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Gentoo Linux Reloaded 331

Posted by michael from the peer-pressure dept.
nitro322 writes "Daniel Robbins, the leading developer for Gentoo Linux, has written an excellent O'Reilly Network article covering many of the various features of Gentoo, what's coming in version 1.4 (due out SOON), and why you should give it a try. If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"
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Gentoo Linux Reloaded More

Gentoo Linux Reloaded

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  • All these weird names (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:38PM (#4434570)
    What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?
    • Gentoo is better than Pygoscelis papua, the scientific name for the species of penguin that it is.

      And yes I finally had to look it up. Before, I thought it was some lame reference to a planet in Star Wars or something. (What's with Lucas and the 'oo' words anyway? They sound stoopid!)

    • What's next, a Cunni Lingux distribution?

      Cunning Linux users prefer Debian or SUSE.

    • Re:All these weird names (Score:5, Funny)

      by mickwd ( 196449 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @06:45PM (#4434781)
      Yes, but no-one would by a Linux distribution if it kept going down.

    • Re:All these weird names (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot.monkelectric@com> on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:30PM (#4434985)
      Hey, I named Gentoo, (seriously). I got invovled with the project when it was called Enoch because I was having some trouble compiling GTK because we'd stumbled onto some weird gcc bug (IIRC). I ended up working on some compiler tools and writing packages ...

      Anyways, one day drobbins decided to change the name to something less secular, and so we sat around thinking up names ... We started thinking along the lines, what did we want to say about our linux? ... we bandied around lots of names, eventually I found some zoo site that said the Gentoo Penguin was the fastest pengiun there was ... and the name stuck

      • Hey, if you're still involved with the project, maybe you can fix the x86 install docs. Found this little gem:

        Important: If you are a stage2 or stage3 tarball, then we've already bootstrapped for you.

  • Defuse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ViceClown ( 39698 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:38PM (#4434573) Homepage Journal
    Lets defuse this bomb before it happens.

    Gentoo is a really nice distro. I wouldn't say it's for newbies and it's definitely geared for developers. The install isn't a cinch but it's very thorough. Before we get into a holy war with sides saying Sorcerer is better or Slackware this or Redhat that - lets try and keep the discussion about Gentoo itself... what is good or bad about it - and maybe help out Dan Robbins with useful constructive suggestions. Now... have at it :-)

    • Re:Defuse (Score:4, Informative)

      by Bishop ( 4500 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @10:54PM (#4435713)
      I like gentoo. I am using it right now. The ports system has some advantages. Being able to apply your own patches and still have the software integreate nicely with the rest of the distro is nice. Compiling with better optimizations can't hurt. Gentoo is usually on the cutting edge in terms of features.

      There are some rough spots. There are broken ports in 1.2. Emerge is tediously slow. The ports systems found in FreeBSD and OpenBSD are much better. But Gentoo should catch up as it matures.

      The init files are stupid half perl. It looks like a sysV init. It should be a sysV init with real shell scripts. I can understand why the developers would want to do something different. But then they should have made the init system different.

      The init system is part of a larger problem. The developers seem to change some little things for changes sake. Unfortunately I can't think of an example off hand. This should tell you that most of the changes are minor. However there have been times when a config file or command didn't behave the way one would expect.

      The stupid ._cfg000 prefix! Those files are a pain in the ass to work with! Why not a ._cfg0000 postfix??

      I will give 1.4 a whirl when it comes out. There are enough little bugs with 1.2 that it is time for an upgrade anyway. If Gentoo 1.4 has worked out most the rough edges I will stick with Gentoo.

      • Re:Defuse (Score:2, Informative)

        by warrax_666 ( 144623 )
        The init files are stupid half perl. It looks like a sysV init. It should be a sysV init with real shell scripts.

        WTF are you talking about? They are regular shell scripts. Have you not noticed the #!... line at the top?!? Change that to #!/bin/sh and off you go. The current system eliminates redundancy, as in: why does each and every init script need to parse the command line explicitly? Why not do have a bit of common code which does the parsing for you? Also, it enables all the init scripts to automatically source /etc/conf.d files which IMHO is a very neat solution to the problem of setting options for daemons in a central location instead of messing about editing the init scripts themselves.

