Gentoo on the PS3 - Full Install Instructions

An anonymous reader writes "My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it. His requirements — Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run. He wanted to make the full use of his Linux install, so he needed a distro which wouldn't hold him back with frustrating problems. The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user. Having used Gentoo extensively, I knew that this would be the solution to my problems. What follows is full install instructions, plus personal opinions, on why Gentoo is better than Fedora Core or YDL on the PS3"

Comments

How much did Gentoo get for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, this just sounds like another fanboy slashvertisement. Gentoo is a decent operating system (although I'm not a fan myself) but half of the description is just telling how great it is and how good it is for a newbie, a fact many people would disagree with. How about keeping the descriptions on topic? On the other hand this is slashdot.

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[eln]

This post is not flamebait, the article summary is flamebait. The summary is basically a troll about why Gentoo is the greatest Linux distro ever and every other distro sucks.

The summary was clearly written by a Gentoo fanboy, as the "requirements" he lists are fairly common, and it's definitely arguable that Gentoo would be the best (or even in the top 5) distro to solve the particular issues he brings up. His friend asked for a distro recommendation, so he (surprise!) recommends the distro he's used "extensively" and then proceeds to slam the other major distros. Flame. Bait.

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[Bandman]

Hey, when all you have is a hammer...

Also, if you put the Type-R sticker on the PS3 Gnome will compile in less time with tighter code. /the more you know

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[smallfries]

OK, I am a big fan of Gentoo and use it on all my boxes .... but this article is trash. It's not just the summary that is flamebait. The "reasons" for why Gentoo is superior to Fedora in the article are laughable. But the worst point, truely one of the worst tips that I've ever heard, is the idea that when the installation is too hard for a newbie they get can an "expert" to remotely install it for them on irc. Sure, tell people who don't know better than getting owned by a script-kiddie on irc is a reason to use Gentoo...

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[WoLpH]

His points however, are valid.

Why Gentoo?

1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
3. It teaches you more about Linux.
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.

All of them are definately true, however it is not said that (some) of those points are valid for Ubuntu or any other Linux distro.
I definately do agree that it's a fanboy post, but he has a few good points.
disclaimer, I too am a Gentoo user

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[asCii88]

You must be new here

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[Da_Weasel]

Redundant!

Ok, I know it's not redundant in this thread by can we please start moderating these "You must be new here!" comments as such. There are easily 10 of these in the comments of every freaking ./ article.

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[Da_Weasel]

Typical ricer post.
1. Ricer! Nuff said...
2. I have yet to see a Linux distro that isn't modular.
3. As many idiot Gentoo users, on many forums have shown, it doesn't teach you all that much. Some of the most ignorant comments I have ever heard regarding Linux have come from Gentoo users.
But I suppose if your idea of learning about Linux is typing "emerge [package]" and "nano -w [conf.file]" over and over again, then yea, it teaches you ALOT.
4. FC6 Automatic Updates: chkconfig yum on
5. *cough* Debian! *cough*

The person who posted this clearly didn't make any points. They just made a few unfounded opinionated remarks.

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[Mister Whirly]

You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot!

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[WoLpH]

Just to fund the points a little.

1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro. You can select what you do and don't want in a program, resulting in smaller binaries, resulting in less memory usage and faster loading. Noticable? Probably not, but theoretically it should make a difference
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation. I agree, (nearly?) every Linux is modular, but I have not found a lot of distros where I can tell what I do and don't want compiled into the program, that adds a lot to the customizability.
3. It teaches you more about Linux. Well, let's compare it to installing SuSE, you boot the dvd, you click next a couple of times, you're done installing. Did you learn anything? Probably not. Lets install Gentoo, we have to choose our bootloader and configure it manually, we _have_ to select what packages we want (or they won't be installed at all), we have to compile a kernel... hmm I'm guessing it'll be more educating than a distro like SuSE. And no, I'm not claiming Gentoo users are smarter. But you do learn a little bit more about Linux.
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5 I must admit that I haven't used fedora in a while but the last time I've used it (FC1 and FC2) it was not possible to go to the 2.6 kernel without reinstalling. Just a serious question though, is it possible to upgrade from FC5 to FC6 without having to reboot and put in the CD?
5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems. The Gentoo forums are known for there good support (I'm not a regular visitor, but I've heard much praise about it). And I agree, 'best documentation' is just an opinion. But that doesn't make it entirely untrue, the support (on the forums) is pretty good.
6. Not all of his remarks are opinionated, but I find it a bit harsh to say he doesn't have any points. Just many general points that are not Gentoo specific ;)

Re:How much did Gentoo get for this?

[fatphil]

They missed one important detail:

    -O6 -funroll-loops

There, now the article's complete!

Overkill

[Ganniterix]

I really think that someone taking his first steps in linux world should not be left out in the cold with Gentoo!! Gentoo has its benefits ... but being user friendly to beginners is definitely not one of them!!

Re:Overkill

[rtyall]

Of course it will, think about how much they'll learn when they spend 3 days trying to get a game to work in a usable X window, having to check the gentoo forums every 5 minutes to see if anyone can help.
I can't think of a better way to spend my hard earned £550 when they come out in the UK.

Re:Overkill

[ArcherB]

I really think that someone taking his first steps in linux world should not be left out in the cold with Gentoo!! Gentoo has its benefits ... but being user friendly to beginners is definitely not one of them!!

The hard part of Gentoo is setting it up and that's really by choice. I've set it up from both stage 1 and 3 and trust me, there is a huge difference. However, once Gentoo is set up, it's cake to maintain. I'd go as far to say that it is the easiest distro I've ever used when it comes to installing software if it is set up correctly. As long as it is set to sync the portage tree regularly (via Cron) and GUI tools such as Porthole or Kuroo, maintenance is a breeze. May I suggest checking out a Gentoo based OS like Sabayon or Vida.

*Disclaimer: This message typed on a Sabayon powered system.

Re:Overkill

[dhasenan]

It has plenty of documentation. Of all the Linux distributions I've used or viewed, it has the best.

And the unfriendliness comes mainly in forcing you to edit config files. When I was using Gentoo, I let the system go for a few months (didn't have an Internet connection) and tried updating (just the security updates, mind)...over two hundred config files needed updating, some of which were required to continue the upgrade process. X was broken, and I didn't have the time to spend fixing everything.

Gentoo has a high cost for maintenance, but it's manageable if you keep up to date--you only have to look at five or ten config files a week. And if you use one of the tools developed for this (I don't recall the names), you can eliminate most of the work (for instance, a config file you haven't touched is replaced automatically).

Re:Overkill

[Enderandrew]

You count contend that is also the best way to cut your teeth. A few years back someone gave me a Mandrake CD, and Linux lasted all of three days on my PC. That was my only Linux experience. Then I decided to give Gentoo a shot as a total newb, and learned a lot.

I don't know why people say you can't start with Gentoo. I think it is the place to start.

Re:Overkill

[hawg2k]

It does, however, have an excellent user forum that the user community leverages to provide a lot of help to people in need. They also have a lot of excellent HOW-TO documents for various aspects of Gentoo configuration.

I'm not arguing that Gentoo is easy, but if the person is brand new to Linux he's going to have lot's of questions and need a lot of help regardless of distro. If this person is also a very technically saavy person, Gentoo seems as good a distro as any, because of the great help one can get (mentioned above).

My 2 cents.

Re:Overkill

[mypalmike]

However, once Gentoo is set up, it's cake to maintain.

A cake with config frosting that must be, on occasion, manually blended with incompatible new frosting.

Re:Overkill

[ArcherB]

A cake with config frosting that must be,

Yoda, is that you?
Seriously, I assume the installer will config the system. Once the use flags are set up, that's pretty much it. While some config files will change as software is updated, not updating the configs has never been a problem for me. Updating them can cause issues, but so far, the original configs have always worked. ...on occasion, manually blended with incompatible new frosting.

If the use flags are set up conservatively, this will rarely be a problem, and even then only after repository has been updated so many times that current libraries become a problem. That said, emerge has not given me near the grief that apt-get or (God forbid) yum have. (Don't get me wrong, yum is great, but rpm's tend to suck.)

Actually, I take back the earlier statement about Gentoo being the easiest to maintain. That prize would have to go to Lindows... er... Linspire because they maintain Apple-strict control of the repositories. But since Linspire is not free, not offered for the PS3, and not the topic of this discussion, I'll stick with Gentoo on my PC and PS3 should I win the lottery.

Re:Overkill

[Corporate Gadfly]

And if you use one of the tools developed for this (I don't recall the names), you can eliminate most of the work (for instance, a config file you haven't touched is replaced automatically).

One of the options is to use app-portage/cfg-update
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/xentric/
Easy to use GUI & CLI alternative for etc-update with safe automatic updating functionality

I use it regularly. I only have to manually update files which I myself have edited (at least once).

Re:Overkill

[smallfries]

Sadly the parent was right. I've been running Gentoo long enough to have to go through several forced profile changes (because every couple of years they become obsolete). At that point the config frosting needs some hand care to become compatible with the new kind. It's not terrible, but it's not automated either, and you need to poke a few things to be in the right place. Most distros don't have this problem because ... when something that big changes they expect you to reinstall from scratch.

The first forced change was upgrading the 2.4 series kernel to 2.6, I can't remember when the second was but it was the same time that the portage tree got wedged by the Xorg upgrade (6.9->7.0). Both required a lot of low-level surgery to fix properly.

Like most things, when portage works correctly it is a dream. I don't do it, but I imagine that a crontab with emerge -u system would work pretty well. But on occasion it does blow, and you need to get your hands dirty fixing it. I guess the sick twisted part of me thinks that just makes Gentoo more fun...

OT Sidenote: Has anyone come across the SBA hack in the nvidia wodging itself to be on? It's supposed to be off by default, but I can't switch it off in my configuration, even after hacking the GPL wrapper for the driver.

Re:Overkill

[parvenu74]

Gentoo would be more interesting to me if there was a distro of it that shipped with the Gnome desktop installed by default, installed as binary, and then recompiled all the vanilla binary bits from source when the machine was in screen-saver mode. Then I could be up and running right away and getting work done and the system could do its compile-from-source optimizations overnight or while I was at work.

Yay, that'd be cool

[JamesP]

Only 3 days to compile everything...

(cue the "but you wont compile everything there, it wont'b as fast without using the SPUs, etc, etc")

Re:Yay, that'd be cool

[cyanid3]

Read. Most of the required stuff is already available as pre-compiled binaries which have been compiled ON the PS3, unlike YDL or Fedora Core, which have PPC binaries.

dependencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of APT or YUM ?

fwyzard

Re:dependencies

[cyanid3]

Yeah. I've spent the last month helping people sort out their issues with Linux on the PS3. And messing around with repositories is frustrating. OTOH, with Gentoo, an emerge will surely install whatever you want, without having to add repositories or downloading RPMs of applications which aren't available thru repos.

Re:dependencies

[jimstapleton]

Yes...

Yum makes Windows Updates look stable, reliable and fast. I never want to see that buggy steaming pile again...

APT is better, almost tolerable, but you still have issues with it occasionally, at least I did.

Gentoo's system does the same thing, but I found the granularity of control is better documented. This means that I can use it in the same fashion as I'd use Yum or APT - namely tell it what I want, and it'll do the work, but additionally, I can more easily perform simple tweaks to fix problem packages. Also, I never found any way in Yum and APT to get a listing of what packages were available, and what specific names to use for them. I know that such exists, but the documentation isn't as good, and when there's a setup that lets me parse a nicely ordered directory structure and/or do keyword searches with the included metadata (a-la emerge or BSD ports), why the hell would I want to go back to Yum or APT.

The documentation makes the application as much as the coding.

Re:dependencies

[bobintetley]

Look, I also like Ports, but come on - how long would it have taken for you to Google:

apt-cache search
yum search

To search package names and metadata?

I like and use both FreeBSD and Gentoo, but there's no need to disparage the great work done by other distros to justify your choices.

Re:dependencies

[smoker2]

Also, I never found any way in Yum and APT to get a listing of what packages were available, and what specific names to use for them. I know that such exists, but the documentation isn't as good,

man yum

LIST OPTIONS

The following are the ways which you can invoke yum in list mode. Note
that all list commands include information on the version of the pack-
age.

yum list [all | regexp1] [regexp2] [...]
List all available and installed packages.

yum list available [regexp1] [...]
List all packages in the yum repositories available to be
installed.

yum list updates [regexp1] [...]
List all packages with updates available in the yum reposito-
ries.

yum list installed [regexp1] [...]
List the packages specified by args. If an argument does not
match the name of an available package, it is assumed to be a
shell-style glob and any matches are printed.

yum list extras [regexp1] [...]
List the packages installed on the system that are not available
in any yum repository listed in the config file.

yum list obsoletes [regexp1] [...]
List the packages installed on the system that are obsoleted by
packages in any yum repository listed in the config file.

yum list recent
List packages recently added into the repositories.

Specifying package names
All the list options mentioned above take file-glob-syntax wild-
cards or package names as arguments, for example yum list avail-
able foo* will list all available packages that match foo*.

That took me longer to paste it than to find it.

Re:dependencies

[physicsnick]

Honestly, how long would it have taken you to Google "yum search" or "apt package list" before posting this drivel? In both cases you could have hit I'm Feeling Lucky and gotten what you were looking for. Please do a little research before posting next time.

