell them to try Gentoo because it's the distro "real geeks" use they will be very frustrated and turn their backs on linux etc. It's the same with Programming Languages: it is a tool and you have to choose the one that best satisfies your needs.
-Kensan(Anti-gentoo rant follows)
I read TFM and had a fairly easy time with the installation. Of course, I've an experienced Linux user. But that was when the REAL fun with Gentoo began!
1. Minor update to glibc. I had to recompile the whole thing, taking hours.
2. Next day, there was a minor update to Xorg. I had to recompile the whole thing, taking hours.
3. Next day, there was a minor update to KDE. I had to recompile the whole thing, taking hours.
4. Next day, there was another minor update to Xorg. I had to recompile the whole thing, taking hours.
5. Next day, there was another minor update to KDE. I had to recompile the whole thing, taking hours.
It didn't take me long to realize that the Gentoo experience was one of endless recompiling for every minor or trivial update. Quite honestly, that's for the birds. Of all the joys I received from learning how the system worked, they were all killed much like a puppy is killed by a falling meteor when I saw that, "KDE has been updated from 3.0.1.1-1 to 3.0.1.1-2! Prepare to spend the next EIGHT HOURS recompiling every single package!"
Now I'm a Kubuntu user and I'm much, much happier. apt-get rules the universe!
(Savvy folks will see that this is a copy from my anon post on Newsforge. I just wasn't done bitching at how unpleasant the gentoo experience was.)
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
1) When I first started using Gentoo I was in love: Fast fixes, portage was godlike compared to rpm, and it was faster/lighter and all that jazz... There were only 20 something use flags at this time, so configuration was a breeze. You always had to tool with your xconf anyway, so this was nothing new. All the important packages were in the tree so no hunting. Portage itself was lean, mean, and completely adequate. Not only was the system easier to deal with using Gentoo but it had the added bonus. All the software I used on the system consumed a whole 2G.
2) Portage as it is now is a bloated and hacked whale that instead of fixing problems via a re-write is just being held together by more duct-tape. There are so many use flags I can't even remember them and frequently the core flags are altered so that something that used to be "included" requires a new flag. This makes it impossible to use your previous knowledge of configuring the system for anything. Its just like being a newbie every time you install it!
3) Packages are being added much faster than they are being tested for compatibility, and sometimes they're not being added fast enough when there are critical improvements in the next release. Despite what the Gentoo Devs are thinking the people that use Gentoo typically want leaner and meaner but only so lean as not to be crippled in any way. Debian would be good, but they bork the process by being slow to the power of assinine. Debian could be BETTER than Gentoo if they'd ever get in the race. I've used the utilites in Knoppix and apt-get is defintely more useable than portage and faster but I would never install it because stable is too far behind the technology curve. Compiling Gnome, or KDE... STUPID... There are no "processor optimizations" in these apps, and any optimizations would give trivial gains. They're pre-compiling a lot of these packages now... but this is years later....
4) Breaks in Gentoo are TOO extreme. Like one day they decided to change my boot files, and my system didn't come up. I'm good enough to know how to fix it, but most people aren't. We don't have "random days" to just tech support our computer, and this was happening far too frequently. I was losing five days a month to random borks. Most people faced with this problem don't figure it out.. They just reinstall windows... Which is exactly what I did. I love linux, the tools... but if you think I can be down when I have work to do well guess again! I basically found myself installing Gentoo dealing with problems repeatedly and getting fed up repeatedly... I tried Gentoo 3x... that's more than most people would eh? Sorry kids, we gotta get past our open beta at some point.
Well that's all for now thanks for bearing with my aggrivation.
- Mind
"When I began my Gentoo adventure, I believed that the main difference between Gentoo and the other distributions I've used (Caldera, Red Hat, Mandrake, Xandros, Storm, SUSE, Debian, Slackware, and Ubuntu) was that it was a roll-your-own distro"
Ok, so basically this guy experimented with Gentoo. He supposedly screwed up, and it screwed up or whatever. Then he gave up fixing it and decided to use Debian. Suprisingly enough, he had no problem using Debian because he started off the article telling us that he's already used it before! I think that sort of invalidates his article for fair comparison. I do think however, that it is fair to say Debian rules anyway. You can take my word for it. God bless America.
-Random person with no agenda
If it's too hard for you to use, then it ain't for you brotha. I don't hear people whine that uclibc buildroot scripts are hard to use. They are just as difficult as their target audience can stand. Gentoo is the same way. It's not a user friendly general purpose distribution. It's meant for great control over your system. It's just a difficult as its target audience can handle. Obviously it's as easy as it needs to be. I don't think a gui that let's you click "Next" a bunch of times is really going to attract more long term gentoo users.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
This guy hasn't even realized true pain yet. To borrow your analogy, ATI's driver install is just like masturbation. Only with a cheese grater. The correct method changes every time they update their driver, it breaks every time you install a set of updates and it doesn't get along with any given packaging system. If you want to add some spice to that Gentoo installation, buy an ATI PCI Express card! Remember! Like masturbation, only with a cheese grater!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I am a professional programmer at a small company, and all of our desktop machines and development servers run Gentoo. Although I would never use Gentoo on our production servers (they're managed RHEL boxes), Gentoo is the best choice for what we do around here. Pretty much every employee here can recompile his own kernel, write out a fstab by hand, and understand compilation errors.
I think it's a real problem that Gentoo gets compared to regular linux distro's....I prefer to call it a "meta-distro". It's a series of tools for creating a LFS system without having to deal with doing package management manually. If you're not comfortable working on that level, use a premade distro.
I keep seeing all of these dumb arguments like "With gentoo you can optimize your packages for your architecture and get speed gains!" or "With gentoo you won't have to worry about dependency hell ever again!". Of course, those two statements are partially true, but it frames the entire argument wrong by presenting Gentoo as if it were another distro, only different.
In other words, Gentoo is not the hardest way to install a linux distro, it's just the easiest way to make your own LFS system. I'd never want to discourage someone from trying it out, but non-gentoo users should regard us saying it's "easy" and a "time-saver" much the same way you'd regard a commercial airline pilot talking about flying a little cessna.
I don't mean to sound all holier-than-thou, but if you aren't either an expert linux user or willing to become one, you are not among Gentoo's target users.
I few years ago it was very exciting to install and use Gentoo. It was a great learning experience and, truth be told, I owe a lot of what I know about troubleshooting to Gentoo. Which brings us to my point : There really is not a practical reason to use Gentoo on a day to day basis. The reason why a lot of people like it is the same reason why many more hate it. Having bleeding edge packages makes it very unstable. It took me three days to install the new release. Three days. Installing a basic desktop should not take 3 days!! That is just insane. I installed it on a 3.4 GHz pentium D with 4 gigs of ram and sata II drives. After installing it, most apps worked, but a few others did not, or were un-emergeable for whatever reason. Right now I am using ArchLinux, which uses Gentoo ebuilds, as my main desktop. I also have VectorLinux on a different system. I'll tell you what, there is no performance difference between these two and Gentoo, they each took less than 30 minutes to setup. Arch, in particular, is extremely easy. After following the the very short basic system install, it was just a matter of pacman -Syu, pacman -S xorg kde gdm, nano -w rc.conf, reboot, done!! 25 minutes total. 686 optimized, rock solid desktop. Gentoo has some sentimental value. But just as BSD and the Ports system, they have a place in the memory of those of us that enjoyed them. Gentoo makes no personal or business sense. It's not about ease of install, but the whole thing is just a waste of time. It had value when it came out. It served a purpose, but right now, it's just old and unstable. Please, guys, don't be mad. Just think about it objectively and you will reach a similar conclusion.
