Gentoo Reviewed 438
An anonymous reader writes "Nick Petreley over at LinuxWorld.com gives the uninitiated an excellent view of what the world of Gentoo is like."
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie
My experiences with Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
I've taken the plunge in the last week or so, and totally switched my system over to linux.
I decided to go with gentoo, since one of the things that always annoyed me abour slackware(my second favorite distro) was the package management(or lack thereof), and just the overall annoying process of having to compile dependant packages by hand for every piece of software.
The install process was grueling to say the least, it took me forever to get the kernel compiled properly(gentoo is rather picky about kernels), but once I got the system installed, and waited for kde to emerge, I was impressed to see that things "just worked". When I want a new program all I have to do is 'emerge program', and it is installed, no having to deal with dependancies or lenghty configuration processes
In other words, the install takes forever, and does demand a fair bit of linux knowledge, but the process IS worth it, once you are finished. I find Gentoo to be quite user-friendly(though it may be picky who it's friends are :)), and I would definitly reccomend it to friends.
Novices. (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm...I think that's completely innaccurate. I would say that probably half of the people using Gentoo are novices, and that most of them installed it themselves. This is based on my experiences in #gentoo on freenode, and the forums. The documentation for installation, and other parts of the distro is excellent, which, in turn makes it a trivial issue for anyone to install it provided they aren't afraid of the command line, and can read.
Re:The problem with Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Except you wont notice that salute, because youll be too busy looking at man pages. I ran slack for three years - Gentoo is just superior in my opinion. Most software is available through the ports system. Some builds are buggy but get fixed quickly. Dependency checking is no longer a headache and all software installs in a "locked down" but still usable configuration. The forced optimization via clean compile during install breathes new life into old hardware as long as you get your hardware flags right. The support forums are great and full of pretty damn knowledgable people. I love this distro and wouldn't go back to slack.
I realize Im biting at a troll - but hey Its Saturday . . .
Debian? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just out of curiousity, does emerger also upgrade? If I was upgrading MySQL, would I have to uninstall it first and live without it while recompiling? This sounds rather wasteful...
Re:I loved Gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree. I was a former Mandrake user, and my first distro was Slackware, and even then I can tell you, Gentoo makes you learn everything... maybe not quite as much as LFS, but then again, installign Gentoo is actually not unlike installing LFS. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that Daniel Robbins based the whole project on LFS.
Linux is just plain fun. Sure, it's not great if you need to get a lot of work done, but it's an amazing teaching tool if you want to truly learn computers.
Yeah, I personally use two boxes -- one for tickering with Gentoo and one for production work on Gentoo. So that way I can do some good integration testing before going live with it. Using this system as worked out great for me, especially since the hardware is cheap enough.
Re:Novices. (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo is not for everybody. Some people don't want to tinker with compile settings or kernel configurations at all. But for people who do, it just works. Rarely have I had a problem with an ebuild failing, and even then it was easy to fix. Besides the fact that dependencies are very very well handled.
the dark side of gentoo... (Score:3, Interesting)
Advice for switching wife's computer to Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting back to the story, this morning I asked her what she thought about the "Linux" software she's been using since the crash and she said it's been fine. Of course, she's only been using Evolution and Mozilla AFAIK so that's to be expected. I suggested installing Linux on her machine for good and she said "sure, why not".
I've used Gentoo for a little bit and I'm pretty sure that's the route I want to go. I just finished burning the 1.4RC4 CD and I'm gearing up to install Gentoo this evening and I'm wondering what others do when less computer literate family members start using Linux. Any tips or experiences would be appreciated.
Re:My experiences with Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I could never compile my own kernel under SuSE. For some reason, I could never get it right. All I would get is a near-endless stream of agony out of the boot console, then the whole thing dying in a kernel panic. Not so in Gentoo. Gentoo makes it easy to get a new kernel going, and to try out different versions. When I want to use my Archos Jukebox - hey make sure you compile in IDS-200 support.
However, I must stress Gentoo is not for everyone. Not everyone has time/interest in getting such a distribution going. But you certainly learn a lot more about what is going on in a linux machine.
My boss always says "using a pc is like going to a movie to look at the projector". I guess that is why he uses a Mac...
Re:My experiences with Gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)
And how is this different from Red Hat or Debian when using apt? With apt for rpm or deb you don't have to spend a day compiling OpenOffice or Mozilla. And don't get me started on customized compilations... the performance increase is usually neglible, but you will never recover the time you spent compiling the software.