        I can understand why the developers would want to do something different. But then they should have made the init system different.

        Actually I'm wondering why more distros don't use the system of dependencies in their startup scripts instead of assigning arbitrary (priority) numbers to their init scripts. The dependency system also neatly avoids problems when e.g. a service won't start, and several other services depend on it. Personally I love the dependency system for the init scripts. It's actually one of the things (along with portage) that made me choose Gentoo, but of course there's no accounting for personal taste.

  • As with... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ekrout ( 139379 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:39PM (#4434576) Journal
    As with most groundbreaking papers in academia, Robbins' piece starts off with "Hi there."

  • What am I waiting for? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by philovivero ( 321158 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:39PM (#4434577) Homepage Journal
    I'm waiting for Mandrake as my desktop and Debian as my server to fail spectacularly to live up to my expectations of a desktop or server OS.

    When they do so fail, I'll try Gentoo, among other things.

    It's been a few years. I'm not predicting spectacular failure anytime in the next few months.
    • Word, we talk like everyone has the time and the extra machine and/or is willing to reinstall the one they have, like it aint no thing. I think for the majority of people trying different linux distributions like picking ice cream at 31 flavors aint going to happen.

      It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.

      • Re:What am I waiting for? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:15PM (#4434908)
        One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:

        1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
        2) mount my home directory (though it might be in /mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
        3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)

        And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)
      • Word, we talk like everyone has the time and the extra machine and/or is willing to reinstall the one they have, like it aint no thing.

        Quite a few Slashdotters are like that. I have 5 or 6 usable PCs and try different things on them for experience and learning and goofing off.

        I've used a couple of different versions of RedHat and Debian, Turbolinux (it came on a CD with my NIC), and started off with Slackware in 1994. I've been using Debian lately but have fond memories of Slackware, and from what I've heard Gentoo sounds right up my alley.

        Of course this is not in a production environment.

        And it does sound to me like Gentoo is for the people like me who goof around. (Bleeding edge source-based distros don't sound like what I'd want to administer at work, though.)

        Oh, and by the way: Word!
      • It'd be cool to try them out without having to do much on our part to see if its worth it. Well, maybe that's what the linux expo's are for.. But I'm to cheap to fly anywhere for an xpo. Maybe LUG's? I have yet to attend one.

        One word: VMWare

        -DZM
    • Mandrake (and other RPM-based distributions) are fine, as long as you never upgrade them. RPM-based systems can quickly become unmanageable, as I recently discovered with my laptop :-/

      Have you truly never wasted a day screwing around with RPM? I spend half my time trying to resolve stupid dependancies that make no sense -- like starting with a PHP install for a headless web server and ending up needing to install X. That's not an actual example, BTW, but it is fairly typical.

      RPM suffers from a (not insignificant) number of basic flaws, and most of these are not present in Gentoo's Portage (or Debian's dpkg, AFAIK).

      I've been running Gentoo on a server for several months now (replaced Redhat), and it has been a pleasure to maintain. I'm not keen on some of the ways in which Gentoo lays out its file structure, but I can live with that. My laptop, which has been running Mandrake for about 18 months since I bought it, finally got to the point where I couldn't install anything anymore because of RPM. I was building and installing everything by hand, so I installed Gentoo over it. This was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Replacing Mandrake was painless; getting Gentoo configured, getting X running, and so on, was unneccessarily difficult. Gentoo has an extremely primative configuration system, which is to say, it doesn't have one. It uses the base package's configuration tools; for X, this is still xf86config. I mean, come on... when was the last time anybody on a modern operating system had to enter scan rates by hand? That is more XF86's fault than Gentoo's, but it does make Gentoo a pain to get running.

      Basically, what I'm saying is that when a package manager is so bad that people have to avoid it to install software, as is the case with RPM, something else is needed.

      Gentoo is relatively difficult to install, compared with other modern Linux distributions. However, once it is installed, it is fast and easy to maintain.

