Gentoo 2005.0: A Live CD And [No] Graphical Installer

Sunsetbeach writes "zdnet.co.uk reports in this article that 'The next version of Gentoo, 2005.0, will also include a graphical installer that will allow users to automatically install the same set-up of Gentoo on multiple machines, according to Gianelloni.' " The article distinguishes the upcoming live disk from the (available) Gentoo Live CD; the new one will contain a fully functioning system ala Knoppix. Update: 11/30 23:09 GMT by M : Gentoo now has a clarification posted; the next Gentoo release will not have a graphical installer, although it is planned for the future.

gentoo already has a graphical installer

[DAC1138]

ummm, vida linux is gentoo with a graphical installer. i fail so see how the next 2005 release will be any different from vida.

http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/

Just some clarification...

[sbennett]

What's planned for 2005.0 is an experimental test release of the new graphical installer. It'll be there for people who want to test it, but don't go relying on the thing.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Zork the Almighty]

I first switched to Gentoo because the bloody fonts "just worked". How sad is that. On a serious note, the user base is one major reason to stick with Gentoo. There is always excellent help and support in the forums, and snobby attitudes are kept in check.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[adam.skinner]

You'll see pretty much any Linux distro use a "full gig" of RAM just running KDE if you let it sit long enough. It's how linux manages memory.

Re:gentoo already has a graphical installer

[sbennett]

Last I knew, Vida used a hacked up version of Anaconda to install the gentoo base system. The Gentoo installer will install with portage. That's quite a difference.

Disclaimer: I haven't used either, so I might be slightly inaccurate on the details.

Re:not just the graphical installer.

[sbennett]

so I could still idle on IRC and such

You know, the 2004.3 livecds (or at least the x86 and amd64 ones) do include irssi for that...

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's called filesystem cache.

What about post-install management?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will admit I still haven't RTFA, but has the Gentoo crew fixed what is my biggest beef with their distro, i.e. the regular smashing of un-identified configuration files?

I mean, I can accept that various configuration files get overwritten when you upgrade stuff through Portage, but that you are (ok, _were_, as it has been a few moons since I used Gentoo) kept in the dark as to what has been nuked does not help me to keep a system running smoothly unless I spend time to track down and re-modify what was smashed back into default values or whatever by Portage.

I will admit I am going from memory here, but this is 2004, people, and it should not be a painfully involved process to keep a system running & tuned after it is installed. I should not have to spend time trying to identify changed configuration files and whatnot, I have better things to do with my life.

Or maybe I never understood how Gentoo worked. But having dealt with various flavours of *nix since my Ultrix-on-{micro}VAX days, I think I have somewhat of a clue on how to manage a *nix system. And yet, with Gentoo, I saw my system become more and more discombobulated due, as far as I could perceive it, to bad config. (Clue stick welcome, here, if I am out to lunch about this.)

So, back to my initial question/gripe, have the Gentoo crew worked at making post-install management of the box saner?

There is only one problem...

[wolf31o2]

Ingrid took the things I said completely out of context and ran with them.

At no point did I ever tell her that we would have a graphical installer on 2005.0's release media. I also did not tell her that the 2005.0 release would be a Knoppix-style LiveCD, as it will, in fact, be exactly like the 2004.3 release with the Minimal, Universal, and Packages CD images.

What I did tell her is that we will have an experimental LiveCD with our first limited functionality beta of the installer, which will most likely be curses-based only and not have any enterprise-ready features available for use.

This is exactly why you demand to have interviews done via email and not the phone, especially when speaking with someone from another country, and be sure to ask to proof read the article for accuracy before it prints.

Re:In related news,

[big ben bullet]

If I see one more of this In Korea.... I'm going to add it to the slashdot subculture on wikipedia!

In fact it's already available on wikipedia ...In Japan [wikipedia.org]

Profit!

Re:No, it doesn't

[wolf31o2]

Parent is 100% correct. Even on the new CD, one would have to type "setup" to load up the installer and use it.

Re:reiser 4?

[grover_99]

It depends on whether reiser 4 makes it into the vanilla kernel in time or not. Gentoo no longer patch their kernels with large patchsets that are likely to breaks things.

Re:Breaks Gentoo as a learning tool

[wolf31o2]

I often see this written. With the exception of a few lines in various /etc files, to be honest, I didn't learn so much about linux from Gentoo. I learned "scripts/bootstrap.sh" and then "emerge world" and the whatever else I wanted to install.

Parent is really right, you know. You only "learn" what we want you to learn, which isn't much, admittedly. For someone with no Linux experience, or minimal Linux experience, or someone who has been using one of the hand-holding distributions, they might truly learn quite a bit, but if you really were wanting to learn how and why Gentoo does soem of the things it does, I would suggest one check out Linux from Scratch and really try to understand why things are done how they are done.

That's not to say I don't like it. I do. I think it's great. But, the last time or two that I did an install, I used Knoppix to do it. I think it's great that they might have a full GUI available during the build. And, I think we can expect them to have the CLI type install available as well.

