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Gentoo in Crisis, Robbins Offers Solution
mrbadbar writes "Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins says Gentoo's leadership is in crisis. 'the Gentoo Foundation's charter has been revoked for several weeks, which means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists.' Robbins offers a solution: his return as President of the Gentoo Foundation. According to Robbins: 'If I return as President, I will preserve the not-for-profit aspect of Gentoo. Beyond this, you can expect everything to be very, very different than how things are today.'"
The emerge of the upgraded management package failed? Did you remember to set the right USE flags?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
$ emerge leadership
Not too many folks could pen such an offer with out tossing in the phrase "tail between your legs" somewhere.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I RTFA but I have no idea what the problem actually is that he is going to solve. Could someone explain?
Are you suffering from Tourettes? It is treatable? Can you have typing Tourettes?
I left gentoo some time ago due to severe problems. Let me sum up the most problematic ones: 1. Package system becoming VERY VERY slow because of the amount db size. 2. No sane way to upgrade properly without doing several rounds of breaking and fixing library dependencies 3. USE flags change all the time and often leave the apps crippled if you don't set it up "just" right (try PHP) 4. No automatic way to uninstall a package and have the system automatically remove the unused ones. 5. Very very slow upgrade cycle for major packages (KDE is a good example)
I think gentoo has some incredible flexibility and it'd be a shame to see the project go by the wayside.
http://lwn.net/Articles/224615/
There's a sticky post in the gentoo forums dealing with this. So far Daniel got a pretty positive response and frankly... as a user that has seen gentoo slowly falling apart over the past few years, I'm glad he's motivated to bring it back on track: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-644321.html
Everytime you kill a kitten, god masturbates.
It's strange how people think Gentooers are into Gentoo for the '--fomg-optimize' thing...
... people are much less likely to offer that since writing an ebuild is easy, but compiling that stuff for different archs is actually not that easy.
.deb of the new Firefox Beta 3. Anyone willing to point me to one?
I had to leave Gentoo a few weeks ago because my Laptop couldn't take the massive compiles anymore - my desks are all FreeBSD btw. What I enjoyed about Gentoo was the ports-like package manager and the ability to carefully choose your dependencies via USE-flags. Here I am, back on Debian, and I think it's actually faster... but I don't really care about speed since I exclusively use XMonad and the console - no need for speed improvements on a 1.6 GHz machine with that.
But what I hate is that I don't have overlays anymore. You could dynamically replace any part of your package repository with something you found on the net. Like the proaudio overlay. Or the Haskell overlay. With Debian, this is much harder, as you have to find someone on the Net that will offer his repo of binaries
For example, I still didn't find any place that offers a
The speed is only a minor advantage of Gentoo and manifests itself in the much shorter start up times and the ability to easily switch to baselayout2 or einit to even improve that one. But since the average uptime of my laptop is about 2-3 weeks, I don't really care if Debian takes 20 seconds longer to boot up.
I'm an infovore...
Except that Gentoo happens to be one of the best. Maybe if one of the dozens of Red Hat clones using the same crappy RPM system died, nobody would miss it, but... Gentoo is too important. Even the non-Gentoo users I know rely on the Gentoo forums and wiki and documentation for help.
Reality is fluffy!
No. I think diversity in Linux is a Good Thing. There are hundreds of distros out there and that's really good to see, because they're all competing with each other, sharing their work with each other, forking one another and then merging back... If a distro dies, ten new ones spawn. That's very good, it contributes to a diversity which makes the Linux community an interesting place to live in.
... as long as it's not RPM-based...
And that 'but it confuses the newbies' argument just doesn't cut it anymore. For the complete boons, there's Ubuntu and probably SuSE. For everyone else, there's choice. I like choice. Right now I chose Debian, but that has changed in the past and will probably change in the future.
I'm an infovore...
Gentoo was my way of learning a lot about linux sysadmining in a short time. In a couple weeks, I learned how to compile packages, manage partition issues, compile kernels, deal with numerous config files, and many other skills. I later switched to Ubuntu, but I still appreciate my time spent with gentoo as a great learning aid. Just enough help to make it not as hard as LFS, but hard enough to be challenging.
Warning, knife is sharp. Please keep out of children.
I disagree. In fact your point:
> There are hundreds of distros out there
is the bit that I would be concerned with. While I can't draw on any formal evidence, it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort across an ever increasing number of distributions becomes counter productive.
I'll shut up now because this is hardly a new idea, but thanks for the debate.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
When you have experienced this, come back and comment.
Of course Gentoo or Slackware or the like will work fine, but in these days of fast processors and cheap memory, why not just use a Debian based Linux like Ubuntu WITH a GUI, and let some one else compile the thing.
Slackware is package based, although I will admit that the packages do not perform checks for required packages. I only know one person that re-compiles Slackware by hand, but he is a bit eccentric. Most of us only compile packages when they are not included in the distro, when they are not compiled with the options we want, or when we re-compile the kernel.
It seems odd to lump Slackware and Gentoo together since most of the people that I know who use Slackware are more server centric than desktop centric and prefer stable software that does not change. Most Gentoo users I know are desktop centric and want the latest greatest untested software. This is reflected in the different methodology of the two distros.
I would also like to point out that Slackware has been around longer than Debian and Slackware produces stable releases faster than one every two to three years. Although Debian is a decent distro, there are other decent distros as well. I could argue that a Torx screw is better than a roofing nail, but it really depends on the job at hand.
The reason for this offer from Daniel is imho not as important as it is that he is offering to step up back as the leader of this project and take his job down to part time so that he again can put some energy into the role as leader of Gentoo Linux. ... though I fear that might happen once again.
Gentoo badly needs some leadership right now, Daniel has done it well before and had Gentoo thriving while he still was at the helm, so let's get him back there and get this ship back on course.
I really hope that the council will accept this offer for the best of Gentoo and not let their personal agendas stand in the way of the good of Gentoo
that he wants an answer in 7 days. There's no way that your $emerge leadership package will compile and install by then.