  • heres to free (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gr3g ( 119302 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:41PM (#4434593) Homepage
    Gentoo needs to make a version that will still compile the software on the system without having to download. Some of us don't have room mates that understand having a dial-up for 5 days straight.
    • Gentoo is a very up to date version of linux. Most of the packages available are the latest stable versions. Installing from an cd means the next 'emerge world' will end up downloading lots of packages as it updates your system. The older the install cd the more downloading to be done. That would defeat the purpose of loading everything from cd in the first place.

  • What am I waiting for? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:43PM (#4434606)
    If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?

    I'm waiting for it to finish compiling!
  • I tried installing gentoo linux in a time not so far away and it seemed like the install was going fine and that the documentation was fairly good until I got to the end.... I installed gentoo linux with ReiserFS support and at the end when I went to compile my kernel I learned a nasty little detail.... ReiserFS support was pulled from the gentoo modified kernel... go figure. If you're going to update your distro then you need to update your documentation as well. Documentation makes the user experience better by providing them with instructions and reference to quickly answer questions without hours of banging head against keyboard.

    • Re:Great... now fix the documentation (Score:5, Funny)

      by drobbins ( 6287 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:03PM (#4434854) Homepage
      Um, we've always had ReiserFS. You forgot to enable "experimental features" in your kernel config... and, um, this was actually covered in the documentation :)
      • Actually, gentoo made us switch from reiserFS to ext3.

        The install of our latest servers was a bit delayed by the decision of what distro to install.
        Our previous servers where running mostly Debian but gentoo bit the bullet with the good interface to compiling and optimizing all binaries while still giving people a packaging system.

        On my laptop I still run Suse PPC, but that was lack of time when I installed it two years ago.
        Next HD is laying around, so is Gentoo.
        Finally I will get the ease of use of Slackware and Mandrake while being able to compile everything I need without libc probs.

        Good job!

  • Dependancies (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@gmaBOYSENil.com minus berry> on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:46PM (#4434612) Journal
    Use Gentoo with caution. I tried Gentoo 1.0 and it didn't support my network card so I couldn't install it. A few months ago I tried 1.2 and now my network card is supported! Yippie! So I start the install and half-way through a several-hour process one of the builds breaks because some file is missing because some server is down and the install script can get the file. I tried again and again over the next few days and had the same problem. I looked at the support forums and saw I wasn't the only person with this problem, and I gave up. It's a great idea, but unlike Linux from Scratch (or almost any other distro) you are totally dependent on Gentoo and their servers.

    • Re:Dependancies (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AgentGray ( 200299 )
      ibiblio seems to be very dependable for me, and I don't remember seeing things like this on the support forum. (Of course, I wasn't looking for stuff like this either).

    • Re:Dependancies (Score:3, Informative)

      by uhmmmm ( 512629 )
      if their main mirror is down, they do have others - you just have to set the appropriate variable in /etc/make.conf

    • Re:Dependancies (Score:2, Informative)

      by wallsaroundme ( 582721 )
      Do an 'emerge rsync'. This will update your mirrors, etc.. Then retry. It's good practice to emerge rsync daily.
    • One of my quibbles with gentoo is that it expects a lan connection. It pulls things down (by default) as you need them.

      # emerge gnome
      pull down gnome panel
      compile gnome panel
      pull down gnome games
      compile gnome games

      etc. However, you can do a 'emerge -f gnome'. The '-f' is 'fetchonly'. It will pull down everything you need. Then you 'emerge gnome' and you're off to the compiling races.

    • Re:Dependancies (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zorander ( 85178 )
      Guess what?

      The debian package system sucks if the only mirror in your sources.list file goes down too.

      There are a multitude of rsync servers and fileservers too. Also, if it can't find a file, try telling it to build one version back as sometimes the file mirrors don't get updated as fast as rsync.

      If you set up your configuration right (as you have to for other distros such as debian), you are not dependent on any one server.

      Read the docs before making stupid assumptions.

      There have been little hitches with gentoo, but then again that's part of the fun of running it. Not only the raw speed, but the making everything work. This is why the more savvy people like it. I've never not been able to get something to work and I've been running it for half a year now.

      It's not like I'm a pro either. It really isn't that bad to maintain, but as another poster said, until your comfortable with debian or slack, use a twelve foot pole.

