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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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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'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
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 #!
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.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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'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.
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!
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
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.
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'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!
To which you replied "Windows XP? never had a problem except on the more exotic platforms. Seriously. At all."
Having a bunch of useless and vulnerable services enabled by default is not a "reasonable default configuration". Having a freshly installed OS automatically hacked within minutes of being online means it does not use a "reasonable default configuration"
I'm not even trying to follow the common slashdot anti-microsoft mindset here, it's just a sad fact that the default configuration of WinXP is extremely vulnerable to viruses, worms and trojans.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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
Obligatory. It never gets old.
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.
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.
I once installed Gentoo from stage 1 on a VPS with 64MB of RAM.
It ran great after it was all done.
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.
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.
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.
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".