Gentoo's approach of configuring and compiling at point of install should - in theory - solve this problem. You can adjust what gets compiled with what options and can therefore tailor the solution exactly to what you need. This is great for some of the more complicated packages, where there are many optional components, some of which may be mutually exclusive. This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish.
In practice, the maze of options and the staggering number of potential compiler flags for tuning things -- it's simply too complicated for the majority of users and even for a very large number of software engineers. A better solution, in my opinion, is to have users describe a basic distribution and the platform on which it is to run, and then have a central cluster use herustics to grind out a way to achieve it.
Personally, I'd do this by compiling a mini distro locally that used a very standard package manager and didn't invalidate assumptions by mainstream distributions also using that package manager. Then the user could use existing repositories to add the stuff that's not critical to them but they still want. Alternatively, the cluster could spit out all of the necessary scripts, databases and configuration files for a Gentoo-style distro to build that perfect foundation.
However, ultimately, I do believe this to be the area virtually all distros get it wrong. The foundation components are the most critical, but they are also the least reusable. Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Gentoo is subject to the same problem in reverse - except it's far more annoying and time consuming.
.so rev bump. Now you need to use revdep-rebuild to track down every package that links against openssl (i.e. anything important) and recompile them. If any of these packages are more than a minor revision or two behind what's currently in portage the only way to rebuild them is to pull the ebuild from /var/db/pkg and copy it into the portage tree manually, then rebuild the digest and hope to god that portage can track down all of the source files or that they're still sitting in /usr/portage/distfiles. In the meantime you'd better hope that you're either on a dev box (luxury!) or nobody sneezes, since everything that needs the package that was so bumped is now running off cached filesystem data.
This scenario has happened to me multiple times on production systems:
Updates get pushed out, glsa-check notifies you of some critical patch to openssl or whatever, you go to do the upgrade only to discover that the new version has a
It's a lot of fun.
I left Gentoo for FreeBSD due to these reasons and also due to waiting for certain packages for too long, then receiving buggy packages and finally, having the base config change several times in 6 months, mainly for apache2, php, etc. After spending a week with FreeBSD I don't think I'll be back to Gentoo for any reason.
> it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort
This nonsense argument about dilluting effort gets repeated over and over. How exactly is it "obvious" that if I do something the way I think is the best, and work independently of the few "majors", I am dilluting the work of somebody else? Its called competition, and, as I least heard about it, it promotes diversity and is rather healthy for a ecosystem of any kind. There is no reason why there shouldnt be extreme diversity in the software landscape. You and your likes seem to suffer from some kind of software xenophobia. How exactly does some obscure source based distro you never heard of, make _you_ counterproductive? Using your reasoning Linux and the BSDs shouldnt even exist because theyre dilluting somebody else's windows based "development efforts".
at a technical level that it's worth saving. Someday, distributing apps as binaries may hit a wall in terms of efficiency and matching individual hardware and if that day comes, we'll be glad there's another way to do things out there which has people who understand it.
Tech Public Policy stuff
As has been discussed before, Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.
.tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.
The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.
Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.
Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.
Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.
Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.
I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the
Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
The alternative in that situation is to 'take the plunge' and upgrade all the dependent packages to the latest (presumably stable, as if you are running ~arch then they would likely not be behind) version in portage. As you are talking about production systems, it makes sense to have testing systems which are kept (reasonably) up-to-date so that you do not get (many) unpleasant surprises when updating the live production systems.
There is but one Linux. But there are multiple forms of packaging. Mandriva and Fedora/RedHat/CentOS can be lumped into the category of having dependancy resolution problems too rigid. Mandriva specifically suffers a loss of redundacy when a source of RPMs fail. Yum keeps mirror catalogs. urpmi from Mandriva has the added ability of using SSH and Kerberos to "Mass Deploy" applications, and can centralize with LDAP. No other package Manager can do that.
But both urpmi and yum fail at handling source code package. You have to download them and compile with rpm --rebuild.
When it comes to Debs, I have no idea how to build Debs. Ubuntu and Debian lack the SSH/Kerberos mass deply ability and are even HARDER to recompile than RPMs.
Portage Handles source Code gracefully. Thats its strength.
I sorta wish that some of these projects would merge. I wish that urpmi handled mirror failures and did a better job than it does. I wish that urpmi could handle source code. Likewise, I wish that yum could use SSH/Kerberos
Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.
I also take issues with things like Autopackage RPM and DEB are here to stay. get over it.
>Using your reasoning Linux and the BSDs shouldnt even exist because theyre dilluting somebody else's windows based "development efforts".
Classic Straw Man Argument there. Well done!
His point is that if you have 100 developers each working on a distro, that's worse than having 100 developers working on a single distro.
Anybody remember MSX?
Exactly.
The best thing is that it's right on your computer, just a couple of commands away:
Remember to modify the debian/DEBIAN/control file to look like it makes sense, pretty much like this
While it's not like downloading a
Oh and yes, you could just untar firefox in
The form of 'metadata' stretched out on top of both these distributions are what make them unique.
.vortex
portage for Gentoo & bitbake for OpenEmbedded
With each, a (usually) high degree of control is given in how to shape the distribution's function and attributes. And this is repeatable from "first principles" compilation of source code (from tool chain onwards).
What is needed is research and standardisation in the ontology of this metadata and it is for this I believe Gentoo can still play an essential role.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time tweaking parts of their application, OS space, kernel and boot methods would certainly appreciate the ability to reproduce that work from scratch if need be.
To publish and share this metadata distribution 'state' is to fine tune the virulence of GNU/Linux beyond the GPL and into the real (and virtual) system space.
shine,
Time flies like an arrow -- Fruit flies like a banana
I think he is trying to say that if everyone for instance worked on Gentoo then work on Gentoo would proceed much faster. This thinking is flawed for another reason than what you pointed out. Distro's have a purpose, it may not seem like it to someone who sees 300 distros and thinks OMG that is way too many. But each Distro was designed to solve a problem, different from another Distro. If everyone worked on say Gentoo then only the Gentoo problems would be solved not the others. For example there are some Distros that are for Desktop use, some for Servers, some for partitioning, some for system rescue, some for High Performance Computing. Having one Operating System to solve all problems is a flawed idea, much better to break up Operating Systems into the groups of problems they solve, which is exactly what has been done.
