I agree, but at the same time going through the process of installing gentoo several times has given me pretty valuable troubleshooting skills now. If something ever does break on any linux system, Gentoo's live CD (and probably any of the other linux live CD's out there) can be a life saver...if you know how to use it properly. Gentoo taught me how to use a live cd efficiently to troubleshoot and resolve problems. That's a pretty valuable skill these days.
I went from Mandrake to Slackware, and I did indeed learn a lot from slackware (way more than mandrake...that was kinda "look ma, i'm running linux!! *point, click* and there's this thing...i think it's called a terminal...and you can do stuff!!! Uh...i dunno what yet...but stuff!!")...but where I really got my *nix education was FreeBSD and Gentoo. My friend was also a long-time slack user, then I showed him gentoo and that's all he uses now. Now, I'm not saying gentoo is intrinsically better than slack, they're both damn fine distros...but depending on the kind of learner you are, slackware might not be the best place to learn how *nix works. I do have a soft spot in my heart for slack, though. It was my first real distro and did teach me the basics.
Think in 20 years anyone will still be obsessed with the commandline and knowing every detail about their OS? God I hope not.
There will always be people who want to know how things work, thats kind of the base assumption of open source. Open Source thrives on the creativity and curiosity of people, and their drive to get into the nuts and bolts of their OS. If that's not your cup of tea, fine. Use fedora, suse, mandrake, windows, OS X, etc...
But for those of us who want to know how our system works, and want to get deep into it, there's distros like Gentoo, guides like LFS, and - by and large - open source software. Just because you might not have that same drive to figure out a system, doesn't mean it's an irrational drive, or even a silly one.
You could use GRP, but it's fairly immature. Stick with debian. In your case, there's no reason to move to Gentoo. The Cost far excedes the Benefit. Unless you really want to mess with stuff just for the sake of messing with stuff, or want to figure out a way to make GRP more useful for more people. But if you just want to use Gentoo, and not try and improve it...it's probably not worth it.
Your logic doesn't make any sense to me. What the hell does Debian have to do with this? Do you just automatically agree with anyone who calls something "GNU/Something"? What Debian does with their own stuff is Debian's business, and does not justify anyone else's naming convention.
Fair enough. When you create a system, based on one kernel, that uses the entire GNU toolset on top of it, you can call it whatever you wish. I just hope you respect (even if you don't agree with) the choice of others who might do the same, and feel the need to give credit to the GNU developers in the easiest way possible - the project name. What you do with your own stuff is your own business, and it does not negate anyone else's naming scheme. My point was simply that the GNU peeps put out the idea of prepending GNU to the name of a system that uses it's complete toolset. Debian has taken that and attempted to set a social precedent, of sorts, creating other GNU systems based on other non-GNU kernels. While you might not like it, I think the name GNU/SunOS makes sense if the SunOS kernel is striped from Solaris and put in the company of the complete GNU toolset. I used to be against the whule GNU/linux thing myself, thinking RMS was just trying to get free PR points. Then, I dropped my dogma on thought about it. It makes sense. Linux can't exist without userland tools. A kernel cannot stand alone.
I honestly don't think there is a good reason. Probably the main difference is that debian might be a bit more difficult to tweak to use the latest packages, whereas Gentoo stays pretty up to date, even when you don't have it keyworded (read: stable). For example, I'm expecting Gnome 2.8 to be in portage within a couple days. Infact, packages are getting merged in slowly. The downside to that, of course, is that an early adopter (again, a keyworded, "unstable" portage) might have an unstable system. I've always used keywords and have noticed very little, if any, instability. With gentoo, you just learn more. That's the reason i use it. I like things to play with to expand my knowledge on a subject. Gentoo does that. Gentoo also has a very intelligent system for handling rc scripts, that seems to just work. rc-update is just awesome. The downside to Gentoo (and it's a highly over exagerated downside), is it's compile time. To put things into perspective, I emerge sync (update the portage tree) daily. For the past week i've had maybe one or two small programs that needed to be updated, and the total compilation time was less than 10 minutes each time. Even with the compile time, the system is perfectly usable while the compile is taking place. Now, if you wait a month between each emerge sync && emerge -u world, you're going to be compiling for a LONNGG time. Your key to using Gentoo successfully is keeping it up to date.
