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New Gentoo 2007.0 Release Gets Mixed Review
lisah writes "Gentoo's recently released version 2007.0 gets a fair-to-middling review from Linux.com. Installation was a headache from the live CD and DVD versions, but the Gentoo Linux Installer saved the day and gets high marks for being 'far better than it's predecessor.' The user experience is also mixed — on the one hand, the distribution boots quickly, has great hardware support, and new, user-friendly artwork. On the other hand, 'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.' Overall, it doesn't look like Gentoo offers any compelling reasons to switch to 'Secret Sauce' if they're happy with their current, uh, flavor."
It's The Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!
.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be
...my Gentoo Linux workstation...
...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart
.rpms together on the command line,
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great
features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless
wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity.
Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really
means...
* Gentoo makes me so much more productive.
Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's
compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it
gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and
potentially unstable optimisation settings.
* Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!
Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a
single program in my life or contributed to an open source
project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing
by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom.
* I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs.
Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported
machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never
used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though,
so surely I must be for using Gentoo.
* Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo.
I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and
thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time
waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc
make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all
startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or
KDE."
*
from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy
fan...
* You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell...
I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be
resolved by specifying BOTH
and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat
packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux
packages together (which the system wasn't designed for).
* All the other distros are soooo out of date.
Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested
software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive
testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their
packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and
compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once
every few hours.
* Let's face it, Gentoo is the future.
OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in
the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place,
it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time.
But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be
growing!
With the founder leaving for Microsoft, would it? Too bad, there is a need for ability to configure a modern Linux system from scratch, with any number of options (X11? no X11? and so on). If nothing else, this helps makers of distributions for specialized devices.
Yes, but would it run an Indy car?
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Ease of installation is not one of the drawing points of Gentoo. In fact, for some of us, an arcane installation procedure is the main draw...nothing teaches you more about linux than having to choose, configure, and compile every single piece of the OS.
2007.0 already? And I only just finished compiling 2006.0!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
while I appreciate a good gui install, and the previous 2006.1 gentoo gui install was QAB, I'd have to agree with the review that any step forward is a good step. Also agreeing with the article, the CLI install is still the way to go and even if the gui install worked flawlessly I think I'd still choose the CLI install method over it. Once everything is installed, the review finds several things they say "don't work", but that is just the nature of the "do it yourself"/"linux my way" mentality of Gentoo. Has this realease turned Gentoo in to Ubuntu? No, and thankfully it hasn't. I believe Arch might be more up your alley if that is what you are looking for.
What have they done, if anything, to address update difficulties? Despite claims, you can't start at one version and keep rolling along to the current version by using Portage. Eventually updates become incompatible with your existing setup and Portage sometimes even fails to update itself.
My blog
I get the scripted installer part for admins, but why would a distro like Gentoo, which has already found its niche, violate that niche by dumping development time into a "newbie" installer? It's not as though I'm really bothered by it, but it seems like they've been content to leave the super-easy install to the Fedora and Ubuntu's of the world... even if it meant lesser uptake on their own distro. Does this new installer still download and compile everything from source? Just seems like it takes the focus off a specialized-install-for-all and puts it squarely on increasing the userbase. Why the change?
The reason is "security". Login root or sudo to run admin apps.
Best Slashdot Co
The article gets the usage right: "far better than its predecessor."
/., the site that HAS to always get this point wrong, it becomes "far better than it's predecessor."
But quoted on
This is NOT THAT HARD to get right, people. No apostrophe means that it's possessive. With an apostrophe,
it's a contraction of "it is" or "it has".
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I use Gentoo on servers because of the flexibility. I can specify exactly what I need. I can generate custom ebuilds easily (they are just shell scripts after all). In fact I can make entire installable custom *distros* for in-house apps and combinations of libraries, etc. I can pin specific packages to specific versions. I can set the build flags for each individual app. I can selectively override the Gentoo-supplied ebuilds with overlays. I can keep track of all my config files and track changes with RCS. I can install multiple versions of PHP, MySQL, Java, whatever, and keep it all straight. This is why I use Gentoo.
I really don't give a shit about a pretty installer. Let Gentoo focus on the power-user niche please, and if you don't like it, use something else.
GUI installation is moot to most Gentoo users. If you want a nice, easy graphical installer and easy system administration go download Ubuntu, it fills that niche very well. However, if you want to toil and trouble to build an optimized system from scratch then Gentoo is still the best solution.
the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.