This is well defined under the incorporating state law. They pass the IP, liabilities, money and other property to another willing entity incorporated under the same clause.
501c3 -> 501c3. Happens all the time. Though the legal negotiations usually last until bank accounts approach zero.
Except it isn't a good point at all because all the developers work together anyway regardless of which actual distribution they are working on.
1) Developers of the different distros contribute all their changes back to upstream. It doesn't matter how many developers are working on which distribution because the fixes all end up back in the same place.
2) Not only this but the different distributions are all going in different directions and have different goals. When something is successful they'll borrow from each other.
3) Ubuntu's goal is to bring Linux to the masses. Debian's goal is to provide a libre operating system. There is no way you could put both developers of those groups together on a single distribution because they both have different goals, but it doesn't matter because they both share from each other and fix problems.
4) A bug in Ubuntu could be a bug in Debian which could be a bug in every distribution. What is most important though is upstream which is where all the changes take place. You seem to have made the mistake of thinking that every distribution has to code all the upstream fixes themselves when what actually happens is that they pull down the latest updates on all these projects and spend a lot of their time making sure everything in the distribution works. If it doesn't file a bug upstream and get it fixed. Hey, now it works on other distributions too!
5) So as you can see everything is co-operated on, even proprietary programs. While reading the uvc webcam driver mailing list yesterday a developer filed a bug in the Skype beta bug tracker as he found a problem with Skype's webcam implementation and even offered to co-operate with them on how to fix it.
I'm sorry, but that is total crap. I have been using Gentoo on production servers which I *do* keep current using stable (not bleeding-edge) packages. This is a large shop with many servers. I have never looked back since switching to Gentoo. Everyone who moans about emerges failing and having to run revdep-rebuild often must be doing something wrong. I've had to run revdep-rebuild once when I upgraded libexpat. So what? It took like 2 minutes.
Don't make sweeping statements if you don't know what you are doing. I run Gentoo on my servers and I run Gentoo on my personal desktop and and laptop and have *NO* problems with it. The next time you feel like bashing it, try it first and this time RTFM. Sheesh....
I was a long time Gentoo user who got fed up and move on. As a software developer myself I found it too laborious to figure out why the latest emerge brought my system down. QA was non-existent and especially so for x86_64 platforms.
Gentoo overall is a decent idea for people who like configurability, but it's too fragile. For instance, I recall one update to the latest glibc which had some bugs in the portage script. Next thing you know nothing, and I mean nothing, works, since they all link against it. There is no "roll back" ability in gentoo, which honestly would be a good idea (and given they have installed files lists it's entirely possible).
I switched to Ubuntu and haven't looked back. While it's less configurable than Gentoo it's more than good enough, and it "just works."
In reality, Gentoo needs to improve the QA and safety (e.g. roll backs) facets more than their leadership.
www.freerice.com
As I've said before, all we really need is an easy to use website with side-by-side comparisons of features along with a way to search and see which ones support your particular hardware "out of the box", so folks can find the right one to fit their needs without having to try dozens like I did.
For me, Xandros just works. For you, it might be Debian, Ubuntu, or one of the myriad of other flavors. We simply need a central place you can check out the different choices and find what is right for you without downloading every distro on the planet. But I think Vista is a good example of why choice is a good thing. With Linux you can choose to be cutting edge and have the bling, or like Xandros be rock solid and just work out of the box without the latest effects, or even build it yourself like Gentoo. Choice is one of the great things about OSS IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Holy Moley!
Gentoo users are cocky in the same way that a guy who built his pedal powered Yugo acts around a buddy who bought a brand new Mercedes. Like people who ride hand built recumbent bikes or use mouseless user interfaces but also make a point of pointing out to everyone around them how that little piece of self-inflicted martyrdom makes them better than everybody else in a way not completely apparent to mere mortals.
Want to learn the command line? Get Unix (any flavour that floats yer boat)
There is nothing wrong with using Gentoo.. Just dont become a Gentoo User.
A sibling post already nailed it, but summarized, the point is as follows: It's fucking open. The regular secrecy rules of capitalist competition don't apply here; 90% of the time, changes are forced to be made open (obviously, depending on what license we're talking about). Any change in any distro is open for any other distro to grab and to use. And since every distro, in the bottom, is the same fucking system, only that delivered in a slightly different way, any progress of any distro is good for the whole community.
So dumb an answer it is, young padawan.
Learned from Debian then Gentoo, tried FreeBSD, used Solaris 10 for a full year, having a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X as my laptop => my server and my Desktop PC are running Gentoo.
If you RTFM, less problems than Ubuntu or even Debian. FreeBSD is also good but not for a Desktop.
I've was using Gentoo since pre version 1.0, I've submitted ebuilds that got accepted in portage and was a contributer at heart. I noticed a big change when Daniel Robbins stepped down, a big enough change to get me to drop the use of Gentoo.
I would love to welcome Daniel Robbins back and and I wish there was a way to allow community vote.
Oh and yes, you could just untar firefox in /opt and make a symlink in /usr/local/bin, but you wanted a .deb.
.deb. It's just a tarball with a description file and an alternative extension, just like those generated by CheckInstall.
I'm glad you say that, because this is not a
Leadership was a mess and it trickled down to the regular users. Fortunately, I found a system that lets me be even more elitist and I haven't been happier. OS X is great, and my new octo core Mac Pro is AWESOME! I can download mp3s really quickly now.
On my server most of the time i find that etc-update takes care of most of the config file updates. If you have config files you want to protect from minor updates use CONFIG_PROTECT in make.conf to protect specific files. Then the majority of config updates flagged with etc-update are ones which you don't need to read over like tweaks to init scripts or such like. I find my config updates are usually over in a few minutes.
The thing i don't like about gentoo is that after a few years of repeatedly upgrading my system using emerge and building new kernels around new hardware and stuff i have started to feel really isolated from any sense of community or identity gentoo may have. I'm not the kinda guy who hangs out on IRC all the time but with other distros i've used in the past i've really had a sense of direction of where the distro is headed in the future and the grand goal of the project. Gentoo just seems to be like that lazy teenager whos just bumming away his life with no plans for the future.
overall though i think its one of the best distros i've used from a low resources server perspective. It still works after 4 without having to scrap it and start again so i'm not going to switch no matter how lethargic its attitude may feel.
