Slashdot Log In
10-Day Gentoo Installation Agony
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 19, 2006 03:51 PM
from the rtfm-and-join-the-channel dept.
from the rtfm-and-join-the-channel dept.
lisah writes, "The Linux distribution Gentoo has a hard-core following, and with good reason. Gentoo is known for its configurability and choices. It's not known, however, for its easy installation. NewsForge's Joe Barr outlined his painful installation experience with Gentoo in an article that explains why, after 10 days, he finally gave up and went with Debian Etch. From the article: '[B]ack in the day, Gentoo users first had to rip the source code from the bone with their teeth before compiling and installing it, but now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it... I exaggerated the ease of installing Gentoo.' And: 'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'" Slashdot and NewsForge are both owned by OSTG.
Related Stories
[+]
Technology: Gentoo Announces 'Seeds' 323 comments
rvale writes "Gentoo has announced a new project called Seeds. Aiming to provide out of the box images for various common tasks, it could be the answer to the common complaint that installing and customizing Gentoo takes too long. However, with other developers and Council members complaining that the project was improperly set up and those backing the project refusing to back off, lending weight to recent claims that Gentoo is suffering from management problems, will what could be a massive step forward degenerate into a repeat of the Sunrise disaster?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Odd (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Odd (Score:4, Interesting)
I took me less than 10 days for my very first Linux install (the author mentions using about nine different versions of Linux) using Gentoo a couple of years ago.
This was a Stage 1 install (the one that takes the longest and requires the most user input/interaction) on an old AMD K6 laptop with some heavy optimization, and included building X and a bunch of useful apps (I can't remember which ones I compiled at the moment), and it really did exactly what I told it to do. Which is what I would expect.
Maybe I just had a better experience than the author.
Parent
10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, Joe Barr:
1. Did not RTFM
2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.
There are alternatives. I have used a chroot approach to building a system while running under another distro. This works well, is low risk and is documented.
Parent
Re:10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the big one.
I'm an Ubuntu convert, but I was exclusively a Gentoo user for two or three years, and I recall there being extremely good documentation that, if followed exactly, would result in a working system in 99.99% of cases.
The only way you could screw up a Gentoo install is to be one of those people who always got an "F" on those following-directions assignments in grade school.
Parent
Re:10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to be reductive here, but Gentoo is really just a platform for building programs from source code and then managing those programs after they are built. There's no mystery to it--most of the other distros install binaries that were compiled on other computers but that work perfectly well on yours. The only thing that is even mildly instructive about Gentoo is that you have an often extremely limited ability to control how you want your own binaries to be built by changing USE flags and compiler optimizations. But that's not going to teach you much in the end: Sure, that one application you just emerged has "jpeg", "png", and "tiff" USE flags. But you know, that's probably because it's an ACDsee-clone image viewing app. And one the program is installed, what then? You just use it the same way you would on an Ubuntu machine.
I guess what I'm saying is that Ubuntu and Gentoo really aren't that different from each other, and your learning experience with Linux is in no way diminished or enhanced based on the distribution you use. Besides, once you emerge gdm and gnome and make your wallpaper a picture of a bunch of multiracial people getting naked or holding their hands and singing kumbayah, you're pretty much there already.
And yes, before your panties get in a bunch, I am a Gentoo user, mostly because I like how it's basically Slackware with a package management system...(sorry Patrick!)
Parent
Gentoo *DOES* teach the newcomers (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't start my unix experience on Gentoo (FreeBSD, rather) but I do remember what it was like to be completely new to the system.
Things that a complete newbie does not know:
When Gentoo sits you down and says "type this", any curious user will say "hm, what is this, what is it doing..." and learn a little bit in the process. Exercise builds skill. If you see it, you might get a little knowledge, but if you do it, you are actually learning. Kind of the hands-on concept.
I guess the point is that Gentoo is for people who are curious and interested in the workings of Unix. Yes, it is possible to use Gentoo if you pretend that typing some long crazy string corresponds to what would be a button click in another distro, but for that kind of user, there's no point. Non-curious users will simply type keystrokes and learn nothing. and then get fed up. and then quit and use a different distro.
