Gentoo Linux Announces Gentoo Linux 2004.1 377
Keppy writes "The departure of Daniel Robbins hasn't dented the progress of Gentoo Linux with version 2004.1 being released. ... please support Gentoo by purchasing something from the online store. The Gentoo homepage also has a short message about the future of Gentoo Linux now that Daniel has left. ' Robbat2 writes with an excerpt from the linked announcement:
"Please consult our
mirror index for download
locations and the
Gentoo Linux Installation Handbook
for detailed installation
instructions. Support for Gentoo Linux 2004.1 can be found through our
user community by way of the Gentoo Forums,
IRC, and various
community mailing-lists.
Release notes for each architecture
can be found linked from the
Gentoo Linux Release Engineering project page."
Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and here (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Interesting)
emerge is as easy for me as apt-get was, and the only difference is I have to be patient with long builds. For me, thats a "so what" ?
I'd personally rather wait during the install, than wait while the machine is supposed to be running.
And while I am not a linux newbie, I certainly am no guru (yet
Anyhow, whatever *nix one chooses, it handily beats Windoze over the head except for gaming. *sigh*
Linux on THE desktop? Linux is on MY desktop.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Informative)
And hardware support... The only reason my laptop is still running XP is that my wireless card refuses to run.
After a bit of hunting it seems that the problem is an IRQ conflict between the inbuilt LAN card (which cant be disabled in the BIOS) and the IRQ that the PCMCIA tries to grab when initializing the card.
The card works in windows without a hitch.
I dare say that someone with skills beyond mine in Linux could probably get it working, but for now im stuck in windows, as are most of the computer using population.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, library versioning could be better (Score:2)
Agreed. Portage should handle clean, depclean and unmerge better, particularly for libraries. A good start would be a version of etcat that shows me what version of libfoo appbar is linked against and what versions of libfoo are installed and available on the portage tree... hmmm... come to think of it, sounds like a project for me....
Re:Yeah, library versioning could be better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is one thing I really love about gentoo. Especially if you're a newbie to linux (I wasn't, but I like you, was certainly no master). Following the installation guide that gentoo provides was a very educational experience for me. Not only does it tell you step by step what to do to get your system up and running, it tells you WHY you're doing it. I was very impressed with the instructions. Oh, and when I ran into any problems at all, their forums had the answer, and when they didn't have the answer, someone responded to my post within a matter of a couple hours, and had the solution to my question.
-matt
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:4, Interesting)
the more or less manual install, coupled with the very good documentation and guides, helped me grow acustomed to linux more than I had by just using it through shell accounts or on friend's boxes
the full immersion that comes with its install is a learning experience that can't be beat, and when help is needed there are docs, forums, and irc -- and let me say the irc (imo) is one of the best ways to learn
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:4, Funny)
On topic when replying to this guy and still funny after all this time ... I've got the Karma to burn on the troll mods :)
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-maticGentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes and leprotards who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -O9 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Flamebait)
It would be funnier if it wasn't so true...
I do find that emerge is a wonderful tool for installing with, however, I think they still need to do some work on the installation guide... I managed to get my gentoo box up running KDE and SAMBA (+some other stuff I require) but, the lack of a decent troubleshooting guide, and my relative inexperience with how Linux actually DOES what it does, means that I'm buggered if I can get the sound to work in an X session.
Still, my philosophy is 'This is how we learn'
Help is an IRC channel away. (Score:5, Interesting)
Very helpfull people there. Base install of Gentoo comes with "irssi" IRC client that you can hook up to right from the install CD. Ask your question (no need to ask "can I ask a question") and try to be as specific as you can.
Now, this IS an IRC channel so you might run into a few knuckleheads there, but be patient and you WILL be helped. The people there are very well versed and many of the OPs are themselves Gentoo developers and they know the system. They will help.
I go there to help also. It's my small way of giving something back to the community as I'm not a developer, but I can try to help others.
