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.
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.
I've been using Gentoo for what I guess about 100 days now, and except for me totally screwing something up early on (I think it was the X server) and having to reinstall the entire thing, I've had a good experience with it.
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.
I just posted a similar set of complaints, but you've touched on one I'd forgotten. The Portage system still works well *if* you're a Gentoo obsessive and emerge sync; emerge -uD world at least once a week. If you get behind, and need to update Portage, layouts, gcc, X and the kernel all at once, you start running into all sorts of really nasty collisions and breakages.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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
I've been using Gentoo for what I guess about 100 days now, and except for me totally screwing something up early on (I think it was the X server) and having to reinstall the entire thing, I've had a good experience with it.
Something you might want to do. Once you get your base system (plus X, KDE/Gnome/whatever) installed, do a stage 4 backup.
Basically, just make a tarball out of your partitions.
If you have to reinstall, just boot off the CD, mount your partitions, chroot, copy the image over and untar it.
Reboot, and you're good to go. Saves a lot of hassle with reinstalls.
Quick, cheap and dirty, but it works well.
Try Kororaa.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
I've been using Gentoo for 2 years now and the only RTFM I've gotten was a 'Read the forums, man'. One quick search on forums.gentoo.org, and the answer was in the second post, spelled out step-by-step. Every problem I've had on any of my Gentoo boxes has been answered on the forums. 95% of the time the answer is already there and you just have to post the error string into the search box.
Either this guy doesn't know Linux as well as he thought, or this story is just trollbait.
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.
That's a publisher problem. When distros were shipping mainly as several CD iso files instead of a single DVD image as they're most popular now, publishers were "trimming" distributions to reduce the number of glue-in CDs that they had to ship with their Linux books. They'd cut out stuff that they figured nobody would use, like the source packages, either GNOME or KDE, maybe some of the services and more obscure administration tools, TeX/LaTeX, or whatever their "media" people decided could go to trim a distro from, say 4 CDs to 2, to make the book cheaper to manufacture.
The theory was that this wouldn't affect anyone since they'd trim out stuff that the book didn't cover and most people didn't use, and you'll notice that they all say things like "Includes complete Red Hat Linux 7.3*" and then down at the bottom "*Publisher's edition!" or whatever.
The trouble was twofold:
- Several major titles from several different publishers were shipped with packages chopped out but without a modified installer, meaning that the user could easily find themselves with an installer asking for (as you found out) either nonexistent CDs or packages missing from the CD even though the right number was inserted.
- At least one major title spent a whole chapter on a package that had been trimmed out of the install media by the publisher.
This was during the "golden age of Linux trade paperbacks" from maybe 1997-2003, I don't know if that sort of hijinks still goes on, but I worked on some of them from a major publisher and got caught up in some of the politics/cock-ups that embarrassed all and led to finger-pointing.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The search on the forums sucks. It deletes some of your search terms because they're "restricted" words for whatever reason. There's a couple of threads on it that you could, umm... never mind. :-) Anyway, if you do something like 'site:forums.gentoo.org search terms' in Google you can come up with stuff.
Haida Manga
The Gentoo Manual is very helpful, and so is the Gentoo Wiki.
:)
And being a Gentoo user and fanboy, I find this kind of poster funny
I'm an Ubuntu convert, but I was exclusively a Gentoo user for two or three years, and I recall there being extremely good documentation that, if followed exactly, would result in a working system in 99.99% of cases.
Well, I've run into a couple instances where the directions didn't work, but the Gentoo forums helped a lot. If you run into a problems, search for the answer in the forum. If you don't find an answer, post your question. You'll get a pretty good answer pretty quickly.
No, admittedly, Gentoo is not the quickest/easiest way to get a working desktop linux install. If that's what you're looking for, use a different distro. But if you're want to learn about Linux and are willing to put in the time and effort, I can't really see a complaint that you can't get it working.
Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.
Hell. I am an op in freenode #gentoo, and we VERY strongly discourage stuff like "RTFM". It's just a slippery slope. If someone persists with that kind of attitude, they are usually dealth with lightly at first, then in increasing levels of force until they either knock it off or aren't allowed in.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Maybe that was the case a while back, but when I installed Debian for the first time in years a couple of months ago, the installer seemed pretty idiotproof. Having heard of its reputation the I RTFMed first, but didn't really need to as the installer was no less good at handholding than many commercial distros. Can't comment about Gentoo, but I suspect that the bloke that wrote the article might want to put himself in a position where he can do image backups and restores (using dd or whatever) so that when "something gets broken" he can at least restore back to a pre-broken state.
"With any of them, you often have to do a little research on the chipset of some component you have on board...hell, you need to know that for many items on a simple kernel config....and everyone has to do that sooner or later...."
What the hell are you talking about? Kernel config? I'll agree that it isn't the easiest thing to do, but get real: most users won't have to bother - a well-configured distro will have everything available, driver-wise, and hotplug or another similar driver-helper will automatically detect the hardware in your system.
Seriously. Only performance tweakers need do a kernel config, if the distro is well-built.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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*
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.