      Brian

  • Is Gentoo the new Slackware (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:49PM (#4434625)
    Back when I started Linux around '97 or '98, Slackware was the "in" distro. People who started using Slackware back then did so because they thought they were 7337 and at every opportunity they would espouse its benefits. I started with Slackware too and am happy I did and probably was an annoying Slackware prophet from time to time. But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness. Yet, if everyone started using Gentoo like droves of users use RedHat or Mandrake, I'm sure Gentoo would lose a great deal of its appeal for some of these users. I suppose the torch has been passed from the "Slackware is for hardcore users", to "Gentoo is for hardcore users" mantra.

    • Re:Is Gentoo the new Slackware (Score:5, Insightful)

      by G27 Radio ( 78394 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:21PM (#4434726)
      But I can't help but laugh when I see the similarities between some of the younger Gentoo users and the Slackware users of yesteryear. These particular Gentoo users seem to think they're hot stuff and mock anyone who uses another distro, or at the very least dismiss their 7337ness.

      I'm sure that there are some gentoo users as you describe, but I'd like to state for the record that all the members of the Gentoo community that I've dealt with have been both helpful and pleasant in their responses to questions. Don't let a couple kiddies give you a bad impression of the average gentoo user.

      Gentoo certainly isn't the easiest distro to set up, but if you know what you're doing the benefits are worth the time/work getting it started. If you compile everything from stage 1 you're looking at at least a day of compile time--but the actual time you need to spend in front of the computer is most likely going to be less than an hour. The amount of compile time really depends on what packages you install. You can use precompiled packages for a lot of stuff, but the point of compiling it from stage 1 is that you have a system that is fully optimized for your specific processor. This made a huge difference on my Athlon--I can actually watch DVD's smoothly now--something that Windows and Mandrake couldn't do for me.

      What worked best for me as far as installation was to create a partition in Mandrake, chroot into that, and do the installation in there. Basically you can do pretty much the entire installation in a shell window without having to stop whatever else you're doing. I'm not sure this is well documented though. If you know your stuff linux-wise you can figure it out. It's not for the linux newbie though.

    • they thought they were 7337

      Is that the new Boeing?

      Oooh, you mean 1337.
    • I suppose the torch has been passed from the "Slackware is for hardcore users", to "Gentoo is for hardcore users" mantra.

      As a happy Gentoo user, I must say that Slackware is still more "hardcore" than Gentoo. I am not sure that is a good thing (for Slackware) though. ;)

  • some helpful links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Corporate Gadfly ( 227676 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @03:50PM (#4434632)
    First a caveat. The Gentoo install is not for the faint of heart. In most cases, right off the bat you've to compile a kernel. Most large compiles take a day. kde can take a day to compile. mozilla takes the usual hour or so. If you can look past all that, it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

    Here are the promised helpful links.
    Gentoo Home Page [gentoo.org]
    Gentoo x86 install instructions [gentoo.org]
    Gentoo FAQ [gentoo.org]
    Gentoo Desktop Guide [gentoo.org]
    Gentoo Forums [gentoo.org]
    Gentoo Bugzilla [gentoo.org]

    That should keep you busy for a week, at least. :-)
    • What you say is true, but Daniel Robbins does state in his article that with Gentoo 1.4 you can be up and running in under one hour, including OpenOffice, KDE and some other stuff I forgot.

    • Re:some helpful links (Score:5, Funny)

      by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:50PM (#4435073)
      What kind of sliced bread do you buy? I thought the whole point of sliced bread was to make the process as simple as possible. If Gentoo was similar to sliced bread, then sliced bread would mean, selecting the type of flour to use in the bread, using a breadmaker for a while, and then slicing it yourself.

      I've never tried Gentoo, but I sure do love the convenience of sliced bread.
      • Methinks you were trying to be funny, but I'd like to respond.

        My wife and I make our own bread. We have several bags of different flour. We purchace yeast like it's a fine wine. We spend hours getting everything together. After it bakes, we run it through a meat slicer set to extra thick.

        I don't mean to gloat, but GODDAMN that's some good bread. We'd take the Pepsi Challenge agianst that Wonderbread shit any day.

