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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 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!
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!
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
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
http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/fwin2k/insiderseye/20000 529windowsme/winmedesktop01.jpg
DIG MY 1337 CUSTOM FONTS AND GRAPHICS! OMG AZN! ...now what's not infinitely tweakable about that?!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
... 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.
The Gentoo of today, starts you off with either a gui install (have not tried it yet) or CLI...but, they start you off with a stage3 tarball...and you actually get a running config quite rapidly. I actually had to research to find out how to get it to bootstrap like it did in the old days and built "everything" from scratch from source. (That link HERE .
But, really...as far as Linux installs go...Gentoo is about as easy as any I've tried. 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....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
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 #!
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...
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?
Agreed.
What this article fails to mention is that done right, Gentoo rivals FreeBSD in the stability department. That isn't to draw flames either. When you're counting 9's, that is just plain awesome.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I know what you mean. Reading the article, I was laughing when I realized he hadn't frobnozled the prepalpitator scripts with the correct USE -octaroon -dingo flags. 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 gentoo installed from source in under 15 seconds.
Seriously, it's not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla install with exactly and nothing but the recommended options. But I was doing stuff like that with Linux 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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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 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!
As someone who has used Gentoo for about 4 years, debian for about 5 and before those Suse, I feel I am able to jump in at this point.
Just because you took a look at the install instructions doesn't mean you are able to judge the distro, gentoo is easily the most powerful operating system I have ever encountered, the amount of control it gives you is way beyond anything else out there, seriously better than debian, any bsd, solaris, AIX, hp-ux.
Yes the installation used to be fairly complex (although a great way to learn more about the inner workings of linux), but it has become simplified over the years, and now although I still wouldn't recommend it to a complete newbie, it is ready for a basic user.
Debian with apt cannot compare to portage, and as for features that should be enabled......I disagree, when installing imagemagick I may not want certain features like perl bindings or jpg support, gentoo doesn't just let me add features it also lets me disable them, this in turn reduces clutter on my system and makes life that little bit easier.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
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 ;)
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 guess you haven't tried many then. I've installed Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Mandrake, Freespire, PCBSD (not a Linux, whatever), ELX, and.... I don't even know what your talking about. Ok, so arguing that I know less than you isn't the greatest retort, but you're seriously out there if you think that anything you've said qualifies as "easy" even for Linux.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
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
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 agree in every area except partitioning; most linux distributions have traditionally made this at least as difficult as it is in DOS; sure, to you and I it's a doddle, but to the masses it might as well be written in sanskrit.
Uh no. I guess you haven't tried many then. I have owned several pieces of hardware that were even based on the same chipset as some supported hardware, but wouldn't work without significant driver hacking/kernel mods.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've used gentoo. Not recently, mind you, but when it first came out. It's not that hard now, from what I hear. There's oodles more, better documentationIt's fun, and you learn a lot from it.
.0001% benefit. It's not the type of control that most people need. If you want to install gentoo to "be cool" then you are a loser. If you want to install it to learn, then you are a hacker. (in the good sense)
But "control" over your system? Let's be honest, for most folks that use gentoo, that's like the ricer who says his "Type R" emblem makes his Civic go faster. It's hours of effort for
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, just try searching the forums when you only update once a year. It's not the second post anymore. The answer is probably in there /somewhere/, but you'll spend a day and a half searching for it with phpBB's crappy search facilities.
If you don't update frequently, almost 100% of the updates fail. And the cause of the failure is probably incredibly obscure, and nobody has ever experienced the problem before.
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!
Actually, it's only dumb because they're not adding a front splitter as well. You don't want to push down the front and not push down the back, the back will get even more bounce-happy and the car will become uncontrollable. So yes, you want a big rear spoiler (you gotta watch those typos, I was trying to figure out if "nig" was supposed to be a racist epithet) on a FWD car if you're going fast enough to actually need one, but not without your bigass front splitter to provide you front downforce.
Fine! Now what does it take to get you to quit bitching and whining about gentoo users? Why don't you just let them run their OS, and you go run yours, and everyone can live if not in harmony, at least without pissing in one another's wheaties.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
Oh, that was a bad typo. Sorry. s/nig/big/ Stupid fingers.
I love gentoo! I love gentoo users, too. I just see too many people (here, not really in the gentoo forums, or mailing lists or IRC channels) who read a story like this and start to get all defensive and say things like "This guy must be moron for not being able to install gentoo!" Sometimes gentoo users seem just a tad full of themselves. As if watching cryptic compilation messages scroll by for hours has made them a linux expert overnight, and anyone who hasn't, isn't.
You can run whatever OS you want to, but if someone has criticisms after giving it a try, what's the ponit in just writing them off?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
'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.'
This is exactly why I prefer it, especially for servers.
lunaslide
"I'm not really interested in product. I just want to know what's going on." -Misha Mahowald
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.
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.
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 repeat: do not use either installer. Read the directions above, especially the x86 quick install.
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.