You really need a second computer to install gentoo. Or at least you did.
Those directions tend to be on a website. I guess you could type them out but what if you forget.
Gentoo sounds like great fun and a great learning experience. But I just don't know if you really have to get every last millimip out of your computer anymore.
What percentage of people still compile their own kernels now?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I hate to sound like a fanboi, but have you tried loading Ubuntu/Kubuntu on your brother's machine? I don't know Gentoo firsthand, having never used it myself, but I've read enough about it that I get the impression that it's a Linux distro modeled as something of a mix between Debian and FreeBSD (please correct me if I'm mistaken). I've got a little experience with FreeBSD and I've used Debian as my primary OS for years. I'd guess that a complete Gentoo setup is not much different from a complete Debian set up, and while it works wonders for you and I, a fresh install of Ubuntu with Automatix is really lightyears ahead of either Gentoo or Debian for your typical home user.
I wouldn't be able to stand using Ubuntu myself, and I'd certainly never use it on a server, but for people who don't want or need to know as many technical details as you or I, it "just works". It's not even Ubuntu that I give credit to, so much as the Automatix script. Whatever, give it a shot, you might be suprised.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
I know what you mean. Reading the article, I was laughing when I realized he hadn't frobnozled the prepalpitator sauces with the correct utensils. I just knew that would come back to bite him on the ass latter. Simply follow the directions, people! Perfectly easy, my grandmother has severe alzheimer's and she managed to get the meal cooked from raw ingredients in under 15 seconds.
Seriously, cooking is not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla recipe with exactly and nothing but the recommended ingredients. But I was doing stuff like that with cookery before there was even a gentoo, just for fun. It is fun, for a certain type of person. But, like masturbation, it's a very personal kind of fun that doesn't contribute anything very useful to society at large. And most normal people really, really don't want to hear the gory details about how you did it and how much fun it was.
I realize that the author of the article was only judging Gentoo by its installation, but using that as a sole criteria for a particular distro is silly. Would you buy a car based on how easy it was to sign the papers and drive off the lot?
I love Gentoo because of the ease of upgrading/adding *after* installation. There's never a reason to reinstall just because there's a new release. Want your system to be as up to date as possible? emerge --sync; emerge -u --deep world; Done.
The source-based installation avoids the binary rpm-hell I used to get with RH, Mandrake (when it was still called that), etc. I've used Gentoo on both personal and production boxes, and have never had any major problem that I couldn't fix/search the forums for an answer to.
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1801
It's an interesting way to do things but given the frequency of patches in many programs simply too time consuming to be worth the effort. Compiler optimizations don't make a big difference in performance and for most applications the difference vanishes completely (zomg openoffice which took 32 fucking years to compile opened 2 milliseconds faster!). The actual way you install packages is pretty straight forward and not much different from other systems (aside from the compiling).
The hardware support seemed to be on par with other distributions I've tried and using the system after you get it setup is just like any other distribution.
You've got a typo here...
Ignore this signature. By order.
You can use apt-get source to download the orignal source with the debian patches seperated into a directory. You can even use the --compile option to build it into a deb for you.
;)
Here's the best part. You can compile source packages from a i386 repository for AMD64, or modify the source for a special build. Just use dpkg-buildpackage to now build into a deb package. Now you have a new deb that you can share and it will work! It's very nice.
If you do modify source use the same patching system so you can contribute upstream.
All I can say is that if it takes you 10 days to install Gentoo, either your computer sucks or you fail at life.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I did use portage for a few weeks, or months. Mandriva does the same. "urpmi firefox" installs everything you need to run firefox and puts it in the start-menu too. Yum and apt are availible in RedHat/Fedora That can't be what all the portage fans are raving about. I'm sure portage is better in some ways, I mean, it's the youngest of the three (rpm/deb/portage) so it shouldn't have much legacy but what makes it so great.
.haeger
Someone mentioned USE-flags and that's one part, I'm sure, but is that all?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
I'm currently using Gentoo. I found it easy to install, but before I installed Linux From Scratch.
The big problem I have with fedora is the updates. A year or so ago i installed FC3. Fine, runs solid, everything I like works etc.. Then one day i do a yum -check-update and theres no updates. Then the next month no updates as well. Weird i say and I go to look at the internets. The internets tell me after a long ass time looking, that I need to use some like other repositories or some shit because redhat no longer supports my version (wtf!) and didnt auto upgrade to the new version (dbl wtf!!).
So i change over to these new mirrors and get some updates from them. I go back to do it again the next week and it barfs all over that it cant find the mirrors. I try and find the same place I found the updated yum config/scripts from before but I cant find it (fine im an idiot). So basically, I have gone from a completely stable machine that did evrything I wanted, to an unupgradeable POS that I have no idea about the possible security weaknesses and shit. I was a long time redhat user. I think I started at 4.5. Anyway, what they USED to do was allow you to upgrade to the next release with up2date.
Im just waiting for like a days worth of free time so that I can move it all over to ubuntu (pain in the ass since i have to relearn how to chroot named and stuff).. Hopefully ubuntu will be better in this regard, but my advice is to never use redhat/fedora EVER. they dont update old versions and thats just lame.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
On my box, I have root mounted on /tmp, so that command would only delete some temp files.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I've been using Linux for at least 14 years, running all kinds of distros ranging from the Slackware 3.x series to Red Hat to Mandrake to Debian to you name it.
/mnt/gentoo, then waiting literally days before you had X11 and an office suite and window manager installed. But Gentoo users will be the first to tell you that you only have to install once, then the pain is over.
/etc/profile, /etc/fstab, etc. files. I guess tha
I've been using Gentoo since the 2005.0 release (over a year), and I've been incredibly happy with it--it's fast as hell and solid as a rock. But I can tell you that being able to use and administrate a Linux box does not adequately prepare you for installing Gentoo for the first time, and maybe not even the second or third time. In fact, your prior Linux knowledge can even be a weakness: If you are a person who is in the habit of skimming page after page of instructions and just "winging it" using what you already know, then you will not be able to install Gentoo. It sounds like that's exactly what happened to the author, and as others have pointed out, he just gave up rather than solve the problems he was having. He didn't even bother to search forums.gentoo.org, which is by far the best resource for Gentoo-related problems around.
I did get a chuckle when the author tried to establish his Linux cred for the purpose of trying to make Gentoo seem like this obtuse, impossible-to-install piece of garbage. It sounds like the author's level of expertise extends no further than being able to *install* a bunch of Linux distributions, which hardly counts for much these days. In the past couple of years, installing certain Linux distros has become the easiest thing about Linux. It's gotten to the point where you basically just decide on a partitioning scheme and the installer does everything else, including all of the configuration. It's idiot proof. I've honestly had more drama trying to install Windows variants on weird hardware than I've had trying to install Linux.