        In the next year, we will probably get our own flour mill and purchace bags of wheat to lessen our dependency on choosing prepackaged flours.

        Gentoo is, IMHO, the best Linux distro out there. I'm sure there are some people, let's call them "Linux Gourmets", who could put together an awesome distro to beat Gentoo. I haven't seen it yet.

        Gentoo needs an install cd. A full Gentoo system already ready to go. After install, you could recompile packages as you see fit. Emerge kicks ass. I've never used the BSD ports, but with emerge, it just works. The dependencies seem reasonable. The ebuild files are well laid out and easily modifyable.

        I'm not a linux developer, but I have a freaky feeling that a lot of RPM and APT gurus are looking at emerge and thinking of ways to make their systems more like it. Maybe a system like apt-compile or urpmi.compile is already in development. If not, it will be soon.

        In short, Gentoo is a serious player in the distro wars. I forsee a lot of people moving to Gentoo in the next year. Especially on the developer front.
  • If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"

    Because I just finished installing and configuring all of my Linux boxes with either RH 7.3 or RH 8.0 ... :)

    Besides, I like the guy with the red brim a little better than the backwards, purple pac-man. :)

  • What am I waiting for? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dzym ( 544085 )
    I'm waiting for a new computer to fall out of the sky.

    Frankly, I've got several computers, Linux or otherwise, all performing their tasks and they're Working Just Fine(tm). Why risk them?

    • i'm kind of in the same boat. my install of 1.2 gentoo is doing just fine, and with all my school work, including my thesis on the line, i'm not willing to risk the upgrade to 1.4.
      so, i can see exactly where your coming from, but with a bit of added experience of about 5 failed install attempts.

      that being said, if you do get a new machine, or maybe just another hard drive, i'd recommend install gentoo, it's quite nice.

  • Gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:00PM (#4434676) Journal
    I find it interesting how many people like having to compile everything and use a distro with such a archaic(not bad, just outdated compared to todays distros) install routine.

    What's even more interesting is how many people have left Debian for Gentoo. Debian users are some of the most loyal I know, and yet many of them have simply moved on. I'm guessing Debian blew it with the long delay's between releases.

    I also have to say after using linux for a while now, I just have no desire or need to get down and dirty with my distro, am I surprised as many people still are. Keep in mind I'm talking about desktop use where I just want to get my work done, not server use, where I do end up compiling some of my apps.

    Personally I just don't have any interest in Gentoo or that style of distro, but obviously not everyone feels that way, since it does seem to be one of the up and coming distros.
    • In general, I'm with you. The distribution should get out of my way, and let me get things done. I'll update it with security stuff, and have done.

      However, the flip side of the coin is that it keeps your mind sharp. Learning how someone else solves the problem is a great exercise, especially for those of us who sysadmin for a living (or want to).

      And I was never sold on the 'compile optimizes things greatly' point. I'm still not totally, but I have to admit that my gentoo laptop smoked my debian desktop with LAME (went from 2-2.5x to 4-5x MP3 encodes) even though the cpu is pretty close (800mhz P3 vs AMD 700mhz), much slower disk, and a quarter the ram.

    • Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fsmunoz ( 267297 )
      What's even more interesting is how many people have left Debian for Gentoo. Debian users are some of the most loyal I know, and yet many of them have simply moved on. I'm guessing Debian blew it with the long delay's between releases.

      Don't think so; you see, I do believe that Gentoo is probably very nice, but most ppl I know that use it (disclaimer: most != all) and used to run Debian were either ppl that never really settled in any distibution because they wipped they're systems clean when they heard that a *new* version of LinuxSomething was released or ppl that used Debian because it was perceived as more hardcore. It's almost the same reason why many of them after 3 months of Gentoo wipe their systems to install FreeBSD and became FreeBSD zealots, only to install OpenBSD on it later because it's da bomb, except that latter on NetBSD catches their attention because in some weird movie they saw a über elite hacker used it. In the end they either begin to run Plan9 or simply go back to Windows, in which they will fondly remenber they're wild days while reading mail in Outlook.