How many computers are too many?
I have a nasty stack of APR / Python / Postgres related packages
and I need something better than my own cobbled together build
scripts. I'm not interested in anything that forces me to rewrite
those packages makefiles or config scripts - I just want something
that allows me to easily maintain the depenendency tree and occasionally
apply a patch or two.
From what I've seen bitbake is really nice for this but there's
this enormous metadata thing you need with it and the docs for
bitbake are really sparse.
Anyone have any advice on how to get up to speed with it, short of
embarking on my own embedded linux project?
There's a Firefox 3 repo for Ubuntu here.
I have, I built it from source, it was easy. Checkinstall even automatically generated a package for me.
Try again fuck face. The only reason you're pissed off is because you're becoming irrelevant, as the abandonment by your own foundation clearly demonstrates.
"For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them"
That's a good way to ensure the newbie keeps badmouthing Linux, pointing out the chores required just to keep it working, in front of his fellow Windows users.
A newbie needs a gentle introduction to Linux first. Ubuntu (disclaimer: I use it) is just fine - it's good enough, pretty and mostly works. In fact, many of my gurus prefer Ubuntu or Debian manly because it lets them focus on what they are doing when whatever they are doing is not maintaining their boxes. If the newbie then feels like he wants to go deeper, then, maybe, Gentoo would be interesting. Or perhaps, it would be educational, if not too scary, to build a Linux box from scratch.
Gentoo is the best choice for the hackers who love to manage their computers.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Doesn't work by choosing hardware specs, but http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/ claims to help you find a distro based around what features you need.
Actually, Gentoo is one of the two distros I see most commonly offered to newbies, the other one being Ubuntu, of course. Those newbies who want an "it just works" distro get Ubuntu while those who have specific needs such as a shell-only test box on old hardware are told to get Gentoo. Even if Portage is getting slow, it's still so much more useful than everything else out there that most advanced users I know tend to gravitate towards it because they are averse to the ridiculous dependency graphs binary -ased package managers tend to generate.
Also, Gentoo is the best-documented distro out there with Gentoo HOWTOs often containing very useful information even for non-Gentoo users. It's pretty much irrelevant what you intend to do on your Linux box, a google for [subject matter] gentoo will usually give yu a detailed description of what you need to do.
Gentoo is much more than the ricer distro many people see in it.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Yeah but you need to really think about how much time you spend maintaining it. Seriously think about it. Even if it hasn't cost you much time, it probably will at some point. This is what people tend to realize about Gentoo after using it for a while. It's fun to hack and at first but after you have spent enough time with it and used some of the alternatives you start to realize that it just isn't worth the trouble when you need to get real work done.
Slightly better since I copied the dependencies from the official iceweasel package, but I agree with you.
A package built like that should *not* be redistributed, just like those created with checkinstall.
In college I was big into Gentoo. It had it's problems, sure, but when you got it working, it was terrific. Then after the college days were over, and I started working, I had a lot less free time. I realized that with Gentoo I spend a lot more time working on the computer itself as opposed to using the computer to do other things. I've switched to Ubuntu, and haven't looked back since.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
"This is also great when you have packages that - if you compile in everything - the package become unwieldy and sluggish."
Does this actually happen?
I used to use gentoo for quite the opposite reason to most people. Not to get a minimal system, but so I could get many of the obscure options that packages for other distros leave out. (Mainly for graphics/media/audio stuff)
Then I'd enable a load of other flags just in case I forgot something.
I did not find that truly awesome amounts of 'use flags' made any difference to how fast the packages ran, or how speedy the computer felt.
what did we accomplish at Microsoft that was worth leaving Gentoo for in the first place?
Duuuuuuuuurrrrrrrr!!!!!!!
MyDixieWrecked, you present a reasonable picture of what Gentoo is good at. Thank you for that. The problem is that too many Gentoo advocates out there are asses about the choice they made. Here's an all too frequent scenario. You're discussing a problem in Ubuntu or Fedora, trying to help someone get the system running correctly. Then, a Gentoo advocate comes by, screams "Ubuntu (or Fedora) is teh suxx0rs! Gentoo, FTW" and then tries to convince every one and their pets with juvenile arguments that Gentoo is the best distribution out there, irrespective of what the end user's needs may be. (Yeah, I'll put my mother on Gentoo.)
Most likely, such Gentoo advocates form a minority of Gentoo users but they form a vocal minority. The problem with such vocal minorities is that they often are so vocal that people start thinking that these minorities represent the view of the majority. I think a fair amount of the "hate people have for gentoo" comes from interaction with those jackasses.
Someone might ask what about Fedora users acting like jackasses or Ubuntu users, or Slackware users. Well, those exist too but somehow Gentoo jackasses seem more frequent to me.
Something needs to be done about all this racist bullshit trolling. This is getting ridiculous.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You don't have to upgrade to the latest version of a package if you don't want to. You can keep using 2 year old software on your Gentoo server with 600 days uptime and manually add security patches to software as required (just a diff + few extra lines in the ebuild you're using). Binary distributions do the backporting for you but because the packages are all built generically with every feature enabled, you'll find that you have to update the package more often than if you manually did it via the "Gentoo method".
Most Gentoo users would just go for the approach of using the latest packages but they'd first test them out on a development server. A real production environment with a focus on zero downtime would have multiple geolocated servers working together for the same cause (example: round-robin DNS, distributed MySQL databases, multiple Apache/Squid frontends, etc). All changes would be tested before pushing them out to the real world. When people say that a Gentoo system can't be used in mission critical enterprise environments, they're speaking complete nonsense. Downtime has little to do with the distribution and almost everything to do with the system administrators and the network/system architecture. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. The fact that you're constantly rebooting your servers (without checking for configuration changes after updates) indicates you don't know much about running servers. Are you sure you've used Gentoo before? I am taking a guess that you're complaining about the change between Apache 1 and Apache 2 configuration formats (or something on a similar scale)? There is NO part of the Gentoo packaging system that would complain about deprecated configuration file formats on a reboot (but individual software packages would complain). Emerge will give you courtesy warnings about configuration changes after the emerge (update) has completed. Just run "dispatch-conf" to either automatically merge configuration files (if you haven't modified them since the last installation of the package) or do a simple diff-merge between the old and new formats for minor revision bumps.