This guy failed because Gentoo has a different philosophy than many other Linux distributions. The emphasis was never on pandering to users who want the installation to be easy--it's on making using and administrating your computer as easy as possible. The "installer" has always consisted of you sitting there manually copying over files before you chroot into
Portage is great, but there are other Gentoo features that to me are just as interesting. For instance, if you're a developer, and you want to do something really out there such as install 12 different Java compilers on the same Gentoo install, you certainly can. On other distributions, your odds of running into dependency or environment variable problems would be pretty high. But with Gentoo, you can just eselect which Java 1.4 or 1.5 compiler you want to use to compile something, on the fly, and your 12 different Java installs can live happily on the same box. *That's* the kind of thing that Gentoo helps you do. If you're new to Linux, welcome! We're glad you came. But you might want to shy away from one of the most notoriously difficult to install distributions for now, unless your sole aim is to write a trite article about how difficult it was to install.
Personal anecdote:
I was recently faced with the choice of upgrading the libc, compiler, and X server (i.e. basically everything) on my main box to major newer versions. I decided it would actually be faster and more hassle-free to just nuke my root partition and install Gentoo 2006.1. It was a breeze, mostly because stage 1 and stage 2 installs appear to have been done away with in the newest release--you have no choice but to do a stage 3 install like a weinie.
It was simple for another reason, also. I had some common sense. If you're installing a new flavor of Linux on the same machine, the same hardware where you have already installed Linux before, you would have to be crazy not to recycle your xorg.conf,
This is my own guide from my personal wiki. If all goes well, with the appropriate ISOs in hand, I can typically get a desktop up and running in about 3 hours (2+ghz cpu-class machine). Note I haven't updated this with the latest ISOs, and the exact details aren't enumerated because they are already done so with great depth in the gentoo handbook already. For instance, when I say 'install kernel', I am skipping a bunch of stuff, but that's because I've done it before. ;-)
Gentoo seems to get a bad rap from two types of people. 1: People who have never tried using it, and 2: People who have never tried using it correctly
Clearly gentoo is not intended as a turnkey solution for gramma (not that there's any linux distro that can make that claim, I'm looking at you, Ubuntu). However, this sort of flamebait story on the frontpage of /. only serves to further the misconception that gentoo is 'hard' to use. Anyone who's used Redhat knows what RPM-hell is, and while it sounds simple to tell my brother 'use synaptec to install the xvid codecs', he still came back with, 'What?!?'.
/. is complaining that I have too few characters per line in this post, so please excuse the formatting. I'm only trying to demonstrate that once you know HOW to do something, it becomes really simple. Sure, Windows is easy to use after you know HOW to remove viruses and adware and spyware and whatever HP decided to install on your box.
version 20060802adownload, burn as iso, and boot off this cd http://somewebsite/install-x86-minimal-2006.0.iso
ifconfig eth0 x.x.x.x netmask y.y.y.y ; route add default gw x.x.x.x ; echo "nameserver YOURNAMESERVER" >
passwd
fdisk
mount
cd
wget http://somewebsite/stage3-x86-2006.0.tar.bz2 ; tar -xjf stage3-x86-2006.0.tar.bz2 ; mount -t proc none
cp
chroot
emerge vim
hahahahahahha eat it emacs!
vi
emerge gentoo-sources ; cd
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage
emerge grub syslog-ng
grub
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
vi
rc-update add net.eth0 default ; rc-update add sshd default ; rc-update add syslog-ng default ; rc-update add numlock default
reboot
I've tried installing Gentoo 6 times in the past two years. 4 times in the last three months. The most recent tries were with stage 3 manual and with the POS graphical installer. Each time I read the instructions, every word, and followed them each step. Unlike a lot of people I know, I'm one to always read the instructions before I do something.
With the stage 3 manual, I got all the way through only to have it not boot. Turns out that time it was because it emerged a kernel based on x86-64 (ia64?) and not amd64. I used the genkernel option because I didn't want to waste an hour wading through config options to get a marginal decrease in memory consumption, and as it was building I noticed the x86-64 part, it even shows it in the amd64 manual. It was either that or the part about installing grub, where it defaulted to using sda as my boot drive even though it was mounting everything from sdb during the install, so I removed the sda and put in sdb (per the instructions, it says to substitute for your particular device name, and since I have an nvidia sata raid with only one drive defined..), but of course that didn't work and I'm not about to reformat and go through all of that again. I was so disgusted at that point, wasting hours on something I was only doing to check it out to see if I liked it, I wasn't about to do it all over again.
Some parts I do like, but I much prefer a distro or OS that comes with reasonable defaults and gives you the option to later change anything you want (FreeBSD). Some in this thread have mentioned OpenBSD as something that's harder to install. I've installed and used that several times and it was _much_ easier than Gentoo. Maybe if Gentoo had a basic install list to get things going, even a simple bash history, with reasonable defaults for fdisk, fstab and grub, then I'll try again.
Just because you write about software, doesn't mean you can install it.
...to compile X on a Duron 800.
I've slowly watched all of the reasons I prefer Gentoo be eliminated by other distros. Here's the original list:
Here's what still keeps me on Gentoo:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Understand it is not for everyone. Neither is Ubuntu, or Debian, or Redhat, or ....
For me, it was a major pain to get DVD Styler working under Ubuntu. With Gentoo, I had it running in under 5 minutes.
Of course, I have also ran Gentoo for the past 3+ years.
Scott Carr
Joe Barr again? Cmon... If I remember (2001) mplayer was one of his "victims" http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/joe-barr.html
You cant take any of his reviews or articles seriously.
Go ahead, mod the hell down out of this post... - Im posting as anonymous coward because I dont have an account and I couldnt care less.
Your analogy falls apart at the end there. Cooking does something pretty damn direct and obviously useful for society. How about you try a little experiment and only eat raw meat for the next week or so and then get back to us?
But the analogy made me think. I've been cooking for as long as I have been using computers, and quite frankly I'm really, really good at both. But with cooking, I've gotten to the point where I don't have to think about it 99 times out of a hundred. There are really less than twenty recipies in the world. There's plenty of variations on those recipies, but once you learn the basic techniques, the way flavors from various spices and other ingredients combine, and the basic recipes, you do not need a cookbook. Ever.
Now, that does not apply to baking. Gentoo is like baking, not cooking. Cooking, if you are skilled, you can wing it with anything. Baking, unless you are an absolute master with 10+ years under your belt, you need to follow a recipe. I had no problem with gentoo, but I still need to follow a recipe when baking anything more complicateed than biscuits or pancakes (and that's just because I have the Joy of Cooking biscuit and pancake recipes memorized.)
And most normal people, when I cook for them, really really want to learn how I did it. And they seem to like the fact that I had fun doing it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Gentoo is not an end-user distribution. Despite how "easy to use" it may or may not be, it will always be a developer distro. Rare exceptions may be meta-distributions built on top of Gentoo for end users.
I grow quite tired of people lamenting how much "harder" it is to install Gentoo than Red-Hat. Of course it is. They're totally different beasts. It's not unlike complaining that your Ferrari F50 doesn't steer like your Chevy 4-door sedan... or that the Ferrari takes 10 minutes for the engine to warm up... or that the Ferrari takes more maintenance. Of course it does.
I have installed Gentoo many times tweaking my install and learning more each time. As many comments before, if you follow the directions it's a breeze. You only have to install it once and it can always be up to date.
.odt so if anyone wants a copy e-mail me. Also, it's a breeze to save your configuration with a cron job.
