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."

Comments

Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's The Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

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
    .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be
    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."

* ...my Gentoo Linux workstation...

    ...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart
    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 .rpms together on the command line,
    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!

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[syylk]

Ehehe...

Even if I *am* a Gentoo zealot myself, couldn't help but laugh reading your "translation" message. It's so damn true! :)

OTOH, you typed a 3K chars message as first post. Why I have the distinct feeling you already had it ready somewhere, to copy and paste it at the first chance, when anything gentooish reached front page?

Ah, I counted the chars with my ultra-optimized, distcc-recompiled "wc"! Zowie, I'm 1337! :D

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[jimstapleton]

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.

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[HAKdragon]

This reminds me of one of David Cross'es stand ups routines.

David: I don't mean to sound like a suck up, but I think women are much smarter than men. I also think that dogs are smarter than women
Woman in audience:I don't believe that
David:You don't think that it's true? You don't think I've done research? Well, you're right. It's not true. That's what's known as a joke. I'll be telling a few of them here tonight.

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[garlicbready]

Like with everything else it has it's advantages and it's disadvantages
it all depends on what you want to use it for
(it's a bit like hitting a screw with a hammer and saying, hmmm this isn't going into the wall very well)

if you want something that's going to work first time, and that your not going to have to arse about setting up
(e.g. a commercial environment) then go with a rpm solution like redhat or suse (this way you've always got the option of support as well at the same time)

If you want something for running the latest cutting edge software and damned the consequences
the sort of person that would make the attempt at building his own conservatory on the side of his house go for Gentoo

Disadvantages
1. it's source based
which can mean less stable / well tested
ultimately gentoo is a source based dist, which means any binary files you end up with won't have been tested
and there's no guarantee of behavior as it all depends on how things have been linked

2. rpm's do some amount of checking when installing the binary, with gentoo it's assumed that whatever has been compiled is correct
(unless make install throws up an error during the build process or you write some checking into the script it's not always possible to guarantee that everything is installed the way it's supposed to be
admitily problems are rare but do crop up now and again

3. it takes ages to compile / install etc
the trade-off here is having access to the latest stuff, so I'm happy with this one

Advantages
1. if you want to get something working that's only just been released
      it takes me 5 mins to write an ebuild script
      it takes much longer to write an rpm spec file
      (this especially comes in handy when your trying to add / remove patches / custom graft as part of the script)
      the reason for this is a lot of the common stuff has been functionalised (is that a word?) into eclass files
      this makes the whole thing default to a certain common behavior unless overridden in the script

      also you don't have to list all the files that should be installed as it works it out for itself all auto-magically
      in an ideal scenario for rpm you'd at least have both options depending on the use of the system (do some checking, don't do some checking)
      ideally I'd really like rpm to take on some of the same advantages as this one (why not?, it might need testing / change of spec files but it'd be well worth it)

2. a lot of the scripts that form the bootup are much more up-to-date
      again most of the stuff in the /etc/init.d scripts has been placed into common functions referenced elsewhere
      it's part of the whole "if it's not broke don't fix it" thing, which in principle gives advantages to commonality if everyone is using the same sort of
      startup scripts if your writing a RPM for several dists and may be more stable / tested
      but the gentoo method is much simpler to write for / more automated

3. it's sourced based
      which means it'll run on pretty much anything, any weird ass bit of hardware you can throw at it (usually)
      (PS3 hint hint)

Personally I'm confident I can fix most things when they go wrong in the portage tree, via an overlay (or at least have the patience to wait for it to be fixed). but for the average Joe user in an office that couldn't give a monkey's for that sort of thing something binary / rpm is better suited

There's probably lots of stuff I've missed here but the general idea is
if you like home brew go to Gentoo (mmm tasty brew)
If you like it plain and flat go for Red Hat

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[numbski]

Actually, no. :) I'm just telling the truth. I don't get into the Linux v BSD argument at all, as I run an Open Source company ( http://www.oss-solutions.com/ ), and Linux has a few things I really, really like - such as the md raid driver and LVM (which blow away vinum/gvinum...no contest!), but overall structure I just prefer FreeBSD.

I'm growing a bit impatient with Apple as of late. They do some things in the background that I just don't appreciate. Just to name a couple - if you go to set up Kerberos on the server version, you never get prompted to set up the master password, and when it comes time to set up non-apple replicas, you're left holding the bags. Took me a week to figure out a way around it and document it! Ugh.