A lot of people using binary distributions (sometimes even those who can write MPEG4 algorithms in multiple assembly languages while blindfolded) don't understand that Gentoo is versionless. People often complain about Gentoo pushing large updates like Apache 1 to Apache 2... something that is only possible with binary distributions if you do a huge all-at-once update on a scale more grand than RHEL4 to RHEL5. It makes a lot of sense to use a versionless distribution rather than be faced with having to update 400 packages all at once.
I've had to run revdep-rebuild once or twice; because of expat and one other package, but in the last 5 years, gentoo has changed their config syntax for networks and the way that pam works with ldap logins. I've had to do big jumps in kernel upgrades because of lack of support of features I use in iptables which caused me to have to upgrade to udev from devfs, and I've had several other weekend's worth jobs because of config file and package deprication.
The reason that I say that Gentoo isn't ideal for production is because of these changes that are made. If you want to stay relatively up to date in your packages (for security reasons), it can be a pretty big pain to keep up with config changes. The measures that you can implement to protect your config files aren't always great since sometimes a minor upgrade will incorporate some new configuration option (I've seen this in apache, php and ldap on several occasions).
Rolling your own enterprise-level server management application, I think, would be easiest on gentoo because so much of the system is exposed and it is so straight forward, but my point in my original post is that for production, you'd like a reasonably stable implementation of configuration and some way of keeping my old setup until I'm ready to do a full revamp of my machine.
I didn't bash gentoo. I'm a gentoo user and I like it a lot... I just wouldn't use it for contract jobs or at my real job (sysadmin of around 130 machines); for that, I'd rather use CentOS.
As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options. I've got an issue right now where the current kernel will not boot my machine and after dozens of attempts, I haven't been able to solve it. I've got several unsolved posts in the gentoo forums about this... the downside is that I'm running gentoo on PPC hardware, so I don't have the largest pool of people to help troubleshoot.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
no no, it'll be ok. slashcode just needs some USE flags.
I'm glad you mentioned that, as it's bitten me more than once in the past.
Gentoo is great to experiment with, and provided you can keep the system bang up to date (and live with occasional breakage), fine. But many of us aren't prepared to make that sacrifice.
On the plus side, maybe as a result of this, it's produced a very helpful community. Much more so than many other distributions.
That's why you don't run Gentoo in production, stick with CentOS or Debian stable.
Or you use your dev machine to build binary packages of everything you need and then have your production machines install those packages. Think of Gentoo more as a distribution -builder- instead. I have 1 box building for dozens. -J
He worked for Microsoft and now pushes for Microsoft based technologies(.net based), then he is not to be trusted at all. It's too dangerous for gentoo.
He was mandated by MS to sabotage from the inside the main source based GNU/Linux distro, since no proprietary software can compete with its flexibility and power thanks to the direct use of the source code. The future of open source is not binary package but source package where no proprietary software can go!
Moreover, thanks to its flexibility, gentoo gnome is not infested *by default* with toxic Microsoft based software like mono.
Beware, The wolf is trying to destroy the Little Red Riding Hood.
So I take it that upgrading from CentOS 4 -> CentOS 5 every few years on 130 machines (26,000 package upgrades at once) to ensure you have the 'latest' features is OK, whereas doing 130 updates once or twice a week with Gentoo is bad? Does CentOS have an easy way to merge configuration files between CentOS 4 and CentOS 5? And how easy is it to compile a custom kernel for use in CentOS?
Most Gentoo complaints I see are comparisons of non-existent features in a binary distro with existent features in Gentoo. I'm constantly having to argue with common/Windows people that use "Ubuntu hasn't got firewall or antivirus protection" as a valid comparison between Windows and Ubuntu. And now that Linux distributions are becoming more popular, I'm finding that a lot of distribution comparisons are just as invalid, nonsensical and biased.
Tried it for 2-3 years (Gentoo on servers), gave up and have switched to CentOS/RedHat.
I loved Gentoo as a way to learn about Linux on the server. But the project has been seemingly adrift for a while, so we're making the move away from it. That, and it's a bit too fiddly on servers for our tastes. (It seems like it should be a no-brainer for servers, but ultimately it's not quite stable enough.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
it is hard to switch back to a binary distro after gentoo, but the parent has a point in that gentoo gets harder and harder to manage. That's why I started looking for alternatives and found Gobolinux, a distro that makes it really easy for mantainers and admins. It is a fresh air in the unix world.
www.gobolinux.org
-- EOF
I've been using Gentoo for years and I love it. In the great FOSS tradition, Gentoo is all about choice (read: control). In the early years the stable branch was not very stable and the forums were filled with emerge problems in the stable branch. In the last few years those problems have almost all gone away. My system is mostly from the stable branch and I almost never run into a problem when I do updates. This is a very good thing[TM] IMO. I'm very glad the devs keep packages out of stable until they are almost always problem free.
But with Gentoo I can keyword-unmask specific packages if I want to be more on the bleeding edge and if I am really adventurous, I can hard-unmask packages. Yes, running a mixed system can require me to unmask dependencies but that has never been a nightmare (for me) and I don't see how the Gentoo devs could possibly prevent it. In fact, it should give you insight into why some packages seem to take longer than usual to make it into stable: all their dependencies need to go stable also.
It could well be that Gentoo is not the right distro for you. If your top priority is ease of use then one of the binary distros would probably be a better choice. But if you want the maximum control over your system, Gentoo is hard to beat.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Your post reminds me of some of the (very) old slashdot stories asking the question of how non-technical/non-programmers can help the F/OSS movements. The response usually came in the for of "there's lots of stuff like documentation (real writing, not tech writing), art, etc, that are also needed."
