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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."
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.
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.
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?
I haven't run in to a broken system yet with this issue myself, but I'd assume all you need to do is find the config file that says "Gentoo 2006.1" and change it to "Gentoo 2007.0", then emerge --sync and then emerge -uDN world. Removing blocking packages is the biggest weakness of portage that I see. As I haven't done this yet or even looked in to it, I'm just guessing at the steps, so I'm sure some one else has more/better info on this.
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.
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.
what part is true?
* The inability to use the box while compiling (not true - I do stuff when compiling all the time, not what is being compiled mind you).
* Slashdot saying BSDs are 1337? Funny, posts saying that they like BSD tend to get modded "Troll"
* That circular dependancies are the only thing to cause Dep-hell? I've had plenty of cases where I have had "Package A" and "Package B", where both required "Package C" of differing versions, where neither would accept the same version of C, and the two versions of C didn't want to coexist. Maybe more helical than circular...
Sorry, while some of it is true in some cases, I find the lot of it quite not funny.
And no, I don't use Gentoo. While emerge has treated me better than some of the alternatives in the Linux world, it's not quite as hassle-free as I'd like.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
Gentoo attracts new Linux users? When did this happen?
/, and wondered what all those weird three-letter abbreviations meant? (/opt? What's that? Does it have to do with lenses?)
I use Gentoo myself but I'd never recommend it to anybody who hadn't been using Linux for a year or two already. If anything, it'd be more likely to scare off any unfortunate newbies that tried it as their first distro.
I wonder how many of you remember when you first typed ls
Nobody else has this sig.
Or, if you're hardcore as Gentooers like to think they are,
/etc/make.profile /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0
/usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0 /etc/make.profile
# ln -snf
Real hardcore Gentooers would get the parameters the right way around.
ln -snf
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