Another is the fact that they hide the password hashes from root. In linux, you have /etc/passwd+shadow, and on FreeBSD you have /etc/passwd and /etc/master.passwd. On either of those systems, as root I can take that shadow file, and migrate users to another box - sometimes I have to run some regexes to re-arrange data, but moving users is trivial. If you look into the documentation though, you find that OpenDirectory and even your typical mac laptop has that password hash obscured, so even though you *can* move the user, you'll lose the users' passwords. That's just not acceptable to me. You can force an ldap entry that reads authAuthority - ;basic;, but to be honest I'm not sure how it reacts to this if you're using authAuthority Kerberosv5 or authAuthority ApplePasswordServer. :\

Whatever the case, it is ANNOYING. :P

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm also getting really tired of bug reports from Gentoo users. They report my app is broken, when it appears they managed to compile KDElibs without SSL, or use a bleeding edge build system which is not supported by stable KDE releases.

If they managed to compile KDElibs without SSL, and if that's something KDElibs allows you to do (easily), then it is not their fault for custom-compiling something, it is your fault for not specifying SSL as a dependency.

As for the bleeding-edge build system, I can understand your frustration, but if (emphasis on if) KDE is moving towards that bleeding-edge system -- if it's actually on the roadmap -- then you should be putting it in your own bleeding-edge builds, too. I hate when we get things like upstart (in Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty) which has all these amazing capabilities, but ends up basically being used for launching runlevels because no developers actually wrote upstart-specific init scripts. (Which is one nice thing I can say for Gentoo; they do tend to always write Gentoo-specific init scripts.)

Now, I don't use Gentoo anymore, don't really like it for a couple of reasons, but if there's anything I hate about Gentoo bug reports, it's the ones I send to the Gentoo guys that get ignored for years at a time.

Yes, but...

[Yetihehe]

Yes, but would it run an Indy car?

And what did you think was going to happen....

[Lord_Slepnir]

Installation was a headache from the live CD and DVD versions....

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.

Re:And what did you think was going to happen....

[JerkBoB]

Just the other day, one of my very close friends (who works in a high performance computing lab at a major university) ...

And what does this friend do for the lab? Scan student ID badges and watch for horseplay? If you had said that this friend was a sysadmin, or even a programmer, your argument might carry more weight.

Having spent most of a decade as a sysadmin, and several more years doing software, I /could/ run something 1337 like gentoo or slack. But these days I just want to use the computer, not screw around. So I use Ubuntu. Saying that Ubuntu is responsible for your friend's ignorance is just silly. Your friend is responsible for her ignorance.

Being the good, close friend that you are, you might want to introduce this person to Google, on teh internets. It's a good way to learn about things like filesystems. Also goat pr0n.

2007.0 ?

[MarkByers]

2007.0 already? And I only just finished compiling 2006.0!

Gentoo still for do-it-yourself'ers

[neersign]

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.

Re:Gentoo still for do-it-yourself'ers

[Vancorps]

Personally I've always seen the strength of Gentoo in that it teaches you how an OS really works for the most part. You're doing every step along the way assuming a Stage 1 install which is the only Gentoo installs I'll perform. You are building your system from the ground up and with that you learn a lot about the underlying systems that you just won't learn from installing and using Ubuntu.

Of course the speed and optimizations are nice as well, with a Gentoo install the only things running on the systems are applications that you explicitly command it to run. It's a pain and I wouldn't really use it for a general purpose workstation but for some servers its simply great. Of course with Gentoo you have to always wait a bit after every release since every new release has big bugs. That's what testing servers are for though.

In short, I agree with you. There is definitely a place for both.

Why?

[nametaken]

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?

for some strange reason

[wiredog]

The reason is "security". Login root or sudo to run admin apps.

/. can't even quote without getting grammar wrong

[ColonelPanic]

The article gets the usage right: "far better than its predecessor."

But quoted on /., the site that HAS to always get this point wrong, it becomes "far better than it's predecessor."

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".

Re:Update difficulties

[LearnToSpell]

You've filed bug reports, right? That definitely sounds unwanted. I'm typing this from the install I did in 2003, and it's up to date.