/bkup.tar.bz2 etc/ var/ boot/ usr/src/linux/.config
I have created my own install guide where I can do a stage 3 install from the minimal CD in about 30 minutes. My server doesn't require X so I can have that up with bind, dhcp, apache, mysql, php, squid, vsftpd, ntp, and a couple other odds and ends in about 2 hours with minor tweak and peaks. I have my install notes available on
#!/bin/bash
tar -cvjpf
When I install, I just copy the old files back over and it's usually pretty good to go.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
I pulled those numbers out of my ass. And I haven't been part of the gentoo community for years, when it first came out the zealots were pretty shrill and I saw a lot of really, really uninformed comments here and in other places around the net.
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I really like gentoo. Or maybe gentoo fanatics still take anything less than unconditional support as an outright attack. If you've been part of the gentoo community for long, you would know that gentoo supporters started the whole "gentoo user as ricer" meme, to make fun of the people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and just wanted to look cool. You've seen funroll-loops.org, right?
I will say that the ratio of hackerness to riciness falls off pretty quickly the further from the core gentoo community one gets. By the time one is in slashdot country, it may not be 1 hacker for every 9 ricers, but it's pretty close, IMO.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Gentoo Directions to cook a hamburger:
...
1) Obtain a cow.
2) Plow Your field.
3) Plant wheat, tomatoes, letuce
4) Graze cow in pasture till fat
5) Harvet wheat
6) Threash Wheat
7) Mill flour
8) Obtain a chicken
9) Milk cow
10) Feed chicken wheat previously harvested
11) Churn butter
12)
Ok boy. if you don't want to read the manual. maybe you want to install a windows like OS on your computer... BUT DONT BLAME BECAUSE YOUR INPTITUDE.
My name is ###### and I've been a Gentoo faithful user for more than a year.
The first Gentoo I installed was 2004. and I didn't read any documentation prior installing. I just printed the manual out and went for it. It was long, but in the end it was a total success. I installed it on all the servers at work (2 machines) and on my two home computers.
My love for gentoo started to fade when the updates started taking too long (I know, there are binary packages, but I mainly got gentoo to compile things myself). Secondarily, my boss (which is not linux-wise) asked me to install X on one of the servers. I did, and was totally unhappy with it, mainly because my boss quickly gave up with trying to administer the server from GUI, and I'm a CLI guy.
So I happily decided to remove X. Ugh. Emerge is great at installing packages, but surely sucks at removing them. The software to query packages for dependencies was still beta at that time, and quite uncomfy to use. I started dreaming of aptitude at night.
All in all, I still have gentoo on one server at work (the one that does routing/firewall) because gentoo can be light like no others. But for the other three servers I now use Fedora, and I have started using Ubuntu for the desktop.
As last note, I want to clarify that my experience with Gentoo has been great. Most of all it made me (forced me) learn a lot of things about the insides of what I use daily that I did not knew before. It's a GREAT educational tool, and I recommend its use, even if for a bit, to anyone that wants to learn Linux.
For the production side, I noted it required me more attention / administartion time than others distro on a typical setup, while it just performs great on small, task-oriented systems (because you can cut off all the bullshit).
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
You know, other than reading Slashdot now and then and running Linux, I wouldn't really say that I'm much of a geek. In the emacs/vi debate I tend to opt for nano. I do academic research for a living and it's true that I need to do some very very basic Perl scripts now and then, so I'm certainly more comfortable with tinkering than the average person, but I haven't a clue about the technical details of operating systems. I am, however, a devoted Gentoo user -- because I find it to be the easiest distribution/OS that I've come across, and I include Windows here.
I don't play around (meaning I run the stable branch whenever possible), and I don't have especially exotic hardware, so I may run into fewer issues. But I've installed Gentoo on two computers with no real hassles. Personally I find the default configurations to be fine for nearly every bit of software, and I've only once or twice needed programs that weren't available in Portage. I know most people use Gentoo because it gives you so many choices, but I actually like Portage because it does all of the work for you and in general the software is just ready to use once it's done.
On the other hand, I tried both Ubuntu and Fedora and wasn't thrilled with either. Fedora didn't run properly on my system. Ubuntu seemed great -- but the default setup is terrible if you're using it to replace Windows. Getting DVDs and mp3s to work was somewhat annoying. It was admittedly annoying on Gentoo to have to wait while X and KDE compiled, but once they were completed I just opened them up and everything worked properly.
It's certainly daunting to look at the Gentoo documentation and see all the talk of optimizations and USE flags and such, but you really don't have to worry about them very much if all you want is a solid desktop. I think Gentoo might be well-served to market themselves as the semi-easy option. They don't automate anything, but their manual installation appears to work. I wouldn't give it to someone who becomes fearful at the sight of a command prompt, but in the long run I think it's less work than Ubuntu.
Obligatory. It never gets old.
Yup I'm a Gentoo user, and have been since the first slashdot artical came out about it. (around Jul 2002). It hasn't gotten any harder since then. I'm not exactly a Linux Noob but before Gentoo I just let Mandrake scripts deal with the OS.
If Joe can't install Gentoo, Joe shouldn't be reviewing Linux Distros, except from a pure newbie point of view. Cause it's just not that hard.
> In my world view a ten year old box should still be able to run a modern word processor and web browser at a minimum. And that's what I've got at home... an old dual PII with 768 Megs of RAM
Uuuuuuh, that's not a 10 year old box. I remember 9 and a half years ago when I got a Cyrix Pentium-class CPU with 64MB RAM and thought it was killer!
P2s may have been out 10 years ago, but quite expensive, and I didn't know anyone who had more RAM than I did at the time.
I was a die-hard Slackware user until a co-worker turned me on to gentoo. Yes, it's a major PITA to install (my first install took about a week and a half on a Dell D800 laptop; I had trimmed it down to a week when I traded in the D800 for a D820, and the install on a to-be asterisk server for my wife's business was only about three days), but IME, you can either feel the pain with the initial install (gentoo) or feel the pain trying to keep the O/S patched after the install (anything else).
While slackware's pkgtools/upgradepkg/installpkg/removepkg tools work pretty well for keeping a slack box *patched* when you want to make a major change (like moving from an obsolete glibc version to a new version because something you want to install from source won't work with the libraries you have installed), your only option is pretty much to rebuild from scratch.
What convinced me to (start) switch(ing) to gentoo is that you *never* have an obsolete O/S as long you keep your emerges up to date...which isn't really all that difficult most of the time.
I'd rather suffer through an install once, then keep the box current with regular emerges than keep rebuilding server after server (or desktop after desktop) because the base O/S install needs to be updated every few years.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If a toddler needs to go to the doctor, you don't toss him the keys to a Ferrari, you have someone drive him there instead.
Gentoo can be a great learning experience, but it isn't for everyone. Those of us who readily use it have our reasons and the minor installation issues are irrelevent.
a) Gentoo will never be used on a wide scale commercially.
1) supportability - you will never ever get a consistent product out of it with so many customizations.