Exactly. The idea is to have a complete environment to allow you to use your computer while installing Gentoo, even if you wish to install from stage1, or perform a completely binary installation. The whole point is to add choice for our users and potential users. The installer is also designed to give some important enterprise features to installing Gentoo, but don't expect to see them even near ready come February.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[21chrisp]

I use KDE on gentoo and have a gig of RAM. With several windows open KDE uses 10% (100MB) of that RAM. I have another machine that uses KDE with 512 MB of RAM and KDE hogs a little less on that (60-80 MB). I hardly ever hit swap on either machine. Application data often sits in RAM after being closed, and will just get re-allocated down the line if RAM is needed.

Actually the worst memory hog (by far) is Java. Java seems to be the only thing that makes me hit swap on a regular basis.

Re:Boot-up time

[tonsofpcs]

So what if its not being developed? Many video postproduction houses and even Networks use the Video Toaster/Flyer (from NewTek, who is now making PC NLE systems with live switching capabilities) switcher/NLE which run on the Amiga. I personally have 2 Amigas on my desk over there (one of them is down right now as my toaster card needs to go out for recalibration). Without Amiga, there would be no LightWave!

--
Let it be, let it be, my Amiga works for me </SIG>

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[leonmergen]

Except that under Linux it's because of caching and gets freed up as soon as it's needed.

something else.

[morgajel]

the real advantage is being able to "turn off" certain sections of the code with USE flags. Did you know bitchx can be compiled to use gnome? when the debian maintainers compile bitchx for you, they decide whether or not to include it. you don't have the choice.

with gentoo, you can use the USE flags
USE="-gnome" emerge bitchx
USE="gnome" emerge bitchx

This allows me to say if I want gnome installed or not if it's just an optional feature on bitchx. Since I mostly use kde, I can do without installing all the gnome dependencies.

to see a list of flags for any given package (and their default status)
emerge -vp bitchx
[ebuild N ] net-irc/bitchx-1.1-r1 -cdrom -cjk -debug +esd -gnome +gtk -ipv6 +ncurses +ssl +xmms 2,473 kB

Then you can choose to enable them or not.

There are a lot of common flags, USE flags which you can set in the /etc/make.conf file. my flags on my workstation are the following:

USE="3dnow amd alsa bzlib cddb cdparanoia curl dnd dvd -dvdr ethereal flash gd glut -gnome gstreamer icq image magemagick imap java javascript kerberos krb4 ldap lm_sensors maildir md5sum mime ming mmx -mozilla mplayer msn jack ooo-kde openssh pdf rtc samba sasl threads type1 tiff usb xvid"

and this isn't even close to all of them.
If you'd like to learn more, let me know. I try not to be a zealot:)

Re:Newbies and Gentoo

[eofpi]

There's a good reason that the X configuration stuff is in the Desktop section: for some uses, linux doesn't need (or even have any benefit from) a gui.

That said, I do think the install docs should provide a link to the X configuration under a heading like "Where do I go from here?"

Re:What about post-install management?

[Eyckelboom]

As far as I know portage doesn't update configuration files for you. It tells you to run etc-update if there are (possible) updates to configuration files.

etc-update allows you to review the changes and apply or ignore them as you see fit.

I believe you can even protect certain files so portage stops bugging you about them, i.e. I'm pretty sure I do not want to revert /etc/fstab to the installation default when I update baselayout (or whatever package fstab comes in), so I could tell portage to just keep its claws away from that file.

Re:What about post-install management?

[AchilleTalon]

There is still a market for Windows...

Seriously, Gentoo doesn't overwrite your config files, it drops updated files with the ._cfg prefix in the directory with a number and the name of the file as a suffix. You simply have to do a find in /etc to find them all diff them to see if something important has changed in latest version. But this has nothing to do with the distro. If a package is changing its configuration files format o is adding or removing important stuff you will always have to modify your config file if you want to use the latest version. So, if you don't want to spend time migrating a package version to another one, just don't upgrade in the first place...

Re:this will totally crush BSD

[ViolentGreen]

You'll also still have to compile all the software for your system, something you don't have to do, but can do using FreeBSD.

No you don't! Have you used gentoo? "emerge -k" installs the binaries if they are available. For most packages, they are available.

Re:This is exactly what Gentoo needs

[Deusy]

"Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:

* How partition and disk structure works
* How GCC actually functions
* How the kernel is installed and configured
* At least something about runlevels and init scripts"

That's utter rubbish.

The partitioning / disk structure is basically a 1-time following of the Gentoo manual. You can get through it without knowing anything other than the simple fact partitions reside on a single hard disk. That's hardly knowing how it all works.

How GCC functions? Don't make me laugh. "emerge foo" does not induce an in-depth understanding of GCC. Copying the basic CFLAGS from the documentation doesn't either. I'd wager the majority of Gentoo users (bearing in mind I'm a Gentoo user who has accumulated >2600 forum posts) don't really understand GCC at all other than knowing it's a tool that compiles.

As to how the kernel is installed and configured, most people somewhat bumble through that and a little thing called 'genkernel' is making said bumbling a lot easier to do.

As for runlevels and init scripts, again it's just a case of following the docs rather than knowing what they are and how they work.