You also end up with whatever crappy defaults the project maintainers have chosen, BigRedCursor theme in Xfree86 4.3 anyone? Gentoo also has no configuration tools of it's own, just because I've used and mastered samba and iptables for years doesn't mean I want to go editing files or writing complicated rules when my distro can (gasp) do it for me, meanwhile I can hopefully get some real work done.
Go Gentoo! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Gentoo for a few months and absolutely love it. Once you run the gauntlet of installation a few times and get used to where things are setup in the system, then it's smooth sailing from then out.
But I think the best feature of Gentoo has nothing to do with the distribution. It's the legions of enormously helpful folks who hang out on the Gentoo Message Board [gentoo.org]. These folks sacrifice their time to answer all kinds of questions about the distribution. Moreover, they are all polite! It's the most unique thing I've ever seen on the Internet...
I hope that Gentoo becomes more popular, but I also hope that this doesn't disrupt the stellar community behind it as well. Time will tell.
Re:Does anyone knows... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and apt kicks ass.
Portage does too, but I got tired of the compile times, and thus the OS switch.
I've switched to gentoo then off and now returning (Score:2, Interesting)
kde crashed almost daily so I removed suse and put gentoo back on that box. Everything was great and I decided to ditch win2000 for gentoo.
The install was hell as always and things went fine untill I tried to get alsa support for my sbLive going. I fought with it for 3 days before deciding to try the newly released suse 8.2.
Suse install was great but there is too much installed by default. Divx and DVD movies both skip during playback. They don't on the same hardware under windows, and they didn't under gentoo way back.
So today I'm prepairing to install gentoo on this box again. Hopefully with the new rc4 the hardware detection is improved a little and I can get the sound working.
(the sb live works for thousands of gentoo users so it has to be something I'm doing that is causing it to fail)
Anyways, I love the portage system. If someone would make a nice gui installer for gentoo I'd be loving life.
Further note (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
As a disclaimer, I don't use LFS or Sorceror/Lunar, so this information is deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.
Gentoo and its community (Score:3, Interesting)
Excellent view? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I don't think the article did a fair job describing the Gentoo philosophy. Having widely sampled flavors of linux and bsd, I found the installation process to be most similar to that of OpenBSD. It is commandline all the way. Which is good for me, because I don't really go for the eyecandies of a GUI installation (they make me dizzy). And after the basic install, what you get is much similar to the base system you get after the openbsd install: a system that boots, can access the network, with some simple tools.
I think the main reason Gentoo won me over was the portage system. After having used the BSD ports system, I found the concept very pleasurable. the gentoo emerge is truly wonderful, it solves the dependency issue with source compiles automatically, while still allowing the control over compilation options.
A note about the compilation time though. Whereas a typical compile of KDE or GNOME would take forever (a whole day and some on my P4 2Ghz), Gentoo recently started the Gentoo Refernce Platform, with certain packages offered in binary form. Mostly the packages that would take a long time to compile.
Also on the analogy to Debian's stable v. unstable versions, I don't think the article was quite correct in saying that Gentoo has "one branch". By using the "~ARCH" keyword in the configuration, Gentoo allows the using to emerge from packages still in testing, not unlike Debian's unstable branch. There were quite a few packages that were only available in the unstable branch (until recently), one example that I remember is bittorrent. And for many packages present in the stable branch, the unstable branch is, as its name suggests, a few releases more up to date.
And I don't think Gentoo was a release "designed for geeks only". The forums often give wonderful aid to newbs, and the documentation pretty much let you do everything with a step by step instruction if you so choose. As for the complaint about etc-update, personally I found the software very self-explanatory, and it is basically just a script that searches the directories for updates to config files and offer you the option of running sdiff on the old and the new (which, incidentally, I've been doing for 5 months by hand before discovering etc-update).
The only complaint, after running Gentoo for 7 months, is the occasionally lack of packages. But given that it is a relatively new distro, it really isn't all that surprising that some items that I would find helpful do not come in nice little ebuild scripts. I guess I could go and contribute by writing my own...
But all in all, I think that to truly appreciate/understand the experience, the only way is to install Gentoo yourself and try it out.