Gentoo is what you make of it. If you don't like some feature, fix it yourself.
Last year, I thought it's time to get off SuSE. I mean, I never liked Novell and, well, ya know... Got around to build a few systems from the source (LFS is quite cute in that way), so... hell, why not try a "build from scratch" system that doesn't require you to do all the steps in between, and to pick and piece together all the little tidbits from everywhere around the world? And, hey, if it's "from the source", what I know about Linux should be enough to keep it afloat without having to dig too deeply into some kind of bizarre package configurator and selector.
... no luck. Won't load.
So Gentoo was it.
Downloaded the Installer and off we go. Ok. First problem, no driver for the Areca-RAIDcontroller. Ok. Source is available, as well as modules for pretty much every distribution (well, every but Gentoo), and the controller is available in kernel from 2.6.19 and up.
2006.1 uses 2.6.18 (or something like that). Ok, so much for "bleeding edge"...
Compiled the driver but
After some research on some boards I finally found someone kind enough to compile it for this distribution so insmod would actually agree with loading it. Fine. Let's go.
After about an hour of tinkering with USE flags (seriously, I didn't know what half of them are for, and documentation... erhm... ok, let's not mention it) and deciding just what packages I want (it's a server, baby, so give it some!), the install started.
3 hours later, it ended. Ended, not finished. A package can't be downloaded. From no mirror. O...kay? Why?
A few hours and some research later, I learned that the package missing is missing because the version on the installer DVD is outdated. The newer version is, of course, available, though the installer insists in using the old one.
I'm pretty sure this issue could be resolved somehow. But I kinda wanted to use the server before it's turned into a heavy paperweight. I know, I'll be flamed for being a noob and whatever, 'cause I couldn't resolve such a simple issue, and I'm pretty sure the workaround is quite easy if you're a Gentoo-wiz, but those things tend to turn people away from a distribution. The newbies, because they can't figure out how to do something, and the Linux vets because they're used to at least working installations.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
so ... when is genthree coming out?
Why UNIX?
Yeah, possessive "it" is "its" like "yours" and "hers", not "it's" like "John's" or "the table's".
The confusion comes from the use being more like the second case: "Its appearance", like "The table's appearance", not like "Your appearance", which has no "s" in this case.
And yet another round of bullshit bingo... Luckily computers get faster all the time, so I can compile OpenOffice 2.2 in just two (!!!) days.
I've installed redhad, suse, mandrake, ubuntu, fedora, and i'm sure quite a few other distros along the way. Gentoo has been BY FAR the most educational of them all. While Suse asked me how i wanted to partition my disks, it didn't really explain why.
./configure output, and the make install output is actually quite useful. It will show you exactly where the binaries are being put, and if there are in errors it will tell you exactly what they are (giving you the oppurtunity to fix them).
While staring at a bunch of GCC output is pointless, staring at the
I guess that it is the difference between owning a ford taurus (a very very easy to use, reliable, doesn't break and if it does its easy to fix, if there is a problem it just turns a light on on the dash that says "Problem" car) and owning an old muscle car. With the old muscle car, you're going to spend a LOT of time in the garage, covered in oil and grease, with a wrench in your hand either trying to get the thing to run again, or trying to squeeze just a LITTLE bit more torque out of it. While spending time in the garage playing with an old mustang doesn't make any sense to my dad the automotive investor, its freaking FUN!
I guess in conclusion, if you want something that is totally 100% rock solid, never breaks, you just turn it on and leave it in the rack forever without touching it, or really doing anything past the initial configuration....one of the other distros is probably for you (actually one of the BSDs is probably for you).
But if you want something that you really have to get your hands dirty with, that has all kinds of weird quirks and things that only YOU probably understand.....well then you should probably go with gentoo.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
The thing that irks me the most is that portage is so horrendously slow. It's beyond painful to use. I switched to paludis and that solved some of the problems, but it's a messy solution for now. Besides, Gentoo no longer has all of the packages I need. I've found myself having to download software from web pages more and more, which was something I wanted to avoid with Gentoo.
Sabayon does a pretty good job of giving me a good setup out of the box, but Gentoo's package management is so messed up now that it's no longer worth that much compiling. Ubuntu used to be noticeably slower for me to use, but either Kubuntu is faster or the gap has been closed and I just prefer the ease of Kubuntu now.
