New Gentoo 2007.0 Release Gets Mixed Review

lisah writes "Gentoo's recently released version 2007.0 gets a fair-to-middling review from Linux.com. Installation was a headache from the live CD and DVD versions, but the Gentoo Linux Installer saved the day and gets high marks for being 'far better than it's predecessor.' The user experience is also mixed — on the one hand, the distribution boots quickly, has great hardware support, and new, user-friendly artwork. On the other hand, 'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.' Overall, it doesn't look like Gentoo offers any compelling reasons to switch to 'Secret Sauce' if they're happy with their current, uh, flavor."

Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's The Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great
features.  Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless
wannabes 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.

    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
    .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, 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."

* ...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...

    I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be
    resolved by specifying BOTH .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).

* 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 -09 -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!

Yes, but...

[Yetihehe]

Yes, but would it run an Indy car?

2007.0 ?

[MarkByers]

2007.0 already? And I only just finished compiling 2006.0!

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[syylk]

Ehehe...

Even if I *am* a Gentoo zealot myself, couldn't help but laugh reading your "translation" message. It's so damn true! :)

OTOH, you typed a 3K chars message as first post. Why I have the distinct feeling you already had it ready somewhere, to copy and paste it at the first chance, when anything gentooish reached front page?

Ah, I counted the chars with my ultra-optimized, distcc-recompiled "wc"! Zowie, I'm 1337! :D

Re:Update difficulties

[pturing]

Gentoo isn't so much a distro as an educational game. If your system works better than an Ubuntu box, you're winning.

There's always a way to fix these problems.

1. Use 'quickpkg' to save important things like Python before you break them
2. Plow over broken dependencies with 'emerge -C'
3. revdep-rebuild when needed
4. If it doesn't work, try the ~x86 package
6. emerge -uDNv world
7. wait a day, emerge --sync, try again
8. update often!! stale systems are harder to update

And the craziest trick of all....
9. backup your /etc and unpack the latest stage3 tarball on top of your installation

One of those things should fix just about any update problem you encounter

Re:Update difficulties

[pturing]

oh, and
emerge -ev world

That one's lots of fun

gentoo

[eneville]

so ... when is genthree coming out?

Re:Update difficulties

[morgan_greywolf]

If you're getting to the point that you're getting incompatible updates with your existing setup, then you can always try `emerge -NDuep` and look at the resulting list it'll give you (p is for preview). From that, `emerge -C` anything you don't use any more, and then drop the 'p' from the command above and re-run it. It'll re-compile everything on your system with the latest packages, meaning that you should hopefully avoid the incompatibilities you're referring to.

Yeah. That's what I did on my Gentoo box back around Gentoo 2003.5. Given that it's still recompiling, I gave up installed Ubuntu on another box some time ago. ;)

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[HAKdragon]

This reminds me of one of David Cross'es stand ups routines.

David: I don't mean to sound like a suck up, but I think women are much smarter than men. I also think that dogs are smarter than women
Woman in audience:I don't believe that
David:You don't think that it's true? You don't think I've done research? Well, you're right. It's not true. That's what's known as a joke. I'll be telling a few of them here tonight.