W
Re:Text incase of Slashdotting (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, an article on Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)
carmack likes it too (Score:5, Interesting)
What did Gentoo Do? (Score:5, Interesting)
But now that machine runs redhat......
Why?
Because one day I wanted a new version of something and did the usual gentoo "emerge -pretend" to find out what was going to be updated and it was only the package I wanted and a couple other things. Cool.
But in the meantime I'd made and eaten supper and when I did the "emerge" for real, suddenly I discovered it was suddenly "emerging" a whole bunch of packages. Including glibc and kdebase and who knows what else.
Worse yet, the emerge failed partway along and I suddenly discovered that because it had changed glibc that suddenly a bunch of stuff did not work any more. Including nice things like "find".
And emerge itself.
I spent about a day trying to fix this and concluded it was going to take a complete reinstall of gentoo - but I had redhat on cd so just went with that.
Since then I've found myself wanting to go back to gentoo a couple of times. And I think I will in a bit - but not until I have the inner strength.
But what was the biggest draw of gentoo? If a package had been ported to gentoo, "emerge package" would install it. And (lacking the need to completely reinstall glibc and kdebase and....) it would almost invariably work the first time and work well. Neither debian nor redhat (with its rpm hell - "You are stuck in a maze of twisty little developer rpms - all alike - but incompatible") have ever managed to do it quite that well.
Hmmm, maybe tomorrow will be a good time to install gentoo again....
Re:Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gentoo, on the other hand, while it takes some work, is simple to set up and doesn't have the same complexity to the install interface (because it lacks one).
And to answer your question, emerge upgrades as well. You can simply type emerge [programname] or emerge -u [programname] to upgrade to the latest version, the -u flag also updating every dependency to the latest. No need to remove first.
Easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My experiences with Gentoo (Score:2, Interesting)
> without upgrading anything, to get those 2 days back?
it's a preference thing. Since the compilation (generally) just finishes it's self in the background (and if it doesn't, it's generally my fault for using insanely aggressive compilation flags) you don't really use that time - just start emerge kde before you go to bed - when you get back from work it'll prolly be done.
also - you shoudn't underestimate some of the optomizations, such as -fpmath=sse - which uses sse for all the floating point math on the system, instead of the ancient, slow, x387 instructions. with my opmizations, I laugh at people who call kde slow
actually tried to steer a noob to RH the other day (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
This used to be true; Debian focussed so heavily on stability that it trailed the bleeding edge by several years. But thanks to unofficial apt sources (which are now surprisingly common) it's possible for your servers to be stable and your desktops to be bleeding edge.
For example, I'm an exclusive Debianite now running Evolution 1.2.4, Galeon 1.3.4, XFree86 4.3.0, Nautilus 2.2.3.1, etc. I haven't had to compile a package for my desktop since dumping Slackware back in 1994. Not regretting it for a moment.
Package granularity (Score:3, Interesting)
What I mean is: let's say you're installing KDE and you "emerge" kdeutils. There are lots of applications in that package, but let's say that I only want konsole and a couple of others. Is there an easy way to specify that?
I know that other distros (RedHat, at least) aren't much better in that area, but I use Conectiva at home, and it has a very fine grained package setup. That's one of the things I like about it (aside from the fact that it has a few tweaks that makes it better to use with Brazilian Portuguese).
For instance, I can install only konsole, and only konsole's documentation in Brazilian portuguese. Each single application has its own package and its own documentation packages (one for each language for which it's available). I think that's very cool. Add that to the fact that apt is the standard package manager, and it's a very pleasant system to maintain.
"rpm -qa | grep konsole" brings up:
kde-i18n-fr-docs-kdebase-konsole-3.1.1-26675
konsole-3.1.1-28534cl
So, back to the question: is it possible to do something like that with Gentoo?
Re:The problem with Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Quite frankly, Slack packages usually install flawlessly and almost always very quickly. I'm willing to sacrifice a small percentage of speed for the convenience of getting my software (even the stuff I compile) installed quickly. I don't want to wait a day or two to try something.
Slackware is aptly named; it's for people who want things to work simply and without a lot of effort. I've tried Gentoo and though some features are impressive, it tries my patience. I for one am sticking with Slack on my home box _and_ my servers at work.
Your mileage may vary of course, just pointing out that Slack doesn't require a bigger investment of time (far less in fact) than Gentoo.