2) time spent debugging your installation - you're making a really good argument for windows. 5 hours a week fucking around with a gentoo installation at $30/hr is $7500 a year. That'll get you quite a few windows licenses. You're setting linux back about 10 years.
b) Compiling your own stuff doesn't make it faster. Even if it does by 1%, and a system rebuild only takes 1 day, you'd have to only rebuild once every 100 days to compensate. That's assuming you're making use of that 1% optimization too. If your system sits at 10% load for that entire time. You'll rebuild about once every 3 years to justify it. Want to prove me wrong? show me numbers. Repeatable numbers.
c) A program asking you random questions about compiler optimizations doesn't make you a linux expert. If you want to run a real linux distribution, run slackware, or God forbid a BSD. I know it's not a linux distribution, but you'll learn more about unix and unix like operating systems if you run a bsd for a while.
d) Shut the fuck up, coming up with build/benchmark numbers for your gentoo build is about as easy as generating urine. You're about as likely to find someone interested in it similarly.
I installed Gentoo on two separate systems one was installed in one day and the other system after three days and gave up an installed CentOS. One system that took one day was a custom built system (Asus motherboard, nVidia graphics card, 1GB RAM) that I thought would take a few days but was very quick because it recognise all of the hardware drivers which was an surprise to me. The other system was semi-custom built system from a Linux system reseller that I won't mention (Tyan motherboard, ATI video card, 1GB RAM, SCSI RAID) even though the CD install was okay but until the compile then system hung several times and needed to reinstall from CD. After several times of this then I got fed up and installed CentOS which much easier.
Before that I used a combination of a slackware base install and then I would compile X/gnome myself. That's right I would compile each gnome package by hand in the right order. I liked to be bleeding edge and submit bug reports, follow the mailing lists etc. It was a hobby. Of course doing this made maintenance extremely difficult. When Gentoo came out with its portage system, things got so much easier.
Anyway when Gentoo first started the majority of its users were power Linux users and developers. They know Linux already pretty well and understand how everything links together. So when Gentoo fails at something the average Gentoo user could track it down pretty well. But over time Gentoo become trendy and people got the crazy idea that actually compiling your own packages made your system a lot faster. That's the birth of the Gentoo racer stereotype.
But Gentoo overall is for power users, developers and hobbyists. If you never wrote your own bash script, edited an xorg.conf file, wrote your own Makefile, don't know what CVS is, Gentoo probably isn't for you. Try some other distro like SUSE or Ubuntu. And then some time later you do learn the in and outs of a Linux system, come over to Gentoo, you will never be happier.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
The Gentoo docs are quite good in general, with the exception of the Gentoo Handbook which is full of blue highlighted phrases which are not links. I'm forever clicking on them to cross reference to another section, with nil effect of course.
It wouldn't be too bad if there were a search box on the handbook pages, but there isn't. Very very annoying.
The Gentoo Handbook is the "best documentation that might have been". Unfortunately it still has room for improvement. Massively greater use of links to other parts of itself, or at least a search box, would make it a lot better.
It is the best distro I have ever used. Can it be hard to someone who is not very knowledgable? Absolute, but it also was the distro that forced me to truely learn Linux.... :-)
it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that
Was there something else you wanted it to do?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
What bullshit!!!!
10 day of agony, read like ten days of repeated successful installs that were eventualy fucked up by a moron who couldn't be bothered to read instructions.
he's just another idiot bringing the windows mentality to linux!!!
At least the 2006.0 version is. It challenges the structured narratives about how we've come to expect an installer to look and act.
The graphical installer mysteriously goes silent at about the point where it's supposed to get its install on. The text-mode installer is better, but sometimes it dies mysteriously with cryptic error messages and no way for the user to restore or resume the process, or else correct the problem.
After a few tries I got it going. For my amd64 machine, there was no easy-peezy installer if I wanted to make use of all 64 juicy bits and both succulent cores. So I had to do a by-hand, command-line install like a true gangsta should. I dare say that process was more pleasant, only because command-line installs don't build up your expectations only to let you down.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
His install broke, he booted into it anyhow. He broke X, he chooses to reinstall. There is some other stuff but I couldn't read any more of the gruesom details, I suffer from nightmares.
Could someone explain what the punchline is? Is this article about Gentoo installation or about this guy being a dork?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Novell SLED 10 for businesses.
I've used the Sinclair Basic, AmigaOS, MacOS 7 through X, Mandrake (back in the day), RedHat, LFS, Gentoo, Debian, Trustix, Adamantix, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, QNX, Solaris, Windows 3.1 through XP, and probably a few others I've forgotten about. In all seriousness, Novell SLED 10 is the most productive OS I've found. The only thing I'm not 100% convinced about is the new applications browser (needs an extra click or two to find my apps) but maybe it's better for less experienced users. Had no worries getting it installed on my laptop (yes, accelerated XGL, suspend, bluetooth, wireless, etc works) either.
If Gentoo is too hard, Joe really should give this one a shot. The pretty interface is really only half of the attraction.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I've been running Gentoo for a while and this guy's experiences totally mismatch my own (I've found basic installation to be pretty darn easy). What hurts (and also feels good sometimes) is maintenance.
When I can maintain the system with a simple emerge command, I'm a happy camper. I mean, a really happy camper. I go into Gentoo Zealot mode, because I end up with exactly the system that I want, and effortlessly with minimal use of my time.
And the thing is, in my early Gentoo days, it mostly went like that. It was easy to love Gentoo, because except for the tedium of etc-update, Gentoo was almost perfect. Sure the box spends a lot of time compiling when there's a big update (such as glibc), but that's the computer's time that is getting spent, not mine. This has very little effect on the user. When people bitch about all the time their machine spends compiling, I have little sympathy. It's the computer that compiles, not me. I don't care how many days it takes, as long as my system remains usable during the whole thing.
And then there's this year, which has totally sucked. I hate it -- I mean HATE IT when I update and stuff breaks, all because I didn't read some obscure thing. If I have to look up special directions (such as the case with a GCC upgrade) then I'm not a happy camper. And I've gotten where I'm terrified of a baselayout update, because I don't know if my machine is still going to boot after this. Then there's the situation where, even though I didn't have any masked packages installed, I suddenly can't upgrade because one of my packages' dependencies has become masked, or becomes conflicted with something else I installed (such that I used to not have a problem, and now I do). And if I just work around it without checking the forums (such as the shadow change a few months ago) my system can become seriously broken (i.e. no logins in the case of the stupid shadow thing).
That sucks. Upgrade trouble on other distros is why I switched to Gentoo 4 years ago. This kind of crap is what's going to drive me to Debian, even though I disapprove of binary distros because things are almost never configured the way you want them. I'm almost willing to have a system that isn't quite the collections of packages that I want to have installed, if it ends up saving me maintenance time.
Oh yeah, and since I'm ranting.. this isn't just a Gentoo thing, but dammit, I hate x11-drm. I hate when after I upgrade kernels, I have to update some other package that supplies a kernel module. This is the shit I went through with ALSA in the 2.2 and 2.4 days, and now that ALSA is in the kernel, I get to go through this shit with my X server. Dammit, either don't use a kernel module, or PUT IT IN THE FUCKING KERNEL SOURCE. Kernel module that aren't part of the kernel, ARE EVIL AND SUCK AND THEY NEED TO DIE DIE DIE!!!!!!!!!!!! Proprietary binary-only drivers are also evil and they also suck and they also need to die too. I hope everyone associated with this crap, some day sees the error of their ways and kills themselves in the most painful and gruesome way possible. Fucking bastards! I hate you! I HATE YOU! HATE HATE HATE! *groan* *scream* *growl* *rage*
Ah, that feels better. Thank you.