What it comes down to isn't whether or not Gentoo or Debian is intrinsically better than the other, rather which of the two suits you better. I've used debian, and I didn't like it. I come from a mainly BSD background, so i appreciated portage, i appreciated a more simplistic rc script setup, and i appreciated the merits of a source-based distro. Gentoo just fits me. I suggest you try both, and come to a conclusion on your own. Otherwise, you'll be tainted by dogmatic views from both sides, trolls, and flames.
Agreed. I used to think i was ub3r l337 by using fluxbox or ion, then I got sucked in my things like...thubmails...and a unified look and feel, and started playing around with different screen layouts/pannel locations in Gnome. Got one that's elegant and non-intrusive, now Gnome is pretty much all I use.
Depends. Most academic scientists use C or K. As far as industry goes - i dunno. Government, it's a toss up. the USGS still uses a lot of Imperial units, I wouldn't be suprised if some government organizations stilled used F.
All of the GNU tools in *BSD are kept in the codebase of the BSD in question. They're customized versions of the official GNU tools (even gcc). On top of that, not all of the tools that exist in GNU/Linux exist in BSD as the GPL'ed version. Awk in FreeBSD 5.x is the One True Awk, nearly all the GNU tools in OpenBSD have been replaced with BSD licensed tools. In FreeBSD ls, vi, cat, grep, more, less, etc are mostly BSD equivalents of the GNU equivalents of the original UNIX toolset. In some cases, they ARE the original UNIX toolset, where the tools have been open sourced. This is the case of Awk in FreeBSD 5.x - it is awk written by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, available here.
That said, there are people over at debian who have slapped the GNU tool set on both NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels, and called it GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD. This precedence seems to push myself towards the conclusion that changing the toolset does, indeed, warrant a name change. For the most part, GNU/FreeBSD and FreeBSD will behave the same, until you type ps -aux on GNU/FreeBSD and get a warning about "bad ps syntax", or fire top and notice slight differences in how it behaves vesus top in FreeBSD.
Personally, If the GNU toolset was thrown on a SunOS kernel, I wouldn't get my panties in a bunch over people calling that system GNU/SunOS. But, perhaps my priorities differ from yours.
Because I make music for the joy of making music. Idealistic artists DO exist. We just know we won't/can't make a living off of it. That said, I already submitted 3 of my songs to this doohicky. Hopefully people like what I do. Give me a listen, my artist name is Eli and the Sporktastics. My stuff definitely ain't for everyone.
and how many people stopped using Gnutella because it has a clever in-context use of GNU, referring to it's license, in it's name? I doubt people will not use it simply because it has G-n-o-m in it's name. They'll think, "Ohhhh Gnomes. That's kinda cool. I'm scared of Gnomes, though...they can hide in places I can't and spring up behind me with a blowdart gun. On second thought...I'll stick with Kazaa and it's spyware. I don't like poisoned blowdarts in the back of my neck."
I have a problem with that statement. Evil is a very relative term. To radical Islamics, we're evil. To many in the west, radical Islamics are evil. I believe that if we want to survive as a global society, we'll have to come to a compromise between the "evil" people and the "good" people. There will always be people and culture that exist with views that clash extremely with ours, and killing them will result in nothing but more evidence for their cause and the cause of others like them. Our country wasn't founded on war and bloodshed, it was founded on compromise and pragmatic humanist thought. We need to expand the domestic compassion that we harbor for all citizens and start applying it to the entire globe. All humans were created equal, NOT just those in the US. All humans deserve the right to believe what they want to believe, NOT just those in the US and other countries that agree with us. All humans deserve the right to live, liberty, and the persuit of happiness, not just those in the US. Compromise isn't as exciting as war, but in war someone loses. It's only a matter of time before it's us, on our own soil.