What?

[Punker22]

I'm not sure what you're smoking but Gentoo is a pain in the but to install, and I'm not sure what you mean by a better package management system than say fedora.... this post seems more like a flame towards other distros and how much better gentoo is than anything.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are smoking im typing this from the gentoo livcd install with the gtk instller.
Using the GPR sets it is not harder than you make it.

Re:What?

[Punker22]

Wow you mean that Gentoo is so great you can use a livecd and actually type?!?! yea so can just about every other distro so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.

Re:What?

[DrXym]

Especially on a PS3. While the PS3 makes a cool Linux machine, I expect that while you are waiting for Gentoo to compile on it that you may as well start a family, raise them up, and watch them have kids. Then finally if you're lucky, the build will have completed before your time on this earth is up.

Anyway, the PS3 is absolutely the last machine you should ever, ever need Gentoo on. Every single PS3 is exactly the same. There is no need to "optimise" a build for a PS3 simply because the build should be optimal anyway, assuming you pick a dist which targets the PS3 exclusively. It's not like x86 where you have a gazillion different processors and devices that you might get some measurable gain by tweaking a build switch or two.

Re:What?

[Slashcrap]

and I'm not sure what you mean by a better package management system than say fedora....

Perhaps he means less likely to shit itself at random times for obscure reasons?

The ability to install multiple versions of the same package without causing yourself brain damage?

A command line package management tool that doesn't suck so bad that it forces you to use the graphical tools that actually do 21st Century stuff like dependency resolution but which when then turn out to suck even harder?

I'm not really a fan of Gentoo, but your comment seems to imply that the Fedora package management tools don't suck donkey cock. The only way I can imagine anyone holding that opinion would be if that was the only one they'd ever used.

And exactly which part of the Gentoo installation did you find so scary? Partitioning your hard drive without a graphical tool to hold your hand? Installing the boot loader? Compiling the kernel? Actually reading the install document - you know, the one that explains everything in detail and assumes almost no prior knowledge?

If you find those things so hard, why are you even using Linux?

In my opinion there are only 3 Linux distros that get package management right - Slackware, Debian and Gentoo. Everything else is just a mess of hacks and poor design caused by their desire to cater to people like you.

And yes, I know Fedora supports APT. But it still uses it to install RPMs and the whole RPM system is fucked up by design. If you're going to argue with this point, please first download and read Maximum RPM. I know it's old and out of date - they've added plenty more suckage since then.

Re:What?

[Penguin's Advocate]

"I'm not sure what you mean by a better package management system than say fedora...."

Haha, wow... If you seriously think fedora's package management is anywhere near the same level as portage...

RPMs are pretty much the worst thing ever in terms of modern package management. Even windows xp does a better job there.

There are plenty of great package management systems out there, there are plenty of good ones, and there are plenty of really awful ones. Fedora falls under the last category.

I mean, if you really like Fedora for some reason, I can see tolerating RPM, but seriously.

Re:What?

[Punker22]

Have you even used yum in the past couple of years? there is no more "dependency hell" there is no more "shitting itself", people that say yum is crap (like yourself) just haven't read the documentation on how to properly use it to solve any of the so called issues you run into. Is there something wrong with not wanting to have to manually compile everything? and if you want to compile everything oh guess what you can do that too!!! install the src rpm and build it yourself!!

I don't find Gentoo scary I just find dealing with anyone that uses it and anyone in that community a royal pain in the ass, and I don't appreciate being treated like a noobie (but what do I expect from a Gentoo user ;). Ever think of not being complete !@#$@#$s to users of different distros?

P.S. why does Gentoo have the biggest fanboy user base? why is it when someone talks to one of you it's always "Gentoo is better" , it can be a completely off topic subject too like "I'm going to make some pancakes" -userA "GENTOO IS BETTER" -gentoofanboy.

it's really annoying.

Re:What?

[Punker22]

Not sure how you think XP is better?? reboot 50 times for 10 updates.... you have no support argument to why rpm/yum is awful, until you do your comment really doesn't hold much water.

Re:What?

[m50d]

You still gain the advantages of the USE flags, which are what makes it (arguably) worth compiling your own software, not the 2% performance increase.

Re:What?

[Penguin's Advocate]

You start off your reply with a gross exaggeration, so meaningful discussion is out of the question. I will say the following about my position and if you actually care, you can look into it yourself. First of all, I am an Apple fanboy. I absolutely love what Apple does with hardware and software. That said, I've been an administrator of many systems as well as owning many systems personally. I've been using Linux for about 9-10 years now. I used redhat as a desktop for 2 years (exclusively, nothing else installed on my machine, no dual booting). I had yellowdog on a beige G3 as my primary desktop for a bit, followed by OS X on a blue and white G3, and then a Sun Ultra2 running solaris (which is now one of my gentoo servers at home). I've been using gentoo for about 4 years now. I run several Sun servers, some running solaris, some running gentoo. I've got a few FreeBSD machines around, and I ran netBSD for a bit, I've administered RS6000's running AIX, and Octanes and Indigos running IRIX. Honestly the only major platform I have no experience with is HP-UX on PA-RISC. At my current job, I maintain a network of 50 Athlon64 machines running XP, 9 Intel Macs, a server running gentoo, a (soon to be replaced) server running Debian, and a Windows 2003 server. At home I run two gentoo servers, a Sun Ultra2 and a custom built athlon64 machine with an Areca PCIe RAID controller and a 12 disk RAID 5 array. I've got two desktops running Windows x64, one running gentoo, one running windows 2000, a Mac Mini G4 (hooked up to my tv via hdmi), 2 macbook pro C2Ds, a toshiba tablet running xp tablet edition, a thinkpad with xp and mandrake dual booting, an an athlon64 DTR laptop dual booting gentoo and xp. I prowl ebay looking for interesting machines to play with, I buy them, mess with them for a while, sometimes I keep them (I've kept most of the Sun systems I've bought), and sometimes I resell them. I also remotely administer 8 gentoo servers for other people who are between 150 and 400 miles from me. These are regular people who have no interest in Linux and who use them as home servers to back their desktops up on, share files on, and store media on. Those machines are between 3 years old and 3 months old, and no one has ever had a problem with them. So I have a bit of experience with various package management systems. Portage is by far my favorite package management system, its fast, and easy to use as long as you're ok using a command line. Ports is my second favorite, and I use it on OS X as well. I really have never had a problem with portage, it generally protects you from breaking your system, and it lets you get "unstable" things at your option. I've only ever had one problem with ports, and it was because I had the same package installed not using ports which was a dependency of another package I was trying to install. I have also only ever seen one problem with windows installer, and it was caused by a Norton Systemworks install on a windows 2000 machine that somehow went wrong. As for RPM, I have rarely had an RPM install go smoothly. Way back when I chalked it up to the difficulty of using a Unix system, but I eventually learned that that is not the case, and it was all because of RPM's flawed design. Fedora does do a lot of hand holding, so RPM may seem easy to use, and portage does tend to build things from source (unless you tell it not to), but if you're using a modern system that shouldn't even be a consideration. When I installed gentoo for the first time ever, it took me about a week, and that was on a slow machine, and I was able to use the machine enough to do two programming projects (one in java, one in perl, neither trivial) while it was installing. But on a modern computer (ie, a dual core processor, a couple GB of ram, a fast SATA harddrive, and a broadband connection), it takes about the same time to install gentoo (building entirely from source) as it does to install windows xp (assuming you're doing a complete NTFS format). It takes at most a few minutes to install most package

Re:What?

[alan_dershowitz]

Optimization isn't just about hardware support, it's also about software support. Maybe I don't want LDAP support, maybe I don't want CUPS support in Samba. Maybe I want to link against Lesstif instead of Motif. Maybe it's going to be a cool server and doesn't need controller support. Sure other distros let you do that, but Gentoo was built for it.

There are other great reasons to use Gentoo if you are putting Linux on your PS3. For example, I would do so because I run already Gentoo on my desktop and so I'm _familiar_ with it. Lots more, unrelated to the technical details of Gentoo.

Re:What?

[Bert64]

Which is precisely what he was doing.
Had you read the article you would have known that:

Other PS3 compatible distros (yellow dog, fedora) are compiled for a generic PPC not specifically for the PS3
He wasn't compiling gentoo from source, he was installing precompiled packages from a repository of packages which were build specifically for the PS3.
For any package which has not been built by someone else for PS3 yet, he has the opportunity to easily compile it, as opposed to having to do without it or perform all the build steps manually.

This has to be a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm serious there is no way GENTOO just works for him. No windows users expects to wait 15 hours for something like KDE to compile.
I make my own operating system!

Wow

[SNR monkey]

This whole summary seems to be slamming non-Gentoo Linux distros.. The author was right to submit anonymously, if he hadn't, he would have been burnt to a crisp.

Re:Wow

[fistfullast33l]

The whole article is pretty dumb IMO. I'm a gentoo user, I like gentoo, but I don't need a reason to install it on my PS3. Instead, I need instructions on how to install it for my PS3 with Cell support. The article isn't really about Gentoo on the PS3, it's about why Gentoo is better than YDL or Red Hat on the PS3. This is just a huge flamebait article.

Re:Wow

[gfxguy]

I agree the article is dumb, but I think it's even worse:

My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux,...

Why on earth would someone who doesn't know much about Linux want to install in on a PS3, of all things.

That's a nice experiment for geeks, and I'm sure there's potential, but it's not partiularly useful for someone who doesn't know much about Linux.

Re:Wow

[fistfullast33l]

I agree that installing Gentoo on the PS3 is probably more of a geek experiment, but we miss the potential of getting Linux to the masses. The YDL install is supposedly quite easy, and doesn't wipe out the usefulness of the PS3 either. You can still switch over to the PS3 OS whenever you want. Compare this to installing any Linux distro on a normal store-bought PC. You have to wipe out Windows/OSX/whatever and then install Linux, and it's not that easy to go back. Not to mention that the install process won't install side-by-side for you; you have to do that yourself. So I really think that the YDL install on a PS3 actually is a great opportunity for a more widestream acceptance.

Re:Wow

[gfxguy]

I disagree. PC's got everything you need to run Linux in a useful manner - keyboard, mouse, and peripherals like printers.

Linux on a PS3 is pointless for someone who wouldn't use it on the desktop.

Moreover, every single modern Linux distribution allows you to easily select a dual boot option when you install.

Re:Wow

[codemoose]

I don't know what distros you've tried, but I was able to install Fedora Core 5 on my store-bought Compaq WinXP machine without wiping out anything. The only hassle I had was the onboard video was b0rked with FC. Dropped in a card I had laying around and it was off to the races.

Re:Wow

[fistfullast33l]

PC's got everything you need to run Linux in a useful manner - keyboard, mouse, and peripherals like printers

And the PS3 has USB ports exposed to Linux, so as long as you have USB devices you can basically use the PS3 like a PC- as long as the drivers are compiled as part of the kernel. You can even do SVideo out the back to a monitor if you wish, I believe.

Re:Wow

[Penguin's Advocate]

Nevermind the svideo, you can go right from the hdmi port into a dvi monitor. It's got an nVidia 7800 series video chip and what amounts to DVI out. That plus USB, harddrive, and blu-ray drive, gives you a pretty decent machine. A little low on RAM though.

My Killer PS3 Linux App - Video Encoding

[Anonymous Coward]

Having seen the insane speed Cell handles encoding and decoding video I would love to have something setup so I can run Linux on my PS3 machine and have it function as a network video encoding device. Converting/Encoding to h.264 format is painfully slow on x86 based systems, so it would be great to be able to have an app that allows you to queue up movies files and farm the encoding off to a PS3 to tear through the files.

Probably too much to ask for, would love to do it myself but I'm not a programmer.

I really want to get into the PS3 Linux stuff since keyboard and mouse stuff works perfectly, but I'm too busy playing Resistance online - 40 player lagfree matches are fucking insane.

Re:My Killer PS3 Linux App - Video Encoding

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck getting Sony to open up the Cell and allow for a) SPE use, and b) graphics acceleration. Doing either would jeopardize its licensing to game developers as they would just switch to Linux and bypass Sony (and Sony's bank accounts) completely.

That might be awesome

[Canthros]

if only I couldn't buy an actual computer for less than it would cost to buy a PS3.

Re:That might be awesome

[chris_eineke]

I find my computers in the ditch, you insensitive clod!

Re:That might be awesome

[Lord Bitman]

stay out of my ditch!

Re:That might be awesome

[codyk]

Good luck finding a computer that quiet for less than $499 . . . much less one with a blu-ray drive.

Re:That might be awesome

[Canthros]

Because Blu-Ray is a critical feature for Linux right now? (And I think you mean $599.)

There are plenty of reasonably quiet miniITX rigs about. I'm sure they're not completely silent, but I'd bet that they're quiet enough. And, in the meantime, they'll be smaller and upgradeable.

Re:That might be awesome

[somersault]

My PS3 farm is so quiet, it's almost like Sony didn't produce enough to send any into my country before March!!

Re:That might be awesome

[Enderandrew]

You can buy them for $500, unless you absolutely need the wifi built in. Sony said they weren't going to really try and stop modders from putting in larger HDDs themselves. Just as it is plain stupid to buy a $300 360, it is pretty stupid to buy the $600 PS3.

Re:That might be awesome

[tehcyder]

stay out of my ditch!

You've got your own ditch? You flash git.