      Debian release cycles are indeed an issue, and an issue that it's trying to be fixed, but interestingly enough the uses that are drawn to Gentto are the ones that knew and used the unstable Debian branch, so the release delay was not really an issue. Some people just prefer to move to other things that for one reason or another they prefer... taking from other comments in this discussion one would gather that from some ppl Debian stable is the reason they don't change their OS, since stability is what works for them. For others a BSD-like ports systems is crucial, thus Gentto, Sorcerer, etc.

      cheers,

      fsmunoz

    • Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Shelled ( 81123 )
      The Bad: Compiling from source means installation isn't a boot-a-CD/walk-away operation, a down side for general desktop use. You really pay up front when installing Gentoo.

      The Good: If you got through the install, you've payed up front. Maintaining your system afterwards is a breeze for experienced linux users. Much easier than my experiences with Mandrake or edHat. Gentoo really is about package management so don't expect custom GUI management utilities a la YAST, etc., but dependancies are handled invisibly. Nor do I have to compile everything with KDE, Gnome or Alsa support, three things I never use.

      The Best: 98% of everything I install works, including DVD, OpenGL games, WINE, all the things that were much harder or impossible for me in other distros, including Suse, RedHat, Mandrake and Caldera. If a package is broken it's usually updated relatively soon and the next 'emerge' works fine. Gentoo has, other than the occasional MOHAA, caused my W2K partition to gather dust.

  • Stupid question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:03PM (#4434701)
    Why should I use Gentoo? Really. Is there some huge feature comparison matrix for all the different distros? Is there really any major innovation between distros?

    I don't run *nix that much. I have a dual boot at home for Mandrake 8.2 and W2K. Do different distros really only matter to the elite linux hackers?

    • Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Informative)

      by Antipop ( 180137 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:24PM (#4434745) Homepage
      Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.

      No other linux distro has this. So yes, this is a major feature/innovation that makes it different.
      • Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.
        So is this BSD ports system like a package manager? If I want to uninstall a program which I installed this way does it makes it easy to do so? What about checking any arbitrary file and finding out what package it belongs to? What about verifying the integrity of an installed package to be sure that the files haven't been altered after installation? These are features I use now with RPM on Red Hat so I'd want something similar in a new system.
      • Gentoo has a BSD style ports system. You type a command (ie. "emerge gnome") and it downloads, configures with parameters you have set in your make.conf file, and then compiles it optimized for your system.

        It's sweet when it works, but a royal pain when it fails. I downloaded the iso, installed it and immediately tried to emerge kde-base after getting gentoo up and running (which was very easy by the way). The emerge process for KDE took all day long between downloading the source and compiling, whereas on Red Hat or Debian it would have been done in minutes. Then to top it off, the X servers compiled by it were not functional because of an unresolved global. Something obviously was missing from their dependency graphs; other people who perhaps had emerged the missing piece in the course of other activites would not have had this problem.

        Of course, I had the source code and in theory I could have dived in to figure out what was going on. In fact, I'm fairly accustomed to tweaking source code to get it to compile and work, but futzing around with X is not what I do for fun. I played around with the system in my spare time for the next week, trying out other things and attempting somewhat half heartedly to fix my X problem. Searches on the Gentoo web site and Google came up dry. Then the new Red Hat psyche CD's I'd burned beckoned, and that was that for Gentoo for the time being.

        I had overall a mixed impression of Gentoo. I think portage is pretty slick. The X problems I had didn't really put me off on it. If I seriously needed X working on the machine, I'm sure I could have got it working. The problem is that when it comes time to set up a machine for some purpose, I usually don't want to be tinkering with it for days. And I'm not talking about futzing around with configurations options, just the routine task of getting the system installed and running takes too long. If it were my personal hobbyist system, no problem; but at work I'm often installing linux on a particular machine to solve a specific problem. I want it done and off my desk yesterday. It's irritating to have to, figuratively speaking, pop the cake in the oven and keep sticking it with a toothpick to see if its done. For that reason, I'd say it's a very superior choice for a hobbyist, especially given the effort they've made to put all the most bleeding edge features into it.

        The article says emerge is going to be much faster in 1.4. Perhaps I'll give it a try again.