Most people are very patient there, but if you're asking a question that's plainly right in the install guide, they'll direct you to that usually.
Don't be a jerk there and you'll do fine. Others I've seen log into the channel and go "this sucks, I can't get this and this working...Gentoo sucks...I can't do anything". Then when no one responds in about 20 seconds they shout "how come no one wants to help me...this sucks". And on and on. Some people are beyond help it seems...and not for just and OS install either, hehe.
Re:Help is an IRC channel away. (Score:3, Interesting)
But then again, some people don't feel they're ever helped it seems. I'm not saying you're one of them of course, but some don't have the patience.
It is free by the way. I've found #gentoo an enormous help when I was first installing my system. They helped me get everything up and running and pointed out certain areas I would need to look more into etc etc. I was amazed at how helpfull.
But I understand you can't please everyone all the time. Al
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
Obviously, it's bad RPM Juju to mix and match RPMs from different distributions. As long as you stick with RPMs built for your specific release of
Re:One more thing (Score:5, Informative)
um..if you knew anything about Gentoo then you would know that it doesn't touch configuration files, if there is a new config file it will rename the NEW file as something like
After the emerge it will tell you that some files config files need to be looked at, a simple:
find
will give you a list of the config files that need updating. Yes. Gentoo even informs you how to find these files. and nice big fat: "use 'emerge --help config' message is staring you right in the face if any new config files need updating.
This isn't something you can just bypass. Nice try. But please, give us a little credit if you're going to make something up!
Re:One more thing (Score:5, Informative)
find
Actually, you can also do:
'etc-update'
This will walk you through the config files that need to be updated, and let you decide whether you want to accept the changes wholesale, discard the changes, or manually merge them in (it will even show you the differences between old and new).
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Informative)
This is the only reason I switched all servers where I work over to gentoo. We need some special builds and such. I don't have time to download/compile by hand. Of all distros I have used Gentoo is the easiest to maintain and keep up to date.
It would be nice with a more enterprise geared gentoo though. It is very fast with upgrades to new packages, might break something. Doesn't happen often but if it does it's often easy to fix.
For the desktop there is no competition. Gentoo is the easiest "bleeding edge distro" to maintain. Alot of unstable packages to test out. And no need to go fully unstable if you only need a few packages.
Now I have about 10 different gentoo boxes at work to take care of. Every friday it takes about an hour of work to upgrade them. Could probably handle 20-30 with not much more time spent.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
Certain things don't allow you to do that (ut2004-demo being the worst) because they are writing to the disk a whole lot, or something else. However, the things like that are rather few and far between.
Stages are more flexible than that! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a stager script that I've hacked the bejeezus out of and configured to generate 2.6-headered NPTL systems that are fully optimized, even though the installs start at stage3. I've got flowcharts and stuff to keep track of the 'stage evolution'
here's my process, IIRC:
1. have working gentoo system with stager and a stage1 snapshot.
2. emerge sync
3. unmask or modify certain
3. stager snap $DATE-custom
4. stager athlon-xp 2 stage1 $DATE-custom
5. stager athlon-xp 1 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
6. clean out temp files in
7. stager athlon-xp 2 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
8. stager athlon-xp 3 $DATE-custom $DATE-custom
so now you've got a fully-native NPTL stage1 to build other stages from and a fully-native stage3 ready to install.
My actual system is a lot more complex, as I build a 'generic i686' stage1 and then fork off to Pentium3 ad Athlon-XP builds for my different machines. I've also got a totally seperate stage geneology for the PPC build, but they all share the portage snapshots and configs for consistency.
MOD THIS DOWN (Score:2)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:2)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:5, Informative)
In short, here are some negative things to keep in mind:
In turn, here are some more (and some repeated from the parent post) good points from my view:
Gentoo is for the computer user who likes to customize his environment and have control and know what is what. If you just want to 'use' your computer, go get Mandrake or Fedora or Windows. If you like
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Informative)
Problems come up on their own. Since programs are compiled and linked against each other and many libraries, when versions change, problems can arise in certain setups, especially new ones.