'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.'
Gentoo is set up the same way as older Unices for privilege escalation. You cannot su if you are not a member of the wheel group.
~ C.
As distribution is not very user friendly. For production machines is not the best choice but for learning how GNU/linux works it's great.
When you make a smooth ubuntu/fedora/mandriva install you might not have a problem but when you achieve a gentoo install, you learn. The same goes for daily use.
I stoped using gentoo because the lack of time (for compiling) but since I use ubuntu, I dont learn so much.
At least FreeBSD let choose between binary and building form source.
I'm more concerned with "predecessor." Is the prior version dead and completely unsupported in any way?
That said, if you are pedantic enough to get upset about an apostrophe where it does not belong, you should also object to the use of contractions in written material. Contractions should only be written when one is quoting the spoken word.
EX[1] no contraction should be used, this is written word.
[2] Contraction is fine, since dialogue reflects words spoken regardless of grammatical correctness.
Sorry, just felt I needed to one-up the pedantry.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
After hosing my archlinux install last week (fdisk'ing and mkfs'ing the wrong partitions when installing ipodlinux :) ) I thought I'd try go back to Gentoo, which I'd left behind during a period of dial-up internet hell. Archlinux was a lot easier to deal with on dialup. Anyhow, I thought I'd give the installer a go in an effort to get an install up and running quickly. I have to say that, at the moment, I don't recommend it. It caused me numerous headaches, and in the end, I basically didn't get a working install of it, so I decided to just go for the classic stage1. I managed to get this up and running nice and quickly, without referring to the handbook at all. The installer is easy?! I think not. I'm currently sat here with a nicely running box. The funny thing is, I have found out that everyone thinks stage1 is a waste of time nowadays, and rebuilding the system from a stage3 is much easier, but hell, it's all working now.
Maybe they should continue working on the installer, but I would advise that people stay away from it unless they are testing it out. I think the Gentoo people should avoid touting it as the latest greatest thing too. If people think that it's the way to go, then I'm confident that they will end up frustrated, and possibly give up entirely on Gentoo, which would be a shame, as it's really quite a good distro.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov
I posted a review of Gentoo 2007.0 on my blog - See: http://www.funtoo.org/drobbins/blog/2007/05/gentoo -linux-20070-review-first.html
Oh, and check out http://www.funtoo.org/ while you're at it and let me know what you think of the new logo.
-Daniel
It does have some of the best documentation I have come across. In the form of the gentoo-wiki site. I always find what I need in that site, even when fixing problems with other distros. That site deserved a mention for being so damn good, but I forgot to place it in my original post.
Who cares?
/* No Comment */
Gentoo is great.
These all make Gentoo my favorite distro.
If you don't want so many updates, sync less. If you don't want to see all the output, use a frontend. If you want to criticize the founder, go ahead, at least we haven't got Microsoft selling our software.
But the fact is: Gentoo installs great if you use the CLI, you haven't got any extra services running at boot, you can fully customize your system. These are the things I'm looking for in a distro.
FYI: I've never compiled for days. Unless you're too stupid to compile openoffice (we've got binaries too, you know)
I found that over the past year Intel released some funky motherboards (i.e. the i965) and installing Gentoo on them was not really easy. I rather like 2007.0 if only because the installer has a more recent kernel that has added hardware support.
Thank goodness there is at least one other slashdotter out there who appreciates good grammar! I thought I was alone!
~~~hsl~~~
One can think of extremely common errors as distributed English reform in action. "Its" and "it's" are pronounced the same way and so should be spelled the same way. Fuck apostrophes.
Besides, this case is backwards; for everything else apostrophe means possessive. This is why people stumble over it and why its doomed as a meme.
Thank goodness theres two others!
> That's a bit arrogant sounding, don't you think?
No, you were the arrogant one thinking you could install it without following the docs closely. I've been sole admin in a linux shop for 6 years and even I work through the docs when I'm putting gentoo on a box.
How well do you think you'd do (if you had access to the code trees) compiling yourself a working Windows or OSX from scratch? Gentoo isn't even that complex to install, it just requires you commit the time to configure it exactly as documented. We've all been there and gotten frustrated when we couldn't get _something_ working - that's part of the learning process. You learned - congratulations. I learned with RedHat and Debian, neither of which would install properly on my hardware when I first began toying with linux.