Well, i wasn't assuming, just asking. Gentoo for the past couple of years has been slowly solidifying (it's a very young distro - younger than most of the other major ones). It did have it's problems in the past, but as far as things go now, it's pretty damn reliable. I'm not sure why the live CD's wouldn't boot, but thousands of other people have used them without error, the repeatability of your problem is clearly not universal, thus there must be something on your computer that isn't agreeing with it. Did you try any boot options? If it didn't boot, i can only think you didn't burn the disk right. I've booted both the 2004.0 and 2004.1 CDs without a problem, as have many many others. These all sound like transition bugs that get hammered out as time goes by. I guess i can't really say much to each particular issue other than, "it works for me." That's what it comes down to - you use what works for you. But, in the spirit of openmindedness, i would ask that you give it another try in about a year and see how it feels then.
If it's better there's no war at all, then why do you support the war machine? Not to flame, i'm just curious. If there were a draft re-instated, i would run as fast as i could to a neutral country. I don't believe in war, so i'm not going to fight war. In my eyes, war only perpetuates itself and the only way to stop it is to not participate in it. Call me an idealist hippy, but that's how i feel. I could rant about the whole economy that's built around war to make it even more embedded into our culture and system, but I won't. Just tell my why you support war, if you feel that there shouldn't be any war at all.
Again, the definition does not fit. I addressed that. Burrying waste is not a technological advance. The only advance that could come from that would be improved long-term storage containers, or maybe a faster fork lift to move them. I'm all for advances in power generation methods in nuclear reactors, use of fuel more efficiently, etc. But I am against sticking radioactive waste, that will be around for quite a while, in an area that shows geologic signs of a past water table which was higher than the yucca mountain site. That's not luddism, that's rationality. Nuclear power will be needed as a bridge to future technologies, no doubt about that...but climates change. Green belts shift. What happens if the greenbelt shifts south from oregon, idaho, and wyoming down towards nevada? It's happened before, and with the half life of waste to be stored in yucca mountain, it's fairly probable that it will happen again.
Here's a lesson in Soil Physics for you, to help you understand my skepticism:
Soil is a highly complex medium, with a net negative charge. Positive ions adhere to soil, negative ions break up soil (called flocculation, why sodic and saline soils suck for agriculture - the negative ions in the salt complexes destroy soil structure). Clay, part of a soil, tends to be quite negative - generally -90 to -20 mmol/kg. It has a pH dependent charge, gernally getting less negative as pH decreases, with a few clay types actually becoming positive as pH dips below 6. This is pretty rare. Right now engineers in yucca mountain are counting on the clay (Primarily smectite and clinoptilolite) to stop any potential nucleide leak. However, according to my chemistry text book, Plutonium-239 is one of the main waste isotopes from nuclear fission. The movement of nucleides through clay is still fairly unknown. Will it sorp? Will it floculate the clay? It only takes one hole in a clay layer to facilitate the free movement of water through it.
Lucky for us this this a pretty damn pressing question, and there are scientist working on it. Personally, I DO hope yucca mountain is a viable site, but I haven't found enough evidence to convince me of that yet.
As far as solar being prohibitively expensive - if it had as many government subsidies as nuclear power does, it most likely wouldn't. The cost per killowatt hour for nuclear fuel that i found is around 5 cents. The cost cited on the same site for solar power was 12 cents. I have to wonder if this cost is the actual or the subsidized cost. What subsidies, you ask? these . Googling for "Nuclear Subsidies" brought that up. I googled for Solar Subsidies and only found a page citing californian subsidies for home owners.
Re:Alex performs live on stage to program his musi
on
Live Nightclub Hacking
·
· Score: 1
Ahh...composition for the tone def! truely the slashdot way!
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Now there's a dictator i can trust!
Enjoy
I agree, but at the same time going through the process of installing gentoo several times has given me pretty valuable troubleshooting skills now. If something ever does break on any linux system, Gentoo's live CD (and probably any of the other linux live CD's out there) can be a life saver...if you know how to use it properly. Gentoo taught me how to use a live cd efficiently to troubleshoot and resolve problems. That's a pretty valuable skill these days.