For the first one, Gentoo also offers pre-build Mozilla binaries for you to use. dont know what compile flags
switching to Gentoo (Score:3, Informative)
Up until then, I'd had some control over 7 boxen running RedHat, mostly RH8. I never moved to RH9 because I didn't like the emerging direction. Starting to cast about for a new distribution, I began to realize that I was thinking of support for family, etc, and not *fun*.
My dual-boot work laptop now runs Gentoo, as does my second (up and coming) server. Other systems are waiting for me to get more comfortable, and for the various nForce2 patches to stabilize
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Informative)
Gentoo is built from source code. This means it can take an entire weekend (Friday night included) to get a system built... Yeah, no kidding. I was a bit suspicious about build times because often when someone jokes "this days days to compile" they mean "it took a long time" which could mean anything. Here's a real stat for newbies: I had a P2/450/384mb RAM, took a little over 8 hours (including reading manual, fixing mistak
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:2)
If you do this, perhaps people will be able to give helpful advice.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:3, Interesting)
Removing even MORE (Score:3, Informative)
I disable a few packages from the 'recommended set' before I snapshot the tree and start building.
Re:Gentoo is one of the best linux distribs, and h (Score:2)
Ever hear of loading modules on boot, like in, say, /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf (for 2.6 kernels)?
One word: RTFM!
News or Commercial? (Score:3, Insightful)
Things of note... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) It's good to see that the DR announcement has not changed anything in terms of release schedule, and the job they did setting up the hierarchy seems to be working very well.
3) At least one mirror has a file claiming to be 2005.1. While Gentoo is great, I don't think that it's being delivered from the future. (At least not yet.
4) The minimal CD is still only 82MB!
5) Slashdot, could Gentoo get its own icon? It's here [gentoo.org]. Thanks!
Re:Things of note... (Score:2)
You never know with Gentoo. IIRC, Gentoo advertised a 2.4.19 kernel when the latest stable was 2.4.18.
In related news, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In related news, (Score:4, Funny)
PAY ATTENTION MODERATORS (Score:2, Flamebait)
This is not a troll. Here, let me explain this joke so the humor impaired can figure it out. Debian released in the next ice age, Microsoft postponing the ice age.
Is this a deliberate abuse of the moderation system, or just the result of the moderation work by an idiot who never should have had mod points?
The scary part is that this is the kind of thing which tends to just get clicked off affirmatively during metamoderation. "Looks like the usual anti-M$ diatribe to m
Re:In related news, (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In related news, (Score:4, Funny)
( no offense, use debian, love debian )
Steve
Hooray for Gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Give it a go. (Score:5, Informative)
The documentation is brilliant, and all the defaults for the packages are sensible, and well thought out.
When I install a box, I do it at about 4pm. Give it 30 mins to configure, and install a new kernel, reboot, and leave it to emerge -u world ; emerge kde mozilla overnight.
Couple of things though - emerge ufed, and gentoolkit - ufed is a gui for editting USE flags, and gentoolkit contains qpkg.
A very brief doc I knocked up is here [umtstrial.co.uk]. It's probably slightly out of date by now, but you get the idea.
Re:Give it a go. (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't have a previous installation of Mandrake, Red Hat or something like that, you should consider doing one before the Gentoo install. Their partitioning tools are easier than raw fdisk, especially if you want to resize a Linux partition. (Reformat them, though, for the Gentoo install.) Again, save those config files!
Re:Give it a go. (Score:2)
The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:5, Insightful)
-m
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:2)
To the left is Gentoo (running 2004.1) on an Athlon XP 3200+ w/ 1Gb of RAM (my main workstation), to the right, Debian unstable on an Athlon XP 2800+ w/ 512Mb of RAM (currently in the middle of an apt-get dist-upgrade, and downloading what seems to be lots of KDE packages).