This was and is true, but I think another big category was forgotten: management. That for a good project to succeed, the techies should keep doing techie stuff, and be shielded from politics and dull aspects of business as much as possible.[*] This Gentoo problem is a prefect example of this. The techies don't want to do business, so that's an area that non-techie people could really help.
I hope the pull through with this, regardless of the solution - I would hate to have to switch to another distro...
[*] - See: Brokes and the MMM, where he talks about the "surgical team"
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
I've been using Gentoo on production servers (and my desktop) since the first year it was out. It used to be a very solid project. It still has much better documentation than, say, Ubuntu. Originally the speed of the custom-compiled stuff was important to me, because of lower-end hardware of the time I had in use - which it did well on (once compiled, of course). The other main virtue, compared to Red Hat or Debian or Slackware of the time, was that it was easier to keep an up-to-date server running without having to do a fresh OS install every year or two.
But over the last year especially Gentoo has gone into steep decline. Upgrades of major stuff come with "upgrade guides" that leave out major things that commonly get broken. The Gentoo bugzilla is manned by kids who compete to close bugs while insulting the intelligence of anyone who'd dare file them. Older libraries which take little space and conflict with nothing are removed without choice or warning when newer packages are installed, and it's just tough if your production server has stuff installed doing useful work that depends on those libraries. Meanwhile the Ubuntu project has worked very hard to become the most-safely-upgradeable Linux (I'd imagine Red Hat must have improved too; but I hate rpms too much to want to try it again). And hardware is so fast now that for standard server stuff there's much less to gain from customized compilation.
For those who say that Gentoo is fine if you just keep a spare system to test upgrades on first, that's bull. Stuff will break on nearly-identical servers that are just slightly different in their versions - that is, going from 1.17 to 1.19 on a app may break, while going from 1.17 to 1.18 to 1.19 works fine. And the breakage can show up tangentially, not just where you'd most expect it. So you'd have to keep a test server for each production server, and very carefully keep it just one step ahead in sync. Plus you'd need to keep it under some sort of dummy load, since some breakage only becomes apparent in production, not in idle use. The real solution there would be for Gentoo to start being responsive to its bugzilla reports again, immediately fixing any breakage caused by new packages so that instead of letting hundreds or thousands of people trip over the same stone, the paths are kept free and clear.
If Robbins comes back, Gentoo could shine again. If he doesn't, it's about over.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I'm with you. I ran 2 gentoo servers that I took down just before I moved to colorado. another firewall is still running at work, and my laptop is fine and dandy running gentoo. The servers did get a little overwhelming, and I guess that's dependant upon the number of services you run too, but even apache at times.. gawd.. I remember when they split the main apache config to several files.. try diffing that! The laptop is great, I can get all the cutting-edge wireless tools working no problem.
Amen to that! We run our servers on gentoo as well
Frag 'em all...
If config changes are difficult to someone, mabey they are not using the correct tools.(dispatch-conf) I run an enterprise-level server and I love that Gentoo doesn't arbitrarily overwrite my configs. I really think that Gentoo correctly notifies you the admin that technology has changed (and is deprecated) rather than just going on and letting you think everything is peachy. If someone is using apache,php or ldap they SHOULD be editing these files and verifying there are no unauthorized/incorrect changes as well as keeping up to date with current features. As for kernel config I believe a minimalistic kernel reduces the chance for exploitation/system hangs.
Quote: "As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options."
.config file over to the new kernel?
Why don't you just copy the
Kernel migrations aren't a big issue at all imho.
That is EXACTLY why we need a site that includes hardware into the equation, and not just asking you lame questions. If I literally wouldn't have had a Xandros 3 Pro box set dropped into my lap by a SUSE fan I would have given up on Linux after more than 3 dozen different distros failed and stuck with XP, and by doing so I wouldn't have learned enough to give those who couldn't afford a pc an older refurb with a low resource distro. As most of the places that donate machines to me take the CALs, I simply would have stripped them for parts and tossed them out.
The reason I learned enough to begin to DIY is because of trying new things on Xandros and learning as I went. Package management, mixing different repositories, compiling from source, etc. Most folks just aren't going to have the patience to try dozens of different distros, nor or they going to be as lucky as I was and have the perfect distro for them dropped in their lap. This is why a central database with features, screenshots, and most importantly tested hardware supported side-by-side would IMO increase Linux adoption by an order of magnitude.
Look at how many machines out there are being shipped with only Vista drivers but don't have the power to run more than basic. With an easy to use website that would suggest based on hardware and features required a half dozen or so distros based or relevancy to start with, along with listing the paid alongside the free distros would help a LOT of folks switch.
Sorry for the length, but this is a topic I fell VERY strongly about. I have had many folks that I could have switched, but ran into a single piece of hardware that wouldn't play nice and had to give up after many fruitless hours searching forums. If I would have had a central plac I could have checked to see if their Compaq, Emachine, Dell, etc were supported and by what distro I could have saved a lot of time and those folks wouldn't be dealing with Windows virii right now. Now if we could only add to that an Ndiswrapper for those damn Lexmark printers my wishlist for Linux would be complete. ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have mine set to show everything but have -1 and 0 collapsed so I can still see good posts by ACs and read the occasionally funny trolls.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
I heard a rumor once that Gentoo was not for the faint of heart incoming Linux converts. If Parent Poster's remark is on target, I think I just found out why.
I sortof understand Debian's philosophy as the Ultra-Scrubbed distro which includes things like Icy Cats instead of Firey Foxes, because the animals don't all play nice together on a branding level. (Will someone ever port Icecat to Windows, or is that a contridiction in terms?)
What exactly is Gentoo's theme? Other than being super-componentized, is this kind of administrative fallout systemic to the distro?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Re: a debian package for Firefox beta 3...
/opt ; that should do it.
Easiest way to go about that is download the tarball, then run alien -d ff3beta2.tgz (or whatever it was called, i forget), then dpkg -i ff3beta2.deb --instdir
I think you could also extract the tarball, run dpkg -b dirname/ packagename.deb and get similar results.