      • Re:Stupid question (Score:5, Informative)

        by asteinberg ( 521580 ) <ari.steinberg@sA ... d.edu minus poet> on Saturday October 12, 2002 @12:22AM (#4435952) Homepage
        No other linux distro has this.

        I was very close to using my last mod point to mod the parent down as flamebait because of that line, but decided it would be more constructive to reply.

        There are a handful of other distros that do what Gentoo does, and some might argue that they do a better job of it (I won't get into that).

        1. Source Mage [sourcemage.org] - The evolution of Sorceror after it's original maintainer ran off, has been doing this for nearly as long as Gentoo (maybe longer even? It's close). Instead of "emerge gnome" you'd say "cast gnome", but other than that it's more or less the same thing - download, configure, compile, install with one command. It's all coded in very elegant and easy-to-understand bash scripts, which is kind of neat, but other than that it's very comparable to Gentoo. I believe they plan to release 1.0 on Halloween.

        2. Other source-based distros - there are two other Sorceror-based distros besides Source Mage - Lunar and the non-free Sorceror. Personally I'd suggest sticking with the above if you want to go with a Sorceror-evolved distro though. I think there's also Rock Linux but I don't know much about that.

        3. Debian. Apt-get downloads and configures and installs programs, but you save hours and hours on the compilation step by using binaries. Or you can use apt-src and go through with the compilation. Personally, I found that it was not worth the time to compile everything when Debian works just as well if not better, has a far more reliable, well-established testing system, and stays nearly as up-to-date (if you use sid, the "unstable" branch, which I've found to be more stable than any of the source-based distros). As for the alleged speed gain in compiling, that is more of a theoretical claim than a number-supported one, and I honestly do not notice a difference.

        Parent - keep in mind that it is never a safe thing to say definitively "no other..." or "never" or any kind of all-encompassing statement - you're asking to be disproven. Certainly Gentoo is a nice distro, but let's not be close-minded about it.

  • What I'm waiting for (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:15PM (#4434711)
    If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?

    I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available. I'm waiting for it to have widely available high performace mirrors that serve binaries, so I only have to compile when I want to, and I can be using that new piece of software in seconds. I'm waiting for it to have a proven track record for strict filesystem hirearchy standard compliance (the same standard each release, please). I'm waiting for it to run on all the platforms I currently use (still missing arm). I'm waiting for it to have a dedicated team of hundreds of developers that release security updates in hours (In binary form so that I don't have to wait for compilation for security). I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system. And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken.

    Glad you asked?
    • dunno about the rest but the transparent integration of non-free stuff is as good as it can be....

      emerge nvidia (downloads and installs nvidia's binary closed source drivers, kernel and glx)

      emerge ut2003-demo (yup, you guessed it...)

      things like RealPlayer are slightly more complex (you have to get the install file from real.com then stick it in a directory before emerge'ing it - presumably because of Real's licensing).

      Seriously, its good - even for non-free stuff..

    • Re:What I'm waiting for (Score:5, Informative)

      by krogoth ( 134320 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMgarandnet.net> on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:14PM (#4434904) Homepage
      "I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available."

      Have you actually looked at the list of packages? It's more than KDE 3 and GNOME 2 - since installing Gentoo on my desktop and server two months ago, I've only found 3 packages (out of... probably over 100 packages that I installed, including some very obscure ones) that didn't have ebuilds - hopefully the ebuilds I made for them will be added to portage soon.

      The list of packages available is already very impressive (I'll bet that Red Hat and Mandrake don't have packages for the unreal tournament 2003 demo, or the Quake 3 OSP mod - these are in portage!), and making a new ebuild is very easy.

      Having 4000 packages is completely irrelevant - there's tens of thousands that you'll never use. Debian's 9000 packages might make you certain that nearly everything you can think of is included, but would you even use 1000 of them?

      "I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system."
      richard$ emerge -s nvidia ut2003 quake
      Searching...
      [ Results for search key : nvidia ]
      [ Applications found : 2 ]

      * media-video/nvidia-glx

      * media-video/nvidia-kernel

      Searching...
      [ Results for search key : ut2003 ]
      [ Applications found : 1 ]

      * app-games/ut2003-demo

      Searching...
      [ Results for search key : quake ]
      [ Applications found : 4 ]

      * app-games/quake3

      * app-games/quake3-cpma

      * app-games/quake3-osp
      (those aren't my ebuilds - it's a completely clean portage tree from a few days ago).