I went from Mandrake to Slackware, and I did indeed learn a lot from slackware (way more than mandrake...that was kinda "look ma, i'm running linux!! *point, click* and there's this thing...i think it's called a terminal...and you can do stuff!!! Uh...i dunno what yet...but stuff!!")...but where I really got my *nix education was FreeBSD and Gentoo. My friend was also a long-time slack user, then I showed him gentoo and that's all he uses now. Now, I'm not saying gentoo is intrinsically better than slack, they're both damn fine distros...but depending on the kind of learner you are, slackware might not be the best place to learn how *nix works. I do have a soft spot in my heart for slack, though. It was my first real distro and did teach me the basics.
Think in 20 years anyone will still be obsessed with the commandline and knowing every detail about their OS? God I hope not.
There will always be people who want to know how things work, thats kind of the base assumption of open source. Open Source thrives on the creativity and curiosity of people, and their drive to get into the nuts and bolts of their OS. If that's not your cup of tea, fine. Use fedora, suse, mandrake, windows, OS X, etc...
But for those of us who want to know how our system works, and want to get deep into it, there's distros like Gentoo, guides like LFS, and - by and large - open source software. Just because you might not have that same drive to figure out a system, doesn't mean it's an irrational drive, or even a silly one.
Battling the FUD from Debian users!! The truely jealous ones! After all...they started it.
You could use GRP, but it's fairly immature. Stick with debian. In your case, there's no reason to move to Gentoo. The Cost far excedes the Benefit. Unless you really want to mess with stuff just for the sake of messing with stuff, or want to figure out a way to make GRP more useful for more people. But if you just want to use Gentoo, and not try and improve it...it's probably not worth it.
Then use whatever distro you use now, and be happy.
Your logic doesn't make any sense to me. What the hell does Debian have to do with this? Do you just automatically agree with anyone who calls something "GNU/Something"? What Debian does with their own stuff is Debian's business, and does not justify anyone else's naming convention.
Fair enough. When you create a system, based on one kernel, that uses the entire GNU toolset on top of it, you can call it whatever you wish. I just hope you respect (even if you don't agree with) the choice of others who might do the same, and feel the need to give credit to the GNU developers in the easiest way possible - the project name. What you do with your own stuff is your own business, and it does not negate anyone else's naming scheme. My point was simply that the GNU peeps put out the idea of prepending GNU to the name of a system that uses it's complete toolset. Debian has taken that and attempted to set a social precedent, of sorts, creating other GNU systems based on other non-GNU kernels. While you might not like it, I think the name GNU/SunOS makes sense if the SunOS kernel is striped from Solaris and put in the company of the complete GNU toolset. I used to be against the whule GNU/linux thing myself, thinking RMS was just trying to get free PR points. Then, I dropped my dogma on thought about it. It makes sense. Linux can't exist without userland tools. A kernel cannot stand alone.
I honestly don't think there is a good reason. Probably the main difference is that debian might be a bit more difficult to tweak to use the latest packages, whereas Gentoo stays pretty up to date, even when you don't have it keyworded (read: stable). For example, I'm expecting Gnome 2.8 to be in portage within a couple days. Infact, packages are getting merged in slowly. The downside to that, of course, is that an early adopter (again, a keyworded, "unstable" portage) might have an unstable system. I've always used keywords and have noticed very little, if any, instability. With gentoo, you just learn more. That's the reason i use it. I like things to play with to expand my knowledge on a subject. Gentoo does that. Gentoo also has a very intelligent system for handling rc scripts, that seems to just work. rc-update is just awesome. The downside to Gentoo (and it's a highly over exagerated downside), is it's compile time. To put things into perspective, I emerge sync (update the portage tree) daily. For the past week i've had maybe one or two small programs that needed to be updated, and the total compilation time was less than 10 minutes each time. Even with the compile time, the system is perfectly usable while the compile is taking place. Now, if you wait a month between each emerge sync && emerge -u world, you're going to be compiling for a LONNGG time. Your key to using Gentoo successfully is keeping it up to date.