Why not a PC

[ShadowsHawk]

**Disclaimer: I have limited experience with Linux** Ignoring the cell, is there a reason to use the PS3 instead of a PC? I've never run into any distro that is hugely processor intensive. I'm guessing most of us have a cast of 500 Mhz PC that would work fine for tinkering so that you could avoid the $600 entry fee.

Re:Why not a PC

[ArcherB]

is there a reason to use the PS3 instead of a PC?

YES
Because you can!

Re:Why not a PC

[the_humeister]

I'd have to say 'no' unless you want to do development for Cell. Otherwise, it's just another Linux distribution on a PowerPC architecture.

Re:Why not a PC

[dahl_ag]

With 218GFLOPS available on the CPU (not considering disabled daughter cores) the PS3 has way more floating point number crunching power than your average P4. At least an order of magnitude more. While MOST users have no need for this power, some do. I myself play with designing neural networks that would definately benefit from this power. Other applications that come to mind include things like Folding@Home and SETI@Home.

Re:Why not a PC

[ShadowsHawk]

And that would be two great uses of the processing power of a PS3. I suppose I should have framed my question as "for the average linux user". I do appreciate the input though.

Re:Why not a PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: MythTv Frontend.

Re:Why not a PC

[Peter Greenwood]

Presumably, the owner mainly wanted a games console but thought it might be handy to have general purpose computing available as and when necessary?

And not everyone has space for a "cast-off 500MHz PC" as well as the games machine.

Re:Why not a PC

[Anonymous Coward]

If cell turns out to be a really good video encoding architecture I will buy one at once. It's not unreasonable to think the average Linux user likes to encode/decode some video or music. I don't really know what an "average" Linux user is but I'm probably one of them. I use it for my main system if that is what you mean.

Re:Why not a PC

[slackmaster2000]

Well, for one thing, he'd still be waiting for all his Gentoo packages to compile if he'd used a 500Mhz PC. :)

Re:Why not a PC

[SScorpio]

I have my credit card handy to get one once this is available. I still love the Xbox Media Center; however, it not being able to decode HD connect hurts it. The PS3 on the other hand should have no problem decoding HD content. $500 HD MythTV Frontends are a great deal.

Linux Cell SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers: grab the Linux Cell SDK from here:

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/cellsw?open&S_T ACT=105AGX16&S_CMP=DWPA

Now that there is a readily available and fairly cheap consumer-level computer with a kick-ass Cell processor in it, it's time we start modifying some code to take advantage of it. Some libraries/applications that may benefit from the Cell include libdv, libxvidcore, libjpeg, libGL, libogg, libmp3lame, mplayer, xine, and mythtv, just for starters.

Re:Linux Cell SDK

[DrXym]

Exactly. If you crack open the Mesa (OpenGL) source, you can see that it plugs into various backends. The PS3 graphics driver is framebuffer only which implies you'd be stuck with a software backend. However there are 6 SPUs sitting there doing nothing... It must be possible to feed them with vector transformations, shading etc and have performance somewhat comparable to an IGP. Not stellar but enough to enjoy some games and desktop eye candy.

questions

[kv9]

Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it.

* if he doesn't know the first thing about Linux, what does he need it for? on a PS3 of all things

he wants to learn the ropes you say? OK

* why doesn't he install it on his own? no better way to do it and the interwebs are full of documentation

this is not meant to be flamy in any way. I was just wondering how come everyone wants penguin power these days, but at the same time they are not willing to invest time/sweat in it.

Re:questions

[shirizaki]

Because they want the perks without the work. That, and they expect it to be as caveman-like as windows is.

They don't want to have to learn how to do command line and compiling stuff. Not that you need to be well versed in both of these thigns to use linux, but it's like not running disk defrag or Anti Virus in Windows, you just don't do it.

Re:questions

[Chutulu]

Because most people just want a system that works. They have better thing to do in life than to learn the core of a new operating system. They just want stuff to work. Because of people like you, Linux will never go mainstream.

Re:questions

[kv9]

Because most people just want a system that works.

is that why 90% of people run Windows? *innocentsmile*

They have better thing to do in life than to learn the core of a new operating system.

to each his own. I have no say in what anyone can do with their time (though, acquiring knowledge is pretty hard to beat). installing an operating system is nowhere close of "learning its core". stop exaggerating.

Because of people like you, Linux will never go mainstream.

I wasn't aware that "Linux" is a company that aims for total market penetration (he heh, I said penetration). or total world domination. or whatever. this is an oooold and tired argument. mainstream usage from uninterested users brings nothing to the table. perhaps monies for companies that want to sell you free things? meanwhile, enterprising folks who know what they are doing and are contributing back to the community are the backbone of Linux and FLOSS in general.

Re:questions

[Slithe]

though, acquiring knowledge is pretty hard to beat That is great, but you can usually gain that knowledge after a few weeks. After that, it just becomes a pain in the ass. After 2.5 years, I threw in the towel and bought a MacBook.

Re:questions

[Minwee]

if he doesn't know the first thing about Linux, what does he need it for? on a PS3 of all things

Well, that's obvious. To pick up chicks.

The only thing that impresses the ladies more than a really expensive game console is a really expensive pimped out game console with a picture of a penguin on it.

Re:questions

[Giometrix]

"I was just wondering how come everyone wants penguin power these days, but at the same time they are not willing to invest time/sweat in it."

The same reason I want a 6 pack without doing sit ups.

Seriously speaking though, he probably just wants a PC in his living room, and being that the PS3 is already in his living room, this setup makes sense. Whether gentoo is a good choice for a newbie or not, I don't know. Last time I looked (a while back) it didn't seem very friendly to new comers.

Re:questions

[kingsean]

* why doesn't he install it on his own? no better way to do it and the interwebs are full of documentation

Ironically, the site that is linked in the summary doesn't help "Jake" out at all. The walkthrough to install Gentoo on a PS3 is actually LINKED to at the bottom of the page. The article on the site is exactly like the summary. He is taking hackneyed Gentoo arguments, which really have nothing to do with development of installing Gentoo on your PS3, and posting them in his blog as if he had to sell people on the install. Gentoo on a PS3 was already done by the Gentoo folks and is quoted as the main source of the "wiki" linked at the bottom. The wiki, though, does give you good install insight such as "(Press Enter)" Much of Gentoo.org's wiki has been copied word-for-word by these other guys

This website has the looks of a barebones advertisement page: "IntelliTXT," full sidebar ads, a "blog" network, links to add it to 7 blog/news aggregators, all topped off with a HORRIBLY done CSS job. In the author's own defense, he did a pretty good job of getting his advertisement out. At the heart of it, it seems like a pretty generic linux hobbyist story: guy finds something with electricity running through it and installs linux on it. Jake isn't even registered to the site, but still asks people to "keep watching" for updates to the install/addon process. They also didn't provide any pictures :(

I'd question the need for Gentoo on PS3 in this situation, their lack of evidence of an install, and the actual existence of "Jake".

Re:questions

[Anonymous Coward]

because we are windows users! :D

Gentoo?

[Chas]

Better package management? Uh. We'll get back to you on that.
Does it's work without bothering you, the end-user? SHUT UP! I'm COMPILING HERE!
Newbie friendly?

GENTOO? NEWBIE-FRIENDLY? Yeah, maybe once you, the non-newbie had everything set up and idiot-proofed for him. At least until it came time to update and recompile some of the packages.

Pardon my sarcarstic laughter here.

Re:Gentoo?

[cyanid3]

>> At least until it came time to update and recompile some of the packages. emerge --sync emerge -uvDN world I don't see what's the difficulty in that. Besides, there's enough documentation to get you out of any mess that you're in. The Gentoo docs are simple enough to be understood by almost everyone.

Re:Gentoo?

[MySt1k]

WHERE in hell did you saw the poster say it is newbie friendly ?
FROM TFA:
- Criticisms of Gentoo:
- Difficult for anyone new to Linux since they get overwhelmed with all the stuff given to them.

- Don't get me wrong, Gentoo is an overwhelmer for any newbie to Linux, but since I'm very comfortable with it, I decided to set it up on his PS3.

- The installation isn't for those who've never spent time at the Linux command line. While the instructions can be understood and followed by everyone, we'd prefer it if total newbies stayed away from it for a little while..

And as for the package management, well, maybe you dislike compiling things, but does that really make it a bad package management ?

Re:Gentoo?

[Chas]

"Maybe you dislike compiling things, but does that really make it a bad package management?"

Well, not to put TOO fine a point on it, YES. This is why it's so ungodly easy to break things in Gentoo if you don't know EXACTLY what you're doing. Moreover, it doesn't guard against circular dependencies (RPM, Windows DLL hell, etc). That's not package "management".

Re:Gentoo?

[Chas]

Only if you confuse reading comprehension with actual comprehension of the underlying issues.

df > Whatthehellisthis.txt

Okay. You're someone who knows dick about command line. What does this mean?

Then, when the newb comes in with legitimate questions, but hasn't read every last syllable of 12,000-odd pages of documentation, he gets bapped with an "RTFM n00b!" instead of getting a nice, concise answer to his question that's only a couple lines longer than the obtuse reply.

Why?

[singingjim]

I know I'm a complete n00b, but why would anyone even bother to do this? I just don't get it.

Re:Why?

[somersault]

Probably the same reason man wanted to walk on the moon, but on a slightly smaller scale - maybe up there with deciding to mix peanut butter and jelly in one single sandwich, or trying on your cap backwards.

Re:Why?

[singingjim]

Nope. Sorry. Not good enough. Some things are just stupid no matter what ridiculous reason one might pull out of their arse.

Maybe you could be just a little more condescending next time.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I too am thinking of doing this to my ps3.

I am thinking it would make an interesting web appliance, or file server, or MAME box.

I am also thinking 'because I can'. It is an interesting idea though. We 'might' see some interesting homebrew. However like usual have crippled that in not saying how to get at the video hardware properly. They have done this on all of the homebrew kits (both the ps2 linux kit and yarozee). And again they are doing it.

I am looking at it and thinking 'that is some kicking hardware' yet everyone else seems down on it. Yet apple comes out with a 500 dollar cell phone and its 'oooo thats cool'.

Re:Why?

[CronoCloud]

First off putting Linux on a PS3 does not remove it's other functions, it's basically a dual boot environment. It adds functionality, so what's to lose.

Re:Why?

[somersault]

I'm sadly unsure of whether you mean condescending to you, or just the rest of the world. You're perfectly right, it's mostly a theoretical exercise at the moment, a waste of time unless we get lots of parallelised apps to use. Though having the PS3 open in this way will make it easier for people at home to have a good platform to experiment with parallelisation :]

What??

[Anonymous Coward]

Just when I finished installing Vista on my PS3 :(

Re:Overkill....not

[Anonymous Coward]

i've a different view, i've used some linux distro back in the 90's (SUSE mainly) but in 2001 when I've decided to start to learn more about and - eventually using a linux distro as my main desktop - I've (re)started with gentoo and here are the main point that i love about it:

1. do everything by "hand" - this way you learn a bit more about the OS "bricks" and you stop calling everything "linux", just the kernel...
2. Best documentation around
3. Best documentation around

sure it takes sometimes to get to a usable system, but after that i think you've got a better view of the system and are more able to diagnose/correct some problem you may get, and more you are no more afraid of the console

but i must admit that this day i use ubuntu on my main desktop (gentoo is still around on server and x(media)box)

Why?

[NorbrookC]

This is the question that keeps crossing my mind, every time I see one of these stories. Is a PS3 (or XBox, or Wii) giving you so much more capability as a Linux box than a box you've built from readily available components? Yeah, great, you got X distro of Linux to run on this platform. Can you still play the PS3 games on it? If you can't, WTF is the point, besides proving it can be done? It was interesting the first time someone did it, after that it's pretty much "me too."

Who gives a shit?

[cpuh0g]

What's the point? Why spend $600+ on a PS3 only to put Linux on it. You can get a PC much cheaper, one which will happily accept most any Linux distro with alot less pain.

*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games and watch Hi-Def (blu-ray) movies, not so I can load Linux and surf the web on a 65" screen.

Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*.

Re:Who gives a shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, once Linux has been installed it allows you to access thousands of other applications and maybe some will develop new ones for the PS3. If you knew anything about the PS3 you would see that like the 360, it's seriously lacking as a media center. Linux installs will provide a method to allow it to play any media format, not just those Sony want you to have. Kids education games also become immediately available. Others will want other things, and that's *their* choice, and none of your fscking business.

Just because *you* cannot find usages, doesn't mean *others* cannot. STFU and move on with your life.

Re:Who gives a shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy was modded troll, but for the "Experienced" Linux users 'friend' who didn't know jack about Linux, seriously he's better off cutting his teeth on a more standard setup. I am highly skeptical the 'noob friend' even exists, but an added 'feature' so that the article submitter could stand on his soapbox and expound points for his made up scenario.

If your an average joe, are you really gonna spend 600$ on a gaming machine only and a month later decide it's time for you to learn linux and INSTEAD of having your knowledgeable friend partition your computer, you have him hack your ps3 (with the possible potential of bricking it? ) I mean it's possible but it sounds pretty unlikely to me.

define friend ?

[Anonymous Coward]

friend1: -My requirements Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run.
friend2: -Gentoo, then! (mouahahaha! Done with this sucker, no, let's get it worse, let's troll slashdot with it!!! Should I put his email online too?)