But 'your' and 'her' are already possessive. You wouldn't say "Yours fly is undone" or "Hers shirt is on backwards."
"Her" is both possessive and non-possessive. To get around this there's another possessive version "Hers". "It's her" and "It's hers" have completely different meanings, similar to "It's it" and "It's its". Not sure why we have "your" and "yours" though, I can't think of a sentence where both make sense but with different meanings.
If it runs on my laptop (Dell E1705 with a Raedon X1400), I'll give it a go. I liked Gentoo back in 2004 (?) when I tried the live cd with Unreal Tournament demo installed. That was amazing, all of my hardware from 3d video to sound worked first try, unlike any other Linux distribution I tried...
Gentoo and distro's like it (LFS) are not meant to be for the average desktop machines. Desktop machines get re-installed and need all types of upgrades every x-amount of days to keep up.
Gentoo is mainly for:
1) Developing and bleeding edge purposes - yes, it's nice to have a package manager that will include the latest of the late KDE and all it's dependencies. No it's not nice that you'll have to wait for tomorrow to get it complete, but it's easier than having to build something and finding all dependencies yourself as you compile.
2) Razor-edge performance on large single-purpose farms. The only way I would like to use Gentoo in production is when I need the optimizations for a certain product (say Apache OR MySQL) deployed on a large number of identical machines, I only need to build it once, then I can deploy (automatically) on the rest of the machines with all the performance I need pressed out, forget about all other USE flags (set everything - (gtk, kde,... and only +mysql).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
no, your definitely not the only one :^D
Anyone who says that the Gentoo manual is overrated is dead on. I've been in the process of a PPC install (so no GUI but CLI is cool) for days now, and often times the commands in the manual simply DO NOT WORK! And then the next day or time I try they miraculously do! Now its claiming that my 12G partition is only 955MB...sometimes. It is really starting to get ridiculous, but so far its the only distro I've found that supposedly works well as a firewire install.
What I would like to see is a Gentoo fork that is precompiled, but only to a certain extent. In otherwords, instead of compiling something yourself, you find a version of it that was compiled with the same/similar flags/optimizations, etc as you would like to have. However I don't know if this is feasible due to the sheer amount of hosting space and bandwidth it would take, and the seemingly infinite possible combinations of binaries there would need to be.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
I tried using the 2007.0 installer and it crapped out. I tried updating to the latest build, and that crapped out. I then decided to fall back to a stage three install, and that worked perfectly. Don't use the installer.
Not to troll, but if you like the idea of a streamlined do-it-yourself system and are not interested in compiling every piece of software you install from scratch, check out Arch Linux. In my opinion it combines the best of both worlds: a great package system that doesn't require compiling everything, but allows it if you wish, and a strict adherence to the KISS and DIY philosophies.
I just switched from Mandrake 2005LE, and I'm really loving it so far. I think I got everything setup faster than it originally took using Mandrake's wizards!
I recently gave Gentoo a try, I thought the handbook was pretty nice, the whole experience wasn't nearly as painful as some people let on, but then again I'm no stranger to BASH. I even got to a gnome desktop relatively quickly. However, I found that i forgot to put jpg or give and a few other little things in the USE flags that wound up making things just plain retarded. Like opening up a image viewer that didn't understand images. While I do think there is a niche for Gentoo, It just isn't my box. I've spent countless years breaking and fixing my machine for fun, now I have a wii, and when I sit down in front of my computer it should be as hassle free as possible.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
Gentoo by default does not allow normal user accounts to su to root. If you want a normal user account to be able to su to root, you have to add them to the "wheel" group.
You don't get to pick and choose what people work on. You just get to accept or reject it.
If you want an upgraded version of python, roll up your sleeves and work out the issues that are keeping it at an older version. Since portage is dependant on python, it's quite reasonable for gentoo to be rather conservative about it. If you want easy binary packages, buy some hardware, build a compile farm and write scripts to automate package generation and testing.
Put up or shut up.