I don't know what this guy's problem was. You download the doc, print it out. Follow the directions.
I installed Gentoo on my AMD ShuttlePC, base install 2hrs complete with NVIDIA support, I then emerged gnome,
some application and other tools overnight. No problem.
I installed Gentoo on my PowerMAC DP G5, same deal no problem! And It's the only Linux distribution that works with the thermal management system well.
I installed Gentoo on my PowerMAC G3 two year ago, I also use that as my internet gateway, web server, imap server,
php, you name it. All with a 30 minute base install and then a script I ran overnight.
gentoo is great! It's optimized for your system.
I once installed Gentoo from stage 1 on a VPS with 64MB of RAM.
It ran great after it was all done.
I support Gentoo (quite happily) on 3 clusters, 6 servers, and a dozen or so workstations for a science research organization. Granted, it's my full-time job, but after the first few weeks of setting everything up, everything pretty much just runs. I now sleep in, take long lunches, and do web development on the side.
If you want the no-brains install and operation, just pony up the dough for Windows. If you actually NEED a *nix-like OS for something, Gentoo is it because:
1) ebuilds (packages) available for just about everything. If it's not there, check bugs.gentoo.org and see if someone (maybe me) has posted it and it hasn't made it into the portage tree yet. And because packages are compiled from source, it's easy to change the compile options to suit your needs. I've tried fighting with SRPMs, and it's just not worth it.
2) Customizing an ebuild, adding 3rd party ebuild, or adding your own ebuilds is easy using portage overlays. The whole thing is customizable without touching any of the acutal portage tree!
3) gentoo-wiki.com has GOOD and UP-TO-DATE documentation for just about everything you want to do. What's not there is on gentoo.org, and bugs.gentoo.org is active and responsive. Gentoo simply has better support than other free distros.
4) If you can't figure out how to partition your hard drive and untar stuff, you either need to learn or you need to find software that runs on Windows instead.
He honestly then must be a fucking moron. Straight up. Just fallow the docs and it really shouldent be a problem. And for those who gripe that they have removed support for stage1, you shouldent need a guide if you wish to use it...
I think the fact that there's "no mystery to it" is what makes installing Gentoo mildly educational. Sure, now you look at the install procedure and think "all you're basically doing is un-tarring a stage tarball, chrooting, and then making mild modifications to a few files." But the fact that that's all a linux install can be pretty eye opening.
Now, I admit that users unfamiliar with the Linux CLI probably won't understand what they're doing the first time and around and will blindly follow instructions, but there is an opportunity to learn there.
Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.
I know how you feel, dude. Imagine my surprise when I typed in "hax0r teh internet" and I got some silly error. Would you believe that this is not just on Gentoo but on all Linux distros? Windows and OS X respond in a similar fashion. Why can't I just type something like "get me a brew from da fridge" and have the computer do it? Why am I paying so much money for all these megabytes and gigahertzes if it can't figure out something so simple to me?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
I got it in 1997, so it's just shy of ten years old. It cost me $2700 at the time too. But it had everything I needed and it's served me well. In fact I'm typing on it right now... :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Can somebody explain to me why it is better to spend days, weeks, and months fiddling with the low level details and problems in your linux installation to get it working to your satisfaction than it is to setup something that gives you 99% of what you wanted, out of the box?
... I've written device drivers in assembler for crying out loud, and architected highly distributed network applications. So I've got the stripes...I just can't figure out why I should bother spending the time & effort to decode something that can be made obvious.
Seriously. I used to be a gentoo user until I realized how much time I was spending fiddling with things to avoid package conflicts and keep my system up to date. I never noticed a qualitative improvement to my user experience, except the geek satisfaction of having survived the ordeal.
I'm far more interested in spending that time *using* my computer to create useful things...why is it nobler, cooler, or somehow more satisfying to waste time solving problems that others have already solved?
It's not that I can't do it
You are in a maze of twisty little passages; all alike.
Gentoo is a distribution that makes fiddling with the interns of your system and software easier by providing tools that automate much of the work without loosing a bit of flexibility. If that doesn't sound interesting to you, then don't use gentoo.
One of the best things to install early on is partimage. Particularly useful when you are doing experimental installs on new hardware (saved me tons of time on my new amd64 system.) Most boot disks (knoppix) have it installed, and all you need is to be able to mount the partitions and lan working, you can recreate it things pretty easily.
(speaking of boot cds/backup, has anyone found a solution to the "Detecting Adaptec I20 Raid Controllers" hang problem with sysresccd on some of the nvidia motherboards? Only posted here because I can't find an answer anywhere else, before I try rebuilding sysresccd kernel/complete )
*snark*
Life's too damn short to reinvent the wheel. 5% extra speed from a custom compile? Screw that! Give the slower binary and more time to live life, be happy, do my job, and get paid. With the time I saved on the 5% custom compile, I can buy a CPU that's 15% faster. Since time is money, I actually save money buying the CPU rather than doing the 5% custom compile.
If it gives you pleasure, by all means, do the custom compile. Hell, even if the custom compile reduced speed by 5%, go ahead and do it if it makes you happy.
Me? Hanging out in the sunlight and fresh air makes me happy these days. The opportunity cost associated with the 5% custom compile just ain't worth it to me anymore.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Life IS to short to spend on installing Gentoo. God bless the user base, it is a fine community. but give me binaries in a simple installer/updater, ah yes Debian .I am not trying to learn anything about the details of Linux, just, get some work done, email my family & friends. Thank goodness these days you can put a cd in , bootup, answer a couple of questions and you have a fully functional system.
I really don't understand how anyone can make an install drag on for 10 days. Upset with poor Redhat management and almost "MS Like" behavior I switched all my systems away from Redhat a while ago, during the 2004 season of Gentoo releases. I recently setup a dedicated Linux server for a client I work with and installed Gentoo Linux (starting with a stage1 tar file) over a running Redhat RHEL4 install using documentation I found on their website and their Wiki-site. It didn't take 10 days and amazing enough I didn't brick a server located in several states away from me.
The main reason I like Gentoo is because of their minimalist and simple approach to package management. Although RPM install faster I think the portage/emerge system is less of a headache and with an auto dependency solver built in it puts installing packages on ez-mode for any system administrator both novice and experienced.
Well, he could use Ubuntu instead, but then he wouldn't have the 10x speedup of harddisk access that comes with a hand-crafted /etc/fstab..
Georg
"it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that."
"Precisely" and "exactly" aren't the words I connect to gentoo. To the contrary. On all levels I had trouble with missing precision.
It started with the system tools, which weren't even capable of sufficiently retrieving vital information when used together. No exact information of packages installed, be it version, use flags, dependencies. The tools I used most to work with the system were find and grep.
I had gentoo installed on a server and several work stations. Even after initial installation and configuration I spend more time maintaining the systems than actually using them. And though I did identical installations on the work stations, these systems weren't identical. Different dependencies, different tools, different features of the tools. The reasons:
a) the first machine was installed part by part, so the interaction between packages were different to the second machine, whose packages were the same but got installed at once.
b) the third machine was installed exactly like the second, but as it was installed a day later, its dependencies were different due to different versions. Oh, not different versions of the packages -- different versions of the ebuilds of the same package version, as they were frequently changed without version changes, without notification.