Gentoo and Debian (Score:4, Interesting)
Gentoo, on the other hand, will give you the latest stuff without problems. You won't have dependency problems like you can have on Debian due to strange package mixes. When you install stuff from 5 unofficial sources you end running into trouble sooner or later.
Oh, and here's a hint if you're thinking about upgrading your hardware and installing Gentoo. Get a dual CPU motherboard. It's not *that* expensive, and it more than compensates the increased cost with great stability and smoothness. I have a dual Athlon MP 2000+ and don't notice that the system is compiling at all. And KDE emerges in about 4 hours.
Re:amazingly, the world of gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Gentoo every day, and have been for over a year now. I definitely noticed a tangible difference when I installed it on my laptop (which, at the time, was a PII 266 - yes I'm patient
I have seen a number of other *tangible* performance differences. I'm not saying I doubt that your benchmarks didn't show any differences; I'm just saying that a few benchmarks can't be used to draw the kind of sweeping conclusion you did.
As for stability, I more or less agree, but Gentoo (like most distros) do sometimes have their own custom patches for certain packages, that *could* potentially increase stability. But in general I don't think stability is particularly great in Gentoo; it seems stable to me (I tend to get 100-day or greater uptimes, rebooting only for kernel upgrades, etc. and not due to crashes), just like most other Linux distros I've used.
Re:Why I like gentoo.. (Score:3, Interesting)
1: Debian is really good for server admins who don't want to bother editing their config files a lot.
2: Debian Stable, however, is not all it's cracked up to be.
I switched a long-time Debian system (it started as Slink... then went to Potato... then to Woody) over to Gentoo because I encountered something that should never exist in a "stable" tree: A stable package depending on an unstable one.
Namely, sendmail. Sendmail would crash on run, unless you have Glibc 2.3 installed, which is in Unstable. Attempting to go to unstable to get Glibc 2.3, caused apt to crash when it was trying to parse the new package list. (Probably my fault, though it works just FINE in stable @_@)
Out of absolute frustration, I switched to postfix... then switched distros shortly thereafter. Mainly because the box got upgraded from a P-166 to a P3-600... but I'd wanted to reload that box for a while.
The switch, of course, was not painless: I had grown too accustomed to point #1, and did not really know how to configure the services the box was running manually. I do _now_, thanks to Gentoo forcing me to learn it.
In the end:
Debian is an easy, (usually) server friendly distribution with a superior package management system (compared to RPM, the person who suggested that the way to avoid dependency hell was to specify both packages on the command line either hasn't dealt with enough RPMs yet, or knows more than I do)
Gentoo is a not-quite-as-easy, enthusiast distribution that is very good at making a fully optimized system a reality, with an easily expansive package system (ever tried to make a
And with 1 good binary distro, and 1 good source distro, who could ask for anything more?
Can you do similar with SRPMs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Might is be as simple as a query to give a listing of what is installed piped into a rebuild of the SRPM files piped into an upgrade (or freshen) command with the force option because the version numbers will be the same? IE, all done mostly with the RPM command itself probably inside your favourite scripting language?
Obviously this applies to any RPM based distos I didn't mention and potentially applies to other package formats that distribute in binary + source variants.
Re:The problem with Gentoo (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, I must be missing something. Every so often I read something like this, and I think, "I'll give Slackware another try, maybe in this new version things work better".
What am I missing? I can't install things easily at all - I have the same stupid problem that I've always had - you want to install package X? You better go download packages Y and Z. Oh, but Z depends on A and B. You have B, but it's not new enough. Can you upgrade it? Maybe. What if C depends on the old B? How do you know? Do you upgrade B or install the newer one along side of the old one?
Confused? So was I, so I never get very far with Slackware. I hated RPM-based distros for this game too, until I found urpmi [linux-mandrake.com] for Mandrake. Yeah, it comes with it, and it's like apt-get for RPMS. I would have used Debian because it handles all of this too, but I was already used to RPMs and Mandrake, and once I found urpmi, I was set.
What is so appealing about Slackware? Maybe it makes a good server distribution where you keep track of everything you install, and you never install much, so you don't need to worry about this. I just never understood it.
Using Slackware, to me, is like having to think about salivating before you eat, so the food doesn't stick in your throat. Who wants to micro-manage things like that unless it's a mission critical server? (Which may be the only place Slackware makes sense...).
Does anyone have an answer to this?