Now, if you want it to be "compliant" to the debian package standards, that might take a bit more time. But for my purposes, I just want a dpkg db entry so I can remote it when I get a new version and be sure I got the whole thing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What's wrong with:
# flagedit =package-cat/package-version -- '~x86'
No muss, no fuss, and you only have to do it once?
Also, --depclean *crashes*??? Can you post a backtrace and any error messages?
To me, Gentoo's not about the crazy flags you can throw to GCC. It's about the flexibility of portage. Ex: can you get debugging symbols for *everything* in your binary-only distro? Probably not.
WRT compiler flags: I've gotten along quite nicely with 'CFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=${CPU} -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe"'.
Also, your "Archetypal Gentoo Builds" idea is good. Perhaps drobbins will work towards something like this in the future?
I say something against binary packaging systems and someone immediately thinks I'm some sort of rabid Gentoo supporter (I don't do much with Gentoo today, hence the post about how the alternative is a bit crap). It kind of throws a new light on all that Gentoo ricer stuff people like to throw about as a laugh.
You must be new here? I've been running Gentoo since 2002. (I ran screaming from RH9.)
I can tell you that I've had to make multiple runs of revdep-rebuild on more than one occasion. (However, all those occasions were within the last year or so... The current package maintainers are fond of tossing out upgrades to core libs that aren't binary compatible with older versions.)
Agreed. The gentoo docs are the best for a lot of things. Also, gentoo's boot system is by far the prettiest and clearest of any I have seen. Unfortunately though, when I tried the installer, it crashed out, and I didn't have the time to get everything fixed - so back to Ubuntu and Mandriva.
FWIW, I'd love to see Gentoo and Mandriva merge. They are both great projects, and both slightly too small. Also, they have different aims, which would dovetail quite nicely...
I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Moderation isn't enough. These jerks need to be flayed.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Correct that and you correct 99% of the (few) problems people have with Linux.
So, you're saying there are at least 100 problems? Or could one have a fraction of a problem?
Know what I'd do?
Keep current iceweasel packages to satisfy dependencies. Download the official Firefox Linux beta binaries. Stick in... some location. Update your desktop launchers/menus (create a ~/.menu/local.firefoxbeta and do update-menus if you're feeling fancy, or just create a new launcher on desktop or something). Done. Just be careful with iceweasels.
Don't know how FF3b works right now, but I used FF2 this way when it was released and it took some sweet darn time for the .debs to materialise. For me there were no ill effects when going from and back to Debian packages.
I know what you're thinking and I agree: It's not pretty, it's not .deb. But my point is simple: If there's no .deb, it's not that critical. There's many, many ways to handle software packages cleanly. In this case, using the binary gets the job done until Firefox 3 is out for real because the Mozilla folks provide a nice clean binary tarball you can uninstall effortlessly.
A clean directory of binaries is a clean directory of binaries where the heck it happens to be.
This is my general battle plan:
Stow in particular is particularly cool. Keeps /usr/local just as nice and clean as dpkg keeps /usr =) Uninstalling stuff built from source is as easy as cd /usr/local/stow; stow -D whatever-1.0.0 && rm -rf whatever-1.0.0 ...
You can have fractional problems on a Pentium I.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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sigfault (core dumped)
I'm long time gentoo user ( I've started around version 1.4) and am more or less stisfied with it. I mean, it definitely has its flaws, but I haven't been able to find substitution that could "scratch my itch".
I have tried Ubuntu as everyone around me were advocating it, but found that while it has much prettier installer and things tend to work out of the box, deep down it's actually inferior to Gentoo.
When things work smoothly in Ubuntu, everyone is quick to point out those maybe few minutes and a CLI command that Ubuntu has spared you, but no one mentions those cases when things don't work.
Each distro has its framework which combines many pieces of open source mosaic, but things get interesting when some piece in mosaic develops a flaw that is not immediately obvious or it affects some portion of users. I don't care for a few seconds spared during installation nearly as much I care for infrastructure support in cases that don't work.
WRT to Gentoo's imminent death:
1. If its going to happen, it won't be soon.
2. All problems of Gentoo can be traced to its origins. At the time, its creator found his pleasure in homebrew approach and wanted to have something that works in some way much rather than trying to get it right first time and also answer many organisational, commercial and law questions.
So now we have Gentoo Organisation, Infrastructure and Distro in the state of Russian Orbital station MIR jsut before its death: there are many interleaving and intervening systems with many semi-documented patches and changes and whole shebang is far from original specs. I mean, evolution is a ni ce thing, but it has its limits. When it reaches its limits, maybe its time to use accumulated knowledge and experience to make something new...
3. WRT to Drobbins, I don't know the guy personally and have nothing against him, but I'm not sure that having him back is a good idea.
He had the chance but has proven unable to make Gentoo his life, so now he's coming back, faced with similar problems ( needing money for RL but being strawn between his hobby and bussiness) and unable to learn from his mistakes and use radically different solution this time.
4. New Gentoo should start from scratch with its policy, organisation and web/distro infrastructure while good old Gentoo I is living on...
If you copy the .config then run "make oldconfig" you'll pull in all of the still-relevant settings from your last build and be asked about anything that has changed.
That was not my experience.
My reason was: couldn't build the core of it with package self-tests enabled.
It was core-utils or linux-utils that couldn't compile when checks/tests were enabled,
and if even a single package compiles but is scrambled,
I don't want it near any system I admin.
Why can't they have checks/tests enabled as a final auto-check before marking something as OK?
( and no, I wasn't using the "~" stuff )
Try also my gallery: http://photo.net/photos/AntrygRevo
I don't really think it's racism. I mean, race has nothing to do with the topic at hand. My suspicion is that these sorts of trolls only use that word because it is the most taboo of all words. It's one of the only words that can really get a reaction out of people, that can end careers. It is a word so powerful, that if it is used while committing a crime, the crime becomes many times more serious. That word is used because we, as a society, give it a special power.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Thanks very much for the replies, guys, but unfortunately my initial request was badly worded.
.deb that much as I wanted a repo. So new versions of FF beta that crop out (which happens every now and then) would then automagically get updated with apt-get update & upgrade.