Also, even at the later stage of emerging things, you do still learn various things thanks to "emerge portage", and "etc-update". Also, to get most daemon programs to run as needed you will need to edit their conf files, and play with symlinks, and edit rc.conf, and conf.d and friends. Heck, I never understood the Linux rc script system when I was using Debian, but I learned it pretty quick when Gentoo started changing things and adding boot-time messages like "/etc/hostname is depricated, use /etc/conf.d/hostname instead".
And, when a user finally gets tired of not having sound and tackles ALSA, they get to learn all sorts of fun things like /dev nodes, devfs, udev, modules.conf, lspci, recompiling the kernel with and without alsa built-in, or as a separate module, or as a userspace lib... and I'd better stop here before I start an ALSA flamewar.
And yes, not reading the handbook is suiscide, and the forums are the lifeblood of Gentoo.
Parent
Re:10 days (Score:5, Informative)
Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.
Parent
OH NOES!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy wants everything handed to him, and there are plenty of distros for that. What I don't understand is that he complains about having to RTFM, then he installs Debian. I could have sworn they were the worst offenders for telling noobs to RTFM.
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:5, Funny)
Debian Etch?! Pfft... If you're gonna slack, do it right and use UNBUNTU!
Parent
Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not complicated, just tedious.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Funny)
Heck, it doesn't even have to be that tedious.
From bash.org:
it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
cfdisk
that's the first one
Parent
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Funny)
That was the sound of the grammar nazis marching in to take you for using the wrong accént.
Parent
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it's not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla install with exactly and nothing but the recommended options. But I was doing stuff like that with Linux before there was even a gentoo, just for fun. It is fun, for a certain type of person. But, like masturbation, it's a very personal kind of fun that doesn't contribute anything very useful to society at large. And most normal people really, really don't want to hear the gory details about how you did it and how much fun it was.
Parent
Re:Personality conflicts.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine for a second utilizing a metaphor that makes some sense. What you're talking about is baking a fucking cake, it's an inherently analog process and it responds well to tweaking. Let me use as an even simpler example making pancakes from a box. Do they ever put enough water in the recipe to get it to flow out right? No. But once you've made pancakes a couple times you know what the consistency is supposed to be like.
Computer don't work that way. I'm going to wade out into the dangerous waters and make an automotive analogy here. If you are working on an automatic transmission, you had better get every little piece and part in the right place, and there's TONS of them. For instance, automatic transmissions are chock-full of check valves, which are constructed from a spring and a ball bearing. Eliminate just one of those (the spring, OR the ball bearing) and your transmission doesn't work right.
Well, your distribution is orders of magnitude more complex (in terms of functional units) than an automatic transmission. Do you think that maybe, just maybe the way you put things together might be important?
Anyway, it's a bunch of bullshit, because while I followed the directions to the letter during my very first gentoo install, I have not done so during any subsequent install, and they have all been successful installs. Of course, that's because I know what I'm doing. I've been messing with this Linux shit for a long time now, and always from either a hobbyist or IT perspective. Constant tinkering has a way of teaching you, mostly by negative example :)
The point is that gentoo is intended for a certain class of user. There are other distributions out there. If you don't need the things you can get from gentoo that you can't get anywhere else, run something else. See how easy that was?
Parent
Live CD's, Sissified? (Score:4, Insightful)
___________________
Free iPods? Its legit [wired.com]. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here! [freepay.com]
I'm a former gentoo user (Score:5, Insightful)
Install wasn't my problem.
Maintenance was my problem. As one of the commenters from the article pointed out, you were basically compiling an update constantly. It could be a minor bug fix but if it was in a big package like glibc, it would take a while to compile. You could go about your business, but you noticed it. The next day would bring about another big compile (say, X!?) and on and on it went. The endless cyle of updating. Some would argue that this was a feature of it. Sure, you're always getting the latest of everything. But it was a little bit of a PITA. The worst was when I went away, came back to a LOT of updates. Those updates (during the end of my time on gentoo) started to break things unfortunately. QA went downhill as the distro got too big.
Anyways, I still think gentoo is kewl, with its configurability. However, I've traded some of that control in for maintenance sanity and am currently on Ubuntu for my desktop and debian on my server.