What it comes down to isn't whether or not Gentoo or Debian is intrinsically better than the other, rather which of the two suits you better. I've used debian, and I didn't like it. I come from a mainly BSD background, so i appreciated portage, i appreciated a more simplistic rc script setup, and i appreciated the merits of a source-based distro. Gentoo just fits me. I suggest you try both, and come to a conclusion on your own. Otherwise, you'll be tainted by dogmatic views from both sides, trolls, and flames.
Agreed. I used to think i was ub3r l337 by using fluxbox or ion, then I got sucked in my things like...thubmails...and a unified look and feel, and started playing around with different screen layouts/pannel locations in Gnome. Got one that's elegant and non-intrusive, now Gnome is pretty much all I use.
Depends. Most academic scientists use C or K. As far as industry goes - i dunno. Government, it's a toss up. the USGS still uses a lot of Imperial units, I wouldn't be suprised if some government organizations stilled used F.
All of the GNU tools in *BSD are kept in the codebase of the BSD in question. They're customized versions of the official GNU tools (even gcc). On top of that, not all of the tools that exist in GNU/Linux exist in BSD as the GPL'ed version. Awk in FreeBSD 5.x is the One True Awk, nearly all the GNU tools in OpenBSD have been replaced with BSD licensed tools. In FreeBSD ls, vi, cat, grep, more, less, etc are mostly BSD equivalents of the GNU equivalents of the original UNIX toolset. In some cases, they ARE the original UNIX toolset, where the tools have been open sourced. This is the case of Awk in FreeBSD 5.x - it is awk written by Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan, available here.
That said, there are people over at debian who have slapped the GNU tool set on both NetBSD and FreeBSD kernels, and called it GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/NetBSD. This precedence seems to push myself towards the conclusion that changing the toolset does, indeed, warrant a name change. For the most part, GNU/FreeBSD and FreeBSD will behave the same, until you type ps -aux on GNU/FreeBSD and get a warning about "bad ps syntax", or fire top and notice slight differences in how it behaves vesus top in FreeBSD.
Personally, If the GNU toolset was thrown on a SunOS kernel, I wouldn't get my panties in a bunch over people calling that system GNU/SunOS. But, perhaps my priorities differ from yours.
Because I make music for the joy of making music. Idealistic artists DO exist. We just know we won't/can't make a living off of it. That said, I already submitted 3 of my songs to this doohicky. Hopefully people like what I do. Give me a listen, my artist name is Eli and the Sporktastics. My stuff definitely ain't for everyone.
I just submitted 3 of my songs (the rest are over 10 minutes...i don't want to kill my bandwidth). Rock on!
and how many people stopped using Gnutella because it has a clever in-context use of GNU, referring to it's license, in it's name? I doubt people will not use it simply because it has G-n-o-m in it's name. They'll think, "Ohhhh Gnomes. That's kinda cool. I'm scared of Gnomes, though...they can hide in places I can't and spring up behind me with a blowdart gun. On second thought...I'll stick with Kazaa and it's spyware. I don't like poisoned blowdarts in the back of my neck."
Actually, you're right. We must change the name!
I agree. This is why I'm against war.
Oh dear God, this needs to be modded up. I'm seriously sick of extraneous linking.
Will, I'll give you 20 dollars for your banana.
evil people exist so I have to deal with them.
I have a problem with that statement. Evil is a very relative term. To radical Islamics, we're evil. To many in the west, radical Islamics are evil. I believe that if we want to survive as a global society, we'll have to come to a compromise between the "evil" people and the "good" people. There will always be people and culture that exist with views that clash extremely with ours, and killing them will result in nothing but more evidence for their cause and the cause of others like them. Our country wasn't founded on war and bloodshed, it was founded on compromise and pragmatic humanist thought. We need to expand the domestic compassion that we harbor for all citizens and start applying it to the entire globe. All humans were created equal, NOT just those in the US. All humans deserve the right to believe what they want to believe, NOT just those in the US and other countries that agree with us. All humans deserve the right to live, liberty, and the persuit of happiness, not just those in the US. Compromise isn't as exciting as war, but in war someone loses. It's only a matter of time before it's us, on our own soil.