:-)
I didn't really want a
That's one of the features I like most about Linux (and FreeBSD, for that matter, though there it's a whole different story): not only is the installation of programs incredibly easy, but you can also keep everything up-to-date without having to bother about it yourself. Or have the apps phone home regularly to check for updates. Or worse: have the apps perform stealthy updates.
I'll think about making my own repo then. But I'll need some server space...
I'm an infovore...
ahhh. I'll have to check that out. I was unaware.
Thanks. =)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
nt
I'm sorry, but that is total crap. I have been using Gentoo on production servers which I *do* keep current using stable (not bleeding-edge) packages. This is a large shop with many servers. I have never looked back since switching to Gentoo. Everyone who moans about emerges failing and having to run revdep-rebuild often must be doing something wrong. I've had to run revdep-rebuild once when I upgraded libexpat. So what? It took like 2 minutes.
Absolutely right. We deployed Gentoo at my former employer (a Chicago Hedge Fund trading in most major markets) as servers, trading desktops, and developer machines, and it proved to be ideal. Most people don't seem to realize that Gentoo is a meta distribution, allowing finely grained control over exactly what is included (down to the version and compile-time options). Manage your local portage tree, mirrors, and define your site-wide default USE flags, and you have a tweaked platform that is exactly right to your needs. Taking the time to do this has loads of benefits--and ultimately takes less time than trying to shoehorn Fedora or Centos into doing a job it isn't optimized for (and sometimes doesn't support at all).
Anyone unable to make Gentoo work in an enterprise environment doesn't know Gentoo. Now, it isn't for everyone (my current employer uses CentOS, which is fine for them, but wouldn't have worked for my former employer at all), but Gentoo is far more useful in far wider circumstances than its nay-sayers would have us believe.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"So I take it that upgrading from CentOS 4 -> CentOS 5 every few years on 130 machines (26,000 package upgrades at once) to ensure you have the 'latest' features is OK, whereas doing 130 updates once or twice a week with Gentoo is bad?"
Yes, you are right.
Even if the two approaches took just the same time after the five-year timeframe, what we will call the "CentOS-way" (not that it has any exclusivity with CentOS, it's just to follow your example) has to be considered *vastly* superior on *any* production environment. The ability to have a given time-frame for a job being done is a must on a corporate environment; while it's relatively easy to define a maintenance window of, say, two months each five years where you think about, design, test, announce and deploy a programmed upgrade on the "CentOS-way", it's not only going to be time-sucking but undoable most of the time the "Gentoo-way" (today is "upgrading monday" but the mail server's main hard disk is failing... well let's suspend today's upgrade, just to have much more problems next week since upgrading depency problems tend to grow exponentially), and will deal to bad press (people can expect minor problems the next two weeks after the "big update" each five years and, while mumbling, they will accept them and will forget for the next half decade); now try to get a satisfied user base with a system that is *guaranteed* to have minor problems almost always (and probably not so minor problems from time to time), not even considering unavoidable minor (or even major) changes each time "foobar" goes from 1.2.3 to 1.3.0 (and there will be at least one of such "foobars" almost weekly).
And then, I'd say that just considering context-switching time will deal to much more time on your "Gentoo-way" but that's nothing but cream on top of the cake.
All of this is just plain evident for everyone that has even the slightest exposure to any real production environment, so you telling that makes me highly suspicious you just hadn't such an exposure (i.e.: you are just making your opinions out of your basement's toy-computing experience). Of course, I may be wrong and then I'd be very courious about your "real life" experiencies regarding your "Gentoo-way" for systems administration and how do you avoid the previously described situations.
Your second paragraph is just too off-topic to be even considered.
While your point that different tools serve different purposes is a good one, I've broken too many Slackware systems over the years to have any desire to return to using it for anything that doesn't absolutely demand it. Perhaps if I worked on embedded systems, it might seem like an attractive option, but I tend to think that I'd prefer something more like Gentoo or FreeBSD in a case like that. Simplicity can be a virtue, but sometimes, too much simplicity can actually make things harder. And that's been my experience with Slackware. Heck, if I just wanted simplicity, I could switch to FreeDOS. Now that's a simple system!
not official firefox but you might get interested in http://www.getswiftfox.com/deb.htm this guy keep fairly update it (if you haven't heard it before of course )
.deb of the new Firefox Beta 3. Anyone willing to point me to one?
: For example, I still didn't find any place that offers a
I see a lot of people who have this or that frustration with Gentoo, but in each case it's pretty easy to see what tool or approach they overlooked which could easily have solved their 'problem'. Gentoo requites some effort and knowledge to use it properly, but it's hard to imagine how the distro could avoid this while still offering the same immense flexibility.
Of course somebody is going to prefer Ubuntu if they have fairly mainstream needs, and dislike spending any time configuring their system. But tell me what other distro could simultaneously drive an arcade machine with 15Khz monitor, a tweaked real time kernel for pro audio and a full suite of bleeding edge (and I mean *bleeding*) source-compiled soft synths and sequencers, all running flawlessly on a Pentium 3?
Firefox 3 beta is available for download as a .deb at the bottom of the page.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/web/firefox-3.0
Registered Linux User #423733
The only way I can think of to produce a totally generic solution is to use software that already exists for calculating optimal settings and for profiling packages, and produce as comprehensive a table as possible of what permutations work for what systems.
You might want to expand on that if you have some time and the energy to write an essay about it. Maybe a tool that uses QEMU or xen while being nice'd +19 for us to run on our machines with spare capacity. Bandwidth might be the highest cost.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Get more people to use Ubuntu and all vendors (3rd party) will provide packages for it. Look at Skype, LimeWire, etc... The trend is there now...
I'm converting everybody I know to Ubuntu because it's easy and it just works. Whoever comes to me with a virus problem (windows) or any type of problem that requires me to re-install the OS, i simply tell them: it's free for you if I install Ubuntu. And I give them the choice that if in 2 weeks of using it they don't like it, I'll restore their Windows stuff for free as well.
I have not heard a single complaint. The first few days people ask me "how do I install foo" and I point them to the right menus. Simple.
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