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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.
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++
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'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
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.
I actually just installed Gentoo again on my desktop for the first time in about 6 months and I was pissed to learn that you can't do a stage 1 install easily anymore. In the end though, reiso in #gentoo on FreeNode informed me that it doesn't really matter, which I kind of agree with. Within a month you'll have updated most of stage 1 anyways so I guess it's worth the less effort up front to get the system set up faster.
Gentoo definitely is better for those wanting to Learn Linux because it forces you to get into the nitty gritty of a Linux OS setup. I started with Slackware 8 or so and used it through Slack 9, but never really grew comfortable with Linux until I installed Gentoo in 2004 for the first time.
For someone to say it took them 10 hours to install Gentoo is a bit deceiving though. It sounds like a long time but really, most of the time you aren't in front of the monitor. I'd say the longest bit of the whole thing is emerging X and OpenOffice and even today that doesn't take long on a P4 with 2Ghz or better. I did the majority of the work overnight while I slept.
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.
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.
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!)
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.