Well, i wasn't assuming, just asking. Gentoo for the past couple of years has been slowly solidifying (it's a very young distro - younger than most of the other major ones). It did have it's problems in the past, but as far as things go now, it's pretty damn reliable. I'm not sure why the live CD's wouldn't boot, but thousands of other people have used them without error, the repeatability of your problem is clearly not universal, thus there must be something on your computer that isn't agreeing with it. Did you try any boot options? If it didn't boot, i can only think you didn't burn the disk right. I've booted both the 2004.0 and 2004.1 CDs without a problem, as have many many others. These all sound like transition bugs that get hammered out as time goes by. I guess i can't really say much to each particular issue other than, "it works for me." That's what it comes down to - you use what works for you. But, in the spirit of openmindedness, i would ask that you give it another try in about a year and see how it feels then.
If it's better there's no war at all, then why do you support the war machine? Not to flame, i'm just curious. If there were a draft re-instated, i would run as fast as i could to a neutral country. I don't believe in war, so i'm not going to fight war. In my eyes, war only perpetuates itself and the only way to stop it is to not participate in it. Call me an idealist hippy, but that's how i feel. I could rant about the whole economy that's built around war to make it even more embedded into our culture and system, but I won't. Just tell my why you support war, if you feel that there shouldn't be any war at all.
Having used Gentoo for three years now, and using it right now, I can say my experience does not match yours. Not to be rude, but PEBKAC?
Again, the definition does not fit. I addressed that. Burrying waste is not a technological advance. The only advance that could come from that would be improved long-term storage containers, or maybe a faster fork lift to move them. I'm all for advances in power generation methods in nuclear reactors, use of fuel more efficiently, etc. But I am against sticking radioactive waste, that will be around for quite a while, in an area that shows geologic signs of a past water table which was higher than the yucca mountain site. That's not luddism, that's rationality. Nuclear power will be needed as a bridge to future technologies, no doubt about that...but climates change. Green belts shift. What happens if the greenbelt shifts south from oregon, idaho, and wyoming down towards nevada? It's happened before, and with the half life of waste to be stored in yucca mountain, it's fairly probable that it will happen again.
Here's a lesson in Soil Physics for you, to help you understand my skepticism:
Soil is a highly complex medium, with a net negative charge. Positive ions adhere to soil, negative ions break up soil (called flocculation, why sodic and saline soils suck for agriculture - the negative ions in the salt complexes destroy soil structure). Clay, part of a soil, tends to be quite negative - generally -90 to -20 mmol/kg. It has a pH dependent charge, gernally getting less negative as pH decreases, with a few clay types actually becoming positive as pH dips below 6. This is pretty rare. Right now engineers in yucca mountain are counting on the clay (Primarily smectite and clinoptilolite) to stop any potential nucleide leak. However, according to my chemistry text book, Plutonium-239 is one of the main waste isotopes from nuclear fission. The movement of nucleides through clay is still fairly unknown. Will it sorp? Will it floculate the clay? It only takes one hole in a clay layer to facilitate the free movement of water through it.
Lucky for us this this a pretty damn pressing question, and there are scientist working on it. Personally, I DO hope yucca mountain is a viable site, but I haven't found enough evidence to convince me of that yet.
As far as solar being prohibitively expensive - if it had as many government subsidies as nuclear power does, it most likely wouldn't. The cost per killowatt hour for nuclear fuel that i found is around 5 cents. The cost cited on the same site for solar power was 12 cents. I have to wonder if this cost is the actual or the subsidized cost. What subsidies, you ask? these . Googling for "Nuclear Subsidies" brought that up. I googled for Solar Subsidies and only found a page citing californian subsidies for home owners.
Ahh...composition for the tone def! truely the slashdot way!