These problems weren't first install problems though, but long-time maintenance and even security problems. Building the packages on one machine and then distributing the binaries could have been possible but wasn't feasable due to heavy hardware differences.
I used gentoo for one and a half years...
cb
Seriously, they get a bad review from someone, so they personally attack the reviewer on their web page? That's incredibly childish.
Furthermore, while I haven't read his article about mplayer, criticism was warranted to that project. I haven't used it in a while, simply because there are other, better, players available now such as VLC, but I remember the install being pointlessly combersome. I also recall a lack of binary packages. Their player wasn't up to snuff, and the reviewer was doing a service to the community by letting them know not to waste their time with it.
I didn't start my unix experience on Gentoo (FreeBSD, rather) but I do remember what it was like to be completely new to the system.
Things that a complete newbie does not know:
When Gentoo sits you down and says "type this", any curious user will say "hm, what is this, what is it doing..." and learn a little bit in the process. Exercise builds skill. If you see it, you might get a little knowledge, but if you do it, you are actually learning. Kind of the hands-on concept.
I guess the point is that Gentoo is for people who are curious and interested in the workings of Unix. Yes, it is possible to use Gentoo if you pretend that typing some long crazy string corresponds to what would be a button click in another distro, but for that kind of user, there's no point. Non-curious users will simply type keystrokes and learn nothing. and then get fed up. and then quit and use a different distro.
Also, even at the later stage of emerging things, you do still learn various things thanks to "emerge portage", and "etc-update". Also, to get most daemon programs to run as needed you will need to edit their conf files, and play with symlinks, and edit rc.conf, and conf.d and friends. Heck, I never understood the Linux rc script system when I was using Debian, but I learned it pretty quick when Gentoo started changing things and adding boot-time messages like "/etc/hostname is depricated, use /etc/conf.d/hostname instead".
And, when a user finally gets tired of not having sound and tackles ALSA, they get to learn all sorts of fun things like /dev nodes, devfs, udev, modules.conf, lspci, recompiling the kernel with and without alsa built-in, or as a separate module, or as a userspace lib... and I'd better stop here before I start an ALSA flamewar.
And yes, not reading the handbook is suiscide, and the forums are the lifeblood of Gentoo.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
I haven't seen very much truth in this thread. You can still do a stage 1 install. If it takes you ten days then you should be installing ubuntu. Installing gentoo is exactly as straight forward as a *base* linux install should be.
1) setup your partitions using *fdisk*
2) uncompress the base system binaries using *tar*
3) uncompress portage using *tar*
4) start building packages
What the heck is so hard about using tar and fdisk. If you can't use tar and fdisk you should get a mac. This is exactly as convenient as a user who wants control would want their install to be.
-P
Let's be honest. The only reason that gentoo still requires this kind of configuration is that it makes users feel "leet" to do something so arcane. Many people start using gentoo and various other linux distributions not because they derive any material benefit from it's design but because they want to feel smart and special. They want to be one of the underdogs, a member of a special revolutionary force bringing free software to the world, always shadowed by their evil nemesis, bill gates.
Users like this don't want everyone to start using linux, because then it wouldn't be hip anymore. As long as linux seems arcane and uninviting, then the people who use it seem cool and mysterious.
Some might despise this kind of linux user. Me, I'm just glad they didn't turn into goths or *shudder* emos.
I couldn't agree more with this statement!!!
I'm so tired of broken ebuilds, monolithic->multiple ebuild migrations, and the like. Every time I do a emerge -uDa world, I get some compiliation problem that requires my personal attention.
Just recently Gentoo went from a single XOrg installation to multi-ebuild installation. To their credit, there's a very complete and helpful guide for migrating. Unfortunately, the "potential problems" section is very long. After the multi-day hell that I had going from a few KDE ebuilds to hundreds of seperate KDE ebuilds, I do not want to go through the same thing again with XOrg. Of course, I now have a machine that cannot be completely upgraded because the majority of packages now require the new XOrg.
Like he said in the article I'm sure there will be a few Gentoo users who will blame me for all the problems. Let me cut them off early. I agree. I'm not switching just yet, because I've got a functioning system that I don't want to break, but let me tell you that I can't wait for the day when I do a full system upgrade and dump Gentoo for Kubuntu.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
Good distribution for experienced users is Arch Linux. You don't need to compile stuff. You don't need to configure everything. You just need to configure things like in each other distribution (but without any clickable dialogs). It's simple as Slackware, has very good package manager and is current.
And it's not Gentoo or Debian.
I spent 10 days waiting for it to compile -_-
I once installed 3 gentoo in HP servers in 2 days! I had even installed a gentoo from a stage1 2 or 3 years ago in a 486 and it didn't took nothing close of 10 days but it took 3 or 4 days to compile everything (I wasn't near the computer all the time to start the next task so some of the time the computer was just siting there waiting)!
Why is everyone getting so much trouble installing Gentoo?
Gentoo was the first distro I ever installed (and pretty much my first Linux experience, not counting slight playing around with Knoppix), and I got it installed in a day (technically about 6 hours at most). I just followed the handbook, read carefully. The ONLY trouble I had was the kernel compilation failed for some reason, and it worked fine when I started it a second time. I had no reasons to look for help on the forums or IRC, since the handbook explained everything so clearly if only you read it. I had a working KDE the next day (left it to emerge X, KDE and Firefox overnight).
My second install was a total breeze, in 3 hours X was already installed (note that this includes compilation of the kernel and X).
If a complete Linux newb could install it in 6 hours, then I can't see why someone having used another distro would have any trouble at all. And if it's an issue arising from lack of hardware support, how is Gentoo to blame rather than Linux? Half of the questions I read in #gentoo are clearly explained in the documentation, most of the others are easily found in the forums or wiki.
And, of course, the most important thing: If you don't want to spend a few hours installing Linux, then why did you choose Gentoo?
As for complete control, that's pretty much bullshit too. Gentoo does not offer anything of the kind. Gentoo gives you a compile-from-source framework taken to extreme, but that's it. You can't break out of it anymore than you can break out of what a binary distro imposes upon you. The ability to customize features of the installed packages is pretty much the only "control" you get with Gentoo.
Tell me, have many of the people who sing praises to their masterful use of -O3 ever tried something truly innovative with their Gentoo box? How many have tried to replace their init system? How many have assembled and tweaked their own desktop environment from bits and pieces, without relying on the Gnome or KDE defaults? How many have tried to force a package like the old XFree to get installed into its own directory instead of being mingled with all the others? How many have tweaked their box to stop using FHS directories? How many have enabled SELinux or preloading or overlayed encrypted filesystems or other cool features by hand, without being spoon-fed by the system?
Unless Gentoo users do something like that, they are just monkeys who feed flags they don't understand into their machines and pat each other on the back. Many Linux users of many distro's do that, but they have the decency to not consider themselves uber-1337 for it.
Sorry for being an asshole but it gets rather tyresome at some point to see the old "complete control and performance" myth being flinged around and around.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Although, if you screw it up... it will screw you up. I recently tried to do a major overhaul (move from X.org 6.x to X.org 7 modular). Man, did I mess up. So I was ticked off, and decided to install Ubuntu. Well, I couldn't get MythTV to work. So I went back to Gentoo.
There have been other times when I've strayed away after messing it up, but I always come back. It's just that nice. No other distribution meets my needs... which, arguably, my needs are to be in constant agony. However, it's my own self-induced agony. If something breaks in another distro, it probably wasn't my fault.