Meanwhile, I'm downloading FreeBSD 5.2.1 for my little router. So what does that make me?
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:5, Funny)
moving to Inferno because Plan 9 is getting too mainstream.
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:3, Insightful)
For a m
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:2)
Very insightful. The holy wars within the GNU/Linux world are as isometric as they are endless. Use a soulless federation like Debian, a commercial sellout like SuSE or RedHat, or a lovingly crafted, wisely designed, endlessly upgradable, feel at home source distribution like Gentoo. I leave it up to you!
Re:The Gentoo "geek-factor" (Score:3, Informative)
Upgrade (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
And you're done.
Upgrading is not needed (Score:4, Informative)
To me the greatest benefit of Gentoo is this: I do not need to blow a machine clean and install a new version or risk a lot with an uncertain install of large packages, I just gradually update my system as new versions become available!
And contrary to popular belief, Gentoo is pretty "user friendly" since it allows "on the fly updating". But this is of course once you actually have your system working flawlessly to begin with..
Re:Upgrading is not needed (Score:2)
How is that different to every other distribution under the sun?
Re:Upgrading is not needed (Score:2)
I set up my home PC using a 1.4rc CD, but at work, I tried the "Knoppix install". You use a Knoppix CD (which is handy to have around anyway) to boot up, and set up your partitions. Then, you download the Stage 1 tarball from Gentoo, get the portage tools set up, and emerge the rest of your system. An advantage is that you can play games
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
Re:How to upgrade... (Score:2)
And using a global keywords upgrade won't work since there are many packages that won't even compile without certain tweaks
about that departure (Score:5, Insightful)
Robbins anounced his departure.. what.. last monday ?? Ofcourse his departure didn't affect the release... it was already finished !
And Robbins hopes to continue working on the release engineering aspect of Gentoo...
Drobbins' store (Score:2, Interesting)
-Not that he hasn't done alot to deserve the money. But If your trying to support the community that supports gentoo you may want to wait untill the NFP community is actually created instead of funding the departing founder.
Re:Drobbins' store (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Drobbins' store (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, Daniel will retain royalty-free rights to use of the "Gentoo" trademark and the "G" logo, allowing him to continue him to run the Gentoo Store if he wants, in order to support his family and attempt to pay some of the $20,000 in debt he accumulated during his tenure as Chief Architect.
I think Drobbins deserves every penny that can be squeezed from the Gentoo store and then some. Thanks Daniel.
Upgrade (Score:4, Informative)
#emerge sync
#emerge -DUu world
(oh and upgrading to the latest kernel that will be in
Could someone confirm or deny?
Not a good idea... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not a good idea... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
emerge -UD world
and you can and should do this whenever you want. The releases really are just for the install CDs. Gentoo is constantly evolving and updating. An emerge -UD will always bring you up to date. I would suggest doing this first though:
emerge -UDpv
This will display the ebuilds that will be updated and their use flags whether on or off. For critical packages I would emerge them seperately. I would also always follow with a run through etc-update to be sure your config
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
Re:Upgrade (Score:3, Informative)
For the OP, emerge -upv world to see what will be upgraded, and then do an emerge -uv world to actually upgrade it (or you can upgrade only the packages you want to upgrade from the list).
emerge -up
Re:Upgrade (Score:2)
I always use "Uu" as is supresses the warning that U implies u.
Best Gentoo Utility! (Score:5, Informative)
for my money - overrated (Score:2)
The system it built for me wasn't noticably faster than my old Slackware install. It certainly wasn't worth the pain of the build process.
Gentoo worked just fine, but in the end I decided I preferred my old "home grown" Slackware setup because I already knew where everything was and how it all fitted together, so I dug out the tape and went ba
Re:for my money - overrated (Score:2)
I agree that unless you use prelinking the system won't be noticably faster than any other distro. And prelinking won't help all packages at that.