Article writer without a clue

[Alphager]

1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
3. It teaches you more about Linux.
Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....
5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.
Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[christurkel]

Gentoo users think by tweaking make setting and c-flags they are somehow getting faster apps than let's say Debian. This is is silly; it's not like Debian compiles it's x86 packages on a Sparc box.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[caluml]

Nice troll. +5 Informative too.
But as usual, you miss the most important point. USE flags.
Why compile Samba with ldap support if you're never going to use LDAP in your network. In fact, isn't it nice to specify to the whole install that nothing should be built with LDAP support? I think so. Less code compiled in = small binaries, less code, less chance of a crash/security update.
I couldn't care less about the speed of Gentoo. I don't change my CFLAGs at all. But I like being able to tailor my machine to the purpose of the system.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[644bd346996]

Most of your points are good, but #2 is a valid concern. Last I checked, you can't install Nautilus in Fedora without installing CD burning software, because of the silly dependencies. People without CD burners shouldn't have to install CD burning software just to get a GNOME desktop.

Gentoo can be very good for putting together a disk image with a very specific set of software, and no extra baggage. Having control over compile time settings gives you a lot more flexibility compared with RPM packages.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results Huge community? " Thats because gentoo doesn't have problems LOL!

Re:Article writer without a clue

[644bd346996]

Even if Debian x86 was compiled on a sparc, they would still be able to produce the same binaries with a cross compiler. Incidentally, Gentoo is a great environment for working with cross compilers.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bandman]

You're actually saying that an install of samba compiled without ldap is less likely to crash than an install of samba compiled WITH ldap, when ldap isn't being used?

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Thanatos69]

To continue on with this... the criticisms

1. Long installation process
How is this a critique of the actual os?
2. Takes long to install applications since they have to be compiled from source
This is definitely a critique, I don't see how it helps a new person with linux though. While small, it just appears to be another hoop he/she has to jump through to learn about the actual os.
3. Difficult for anyone new to Linux since they get overwhelmed with all the stuff given to them.
Then why the hell are you giving it to someone who doesn't know anything about Linux. Your friend comes to you for advice and you give him poor advice as to what to use, nice friend. I hope your friend is monitoring this topic on \. just so he can see you get flamed over and over again for choosing gentoo

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Alchemar]

The only one I would disagree with is 3. Installing Gentoo did help me learn a lot about how linux works, mainly how it boots. That is only a fraction of learning linux, but it was very educational.

On that note, having my friend install Gentoo for me would have been as educational as having my friend take a test for me, and tell me what grade "I" got, and don't bother me with all the confusing stuff like what the answers were, yet alone the questions.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[644bd346996]

While samba's stability probably does not depend much on ldap support, the binaries will be measurably smaller, which is nice. Gentoo is frequently the only distribution where you can easily have an unusual software or hardware configuration without breaking the package management system.

For example, my previous computer had a Voodoo 3, which requires the glide libraries to get accelerated 3d on linux. Gentoo is the only modern distro I know of that lets me use glide, and it is trivial to enable it. It is pretty neat seeing cairo and glitz running so smoothly on such an old box.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Daemonstar]

Which is why most other distributions offer packages like:

1. base package
2. base package + feature 1
3. base package + feature 2
4. base package + feature 1 + feature 2
5. base package + feature 3

Even so, it's not like the system is going to take a big performance hit because some packages have added support to them (except maybe disk space, depending on the package dependencies). And there's the added bonus of already having built-in support without having to redo the package if you need/want support for a feature later.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bandman]

well, glide itself is not "modern", but that doesn't matter much in the scheme of things.

I can see only a very small benefit to custom compiling all (or even most of) your packages, except in very specific cases, and binary size is probably of secondary concern in the era of almost free 80GB drives.

I'm glad Gentoo exists as a solution for the people who want it, but some people pitch it as the end-all be-all solution of linux machines, and that's just not how it goes. With the proper administrator, even Fedora will run well on a server.

...of course, I'm biased. I've used Slackware for 10 years or so and that will make ANYONE a curmudgeon.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.
Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities.

Ubuntu problem: 1,800,000 results
SuSe problem: 1,700,000 results
Red Hat problem: 51,300,000 results

So clearly, Gentoo has fewer problems!

Re:Article writer without a clue

[oglueck]

> Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install.

Exactly. Try and install ONLY the software you WANT on a RedHat system for example: impossible because of dependencies. And I am not speaking of libraries here. Try and install without X, LDAP (add favourite useless app here) for instance.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit.
> Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
Oh, so you mean that the fact that my CPU is better and other distributions won't use it's features, is not a Gentoo advantage? I could argue that the difference is noticeable as it is on my system, but I won't because it depends on a number of other factors. But yeah, the ability to choose the optimizations you wish is an advantange and is one of the many reasons one should choose Gentoo.
>Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
He meant use flags. So, yes, practically other distros dictate how the software is compiled. And that could never be perfect, because each use and each user has different requirements. Having features which you don't need, but slow down your work, while not having the once you actually need, is a very clear disadvantage. This might matter even for a simple desktop user (what happens if your address book software is compiled without support for your mobile phone?), and can be very important for a more advanced one (what happens if I want to apply a simple patch to a software, making sure that it will otherwise work the same way as the supplied with the distro?).

Just to note, I'm not a big fan of everything in the portage system. There could be many many improvements there. And there are many advantages over other distros' packaging systems. With the only clear disadvantage of the speed it takes for a package to install. (It is not that much trouble, believe me.)

>It teaches you more about Linux.
Hm, well, it does. Especially those who are quick to learn. You have more idea about what is going on with your systems than distros like Fedora or Ubuntu. I find it sometimes more educating than Slackware. I would agree with you that it is not the best way to learn, though.

>You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
Your point is valid, but it is actually sometimes true and Gentoo deliver you more fresh versions of many packages and features. Even if you count the compilation time.

> Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.

The thing about the documentation is true. I use Gentoo documentation exclusevly for everything, even non-Gentoo and non-Linux installations. While I never liked Ubuntu or Fedora Core documentation. But still, I'm an advanced user...

Re:Article writer without a clue

[a.d.trick]

1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.

Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.

In certain cases there actually is some truth to that, but unfortunately some Gentoo users horribly exaggerate it. There's a good summary on the Gentoo Forums.

2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.

Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install

He worded this badly, but to a certain extent it is true. Binary distributions need to keep certain packages at particular versions. If you try to upgrade glibc make sure you keep the old version otherwise there's no way on earth your system will stay running. With Gentoo, once you've rebuilt everything that depends on glibc, you can remove the old edition and move on with life. As a result, you can upgrade incrementally and still stay current.

This is also slightly true in another way because portage is extremely cool! :P Ok, enough fanboyism, portage is definitely not perfect, but it allows you to exercise a lot of control with fairly little effort (as long has you know what your doing, which admittedly does require some RTFM).

3. It teaches you more about Linux.

Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!

I think he is right about this, but I think it's actually a bad thing. A distribution should exists to let their users get work done, not to teach them about arcane Unix tools. Following the Gentoo manuals involve a fair amount of work on the command line and so even the mildly curious will learn a thing or two by experimenting. Fortunately, the Gentoo people are working on this and I'm expecting more user-friendly installs and tools.

4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5

Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....

I agree. That's a horrible, horrible reason. First of all, you have to wait for things to get in portage (or an overlay if you using one), and if you're slightly sane you'll wait till it gets marked stable instead of unmasking it. That generally takes a while.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[drinkypoo]

I can see only a very small benefit to custom compiling all (or even most of) your packages, except in very specific cases, and binary size is probably of secondary concern in the era of almost free 80GB drives.

So what? I can see only a very small drawback to it, assuming you have a sufficiently fast machine and a sufficiently fast network connection. I think it IS pretty stupid on the PS3 unless you happen to have another gentoo system around (or I guess any linux) so you can use a cross-compiling distcc. I used to have a Cobalt RAQ4 upon which I put gentoo, and this was the method I used to do compiles in a timely fashion.

Here's something to consider though: the LDAP support is a good example. Loading the library to provide it will consume memory. If you never use it, then you're simply wasting memory. Depending on how intelligent the program is, the library may or may not be able to swap out - it might be in use. Even if it isn't, it will increase the time spent starting the program, and later increase the time stopping it again if it's swapped - which it probably will be on the PS3 since it only has 256MB RAM available as it lacks UMA.

It's unfortunate that optimization is more important on systems less able to perform it, but there you are.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[g33uu]

I don't think binary size is really the main benefit (its a small part of it). Along the same lines, however, it's not having to install all the libraries for all the extra stuff you don't plan to use. On a desktop, not too big of a deal, but on a server.. when I can tell it not to use X or kde or alsa et al, it saves quite a bit of time and space. I like Gentoo a lot, but I eventually moved away from it. It requires more maintenance than a bipolar girlfriend. If you don't update on a very regular basis, you end up spending 6 hours updating the entire system and editing config files.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

And what if a security vulnerability is found in the LDAP features of samba? You may not be using them, but they will still be loaded because they're compiled in.
Also, to enable LDAP support in samba you need various ldap libraries installed, wasting even more space and providing new places for security holes to be found.

Here's another example, i tried to install pine on a redhat box fairly recently... Pine has optional support for kerberos, which on redhat is turned on, so i had to install a whole stack of kerberos libs before i could install pine. The telnet client also supported kerberos as well as various other things, which meant it tried to authenticate to kerberos on each connection (which took a few seconds to time out) before defaulting back to normal operation.
On gentoo, i build pine without kerberos

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

If you compile specifically for your CPU, then your programs will maybe average 2-3% more performance, they certainly won't perform slower.
Some apps however, seriously benefit from being compiled for a specific CPU...

Since you mention sparc, the earlier sparc (v7) chips had no (i believe) long division instructions in their FPUs. Thus, code compiled for the most generic sparc chips will use other instructions to emulate a long divide. Calculations like this are common in encryption.
Later sparcs (v8, v9/ultrasparc) included these instructions, so compiling for one of these more modern processors results in significantly improved performance. If you have a v8 or higher sparc, try it yourself... Compile OpenSSL for a generic sparcv7 and again for a sparcv8 or sparcv9/ultrasparc and compare the performance difference. A generic precompiled distribution for sparc usually includes binaries compiled for compatibility with sparcv7 systems, and thus performs very poorly on newer sparcs.

Another example, is the john the ripper password cracker... It has specially optimized routines for processors supporting MMX, SSE, SSE2 and Altivec, when using these routines instead of the generic ones performance improvements of 800% are not uncommon. Although obviously a distribution using binaries could not enable these options without breaking compatibility with older processors.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

Most people give up too easily...
Someone tells them gentoo is good, they try installing it, give up quickly and never look back.
If you let them try it first, and they grow to like it, then they will have much greater incentive to complete the process when faced with the task of installing it. Also, they will know how it *should* work, so they will be more easily be able to tell if they botched the install.
I've installed gentoo for a few people, most of them have since tried to install gentoo on other systems with much more patience and success than people who just tried to install it from scratch with no prior gentoo experience.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

Instructions should always be command line if possible...
Explaining a graphical process through screenshots and/or animation is a pain, often difficult and time consuming to follow.
Explaining a command line process is much easier, less prone to error (cut+paste) and faster to follow (cut+paste) and any errors returned will also be in textual form so they can be reported and queried.
You don't need to know how or why the commands you paste work, just follow the guide and paste them in. Why does anyone have a problem with this? It's far easier and more effective to write instructions for a commandline interface than a graphical one, and surely the user has a specific task in mind and that's why they're following a guide, right? Surely they just want to get it done as quickly as possible with the greatest chance of success.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[safeness]

I've been using gentoo for a few years now and, while I do agree with most of your points, I disagree with #3 and #5.

Nice rhetoric on #3 btw, but having to build an entire distro from scratch teaches you a whole hell of a lot about how linux works. It's because it forces you to use the command line more than many other distros and the fact that the user sees how the pieces of the OS fit together via the use flags, compile order, and the output of the makefiles that you're so fond of.

So the "huge community of people" might be a bit of a hyperbole, but it's not like you have to knock gentoo to make Debian look better. The documentation of gentoo really is fantastic because it needs to be for non-developers to use it. Gentoo's forums have a wealth of helpful information and on several occasions I've read users of other distros say that a fix posted by a gentoo user helped them on their distro of choice. Many developers post regularly in the forums and I've found it much easier to find useful information there than when I was searching through the Fedora forums. Fedora likely does have many more users, but I would guess it to have a higher percentage of new users who haven't done as much reading and don't know the inner workings of linux because they don't have to. Gentoo does have some ricers with CFLAGS so long you'd think they were overcompensating for their penis size, but most of the users I've interacted with are level-headed, knowledgeable, and quite helpful since they remember what it was like to be stuck at a terminal when X won't start, etc.

Gentoo's not the first distro I've used and it isn't the last either. Ubuntu's really nice too and it's a lot easier to help friends out with than gentoo has been in my experience. :) I like gentoo because it's extremely configurable and flexible and I like Ubuntu because it's slick and easy to set up and maintain. Let's not distro war too much. ;)

Re:Article writer without a clue

[nostrad]

and which is why you, in every case need to find every package. In some cases they are common libraries but not always.
Let's say I want to install ethereal, but on a system with no graphical frontend (wireshark nowadays):
In gentoo, that's easy. You simply have a USE="-X" (and a few others...) setting in make.conf and emerge ethereal. No graphical frontend.
In debian, I need to figure that I should not do apt-get install ethereal, but apt-get install tethereal.