Thanks to the gentoo community for the fun few years. #gentoo was always lively
Re:I'm a former gentoo user (Score:5, Informative)
I just posted a similar set of complaints, but you've touched on one I'd forgotten. The Portage system still works well *if* you're a Gentoo obsessive and emerge sync; emerge -uD world at least once a week. If you get behind, and need to update Portage, layouts, gcc, X and the kernel all at once, you start running into all sorts of really nasty collisions and breakages.
Parent
A few points... (Score:5, Interesting)
2) A lot of the recent headaches (incuding #1) come from the fact that the project is just too damn big. It was a blast during that year or two when Gentoo usage skyrocketed, but the whole developer/support/user system hasn't scaled well.
3) *The* key to installing Gentoo -- unless you really know what you're doing, you need to install some other distro first and copy the xorg.conf, fstab and grub.conf files to use, or at least reference, for your Gentoo install. I can write an fstab by hand, if necessary, but there's no way I could do that for xorg.conf.
I'm preparing to switch to Gentoo, actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
But why the switch?
I've been using Fedora Core and before it Red Hat since version 5 (when I swtiched away from Slackware, for good, it would seem). I like it a lot. Fedora Core, in particular, is a no-brain-necessary sort of Linux. I haven't had to touch a configuration file in god only knows how long.
BUT... It's slow. I've had the inkling that it seemed to make my PIIIM 1.2GHz machine just a bit sluggish for my tastes. Gentoo has tempted me for several years as a result, but I always thought to myself: "Well, for a 10% increase in speed as the result of recompiling an entire system, it's probably not worth it..." I've always built my own kernel with proper CPU optimizations and just left it at that.
Then the other day I stumbled on to Swiftfox (do a Google search), which is basically a set of precompiled Linux Firefox builds for specific CPU architectures. I downloaded the PIII Mobile version and launched it in place of the Fedora Core 5 Firefox build.
WOW. The speed and interactivity benefits sure feel like more than 10%. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but my subjective impression is that Swiftfox is maybe 80% faster than the Fedora Core Firefox build on my personal machine (a Thinkpad T23). It's not just obvious, it's the sort of thing that will make me want to gnash my teeth if I have to go back to the standard Fedora Firefox build.
And now I'm thinking to myself: that's just one app. What about glibc? What about kdebase? X.org? Could I be missing out not on 10% speed gains, but on 40-50% speed gains, or more? I don't know, but I think maybe it's time I dust off my inner geek and find out, and Gentoo seems like the place to do it.
Which fanboy are you? (Score:5, Funny)
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
Parent
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Gentoo for what I guess about 100 days now, and except for me totally screwing something up early on (I think it was the X server) and having to reinstall the entire thing, I've had a good experience with it.
Something you might want to do. Once you get your base system (plus X, KDE/Gnome/whatever) installed, do a stage 4 backup.
Basically, just make a tarball out of your partitions.
If you have to reinstall, just boot off the CD, mount your partitions, chroot, copy the image over and untar it.
Reboot, and you're good to go. Saves a lot of hassle with reinstalls.
Quick, cheap and dirty, but it works well.
Parent
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo definitely is better for those wanting to Learn Linux because it forces you to get into the nitty gritty of a Linux OS setup. I started with Slackware 8 or so and used it through Slack 9, but never really grew comfortable with Linux until I installed Gentoo in 2004 for the first time.
For someone to say it took them 10 hours to install Gentoo is a bit deceiving though. It sounds like a long time but really, most of the time you aren't in front of the monitor. I'd say the longest bit of the whole thing is emerging X and OpenOffice and even today that doesn't take long on a P4 with 2Ghz or better. I did the majority of the work overnight while I slept.
Parent
Re:Exactly! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Gentoo for 2 years now and the only RTFM I've gotten was a 'Read the forums, man'. One quick search on forums.gentoo.org, and the answer was in the second post, spelled out step-by-step. Every problem I've had on any of my Gentoo boxes has been answered on the forums. 95% of the time the answer is already there and you just have to post the error string into the search box.
Either this guy doesn't know Linux as well as he thought, or this story is just trollbait.
Parent