At my place of work, when I was helping out doing sysadmin last year, I discovered that the current sysadmin is a Gentoo fan, which is ok, except that all the Gentoo boxes were plagued, really plagued with update problems, sometimes showstoppers, but often bugs that required half a day to track down. We could not replicate one setup from one machine to another. It simply did not work. Sometimes I had to fix really bad update problems where something critical, like Apache, MySQL or some obscure PHP package got updated quietly, bringing the service to a screeching halt. Portage is enormously flexible, but it is buggy and some things are simply so painful to do (like the Java JDK setups for Tomcat etc), that it sometimes just doesn't seem worth it (having to write my own entropy generator so that mod_perl would work was mind blowing).
No, in retrospect, I think Gentoo belongs firmly in the realm of the very advanced admin user who only runs one or two services per box. For the rest it is a cool experimental and very educational toy, but I would in future only use Debian (or perhaps the Ubuntu server versions now), or one of the commercial distros (But not SuSE. It's better than RedHat but Novell is going to implode)
Ohhhhh, if you want it to be possessive, it's just "I-T-S"
But if it's supposed to be a contraction, then it's "I-T-apostrophe-S".
Scalawag.
( http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail89.html )
Specifically he complains that when you try to run admin applications, you're prompted for the root password, but it's not accepted. Unfortunately, he's probably being a clueless git here -- by default, gksu asks for your password, not root's (and it's not ambiguous whose password it's asking for), so of course he gets denied when he gives root's password. Likewise when he su -'s, he logs in fine because that's when you're being asked for the root password.
-- Old Man Kensey
Once you install Gentoo, there is no need to "upgrade" later. The way Portage works, you are constnatly upgrading. So if you had installed a previous version, you will already be "upgraded" to the latest when it comes out.
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
Not wishing to rock the boat, and not having a problem with gentoo per se, initially I maintained the status quo.
A few weeks ago, I made a decision. Future server rollouts will be Debian, Gentoo will slowly be discontinued. The reason is nothing to do with installation - I've got enough experience with it that I could install Gentoo in my sleep with my hands tied behind my back.
The problem is one of maintenance. With Debian or RedHat or Mandriva or almost any other Linux distribution, there's a specific version. A line in the sand, if you will, which states "this is what version we're dealing with".
Gentoo gets rid of all that, in favour of individual packages being marked stable/masked ("unstable")/hard masked ("very unstable, will break things, you have been warned"). In theory, you never have to do a major version upgrade of a Gentoo system. You just install everything that's marked stable that you want, if you need something specific that hasn't been marked stable you unmask it. A bit like running Debian Stable with the odd package from the testing branch.
This sounds great, until I now point out the problem.... Gentoo suffers from bit rot. Before you mark me down as a troll, let me explain. Packages still turnover as they age. Eventually, packages are marked obsolete - ie. dropped from portage altogether - and unless you've already taken account of this possibility, once that happens it's a bugger to reinstall them. And once a package is dropped because it's obsolete, sooner or later other packages won't take account of the older versions quirks and version dependencies become at least partly down to luck. Good luck rebuilding a system which has failed with the exact same versions of all the packages it had on there - if it's not been updated in a while and you haven't accounted for such a possibility, the task is to all practical purposes impossible. Combine this with package QA which frankly is nothing like that of Debian - "Stable" generally means "It doesn't cause anyones individual PC to keel over horribly", not "It plays nicely with everything else in the network like it's suppsoed to" - and you've got a recipe for long drawn-out pain if you're trying to run Gentoo on anything more than a few systems.
The only solutions that I've found are:
Note that I've omitted "keep a copy of every package you install" or "make a note of the version of every package you install". These are effectively useless because ebuilds frequently use the packages sourceforge site to download the code from, and if the package moves or the version that you have in your (old) copy of the portage database is removed from sourceforge, you can't install that package and you've got to do an emerge --sync to get an updated ebuild (and an updated everything else in the process). It's not like any other distribution where the mirrors keep a copy of every package so it doesn't much matter if the upstream server on which the project is hosted breaks somehow. Unless you keep every package from day 1 complete with all its dep
While I'll never claim to be a Linux "wizard", personally I prefer FreeBSD as a *n?x solution, but at any rate .. I'm far from being Linux stupid and to date, I still can't get Gentoo, even a stage 3, installation to occur without massive issues. (If it's the hardware then all I can say is gentoo hates it and all other *n?x flavors including Sun OS and the BSDs like it.)
Further more, a wise man once said, "work smarter, not harder", spending hours if not days on end compiling everything from souce seems "harder" to me. Gentoo zealots of course have their opinion, and I'm proud of them for it. But I see nothing wrong with easy to install, within a few minutes, binary OS installations and upgrades for 99% of the Linux community.