Repeat that for a few packages and it gets frustrating. This example is a bit bad though, because in gentoo I'd probably need to add -gtk and a few other use flags. But that's easy, emerge -pv ethereal would show something like:
USE="gtk ipv6 ssl -adns -kerberos -portaudio (-selinux) -snmp -threads", a little package knowledge (or ufed, the USE flag editor), will tell me that gtk is the graphical frontend, and disabling that will solve it.

In debian apt-get search etheral would show me tethereal as a package and I'd install that instead.

The good thing in gentoo is that it will end up as global, every other package can benefit from -gtk and skip the graphical frontend, but for every debian package I need to find the non-graphical package instead (assuming it exists!).

Re:Article writer without a clue

[SilentUrbanFox]

"5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems. Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities." While I won't go as far as to say Gentoo has the BEST documentation out there, it has some pretty good stuff. gentoo-wiki.com, despite me being a Ubuntu user, often acts as a very good source for generalized howtos, and seems to be generally more up to date than the aging TLDP. Give Gentoo credit here, at bare minimum, but with the disclaimer that to USE the documentation (no pun intended) you needn't use Gentoo. "2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation. Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install" Gentoo allows you to not link in certain libraries, the common complaint I hear being GNOME. A lot of GTK+ applications on Debian-based distros and the like require GNOME libraries to run needlessly, whereas on Gentoo you can just USE="-gnome" and not have that requirement, and still benefit from a majority of the functionality. I'm a diehard Debian and/or Ubuntu user, but there is no need to counterflame Gentoo users. Instead, acknowledge the points you can objectively agree with.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Daemonstar]

Or, like Ubuntu, you open the package program (depending on which desktop you're using), select the programs you want, and click install. Doesn't get any easier than that. And, if a program is dependent on another package, it informs you and automatically selects the appropriate packages.

Of course, it all depends on what the new user's intentions are. Learning Linux vs just using Linux are two different things. Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, etc. are all geared a little differently and for different levels of expertise. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish and what you're familiar with.

And there's always *BSD. :)

Re:Article writer without a clue

[wolf31o2]

1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.

Actually, it really depends on the software/hardware combination. For example, using Gentoo on an Opteron box doesn't show much variation, since the baseline is a CPU with AMD64/EM64T extensions already. The difference in PPC, however, can be pretty astonishing. At the same time, the PS3 is PPC64, so this whole point is moot here since the distribution is already optimized pretty closely to the capabilities as a baseline. About the only thing we offer over most other 64-bit PPC systems is Altivec for the PS3 by default, but we aren't the only ones.

2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install

I believe he means the ability to change how things are compiled via USE flags, such as the ability to disable LDAP support in your system, as another commenter said.

3. It teaches you more about Linux.
Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!

When will the Gentoo hater quit using this crap? You don't learn shit from watching compiler output. What you learn from is editing configuration files and seeing how changes you make to the system directly affect the output of that system.

4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have to wait for the latest version of the distro like Fedora Core 5/6, Yellow Dog Linux 5
Ah, you mean it's like with the other distros who let you download the latest and greatest. Debian testing is usually pretty bleeding edge, and Debian is considered to be one of the slowest distros to upgrade....

That distinction is usually held for Debian's stable release, not the distribution as a whole. Of course, the article is pretty full of it on this point, since many distributions allow for more frequent upgrades these days.

5. Huge community of people, and the best documentation among all Linux distros, so you'll never have unsolved problems.
Hmmm. Google "gentoo problem": 1,520,000 results
Huge community? I would say Ubuntu or SuSe or Red Hat all have far bigger communities.

Had you said "Debian" to include Debian/Ubuntu/Knoppix/all the other derivatives, I would agree. The other communities are likely much larger. Red Hat seems to be quite a bit smaller than it used to be, especially outside the United States. While the Gentoo community definitely isn't the largest, our documentation surely is some of the best out there.

This article does show one of the major downfalls of Gentoo. There are a large number of "fanboys" who post false claims about Gentoo, and make the entire distribution look bad, as a result. Gentoo is primarily a developer platform, written by developers, for developers. It takes a very different approach to package management than other mainstream distributions, and provides tools to allow for greater customization easier than most others. Of course, there's nothing you can do on Gentoo that you cannot do elsewhere, it's just generally easier under Gentoo for those that know what they're doing. We provide tools that you use to tailor the distribution to suit your needs. For some people, that is exactly what they want, for others, it's too much work, and there's nothing wrong with that. We fill a specific role.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[wolf31o2]

I'm glad Gentoo exists as a solution for the people who want it, but some people pitch it as the end-all be-all solution of linux machines, and that's just not how it goes. With the proper administrator, even Fedora will run well on a server.

...of course, I'm biased. I've used Slackware for 10 years or so and that will make ANYONE a curmudgeon.

Exactly. Gentoo is a solution for people to use how they see fit. No more... no less. It isn't the solution for everyone, nor do we try to be. Instead, we try to be a solution for as many people as possible, and give the user the tools necessary to tailor the distribution to suit their needs if it doesn't already.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

Right... and Ethereal, for example, assumes you want the GUI compiled, so it installs X.

Did you even read the thread to which you replied, or did you just feel like typing?

Re:Article writer without a clue

[644bd346996]

Binary size can make a difference for people with Celeron machines: small cache and not much ram. For most apps, reducing the binary size does a lot more for improving performance than do fancy optimizations. Whenever I've used gentoo, the only optimazations I've used were to set the cpu type and set a default of optimizing for size. Obviously not all apps will compile or run with size optimizations, but most will. I haven't benchmarked, but I would bet that having a size optimized coreutils makes shell scripts quicker. I do agree, though, that being able to throw out extras is the biggest advantage of Gentoo.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[burndive]

I agree. That's a horrible, horrible reason. First of all, you have to wait for things to get in portage (or an overlay if you using one), and if you're slightly sane you'll wait till it gets marked stable instead of unmasking it. That generally takes a while.

Or you could, you know, work to add it to portage or your favorite overlay, or make your own overlay. You can unmask the packages that you want the latest versions of. I started using Firefox 2.0 in the RC days this way. It required unmasking some dependencies as well, and it was nice that portage identified that for me and allowed me to have control of exactly how it was resolved.

Gentoo was my first distro, and I use it on my media server, and in most other situations where Linux is required/desired. I'm sick of people dismissing the idea that it teaches you about Linux. No, the compiler output is not a significant part of the learning process. The simple fact is that if you never have to pay attention to init scripts, you will never be aware of them. If the entire system is installed and configured for you, you won't know where to start if you want to change anything. Gentoo is not for everyone. Gentoo forces you to make choices. The documentation clearly explains these choices in most cases. It's certainly not for those who want a turnkey system, but it is very easy to maintain for those who go through the trouble of the initial setup, and it does force you to learn a thing or two.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Daemonstar]

*scratches head*

Um, if you're referring to running Ubuntu (in my example), you are already running X. If you're using Ubuntu for CLI only, then why run it when other distributions are better suited for it? As for other distributions, most have an ethereal-without-X package (which it isn't Ethereal, anymore, anyway; it's Wireshark).

But my point remains valid; you don't have to go to the CLI to install anything (or even start it) for some distributions, just point-and-click and it's done for you (like most "Linux newbies" will be more familiar with, anyway). The program "just works" (hopefully), and the new user is unaware what has taken place in the background (and they probably don't even care at this point). Which would bring us to a great learning point for the new Linux user! Object lessons all around! :)

Think about it this way, which is it easier to configure static routing on: a Linksys router web interface (say BEFSR11) or a Cisco 2501 CLI?

The main sticking point of the original article isn't optimization of Linux (which is what Gentoo is good at), but posters are concerned (at least voicing their opinions) about ease of use for newcomers to Linux. Again, as in my above post, it all depends on the goal of the "Linux newbie": casual user or dedicated student?

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Alphager]

Had you said "Debian" to include Debian/Ubuntu/Knoppix/all the other derivatives, I would agree. The other communities are likely much larger. Red Hat seems to be quite a bit smaller than it used to be, especially outside the United States. While the Gentoo community definitely isn't the largest, our documentation surely is some of the best out there. This article does show one of the major downfalls of Gentoo. There are a large number of "fanboys" who post false claims about Gentoo, and make the entire distribution look bad, as a result. Gentoo is primarily a developer platform, written by developers, for developers. It takes a very different approach to package management than other mainstream distributions, and provides tools to allow for greater customization easier than most others. Of course, there's nothing you can do on Gentoo that you cannot do elsewhere, it's just generally easier under Gentoo for those that know what they're doing. We provide tools that you use to tailor the distribution to suit your needs. For some people, that is exactly what they want, for others, it's too much work, and there's nothing wrong with that. We fill a specific role.

I wholeheartly agree with you. I am a gentoo-user btw. The article gives all the wrong reasons to use gentoo as a linux-beginner os.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[ladylinux]

Hello, Not Sure what you are trying to say with point 5 But Google "Fedora Problem" 1,580,000 results Google "Yellow Dog Problem" 1,530,000 results I agree with your points by and large. But give fair coverage. Gentoo forums are by and large a great resource.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[644bd346996]

Part of my point is that even something as old and obsolete as glide can be installed and used in conjuction with very new software such as cairo and glitz. Gentoo made it very easy to take advantage of the fact that the software is open source, and made a computer go from worthless to suitable for daily use. Doing this on a distribution like Fedora would have pretty much required circumventing the entire package management system, or repackaging a huge number of packages. (Though it has undoubtedly gotten easier with modular X.)

Re:Article writer without a clue

[that this is not und]

NetBSD is a better environment for working with cross compilers. It's been natively ported to most of the archs you'd want to cross-compile to. That's a pretty robust 'test suite' IMHO.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[LMariachi]

Although obviously a distribution using binaries could not enable these options without breaking compatibility with older processors.

Yeah, obviously, because there's no way for a binary to check what processor features are available. Oh, wait...

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Alphager]

I never claimed that the other Distros are better; i said that the authors claim "There are _NO_ Problems with Gentoo" is simply untrue.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

I don't disable affected features, i simply disable features which are not being used.
And then i filter incoming security advisories according to where the vulnerability is, which means that i won't be bothered by advisories which are not relevant to my install.

Re:Article writer without a clue

[Bert64]

So you have to write your code specifically to do this... It's much easier to select processor type at compiletime.

Um

[neimon]

It's a game console. Can't you people leave anything to do what it's supposed to instead of putting bloody unix on it? My GOD I wish I had $600 to waste on something new to stuff linux into. I'd buy new tires instead.

Re:Um

[Enoxice]

*nix on tires? What a great idea! Then you can write a shell script that controls the speed and direction of your "spinnerz" hubcaps!

Re:Um

[SnarfQuest]

Which distribution would you use on them?

PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[Doc Ruby]

Apparently, you can now develop Linux apps on PS3. High-end Cell machines, like a Cell Blade CBE from IBM, cost about $20-50K. And those CBEs are not really finished, stable HW architectures, and are in short supply, making their OS/SW environment very changeable.

A good strategy is to start developing on a PS3, while CBE HW catches up. If development takes 6-9 months, by then the CBEs will be cheaper, more stable, better understood by both their vendors and the community for getting support and working around weak links. And that time can be used to fundraise and team recruit around a PS3 prototype.

But the $64,000 Question (literally) is what it takes to port a PS3 Linux app to CBE Linux. Does anyone know yet? Whitepaper? Walking/talking expert for hire/bribe? If porting a PS3/Linux app to CBE/Linux is harder than porting an embedded x86 app to a Xeon, or an embedded R6000 to a multiproc R6000 server, then it might be worth it just to wait to start on the CBEs when they're ready. Though a PS3 running a supercomputer DSP app prototype could be cool enough to be worth the whole trouble, anyway.

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[maynard]

Though a PS3 running a supercomputer DSP app prototype could be cool enough to be worth the whole trouble, anyway.

It's my understanding that the distro is just booting up PPC Linux and running off the main PPU in Cell. So, how much control does one have over those SPU DSPs? That's the real question. Presumably there must be a kernel interface and a library which allows one to DMA load stuff from main memory to an SPUs LS. I think most people are chaining data from one SPU to the next, which means that your algorithm will probably have to be broken into a series of compute steps - each run on a separate SPU. That means, *you* have to manage all the problems of cramming each program and data segment into 256K, verify concurrency across the chain in each step, move data segments to the next processor in the chain, and extract results. What a PITA.

Also note that double precision and integer work on those SPUs is pretty slow. Your big gain will come with single precision SIMD calcs in a matrix. Now, if your problem fits within all those limitations... then Cell will kick ass. It is a cheaper and faster FP engine than anything on the market today. I've been telling people where I work that we should buy a 20gb PS3 and try to port our monte carlo sim to Cell... just to see if it would be a good bang for the buck. So far though, skepticism of a toy performing reliable scientific compute runs high....

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[rootmonkey]

The main difference between the Blade and the PS3 configuration is memory limitations and the number of SPUs available. The Blades have 2 CBEs with 8 SPUs and 1 GB RAM each (so 16 SPUs, 2 GB total). The PS3 has 7 SPUs and 256 MB (under linux). There is also a networking limitation since inifiband can be added to the Blade system.