I can't argue against using something that's firmilar but if you know what you're doing, if you've used one distro you've used them all. If you think that compiling everything from tarballs and solving dependancy problems on your own is
Re:for my money - overrated (Score:2)
And 'emerge program' is easier than your world. It will:
a) Check and install all dependencies of 'program'
b) Unpack the source, run configure, make and install the 'program' for you.
c) Portage allows you to have several versions of a program installed due to it's use of slots.
Not beeing a Gentoo zealot, but I don't see how your argument is valid.
etc-update (Score:3, Informative)
IMPORTANT!!!!: make damn sure you know what you are doing before running etc-update!!!! It is very easy to bork your system if you're not paying attention. Read the manpage and check with the forums before using it.
Gentoo vs. Slackware (Score:4, Informative)
I literally just moved my home computer from Slackware 9.1 to Gentoo 2004.0 last week (ok, over the course of the last week!) and I have to say that it is indeed the slickest Linux distribution I have ever used!
I still run Slackware 9.1 on my laptop, which has 5/3 the memory and a CPU twice as fast as my home computer - but my new Gentoo box actually runs about TWICE as fast!! It's amazing how compiling everything w/ -O3 and -march=XXX really makes a huge difference. Last night I was simultaneously compiling OpenOffice, Evolution and Gimp, with no slowdown at all in my web browzing, development, etc!
Also, nvidia, sound, FB, kernel 2.6.5 worked the first time, plus it has thousands of packages to download (everything I need), and boots faster than Windows did on my faster machine (by ~8-15 seconds, depending on my readings).
One more thing - Portage is even more user-friendly than downloading *.tgz from linuxpackages.net and running installpkg. It searches for the right version from various mirrors, then downloads, does MD5 checking, and compiles automatically, and maintains a nifty little log, and checks for all dependencies. Also - it provides the most freedom I've seen in a distribution - nothing I don't need or want is installed. Getting evolution to be optimized to my machine is just a matter of typing "# emerge evolution"
Gentoo is indeed fan-freaking-tastic (if you have the patience to compile everything from scratch).
A. Coward
Re:Gentoo vs. Slackware (Score:2)
Not mentioned yet, or often around here (Score:2, Interesting)
There have been lots of issues over the past few months regarding improper (too hasty and with too little testing) moving of pacakges from ~x86 to x86. This often results in pacakges that will not compile cleanly in the stable branch for all users.
There was a hide
Karma Whoring (Score:3, Funny)
"Update your system with 'emerge sync' and then 'emerge -DUu world'"
and
"Don't forget to run etc-update after you upgrade; that way you can merge any changes to the config files in
I figured I'd take part in some karma whoring of my own: GENTOO IS A LINUX DISTRO!!! omg!!!!!! I bet you DIDN'T KNOW THAT!!!
Now give me my fucking karma.
Ready for production? (Score:2)
Is anyone using Gentoo in a server farm in a production environment? That's always been one of the strengths of Debian's stable release. You can run your servers for years at a time and never have an update break ANYTHING. Has Gentoo reached this level of stability yet or is it more of a bleeding edge kind of distro?
Gentoo is not for everyone... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some Gentoo developers just seem to release stuff without thoroughly testing it out. Here's some examples just from my own experiences over the last 2 months:
Gentoo can be a very cool distro if you're willing to put up with the annoyances of (IMHO) a somewhat muddled and slipshod update-release process.
Gentoo is pretty damned good (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that, or deciding to install OpenBox as the Window Manager, and then having pure simplicity itself on my desktop as opposed to KDE or Gnome.
It has brought new life to my old HP Omnibook laptop, now 6 years old at least. Of course it was hell installing it, even with a Stage 3 install. The laptop was previously running Mandrake with Blackbox, and would run out of memory all the time (160MB installed) even without running much. Gentoo, by being custom all the way, means that I have memory spare, enough to run Apache and Postgresql and have a little portable web development machine.