Please, do not confuse "being aware they exist" and "understanding", with the term 'knowing' implying the latter. And Gentoo is a MILLION miles away from LFS. Aside from the fact (almost) everything gets compiled and they are both Linux, there really just aren't that many similarities.

I would suggest that it's more the time taken to set up Gentoo rather than the difficulty of it (which isn't that difficult for the majority whom the docs serve well) is what provides the entry barrier. Don't get me wrong, for the willing it can be an invaluable process that does introduce them to the fundamental Linux concepts. BUT the majority of users who get through the installation process are still woefully short of the knowledge needed to maintain a healthy system and you get a lot of silly posts in the forums as a consequence. I should know, I've made a few myself.

I used Gentoo for the compatibility...

[Knight2K]

not really the speed. At the time I tried it, early in 2004, it seemed to be the only readily available distribution that actually worked with AMD64. Fedora Core claimed to have a distro for it, but I read a lot of horror stories; Mandrake and others only seemed to have commercial payware products for the platform.

I did have problems with Gentoo (when using USB2 the whole computer slowed down, hotplug didn't seem to work right, etc.), so perhaps this was more a reflection of the maturity of Linux distros in general on the AMD64 platform. I also didn't really find it much faster that other distributions I've used on x86 machines.

I guess I'll have to try again soon. I'm currently stuck on WinXP since I needed something that worked, but it may be time to survey the current 64 bit landscape.

Re:something else.

[morgajel]

bitchx was a poor choice on my part- it was the only example I could think of of the top of my head.
Perhaps mplayer will be a better choice:

emerge -vp mplayer
[ebuild R ] media-video/mplayer-1.0_pre4-r7 -3dfx +3dnow -3dnowex +X +aalib +alsa (-altivec) +arts -bidi +cdparanoia -debug -directfb -divx4linux -dvb +dvd -dvdread -edl +encode +esd -fbcon -ggi +gif -gnome +gtk -ipv6 -joystick +jpeg -libcaca -lirc -live -lzo +mad -matroska -matrox +mmx -mmx2 +mpeg -mythtv +nas -network +nls +oggvorbis +opengl +oss +png -real +rtc +samba +sdl -sse +svga -tga -theora +truetype -v4l -v4l2 -xinerama +xmms +xv +xvid 0 kB

How are the options for a debian install of mplayer?

I'm speaking as a former debian user here too- it took my friends *months* to get me to try gentoo. When I finally did, I used it for one month. I was hooked. it's not perfect (emerge search packagename is slower than apt-cache search), but it's proven it's worth.
I got nothing but love for debian, but I honestly feel that emerge is to apt as apt was to rpm.

"no offense," says the mouse to the T-rex.

Re:something else.

[Zarhan]

it's not perfect (emerge search packagename is slower than apt-cache search)

Try emerging esearch. The index creation will take a while of course, but then you can find packages at the speed of grep :)

Re:What about post-install management?

[SPQRDecker]

Not necessarily. The great thing about Portage is the ability to interactively update config. files using the utility 'etc-update'. This tool will list all updated config. files, automatically merge inconsequential changes like whitespace, allow the useer to compare the differences side by side, pick one version over the other, manually edit the final result, and, most importantly, undo the changes when things go horribly wrong (provided you don't delete the temporary files).

Re:Whoopy Do

[The Cisco Kid]

This version of *GENTOO* (a reasonably new distribution, typically used by hardcore linux geeks) now has a graphical install.

Redhat (now Fedora), SuSe, and others, have had graphical installs since.. Well.. I honestly dont remember. Several years, at least. I know Redhat 6 had it, and thats pretty ancient now.

Comparing Linux install to Windows install is a red herring, since *MOST* windows users wouldnt be able to install *EITHER*.

But my telling you about it is going to do nothing for you - you need to try yourself. Find yourself a spare machine (doesnt have to be bleeding new, some old 500Mhz machine would be fine), and grab a copy of Fedora Core2 or 3 (may not be the 'perfect' choice, but for getting an idea of Linux, its probably a good choice), and install it. Play with it. Install some apps. Break it. Reinstall it. etc.

Read the response to the article by the Gentoo Dev

[labradort]

Apparently the article is misleading, according to a follow up response to it by the Gentoo Developer interviewed by the IT reporter.

See: this follow up posting under the original article [zdnet.co.uk]

Name: Chris Gianelloni
Location: USA
Occupation: Gentoo Linux Developer
Comment: Well, what can I say except that quite a bit of the "meat" of this "interview" was ignored. I did make mention that the full-environment LiveCD would be an "experimental" CD available for x86 and amd64 and that it will have a "limited functionality, beta version" of the installer on the CD. At no point did I represent that there would be a 100% completed installer available by February, but now it appears that everyone under the sun thinks that there will be one.

There will not.

Trust me on this one. The Gentoo Installer project is working very hard, but they are not anywhere near completion and definitely will not be so quickly after the winter holidays.

Also in 2005.0

[bozarthj]

The 2.6 kernel will become the default kernel, not just for the liveCD, (which as been that since 2004.3) but for the distro. Instead of emerge gentoo-dev-sources for 2.6, it will be emerge gentoo-sources.