Re:Update difficulties

[NeoThermic]

Portage will remind you that it has an update and you should install it after you `emerge --sync`. Updating portage should be the first thing you do before you `emerge -NDu world`

If you're getting to the point that you're getting incompatible updates with your existing setup, then you can always try `emerge -NDuep` and look at the resulting list it'll give you (p is for preview). From that, `emerge -C` anything you don't use any more, and then drop the 'p' from the command above and re-run it. It'll re-compile everything on your system with the latest packages, meaning that you should hopefully avoid the incompatibilities you're referring to.

Then again, if all that looks too much to do, Gentoo might not be for you? ;)

NeoThermic

Re:Update difficulties

[pturing]

Gentoo isn't so much a distro as an educational game. If your system works better than an Ubuntu box, you're winning.

There's always a way to fix these problems.

1. Use 'quickpkg' to save important things like Python before you break them
2. Plow over broken dependencies with 'emerge -C'
3. revdep-rebuild when needed
4. If it doesn't work, try the ~x86 package
6. emerge -uDNv world
7. wait a day, emerge --sync, try again
8. update often!! stale systems are harder to update

And the craziest trick of all....
9. backup your /etc and unpack the latest stage3 tarball on top of your installation

One of those things should fix just about any update problem you encounter

who cares about the installer?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 installer

[davermont]

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.

Gentoo Is a good learning tool

[blhack]

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.

While staring at a bunch of GCC output is pointless, staring at the ./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).

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.

Reinventing the Wheel

[MostAwesomeDude]

'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.

Re:Update difficulties

[Cocoronixx]

cubby49 sgonzalez # eselect profile set default-linux/x86/2007.0

Gentoo 2007.0 Review from Daniel Robbins

[funtoo]

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

And one more thing...

[Ogi_UnixNut]

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.

Re:And one more thing...

[Columcille]

Gentoo community is a good reason to use Gentoo. YMMV, but I've played with other distros and gone to forums or chat rooms for help with some particular problem and the typical response is, "What? WTF do you want to do that? I'm not going to help with that!" Gentoo response is, "What? WTF do you want to do that? Sounds stupid, but if you really want to do it you would..."

Re:A little "hands on" experience with 2006.1

[AeroIllini]

I hear your frustrations, because I've been there before. I've been running Gentoo exclusively on all of my varied machines for a little over 4 years now, and non-exclusively (dual booting Windows) for almost 6.

But Gentoo is not a distribution. It's really more of a meta-distribution. It can be tailored to just about anything you want, but you need to be willing to take ownership of it and work with it.

If you're looking for your server to Just Work (tm), then by all means, go get SuSe or Mandriva or Ubuntu or Fedora or some other distro with precompiled binaries and a slick installer program. Gentoo's not for everyone. But, if you're looking for fine-grained control over your operating system with some handy scripts to help you out along the way, then you have to be willing to get your hands a little dirty.

I picked up Gentoo as an educational tool; I figured building it from scratch was the best way to learn about Linux, and I was right. Since then, I've stayed with Gentoo because I like the flexibility it gives me, and because at heart I really just enjoy building things. Right now I have Gentoo installed on two servers, a desktop and a laptop at home, and I'm working on building a tiny MythTV frontend that will boot from a USB key (under 100MB). Gentoo's flexible enough to allow me to do that, but then again, I'm willing to sit with it until it's right.

Gentoo never has been and never will be a Just Works (tm) operating system. It's for the hobbyists, the administrators, the students: anyone who wants a much finer grain control over their system. If that's not for you, then no one at Gentoo will hold a grudge.

Re:Update difficulties

[ozbird]

Or, if you're hardcore as Gentooers like to think they are,

# ln -snf /etc/make.profile /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0

Real hardcore Gentooers would get the parameters the right way around.

ln -snf /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0 /etc/make.profile

Finally, something I'm qualified to comment on!

[jimicus]

In my current job, I inherited a whole bunch of servers running Gentoo.

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:

• Take account of this, download and compile everything you're ever likely to need on day 1, then if your needs ever change, repeat the entirety of this with a new server and migrate data across. Never upgrade individual packages, nor install anything new after day 1. Not really an option unless you really like missing out on security updates.
• Update your system with emerge --sync ; emerge world regularly. "Regularly" probably means at least once a week. Be warned that package upgrades can and do occasionally break things - sometimes you get told about this, generally shortly after the new package is installed and sometimes you don't and you find out the hard way. Only really practical if you've got a complete replication of every damn system to test things on first, and even then it soon falls apart once you've got any serious number of servers.

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