I responded to the wrong post.
Now I'm going to tell you a few things. First off Gentoo aint for the faint of heart or those to busy to spend a while learning or who want an easy installation with lots of hand holding. If you can't find your ass without a map and both hands then Stay the hell away from Gentoo as it aint for you junior.
Now for those willing to put a bit of Blood, Sweat and Tears into it, Gentoo is the best system you'll ever use and here's why.
First, it's one of the only two Purist Linux environments you'll ever find. The other is Linux from Scratch. Now some of you may wonder WTF is a Purist Linux Distro? It's like the Dodge Viper. None of that smooth riding suspension and seats designed to cradle you shit, instead it's a real lean machine or it can be that Semi-Truck you see barrelling down on you in you're rear view mirror.
As part of this purist thinking, Gentoo stays far closer to the LSB then any other distro out there. Debian I'm talking to you. When I install the kernel sources, I want all of them in their designated location (/usr/src/linux) so I can build the kernel with exactly the options I need. I don't want a shit load of modules loading for hardware I don't have and Redhat, I sure as hell don't want a load of services starting on a desktop that only open security holes that I now have to close.
Second Gentoo is about Choice. You get to choose what features/tools/options a package is built with. For example, I maintain a small network (less then 10 systems) and have absolutely no need for Ldap/Kerberos/Apache/Samba or a rash of other stuff and Only Gentoo gives me the ability to build the system without any un-needed dependencies. Can't do that with Debian/Redhat/Mandriva or Suse AFAIK. In fact, I never even figured out how to get Debian to recompile the entire system from the original source code without those un-needed/wanted features.
Third, Gentoo will teach you alot about Linux in general because of the enthusiast involvement. Gentoo is very much like the original Linux community. Lots of people given access to a shiny new toy playing and seeing what they can do with it. Seems those Debian Users are stuck wearing suits & ties all day while talking to bean counters, unlike the average Gentoo user who'll remind you of a teen that just got their first set of wheels.
Now from the few remaining gentoo masochists. You aint a gentoo'er until you've done a stage 1 install on a buggy motherboard and then performed the arcane act of Upgrading the toolchain from GCC 2.93 to 3.3 then 3.4 and then to 4.0.1. I'm doing a stage1 install of Gentoo right now in a VM under XP-Pro prior to a network wide roll out mid-year since it's easier to bug exterminate and tweak things. As to how I'm going to roll Gentoo out, I'm going to lie/cheat/steal to get it done. After I get the VM working correctly, I'll simply create a tarball of the working system and boot each unit with a minimal install disk. This allows me to prep the drive for the roll out, where all I have to do is expand the tarball from the server and simply chroot into the new envornment and run the boot loader installer. Then simply shut down, turn out the lights and lock the door on my way out.
Gentoo, Linux' answer to trainspotting.
Gentoo is great for one off systems for people who aren't intimidated by having to piece things together by themselves. It makes a great dev workstation. Alternatively, it's a good meta-distro for producing a build tree for a specific purpose.
It's absolutely terrible as a general purpose distro where you want low maintenance and security only updates.
Then what was the predecessor? The point stands.
I just went to one of their mirrors and found out.
Check this out: http://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/x86/
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
My point is: every distro has its own niches. :-)
.02 .br cents.
Some people like rpm & friends better, some like apt-stuff, some like the pkg* and some like emerge.
It's that simple. There is no holy grail distro.
It all gets down on how you manage your box/servers and what you think benefits you.
My
The logo... Let's just say I think letters 2-4 stand out a bit much, and the first word that comes to mind is NOT fUNToo. =8^P Of course, if that's the effect you were wanting, it's certainly in the tradition of the GIMP, BitchX, C.L.I.T., etc, and I'm not one for being PC just for the sake of it. Just be aware of the word association it invokes, is all. You're probably more aware of the doors it might close than I am. If you are and it was deliberate, great. =8^)
/more/ confusing when the newbie and the trying-to-be-helper are reading two different things. (I just went thru that myself, trying to figure out which one you read. I still don't know. Good thing you weren't asking for help! =8^( )
/should/ be reading for any specific purpose, and why.
