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.

Comments

OH NOES!!

[chrismcdirty]

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.

Live CD's, Sissified?

[corroncho]

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!

I'm a former gentoo user

[Frag-A-Muffin]

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 :)

Re:Follow the Directions!

[spun]

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.

10 days

[whoever57]

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.

Re:10 days

[Fallingcow]

1. Did not RTFM

That's the big one.

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.

The only way you could screw up a Gentoo install is to be one of those people who always got an "F" on those following-directions assignments in grade school.

Re:10 days

[BeeBeard]

I'm always baffled by the contention that Gentoo "teaches you Linux." In a time when most hardware is automatically detected by the kernel and automatically configured by the distro (including Gentoo, if you set it up that way), there really isn't nearly as much necessary config file editing as there used to be. Are you talking about trying to learn where your program and configuration files are on your root partition? Well, emerging something surely won't help you there. Could you mean the installer teaches you Linux? Because all you're basically doing is un-tarring a stage tarball, chrooting, and then making mild modifications to a few files. And regardless, you're (hopefully) just typing in what you were instructed to type, when you were instructed to type it. Then you're done. How could that have taught you a thing?

I don't want to be reductive here, but Gentoo is really just a platform for building programs from source code and then managing those programs after they are built. There's no mystery to it--most of the other distros install binaries that were compiled on other computers but that work perfectly well on yours. The only thing that is even mildly instructive about Gentoo is that you have an often extremely limited ability to control how you want your own binaries to be built by changing USE flags and compiler optimizations. But that's not going to teach you much in the end: Sure, that one application you just emerged has "jpeg", "png", and "tiff" USE flags. But you know, that's probably because it's an ACDsee-clone image viewing app. And one the program is installed, what then? You just use it the same way you would on an Ubuntu machine.

I guess what I'm saying is that Ubuntu and Gentoo really aren't that different from each other, and your learning experience with Linux is in no way diminished or enhanced based on the distribution you use. Besides, once you emerge gdm and gnome and make your wallpaper a picture of a bunch of multiracial people getting naked or holding their hands and singing kumbayah, you're pretty much there already. ;-)

And yes, before your panties get in a bunch, I am a Gentoo user, mostly because I like how it's basically Slackware with a package management system...(sorry Patrick!)

Re:Personality conflicts..

[drinkypoo]

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.

Imagine for a second utilizing a metaphor that makes some sense. What you're talking about is baking a fucking cake, it's an inherently analog process and it responds well to tweaking. Let me use as an even simpler example making pancakes from a box. Do they ever put enough water in the recipe to get it to flow out right? No. But once you've made pancakes a couple times you know what the consistency is supposed to be like.

Computer don't work that way. I'm going to wade out into the dangerous waters and make an automotive analogy here. If you are working on an automatic transmission, you had better get every little piece and part in the right place, and there's TONS of them. For instance, automatic transmissions are chock-full of check valves, which are constructed from a spring and a ball bearing. Eliminate just one of those (the spring, OR the ball bearing) and your transmission doesn't work right.

Well, your distribution is orders of magnitude more complex (in terms of functional units) than an automatic transmission. Do you think that maybe, just maybe the way you put things together might be important?

Anyway, it's a bunch of bullshit, because while I followed the directions to the letter during my very first gentoo install, I have not done so during any subsequent install, and they have all been successful installs. Of course, that's because I know what I'm doing. I've been messing with this Linux shit for a long time now, and always from either a hobbyist or IT perspective. Constant tinkering has a way of teaching you, mostly by negative example :)

The point is that gentoo is intended for a certain class of user. There are other distributions out there. If you don't need the things you can get from gentoo that you can't get anywhere else, run something else. See how easy that was?

Gentoo *DOES* teach the newcomers

[silverdirk]

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:

• ls
• mount
• tar
• man
• grep
• /etc
• editing make.conf
• making symlinks
• /boot
• boot loaders, in general
• compiling a kernel, by hand
• installing a kernel, by hand
• editing /etc/passwd
• knowing the basic pieces of software, what they do, and how they are divided by purpose: cron, a system logger, Xorg, apache, etc etc etc.

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.