Starmen.net
I am willing to concede that Gentoo is not the easiest Linux build to install. The last time I attempted to use a LiveCD frontend install, the frontend kept screwing-up on me [because I had failed to do an md5checksum on the file]. Upon [partially] realizing this, I went for a command-line install, which I screwed up a few times before getting it right. All of this was because I thought I could just type whatever was in the manual, with no regard for the comments and tips written with them. THAT is how you screw-up a Gentoo install. What users (especially the author) need to understand is that Gentoo is not meant to be user-friendly. It is meant to be functional and insanely customizable. The way it is set-up now, you install a stage 3 tarball and bootstrap backward to get your customization options. You can complain all day and night about how it takes forever to compile, and that by the time you emerge one package in portage, you have to emerge another; It's all pointless bitching and moaning. Problems come when people start messing with .config files and emerging unstable programs because they don't know any better. I have 4 different kernel versions for my desktop, and I could use each one of them without ever having any difficulties in my work. There is no need to "emerge -uDNav world" every day... it is a conscious decision to irritate the hell out of yourself. If I can run 2.6.14-r3 without any problems, you can go without using portage every day. If you want user-friendly, install Windows; It'll manage your virtual RAM for you, and practically do everything except run your anti-virus program!
"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
What are the mplayer folks actually saying in the manual?
Barr: MPlayer is nightmare to configure and install... okay, seems they have improved a little bit now.
MPlayer: This is not the best researched article in the world! (In fact, we think that MPlayer is just simple to install and quite trivial to use!)
See? MPlayer folks don't even try to tear Barr's arguments apart logically, they just think Barr is full of it without saying why. And put it in their bloody user manual.
Whereas some other projects have this sort of approach to negative press:
Some reviewer, can't remember who: Amarok is a great app, it does this and this and this very well, but the documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was a bit bad.
Amarok team: Ooo, look at this interesting review of Amarok! They got a very positive impression of us, but they thought that documentation and logic behind this and that and the other was less than satisfactory. We agree completely, and we're working on these!
See? "This article sucks" is not a defence. "This article is dead wrong because...", followed by some particularly thrilling explanation, is.
Having /etc under version control is key in any place where multiple admins can work on the same machine. I learned this from the guy who taught me Unix, SCO Unix of all things (hey, remember when they were cool?!?) The rest of your comments are spot on, too.
/.ers know that, I just wish most managers and CTOs knew that. CYA and all that.
As for how litle support a decent OS needs, I know that, you know that, most
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Debian Immigrant
You have learned about Knoppix from a new software engineer guy who keeps laughing every time you bring up a new feature using Internet Explorer. The software engineer guy tells you what a "Distro" is. Your parents tell you that Linux is Evil, and Knoppix is the anti-christ. To make a copy of the Knoppix's ISO image, you bought a stack of 100 CD's. When learning to install Knoppix to your hard drive you believe that Knoppix is actually 3 distro's; Debian, Knoppix, and Beginner. Fearfully, you choose "Beginner".
I used Slackware in the distant past (~1994), RedHat several years ago, Fedora a couple years ago, and recently SuSE and Gentoo.
...
I found that with the RPM-based systems, I frequently got into RPM hell[*]. Although I have run into conflicts with Gentoo (mainly X and KDE), this has happened much, much less frequently than the RPM issues I had.
On the computer I bought around 2002 (A 1.1GHz Athlon), emerging is often time-consuming. However, on my newer, 64-bit AMD box, it's quite fast for all but the biggest emerges.
So overall, I'm much happier with Gentoo, but YMMV. Void where prohibited. For external use only.
[*] For the few people who are reading this far into this thread and don't know what that is: installing new software or updating existing software conflicts with existing software and/or requires 2 more things to be updated, which then requires 2 more things to be updated,
You've described pretty much what I do. I use Gentoo as a start, and then set up my devel environment so it optimizes. Then I build what I want from source. I've built both XFree86 and X.org from source (I'm not a fan of the recent modularization but I'll cope). I've set up Enlightenment as I see fit, but I am kind to my wife and default to a customized (Desktop-wise, not code-wise) Gnome anyway even though I don't like using software I didn't build from scratch. As far as performance, you must have had some bad experiences kid... On the same boxes that I used to run RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 2 and 3 on, the Gentoo installs blow them away in terms of performance. Boot time is faster (when I need to boot) which is a combination of optimized code and a more efficient init system. I'll give you a concrete example:
I have an audio-visual workstation I set up to edit multitrack audio, control my outboard digital samplers, synths and drum machines, and edit video. I used to run it on Redhat 9. But I DIDN'T use the Redhat defaults. Instead, I'd install a very spare RedHat 9 with just enough tools to do devel stuff, then I'd start building everything else from source myself. Not SRPMS, but the actual sources from the various sites. Everything from the kernel, to X, to the desktop environment (I've built Gnome and KDE from source with my own choice of what I did and didn't want), to the apps. I did this because I saw notable performance gains over precompiled software. Those notable gains were in things like:
-Snappier desktop performance (thanks to the low latency patches for the 2.4 kernel and my eventual conversion of Redhat 9 to use the 2.6 series kernel)
-The ability to run more audio plugins for realtime audio processing (plugins in the multitrack editor Ardour)
-Faster performance in the video editor over the precompiled stuff (Cinelerra rocks if you build it yourself, it sucks if you don't or can't) My renders went were nearly twice as fast when I compiled myself instead of using binaries.
-Faster CD and DVD ripping (specifically the encoding portion, you obviously can't speed up the read from the drive itself) than the RPMs that I could have used from the net
-Integrating Xen into the system once I got it to the 2.6 series kernel
And this was all with Redhat 9. A friend suggested that I try Gentoo. I was a bit intrigued since I'm also a huge fan of Linux from Scratch. So I got another HD in the box and gave it a go. I built nearly the same system using Gentoo and was completely floored by how much faster the system was. Sure, I could wait until Fedora got up to speed by moving to a newer compiler/lib suite, but I don't WANT to wait. I WANT IT NOW. I used to boast that my custom compiled RedHat builds would boot in a little over a minute if you excluded all the BIOS crap when the system starts. But my Gentoo boxes cut that way down and I'm at a desktop in less than a minute even WITH the BIOS stuff.
Another example (you've probably already closed your eyes, ears and mind at this point):
That Media Center I built on a P3? I had attempted the same thing back in 2003 with RedHat and it just never really worked right. So I stuck with Windows ME on that box (which was a fine OS even though a lot of people had bad experinces with it, I never did. Other than the fact that I dislike the Microsoft ethics and their lack of cool desktop stuff). Then I got a new more powerful box and in 2004 I gave Fedora Core 3 a try. It ran fine and I had it up until last month when the box was fried by a power surge. Since I'm strapped for cash right now and my family RELIES on the Media Center, I went back to that old P3. This time I grabbed my Gentoo CDs and it took me about two weeks to get the system back up to where the Fedora Core 3 (P4 era Celeron 1.7 Ghz CPU) was. The only thing I had to lose was the realtime deinterlacing (in xine) of the video for the 1080p LCD monitor. However, once again I was very amused that a box that showed no signs of being a capable Me
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The author of the article discovered that he had to read the goddamn manual. My heart bleeds for him.