The memory difference is the biggest hurdle since it will limit your data sets. However it will allow developers to prototype. The code itself will be completely portable between both systems since they both run Linux and have the same interface and SDK to the SPUs.

There are developers using the PS3 for CBE app development. You could ask them directly http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_fo rum.jsp?forum=739&cat=46

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[Doc Ruby]

The Cell's techniques for exploiting the parallel pipeline of DSPs/PPCs is notoriously novel and complex. The IBM Linux/gcc toolchain is supposed to wrap that in a familiar API and build process.

The question is what's the effort/cost in porting PS3 to CBE? Is the savings of prototyping on PS3 worth the expense of porting to CBE, if they're that different? Considering the differential gradient of CBE cost by the time the PS3 prototype is ready to port.

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[Doc Ruby]

That's reassuring.

Does the PS3 API to the SPUs automatically (at compile time, or runtime) scale to the number of SPUs available? And is switching networking from PS3 to CBE infiniband completely modular?

In other words, can the same code run faster against more data if coded to scale to resources, without the equivalent of lots of #IFDEF parallel code paths?

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[maynard]

Yeah, right. There's a special spu-gcc compiler and linker to link spu code to PPC programs, and a threading model for loading and unloading code/data segments onto an SPU. Here's a short explanation, along with Linux install instructions:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-linuxps3-1/?ca=dgr-btw01Linux-and-PlayStation 3

So, that's how Sony expects you to manipulate an SPU... you don't really get direct access to the hardware, you have to follow their threading model. But, since it's C, you can embed inline assembly if you want to go hard core.

The threading model looks pretty broken to me. You've got all these cycles lost in thread context switching, when the best approach is just to let something small run in chip without intervention. This is why I think monte carlos are perfect for Cell. Your real concern then becomes: Can I break my entire calculation down to six or so roughly equal steps, and cram enough of my dataset for each operation down to ... say 32KB or 64KB blocks?

Where I work a lot of folks use GEANT as their main sim engine. It just seems like a no-brainer to try a port to the Cell.

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[Doc Ruby]

That all sounds like work for the optimization phase of the compiler. Is the IBM Cell gcc that lamebrained?

Re:PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting?

[rootmonkey]

It depends how you write your code. It won't automatically do this, but you can write the control code in such a way that it does. There are newer versions of the SDK from IBM that will help with this. However it depends on a number of factors. You can use several different models, like streaming data between SPUs, and each SPU runs a different program. Or have all SPU run the same program and work on different parts of the dataset, there are several other models as well. So it really is problem specific. One nice thing about programming the Cell is that IBM has opened the architecture so that the programmer knows whats going on and has the control needed to get the performance.

meh

[BladeMelbourne]

full use of the ps3 system and gentoo go hand in hand. your processors will be compiling most of the time.

yes I have da ppc chip running linux. I prefer Fedora.

Re:meh

[PygmySurfer]

actually, wouldn't the SPEs be sitting idle most of that time? :)

Re:meh

[Slashcrap]

full use of the ps3 system and gentoo go hand in hand. your processors will be compiling most of the time.

Actually Gentoo for the PS3 is distributed as binary packages. The PS3 doesn't really have enough RAM to make compiling everything a comfortable experience.

But don't let actual facts get in the way of your bandwagon jumping, karma whoring comments.

And from what I've seen of recent Fedora releases, all that processor power on the PS3 would be used to startup and run Yum.

Re:meh

[that this is not und]

Since the PS3 is a closed and rather fixed-architecture system, wouldn't it make complete sense for the Gentoo to be distributed as binary packages? There is only one permunation of hardware to build the binaries for. It makes no sense for anybody to ever compile anything for the PS3 more than once. Package-combination perumations certainly exist, but the base distribution should be binary only and there's no reason, ever, for it not to be.

Do you trust this man?

[crush]

There are such seriously uninformed assertions in the very premises of TFA that it's hard to take what the writer says seriously. For example:

while they're not bad in any sense, they do have problems which are associated with any RPM based distro- dependency hell. I'm sure that any of you who've tried to install any applications would have faced the problem of missing dependencies sometime. And it's all too common to have a few packages totally missing from the repository which means that you have to search for their respective RPMs on the net, download them and install them separately. While functional, this can get a little frustrating over time.

"Dependency hell" existed before YUM (which came from Yellowdog's Seth K. Vidal) solved the problem. YUM is explicitly a dependency solver. It builds on top of the RPM system to automatically find and install the dependent RPM packages.

I knew it wasn't going to be Fedora Core or Yellow Dog since they seemed to have lots of problems when it came to media players.

Fedora Core (don't know about Yellow Dog) explicitly chooses to stay away from software which relies upon non-Free, patent-encumbered material. As a project it considers things like Ubuntu's binary graphics driver distribution, or the inclusion of mp3 decoding software (which is encumbered by the Frauenhoefer Institute's ridiculous patent) to be against the GPL and Free Software. As a result it helps to foster the development of free alternatives, without which there would be a much smaller software ecosystem. This is sane, long-term thinking which steps away from opportunistic, short-term compromises which seek to cannibalize market-share from other Linux distros by spreading confusion and misinformation. Debian has a very similar attitude. There are some non-Fedora run repositories where people have packaged up things like the mplayer codec bundle, mpg321, flash etc. If you really have to have them it's easy to edit /etc/yum/repos.d to add the repository.

The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user.

Look, if an ebuild isn't in the portage tree then you're not going to have much luck installing it unless you make your own. Ditto for an rpm being available to yum in a repository. Your article is uninformed fanboi-ism. To your friend: don't let him near your PS3!

To anyone not using Gentoo, don't take this article as representative of the community, it's a great distro with many advantages and not everyone involved with it is as much as a moron as the article writer.

Re:Do you trust this man?

[heinousjay]

Out of curiosity, what's so ridiculous about the patent, exactly? I suspect you're going for the 'all patents are bad' thing I see around here most of the time, but I figured I'd ask in case there was an answer that had some facts behind it.

Re:Do you trust this man?

[Goaway]

So basically your shit won't work but at least somebody's else's ideologies are satisfied.

Re:Do you trust this man?

[junglee_iitk]

While I agree to everything else, this part is incorrect:

Look, if an ebuild isn't in the portage tree then you're not going to have much luck installing it unless you make your own. Ditto for an rpm being available to yum in a repository.

Actually, opposite is true.

I have found Gentoo to best solve this problem. You can install softwares even from CVS/SVN/Darcs repositories using the portage (and not manual install). All you need is an ebuild. And ebuild formation is, most of the times, just copying any previous ebuild of another software and renaming it to your software-version. Compare this with making RPM/deb files.

And the rare cases when you have to compile some program, like X or kernel, to enable/add some feature, it was the easiest way I found to do, and still remain in 'installing the distro' realm. I installed Gentoo for the only reason that I needed latest Unichrome drivers, and I didn't know how to do that in SuSE 9.1.

By the way, yes, the article is basically about how some fanboy installed Gentoo on PS3. Aside from being a fanboy, it is indeed informative, and and atleast not a flamebait (give the guy a break :))

Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[nadamsieee]

I've been using GNU/Linux since about 1998, and I used Gentoo for approximately 3+ years. I've even written and submitted an ebuild or two. It definitely has some advantages over other distros and definitely has disadvantages. But it (like all man-made things) is far from perfect. Statements like these simply aren't true:

1. Best distro when compared with Fedora Core 5/6 or Yellow Dog Linux because of no RPM/dependency/repository hell

In Gentoo packages are installed using scripts called ebuilds which are intended to contain all of the dependency information for the packages. People write the ebuilds. People (all of them) occasionally make mistakes. Its not unheard of to have a dependency bug in Gentoo.

2. Easy to install ANY application - emerge . It will download source of all dependencies, install and setup everything.

The ease of installation also depends on the quality of the ebuild. Were all possible combos of USE flags even tested for a particular ebuild? Do those combinations actually work? Again, ebuild aren't magic and they contain to contain errors. Also, portage only gives you a default configuration file. You have to make (and test) any configuration file changes yourself. So the statement that portage will "setup everything" is misleading.

3. Will get the latest updates first, and you will be able to download and install it without any problems.

This definitely isn't always true. As the Gentoo devs struggled to get a handle on quality, packages began to take a substantial amount of time to work their way into the stable arches. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at one point new ebuilds had to sit in ~arch status (sort of like test repository in other distros) for one month without complaint before being marked as stable. It didn't seem to matter if anyone actually tested or even looked at the ~arch ebuild during that month. It was just a mandatory waiting period in which the dev hoped that some users bothered to test the ebuild and complain if it broke. I think the quality of the ebuilds are improving with the refinement of Gentoo's architecture herds, but with more process and more people comes delays. Quality and speed are almost always at odds in development.

4. It won't take time to install applications since hundreds of binaries already available through Portage Overlays. Thus, you will get applications compiled specially for the PS3, not just a regular PPC computer. The advantages of this will be big once GCC is optimised for the Cell processor.

Performing work always takes time, even installing binary packages, and the default behavior of Portage is to install from source.

5. You can ask for help while installation through irc, or ask someone to install it for you remotely!

As an experiment, I'd like to see everyone interested in Linux on PS3 to log onto IRC and ask somebody to install Gentoo for them remotely. Report back here with the results. ;)

Basically Gentoo can be great if it fits your needs, but pretending that Gentoo is perfect and problem free isn't going to change the reality that it isn't.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[oglueck]

> Also, portage only gives you a default configuration file. You have to make (and test) any configuration file changes yourself.

That's totally on purpose! You don't want any package manager to mess with your config. When was the last time SuSE overwrote the httpd.conf with a default version? Okay, with major releases it is a bit tedious to upgrade to a new config file format. But any ebuild is free to provide an automatically updated config file for you, which you can accept, merge or reject with etc-update. It's just not common practice.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[massysett]

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at one point new ebuilds had to sit in ~arch status (sort of like test repository in other distros) for one month without complaint before being marked as stable. It didn't seem to matter if anyone actually tested or even looked at the ~arch ebuild during that month. It was just a mandatory waiting period in which the dev hoped that some users bothered to test the ebuild and complain if it broke.

Well, my understanding is that a new ebuild has to sit in ~arch for at least a month. After that though, it's not as though promotion to stable is automatic unless anybody complains. The ebuild stays in ~arch until somebody files a bug to promote it to stable. Generally the person who files this bug will be someone who uses the package and hasn't had any problems with it. But often things sit in ~arch for months, indefinitely, until somebody asks to get it promoted. And, if there are big bugs against it, it won't get promoted to stable.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[oGMo]

Basically Gentoo can be great if it fits your needs, but pretending that Gentoo is perfect and problem free isn't going to change the reality that it isn't.

This is true; however whereas binary package distributions tend to work-or-not-work, Gentoo provides you with pretty much everything you need to fix something when it doesn't. It's less a matter of "perfect" and more a matter of "perfectly transparent".

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[danomac]

I've been using Gentoo for a few years now. I had a leave of absence from linux in general, and returned in 2003. I have tried other distros as well, as I have installed other distros on friends computers.

For me, Gentoo is my preferred distro. The main reason is: other distros have packages scattered throughout umpteen different repositories. When I set up ubuntu on a friend's PC, I got quite irritated at all the missing multimedia packages (I know, it's licensing or some such thing.) The popular media players/codecs/etc were all in portage. One command dragged in all the codec dependencies and built mplayer. On ubuntu, most of the packages were available, but unless you messed around with /etc/apt/sources.list you'd never be able to install them. For a new user to ubuntu, finding stuff that I was used to finding in one place was rather difficult.

In another post, someone mentioned the flexibility of Gentoo. The installer CD is very basic and will only get you into a shell environment. For servers, this is great, you don't need to install a desktop or window manager. If you want a desktop, then starts the [long] task of building X and getting your window manager and desktop installed. The other distros I've tried always load a gui. My preference on servers is to not have a gui at all.

Portage isn't perfect. Circular dependencies happen all the time. The most recent one was with the cups package. Installing a package required cups and X. Now, cups required X, and X required cups. Oops.

Also, not updating for a long period of time can cause strange problems. On my friend's PC ubuntu wasn't any different however.

Gentoo does have problems, but I still use it anyway. The documentation on the website is excellent, and the forum community is helpful as well.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[nadamsieee]

This is true; however whereas binary package distributions tend to work-or-not-work, Gentoo provides you with pretty much everything you need to fix something when it doesn't.

There is nothing preventing you from rolling your own RPM or DEB. At some level, distro wars become silly and meaningless; in the end you're running pretty much the same applications and underlying operating system.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[csplinter]

That is not a bug, refer to the documentation it's not a hard problem to solve. Try something like 'emerge cups && emerge xorg', problem solved.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[danomac]

Actually, I used

$ USE="-X -dbus" emerge cups

then emerged everything else. I fixed it immediately, I didn't need to refer to the docs.

Circular dependencies are a bug, IMO.

Re:Fanboy-ism at its best/worst

[csplinter]

You didn't fix the problem you just bypassed it, thats just a hack. The real solution is to install both at the same time, and it's not a bug, there is a reason they both depend on each other, read the docs and you will find out why.

Easy steps to install Linux on the PlayStation 3

[Anonymous Coward]

developerWorks has a good article up about Linux on the PlayStation 3. It includes overview, installation, and first Cell BE processor programming steps.

head asplode

[Lord Ender]

he didn't know much about Linux ... His requirements -- Install a distribution which is easy to maintain ... Gentoo

My brain exploded when I read that. This author is WAY out of touch with reality. Of all the widely-used Linux distros, Gentoo, by FAR, requires the most administration effort and expertise.