The only thing that is scaring me is that I have just emerge -DUu world, and something has downloaded the kernel 2.4.21 headers when I have kernel 2.6.5 on my machine. I did emerge -pv world first as well, and this was not indicated, grrr.
Odd Timing... (Score:3, Informative)
"New" as in a reformat and repurposing of a venerable rack-mount. My email server moved to a new box and this one is becoming a firewall. All of my production machines are running Gentoo.
Yes it's crazy. But I k#0\/\/ w#@t 1m d01#% +0 C##p fr0# 831n% 0wnd.
Re:Am already there! (Score:3, Interesting)
emerge -uvD system
emerge -uvD world
etc-update
Re:Am already there! (Score:2)
Re:Am already there! (Score:2)
Further: Not using the -p switch to see what will be installed during your updates is probably a bad idea, though blindly doing an update is better than not doing updates at all... Certainly the official documentation suggests that you use the pretend flag to check dependencies. This will also tell you if somehow something you need for upgrading has been masked and cannot be updated.
Re:Am already there! (Score:3, Interesting)
Gentoo on dialup means regular updates unless you want to end up in download hell.
For current Gentoo users, no need to "upgrade" (Score:2)
"emerge sync && emerge -UDvp world"
once a day, or once every other day or so (not more than this, once daily should be enough, if you do it more it could slow down the rsync servers...don't be greedy).
You do this a few times a week and you've GOT the up-to-date Gentoo already. The "Gentoo Linux 2004.1" is mainly a new version for the install CD's.
And I've also been using Gentoo since about last October and haven't looked back. It's kinda cool since I built this system from sc
Re:For current Gentoo users, no need to "upgrade" (Score:2)
Re:Awww crap! (Score:2)
This lets you take advantage of both the speed of a binary install and a base system that's been optimized for your cpu class.
Re:autoupdate (Score:2)
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:2)
where you can do the installation yourself, but any environment that supports
the network and chroot should work just fine (any live-cd or installed
linux partition should work just fine).
I have, in the past, installed an old minimal version of RedHat just to get an
environment to install Gentoo from when I couldn't boot off of a CD. Does anyone
know of a boot floppy that supports chrooting (Tom's didn't when I tried)?
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:2)
I'm looking for a boot floppy specifically because I have several
machines that have floppy drives, but either don't have a CD drive or
can't boot off of it.
Re:Does it still have the same installer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Enterprise Systems require a modicum of competence (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps not, but if one is a competent admin, one can quickly put together a python (or [insert your favorite scripting language here]) script to automate these tedius steps in response to a few quick questions posed at the start of the script.
That is what I did when we deployed Gentoo enterprise-wide for my employer. (Maintaining your own sync server, frozen to your enterprise's tested and vetted state, is also a wise thing to do. Still vastly more managable, flexible, and easy to keep up to date than any other distro I've come across, and over the years since my first pre-distro use of Linux back in '93 that is more than I care to count).
Re:Removing packages? (Score:2)
Oh crap...
Re:Removing packages? (Score:2)
emerge unmerge gcc
Might not be the best idea on a Gentoo system...
Re:Gentoo unrealistic for production environments (Score:4, Informative)
So only update when there is a security or stability fix that effects you.
You should have very few packages on a server. (For me it's (Apache, SSHD, mod_php) or (SSHD, postgres) or (SSHD, OpenLDAP, Courier))
So maintain a local portage tree and build binary packages for distribution across your server farm. You only need to build each package once. You could even set up distcc [gentoo.org] if you expect to have spare cycles on some of your servers
Is there a way in Debian or commercial distros to tell Qt to compile with support for Postgres or MySQL so you can install Rekall on your desktops (without recompiling it manually)? Is there a way to tell Courier whether or not to include support for OpenLDAP, MySQL, or Postgres?