The review, from this Gentoo/~amd64 user's perspective... I'd agree with some, not all. Looking around, the biggest issue I see is that there's now two different "installer handbooks", the general Gentoo Linux handbook and the 2007.0 handbook, plus the quick install guide (and tips and tricks, and alternate install guide, and...), and it's not going to be immediately clear to a newbie if he's reading the right one or not. Then when they go looking for help, they'll likely just refer (or be referred) to "the handbook", making things all the
So after I finish this, I'm headed over to the docs list for a suggestion. For 2007.1, what about a single one-page document, listing all the installation docs with clear pointers as to what is specifically covered in each one? As some of the existing docs list several of the others, replacing the several references with a single but more prominent reference to a single list, should actually reduce total line count, I'd imagine. That should get your quick-install suggestion shown more prominently, plus provide stronger hints on exactly what one
I think that covers, directly or indirectly, most of the issues you had, including networking, the lack of stages, and the low prominence of the quickstart guide, since all three are covered, but at present it's confusing enough I can't really blame anyone for not seeing the coverage.
Anyway, as I don't believe I've had a chance to say it to you before, thanks for the distribution. For some of us, it's really almost perfect. Well, as perfect as reality gets, anyway, despite the various negatives, which from this viewpoint end up seeming rather minor when compared with the positives. Unfortunately you apparently experienced that old saw, "you can never go back", because even if you do, it's not the same. (As I'm sure you know, the events triggered some changes, but anyway, it's history now.) Still, disagree tho you might with some of his choices now that he's grown, I think you've every right to be proud of your "kid", now that he's growing into the equivalent of a young adult, as tho there have certainly been growing pains, he's turning out to be quite a responsible young member of his community. =8^)
Duncan
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
Has the Gentoo team revised the license so as to acknowledged their violations of Microsofts IP and patents.
davecb5620@gmail.com
First, it would get so far in the boot process and then start complaining about not having enough space to create stuff - despite 160MB RAM and two swap partitions nicely sized that could have been used, but I couldn't even log in as root to turn on the swap partitions.
Second, the install hung when trying to load X. I had to use the case's reset button to recover.
I can't say if there were other problems with the LiveCD as that is about as far as I got with the it. I switched to the minimal CD and have been happily installing since, albeit a slower process - but I'm learning more about the Gentoo way of things, and am quite happy about that. Still, it would have been nice to be able to use the LiveCD instead of having to download stage3 and portage.
Needless to say, I might wait until 2007.1 to install Gentoo on my Desktop.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Hi!
:)t ml)
;)
Sorry, but as a Mustang freak I just had to answer to this
In '98, I bought a '68 Mustang (same age as me), and I really, really loved it. Spent a *lot* of time tuning it and playing with it, replacing the engine with a 351W, 2" X-pipe exhaust, stuff like that (http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/mustang/index.h
Never saw it again after the damned US borderpeople suddenly wouldn't extend my work permit, and so it simply got lost...
Have fun with your machine, you lucky sod!
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I'm using gentoo on my home systems. Everything people have said about the ridiculous compile times is absolutely true 8-). One big thing gentoo has in it's favor -- multiplatform support!
x86, there's like 1000 distros. x86-64, somewhat fewer. PowerPC, fewer than that. Anything else? Heh. Probably the choice is gentoo or debian (or NetBSD, not a Linux distro but also supports a crapload of architectures.). Ubuntu, despite being debian-*based*, supports x86, x86-64, powerpc, and (text-only I think) ultrasparc.
Gentoo has CD installs for x86, x86-64, Itanium, Alpha, HP PA-RISC, UltraSPARC, PPC, and PPC64, plus some sort of greasy floppy or net or something installs for ARM and MIPS. (Last I checked, Gentoo may have been the only OS other than Irix to run on a few of the oddball SGIs.. some USE flag would turn on kernel, compiler, *AND* libc patches.. it was something dumb, like the machines were dual processor but didn't have cache coherency, so the compiler had to throw out extra code to flush caches under some conditions.)
I think someone is also trying to get gentoo 2007.0 ported to m68k.. I assume they're still waiting for the stuff to finish compiling lolz 8-).
Security only updates are backports to the same version you're running. Updating packages flagged by GLSA gets you both security *and* feature updates, which may be incompatible, requiring maintenance.
If you want an up to date distro, Gentoo is pretty good. If you want an unchanging API, it isn't.