Gentoo is for people who want the very latest in technology and the highest possible customization ability, but don't mind manually rewriting config files every week when a new version of a given package is released. Clearly, the author of this article is not qualified to--actually, no, he's just on crack.

Re:head asplode

[i_should_be_working]

My brain exploded when I read that. This author is WAY out of touch with reality. Of all the widely-used Linux distros, Gentoo, by FAR, requires the most administration effort and expertise.

Actually, no. Gentoo is not the easiest to install, even with the new GTK graphical installer. But to maintain, it is a breeze. "emerge --update" isn't any harder to type than "apt-get update". And yes, there are graphical frontends to portage.

Re:head asplode

[Lord Ender]

Have you used Gentoo? Emerge is much harder than apt because gentoo packages come with new configuration files for the same release levels! You must choose to either keep, overwrite, or manually edit new config files when you emerge. Debian/Ubuntu don't do this because they don't change config file versions unless you upgrade to a new major release of the OS.

Re:head asplode

[i_should_be_working]

I admit, I had forgotten about that part of an upgrade. I think I always went with the new configuration file (or whatever the default action was). I don't remember it changing my settings for anything.

But I still prefer portage and emerge over apt-get (except for the compiling time). It just seemed easier to do things that are complicated in Debian, like downgrading a bunch of packages, or trying out different verions of a package. And I was a noob when I used Gentoo.

Re:head asplode

[Lord Ender]

It isn't really the fault of any tool (emerge, apt, or yum). It is a result of the package release policies of the distros. In RedHat, Debian, or Ubuntu, you can do an update every day but never have to worry about a changing config file. You only have to worry about config file changes when you do a major upgrade.

With Gentoo, they release packages the second they are ready, instead of waiting for OS releases. You could end up doing config work every week with Gentoo that you only need to do twice a year with other distros.

If you had actually made use of your Gentoo install, you would have many customized config files, and you would have realized how difficult and time consuming it is to keep things up-to-date.

I have used every distro, and used Gentoo as my primary desktop OS for over 1 year. It was a wonderful learning tool, but once I realized how much time I spent administering things, I switched to Ubuntu. Gentoo really should ONLY be used by people who are dedicated, motivated, and have plenty of free time.

Re:head asplode

[Anonymous Coward]

> With Gentoo, they release packages the second they are ready, instead of waiting for OS releases. You could end up doing config work every week with Gentoo that you only need to do twice a year with other distros.

Or not. Gentoo saves every new config file as .cfgblalbla in its appropriate directory by default, then informs you at the end of the emerge you're running that there are updates to the config files available. If you don't want to touch them, you need not, and your system will keep running as usual. If you _do_ want to update, it allows you to either keep the old config, update to the new, or merge between them.

Very flexible, and a damn sight better than the Fedora way of doing it with their .rpmsave, .rpmorig and .rpmnew files littering the filesystem waiting for you to discover them. Or worse, just overwriting the config file with the new version (like the gdm packages (used to) do).

Re:head asplode

[Lord Ender]

That's not the case. If your emerge happens to update Samba to a version with a new config file format, you had better update your config file RIGHT AWAY, lest you be left with a broken computer as soon as the service restarts. This problem never comes up with a computer that has a fixed release schedule.

Re:head asplode

[Bert64]

And that's flamebait too...
Config files that i've not modified since installation get updated automatically (from old defaults to new defaults) when i upgrade packages. Config files that i have modified can be left alone 99% of the time anyway. Are you claiming that any other distro wouldn't require you to modify your configuration files when performing a major update of a package? Or is it just that, once you've settled on a particular release of a distro like fedora you won't get any major version updates of packages unless you reinstall using a newer distro release?

MOD PARENT UP

[Bandman]

I wish I hadn't replied already

MOD PARENT UP

OBL Bash Quote

[Joker1980]

it only takes three commands to install Gentoo cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge gnome mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6 that's the first one

Just play games on the thing!

[Bob54321]

If I had a friend who knew nothing about Linux and owned a PS3 and thought it would be a good idea to learn Linux by running it on a PS3, I think I would just have to slap them down. You spent $600+ to play games so play games.

On a side note, has anyone managed to screw their PS3 by installing Linux yet - is it possible the combination of shiny new toy and no real Linux knowledge could lead to expensive shiny looking bricks?

Re:Just play games on the thing!

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot brick the PS3 doing this. It is designed to take alternative OSes and Sony actually worked with Terrasoft (YDL) to have Linux working on the device before it was on the market. There is no hacking going on to install Linux on the PS3, Sony even provide the installer and partition tools.

Alternative OSes do not have full access to the hardware or system, they run inside the PS3's OS, and there's no access to the system partition. The latter is what will lead to "backup" games, should it happen, so you can be pretty sure Sony will issue a system update to close any holes.

Installing Linux on the PS3 is to enable access to other applications, not a computer replacement.

Re:Just play games on the thing!

[gamer4Life]

Just like when you spend $500+ for a iPhone to make calls, so all it should do is make calls right?

There's NOTHING wrong with having a device that does more than one thing.

Re:CmdrTaco = loser

[somersault]

Ye gods! I have never seen such bait for flame!

PC3??

[TheCybernator]

may be author meant PC3 and not PS3 :))

With "friends" like this...

[john-da-luthrun]

His requirements -- Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run.

So you installed Gentoo. You bastard. Did you run over his dog at the same time?

Re:With "friends" like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as the guy with the PS3 can't even maintain a linux distro, odds are he doesn't have a dog.

He probably has one of those new talking robots though, which he probably asked his friend to put linux on, and the robot probably responded with "I will fcuking kill you both!!"

Distro wars

[digitalhermit]

I have this dream where this guru sits in a lotus position and says, "All paths are the same." About him, his students engage in debate about the true path to enlightenment. We are focused on the guru so we hardly hear the smattering of sound bites: "Emacs all the way!" "vi, my friend." "Namaste, but SuSe is the way." "In the beginning was the command line, and so shall it be in the end." "The GUI is easier, and easier is better."

In this dream a light wells up behind the guru. He gestures to the earth, touches it, the Kernel tree grows up from that spot. He pulls a leaf from the Kernel tree, crushes it in his palm and casts the pieces to the wind. Where each bit of leaf falls, a new Distribution Tree grows. Soon there are hundreds of trees about him, innumerable as the stars in the heavens.

The students are aghast. So many distributions, so alike and so different. They scrabble around in confusion. Which is the true Way? Then light erupts from the guru. The students understand: All spring from the One Tree.

Aum.

(Yeah, too much Christmas eggnog for me.)

Re:Distro wars

[mr_da3m0n]

If I had mod points, I'd mod this positively until it glew.
That was.. I don't know, it was so peaceful. I wish more people saw things like you do.

Re:Distro wars

[dragonturtle69]

This deserves a higher moderation.

I'm wondering...

[reddcell]

When the last time the OP actually USED Gentoo. It has fallen from the high horse it once rode upon.

Re:I'm wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked, it was always a waste of time designed for elitists who have superiority complexes.

Office Suite?

[gregtron]

"Among his biggest needs was an office suite..." ? Friend1: Hey, man, whatcha playin? Is it co-op? Friend2: Hell yeah, grab a controller. I'm just workin on this bitchin spreadsheet.

Re:Office Suite?

[Anne Thwacks]

You should try "cashflow from hell!" Beats GTE when it comes to realism. Why be a pimp when you can be an Enron exec?

where do these people come from

[Anonymous Coward]

I only use Gentoo also. But this article sounded like it was wrote with someone with a stick in their ass. I don't know where people like this come from as I also participate in the gentoo forums and usually never see stuff like this. Please forgive him, he isn't the representation of all of us gentoo users.

$600 for a Hi-def linux video server/client

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's the point? Why spend $600+ on a PS3 only to put Linux on it. You can get a PC much cheaper, one which will happily accept most any Linux distro with alot less pain.

*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games and watch Hi-Def (blu-ray) movies, not so I can load Linux and surf the web on a 65" screen.

Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*."

so do you consider $600 for a Hi-def PPC/Cell based linux to high a price for this box ?, can you do the same for less on a x86 box ?.

it seems that all the main people contributing to the advancement of PPC linux are indeed useing gentoo PPC64 and the fact is, the toolchain for devs to make use of the SPU units are right now available there throught the hard work of several good linux people.

theres a liveCD and a stage4 you can use, and its getting better every day as more and more people report their experiences with it.

see #gentoo-ppc64 for yourself, and as far as iv seen if a problem gets reported there, it gets fixed PDQ.

as easy as x86 slax to make your own personal liveCD's, perhaps not, but the devs are trying to give you a good base and write the needed Altivec/spu patches in time for YOUR benefit so give them a break and help them out were you can seems only fair.

if makeing a new PPC based slax could be your idea of fun so go do it if you like and let everyone be happy and have even more PPC FUN
http://slax.linux-live.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1 1497&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30&sid=eb0d6b3 d5c298b5cf34bfdb2dd928fc2

if your a x86 dev looking to program the PS3/PPC/Cell/spu's etc for the first time iv tryed to put together a list quick list of the most useful links/papers here http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php ?t=1082 if your interested in things PPC related.

Why?

[gentlemen_loser]

I'll bypass my comments about Gentoo being the distro that the author picked. Everyone else seemed to do a pretty good job of covering that.

I do want to ask why though? Why dump that much money on a brand new PS3 and then put Linux on it? Do not interpret this as a bash against Linux, but rather I am trying to understand the end goal and attraction. I would think that someone wanting to experiment with Linux would either dual-boot a PC (or Mac), or buy another box (for less money than a PS3) to install Linux on.

Problem from the beginning

[Nom du Keyboard]

My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux...

I totally don't know what that means, but I want it!

obviously

[smadasam]

Obviously Gentoo is the best choice. Why would there be any question?

Why put linux on your ps3?

[Grimmreaper74]

Call me a Newb but what are the advantages of putting linux on your ps3, I've never used it and have no idea why it's better. But what is the deal with putting it on your ps3?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

To prove we aren't all fanboys

[bcmm]

I use Gentoo and can't stand Ubuntu, but I still recommend Ubuntu to people with no experience or Unix-ish OSs. It's far better to start of using something that works easily and tinker with that till you know what you're doing, before switching to anything that actually requires tinkering.

To be fair, I don't know what Gentoo's install is like now. Maybe you can do an install without knowing much.

I love gentoo fanboys

[Sneakernets]

Let's take an example from the REAL world...

Let's say you want to enter a building. Theoretically, it'd be faster to enter the building if you wait for the door to rot, as there are no brain cycles involved in having to open the door. It also solves the "dependency hell" of unlocking the door with a key you don't have.


Truly the best Distro out there.

I'm sorry I had to! :D

He's just your average n00b!

[pitc]

Me too! When I bought my brand new $$$$$ console all I wanted to do was install Linux on it so that it would be easy to use and maintain!

Why the FUCK would anybody want to do this!? -nt-

[shagymoe]

-nt-

Three words - pre compiled binaries

[PS3Penguin]

Which is actually quite funny .. because one of Gentoo's big things .. is compiling everything on your system .. with full optimizations for what you have. If you look at this posting in my blog, http://ps3penguins.blogspot.com/2007/01/gentoo-lin ux-on-ps3.html you can find several links relating to this .. key is the planet.gentoo link that talks about pre-compiled PS3 binaries.

Re:Overkill....not

[Rei]

You know what I like best about (Insert Non-Gentoo Distro Here)?

1. Not having to do everything by hand.
2. Not having to read the documentation for most apps.
3. Not having to read the documentation for most apps.

Another fake community ad

[d.3.l.t.r.3.3]

I smell fishy arguments and last resort PS3 non stop marketing... Falsifying an Emmy Award worldwide wasn't enough?

We are all impressed with the conclusion.

[dilvish_the_damned]

The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user. Having used Gentoo extensively, I knew that this would be the solution to my problems.

So the only solution was to have him install the distro you were most familiar with. I have heard of this happening before. Somewhere...

Gentoo is not a bad choice

[joegun]

I guess it takes different philosophies. But Gentoo is not unfriendly as far as how to get it running is concerned. In my experience of working with various distros Gentoo has been very usefully documented, organized, and communicative. In general Fedora and Ubuntu are topnotch Windows alternatives. If you want your system to work out of the box with minimal intervention than YDL and Ubuntu are amazing. If, however you want to learn and use Unix you cannot go too wrong with Gentoo or even Debian.

Back in '94 when the idea of user friendly was Sun's patch system I turned to FreeBSD's port system. The port system brought me face-to-face with the compiler and kernel. I never stopped learning. And it was not more difficult than resolving a missing dependency under RedHat, and it was leaps and bounds ahead of Slackware. After the hubbub of Linux started growing I moved to Redhat and Debian full time. I have always been dissatisfied with both distros as far as being able to communicate with me and offering options to resolve issues. In 2001 I moved to Gentoo and it was a marriage of love. Whenever anything goes wrong with a Gentoo ebuild the solution usually is within my grasp to fix. Compile times of 12 hours (yes only 12 hours!) is a small price to pay for the initial install.

With the decline in the quality or existence of man pages, Gentoo has the best documentation I have come across. I even read sometimes about other people using Gentoo documentation to help them when they are using other distros. While that's not amazing, it is, at least, a sign of respect.

Now, install Gentoo on the PS3??? Are you crazy, out of your mind? I think absolutely not. If you are installing Linux on the PS3 you are doing it for 3 reasons:
1) You can, so why not?
2) You want to develop something, like games (not until Sony releases more patches and tools); like finding twinned primes (sure, but you still don't have a paddle)
3) You are an acne-scarred chess club runt who wants to see what they can do, you have the computer, you have the ability, let's get grokkin'.

Now, the crazies out there who are using their PS3 as a desktop replacement should go back and huddle in their voyeuristic holes and play with their Mindstorm controlled webcams. If you want to learn Linux, you do not want something that will do everything for you and pat you on the back congratulating you on your amazing clairvoyance. You should be bogged down doing menial things such as fdisk, setting up your timezone by using the file system, and reading about how X is configured (oh my).

As for the OP, he is a fanboy. Gentoo will not make your PII perform like an modern processor. The PS3 is SLOW to use, to install, and to boot between OSes. It's a hobbyist's project and anyone else will have their time better served by using Knoppix on their current computer system.

---
Gentoo FanMan

Not Better just different

[garlicbready]

I wouldn't say Gentoo is better, simply different
It has certain advantages and disadvantages

From a usability point of view Gentoo isn't exactly easy to setup / use
not the sort of thing for someone who's never seen Linux before
But it is more configurable

it is more cutting edge in terms of the software available
(the init scripts for example are a lot more cleverly done, avoiding serious script bloat)
sometimes this can affect reliability, but it makes up for it by making it extremely easy to get it working on
strange and wonderful hardware that might not have even seen Linux before
downside - can take a while to compile (but you get used to it), upside more up-to-date versions of software avoiding dependency hell

From a package management point of view
I would say that this suits odd / unusual hardware better than perhaps other package management systems
as your able to use existing ebuild scripts to compile software on hardware that's never been tried before

the upside is it's something that's easy to patch and if you want to get something working that isn't already setup
in the repository it's the easiest system to use in order to do so
basically every application just has a simple bash script called an ebuild to describe how to compile / install
these tend to be a lot easier to write than RPM spec files as most of the tracking of what's installed where
is mostly automated, and these scripts don't have to be packaged up in the same way as RPM's
chances are with the PS3 quite a lot of software will probably just install from the default repository without any changes (you won't have to package up or construct any RPM's, instead you just type emerge that's it)

the downside is with RPM you have checks in place to make sure everything is installed exactly where it's supposed to be
you sacrifice ease of development, for reliability (having to list where everything is going to be installed)
which is what people want for situations where you want a common system on a whole bunch of PC's with similar hardware

it's more convenient in that respect for uncommon hardware platforms, where getting it to work even if it's not perfect is preferred over rolling out a common system to a whole bunch of similar systems
so in that respect it probably is better for the PS3
(but at the same time so what? I woudn't expect to see a news entry on slahdot for this)

Re:CmdrTaco = loser

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I would reply to this, but I'm quite busy installing Linux on my digital shirt. 'course, the shirt is rather uncomfortable now that all the hardware is in place. Most discomfiting.

Fanboy? What's the point?

[lcam]

I use gentoo too, and like it very much and use it every day and might even be a "gentoo fanboy". I might even rant about how powerful, flexible and elegant Gentoo is, but when my friends where curious about linux I give them a knoppix CD. They can try out linux without disturbing their hard drive. I can't see myself recommending gentoo to a newbie; it is like measuring a parking space in millimeters (or in microns).

My second favorate distribution is knoppix.

I use knoppix when there is a problem for the same reasons some people use duct tape to fix something that are broken. Just as a temporary solution until a permanent solutions is arranged. The GUI gets in my way most of the time especially when I'm in a hurry. So I guess my most used boot parameter is: "2"

The time required to setup knoppix is the time required to make sure the PC will boot from the CD. I'd like to see another distro beat that setup time. :)

Games? This is a PS3, for cricket's sake

[tepples]

Of course it will, think about how much they'll learn when they spend 3 days trying to get a game to work

If you want to play a game on your WORKSTATION 3 running Gentoo OS, you push a button, and it becomes a PLAYSTATION 3 ready for inserting a game disc.

Re:Games? This is a PS3, for cricket's sake

[fbjon]

Where can I buy a button like that for my workstation?

But can it run Linux?

[CYDVicious]

Hmmm....nm.

Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86 .xml?full=1

^^^ This is what I remember going through, I don't know how you pulled it off easily :S

My first steps

[Godji]

I did actually take my first (successful) steps with Gentoo. One day I woke up fed up with Windows, and bought the first Linux distro I could find around - a Mandrake 7.1. It was very easy to install, even with my somewhat limited knowledge back then, but was incredibly difficult for me to work with. I was a Windows power user after all, with a lot to unlearn. So a week-long try to use the thing resulted in me hating Linux for the next month or so.

But then the scratch appeared again. I got a Red Hat whatever version this time. Installed almost as easily*, but was just as difficult to use efficiently. Sure, I could browse the web and check my e-mail, but everything else was a pain. I didn't understand the system, and I had no idea what going on down there. I was persistent, too, spending almost 3 weeks struggling.

I was so frustrated that I never wanted to look at a Linux system again for as much as an year and half after this. Then, once I had enough force of will to try yet again, I decided to take a different approach. I wanted to know as much of the system as possible, in order to customize it and configure it properly. I would even build it myself if I had to. I don't even know if Gentoo existed at the time, but I certainly didn't know about it. The only distro sort of covering my goal was, [dramatic pause], Linux From Scratch! So I followed the detailed, but not well explained instructions, and had a blazing fast booting system that could do essentially nothing. After a short-lived unsuccessful attempt to install X, I admitted defeat.

I had given up all hope until I randomly stumbled against Gentoo in 2004. I read about it, looked at the documentation, and decided to give Linux a final try. I spent a month almost exclusively working for that goal. Long story short, it's been the primary OS on all my machines ever since. The documentation and community as well as pure technical power of Gentoo are unmatched**.

Today, most distributions are far, far beyond the Mandrake 7.1 days in terms of usability, and my experience would probably be better had I started now. Still, when someone approaches me for assitance in making the Linux switch, I ask them what they want from their system. Do you want a shiny system that will install easily, work immediately, and be mostly good enough? There's Kubuntu. Do you want to learn a lot about your system, understand how everything works, and have the ultimate Linux experience, even at a large initial investment of effort? Or maybe you're serious about computer science and know a little about computers in general already? Here, try Gentoo. Obviously I would never recommend the latter to my grandmother, but for intelligent people who are not afraid to learn and like to play with technology, Gentoo just might be the ultimate operating system.

* Mandriva has (maybe) the best installer of all distributions, even today.
** BSD folks I know often tout the high customizability, flexibility, and power of their ports package system over anything Linux distros have to offer. I got familiar with FreeBSD a few months back, and guess what - Gentoo's portage is in fact inspired by ports, has the same philosophy, and is more powerful (USE flags), even if significantly slower. It gives you one of the best features of BSD on Linux, with added bonuses :)

Re:My first steps

[Ganniterix]

Yeah I get all your points ... but Gentoo was far from being your first steps! I played a round with RedHat, Suse and Mandrake ... and I finally was introduced to Gentoo. It was with Gentoo that I really made my bones. But then I got fed up of compiling KDE every 2 weeks because a couple of files got updated (I know now it's better because of the modular updates ... still a long time to finish compiling). I decided I had enough and started using Fedora! Is it the best? I don't care. Does it work ? Yes. RPM-hell? Huh? WHAT?? in 2 years I got an rpm database corruption once ... which was solved with a google search and 5 mins of typing and a couple of package inconsistencies in the java branch of Fedora (mainly with some geronimo packages). Yeah .. pure hell! I mean ... if you know that two package repositories are non-compatible with each other (and not officially supported by the Fedora community) why do you complain when your cross-dependencies get mixed up? Is that really an RPM issue ... or a bad admin issue? My original point was that gentoo is a good learning tool for non beginners, a new Linux user needs/must use something simpler to get started. Knowing how to make a stage 3 installation, setting up compiling parameters, manually installing each and every application and setting cron scripts ... is definitely not beginners stuff. You start with more simple things ... like a graphical installation ... some graphical tuning ... get familiar with the terms ... maybe start scripting ... compiling some self written program ... configuring some /etc/RANDOM-APP.conf ... and then maybe gradually start playing around with Gentoo. Telling my Windows savvy friend ... yeah let me teach you linux ... and have him sit next to be gaping like a fish while I read gentoo documentation and type some gibberish ... is not a very good teaching technique. PS: I'm answering to a number of comments on my original post over here ... not all directed to the previous comment :)

PS3 OS's

[Acidraven]

there are only two real PS3 Os's at the moment Gentoo, and YDL, fedora is a basic hack and not supported by anyone. YDL has had some issues because they have a pay model and till recently the only way to get it was to get a pirated copy or pay for it. Now the only issue with YDL is that it is not kept as up to date as some people would like. I don't know how active there community is, hopefully it will be something that I can find access to with out havening to pay money.
Gentoo is in active development, there are a few people who are finding out how to make things work. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3725047.html And in that thread there are a few things that would have taken care of the major problem people see about doing development on the ps3. With both a Binary Repository being set up since there are only a few things that can be diffrent between PS3's there is not as much need to compile for your system, and some direction on how to set up the distributed compile so you can use the power of the computers you have on the local network.
Right now the major holdup is that there is only frame buffer support for video, and who knows if someone will hack out a OpenGL driver that uses the SPU's, or if Nvida and Sony will put a Driver into the hypervisor. anything is possible since this is only month 3 of the ps3 being out and month 2 of linux on the ps3.

Re:Overkill....not

[Mister Whirly]

Spot on. When most people want to drive to the store to get some milk, they don't want to manually build a combustion engine from scratch, or even want to know how it is done. They want to put the key in and turn, and have everything work without having to know why.

Re:Overkill....not

[644bd346996]

I figure, if I'm not going to read the documentation, why am I even installing it?

Independent games?

[tepples]

*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games

But will Sony allow independent games developed by a team of devoted amateurs to be published in the PS3 native format, or will you have to install Linux to run them?

Re:Independent games?

[that this is not und]

independent games developed by a team of devoted amateurs

Let me know when you want to drop by and pick up one of the Dell Optiplex GX1's I have stacked out in the garage to run Tux Racer on.

Re:Overkill....not

[zaxus]

Hell, even if I know why and how it works, that doesn't mean I want to build it from scratch. The goal, after all, is to get to the store, not build a car.

Why is this a Troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this post listed as a Troll? He's saying the exact same things as every other post before him, and as every other post after him, but they aren't Trolls. Guess everyone needs a scapegoat.

Re:Overkill....not

[fatphil]

Getting to the store during the daytime, right?
So build it without lights, and it'll be smaller and lighter, so drive more quickly.
Also build it without burglar alarm - that will save the battery, so that will last longer.

Re:Overkill....not

[Rei]

Yeah. I mean, it's not like end-user applications have long chains of requirements or anything...

Re:Overkill....not

[644bd346996]

My point is that too many of those dependencies are imposed by the packagers in order to support all possible combinations of software. Even something like mozilla has fairly simple minimum requirements. By giving you access to compile time options, gentoo lets you strip your software down to just the pieces you need. It is possible to have a usable desktop environment and still know what each package does.

Re:Overkill....not

[Rei]

Hey, you know what? I don't need to know how every component in my car works or is set up, down to every valve, hose, and spark plug. I don't want to have to learn all of that. I want to get into my car and drive it. The only "applications" I want to know how to work are the steering wheel, the brakes, the shift, the radio, and things like that, and even on them, I don't want to have to "configure" and "build" them first.

I want to get into my car.
I want to drive my car.
Period.

Same with my computer. I want to run end-user applications, not waste my time setting up everything in between the end-user application and the base to eliminate a hundred megs or so of unneeded apps (ooh, 3 cents worth of disk space...). I'd rather spend my time, well -- doing things that I *want* to do.

Re:Overkill....not

[644bd346996]

Like every other distro, Gentoo comes with sensible defaults. Gentoo just gives you more flexibility in overriding those defaults. But then, you shouldn't bother with Gentoo unless you are going to take the time to customize some things.

There really is no reason to complain about having options. If you don't like having options, get a mac and get off slashdot.

Re:Overkill....not

[Rei]

Yeah. Because if you don't want to have to build and configure everything on your system, Linux and news focused on geeky topics clearly has nothing to do with you. Right? Slashdot is only for those with too much time on their hands and a desire to spend it unproductively, right? I mean, it's not like I'm so geeky that I spend my spare time doing things like programming for open-source video games or contributing patches to make a Linux scsi driver work with a card of mine, or things like that. No -- clearly because I don't want to waste my time, because I have more productive things to do, I have no business being here on Slashdot. Thanks for setting me straight.

Re:Overkill....not

[644bd346996]

I'm saying that slashdot is not for people who cannot stand the thought that other people have the option to chose differently. That seems to be one of your problems.

Re:Overkill....not

[Rei]

You've basically responded to a post about why I think it's unwise for most people to use Gentoo with a suggestion that I leave Slashdot, and now you're telling me that it's me who "cannot stand the thought that other people have the option to chose (sic) differently"?

Curiouser and curiouser.

Re:Overkill....not

[wheany]

Hey, It's a car analogy!