      "And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken."

      Portage and ebuilds.

    • Re:What I'm waiting for (Score:3, Informative)

      by dattaway ( 3088 )
      I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available.

      If you don't mind tarballs, it looks like that 4000 number has been surpased. This is my gentoo distribution tarball directory last updated a month ago:

      dattaway@attaway $ ls /usr/portage/distfiles/ | wc -l 4279

      dattaway@attaway $ du /usr/portage/distfiles
      6881448 /usr/portage/distfiles

    • Re:What I'm waiting for (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shelled ( 81123 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @08:49PM (#4435300)
      If you want a binary distro, use a binary distro. There are dozens around. Gentoo isn't for you and that's not a failing on the distro's part. I've always found a mirror first try and they've almost always been DSL-saturating fast. You need 4000 available packages and instantaneous perfect security? And don't find that contradictory?
    • Exactly, I think "from-the-peer-pressure-dept" line that michael tagged to this story is very applicable.

      Gentoo is very nice and all, but there are a number of things that made me switch back to other distros after using Gentoo for a few months.

      First, there are better completely source based distros. The most important of these is SourceMage.

      Second, I don't like to compile every single little thing. There is no point to compiling every single little thing. Most of the optimization claims that people say about Gentoo are mostly myths; it's really mostly a placebo effect on most modern computers. The only place it would have a discernable effect (above 10% increase in speed), is on really old i686 hardware (p3-katami, early p3-coppermine, slot-A athlons). Anything other this obviously isn't 686. The only other processor where i586 optimization helps is the Pentium Pro.

      Third, Gentoo brakes more often than other distros do. I had more breakages in running five months of Gentoo than two years of Debian unstable/testing, and four years of various slackware releases.

      Finally, I would like to say that Gentoo is a great distro. Non-free software availablity is very good. It's not however the "killer" distro that some people say it is. Portage is quite slow compared to other package managers (perhaps it should be rewritten in C or C++), or even the BSD ports system. Hopefully portage2 should address these issues, if it ever gets done.

      Basically, gentoo is somewhat of the "in-distro" that Debian was several years ago.

  • my gentoo experience (Score:2, Informative)

    by emoeric ( 470708 )
    i went through a series of reinstalls on my linux desktop over the summer, and in the month or so when i was on gentoo, i was a fan. There's definitely something to be said for optimizing binaries for your specific hardware. OTOH, the reasons i eventually returned to debian were:
    • dependency problems in some portage scripts and
    • having to compile everything.
    It may be a great thing, but when i wanted to try a new program right away, waiting for it to compile was a definite pain in the arse.
    Now, as far as my dependency issues, i'm not sure if they got them resolved with the new version of portage, but it might be worth checking out. At any rate, i love dselect and i dunno if i'll be reinstalling now that i got the unofficial kde3 debs [bluewin.ch] working

  • Waiting for a floppy install (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The Turd Report ( 527733 ) <the_turd_report@hotmail.com> on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:22PM (#4434736) Homepage Journal
    With my newest box, it came down to either being Debian or Gentoo. Gentoo would only do a CD install (I didn't have a CD-R) so Debian won. Give me a floppy/FTP install and I will give it a go.

    • Done (Score:3, Informative)

      by djohnsto ( 133220 )
      You should read the install instructions on the Gentoo site. If you have a bootable floppy that can:

      - fdisk the install drive / partitions
      - format the partitions
      - give you a working network connection
      - Let you run a command shell with ftp and chroot working

      That's all you need. You can probably use that Debian floppy to install Gentoo. Of course, there's the matter of downloading a 50-100 MB tarball + kernel sources for the initial install, plus more downloading and several hours of compiling to get a usable system. But you can do it without a CD (or even a CD-ROM drive).
    • i installed using a GRUB boot floppy to netboot a kernel and i was up and running. another machine on your net to run bootp and tftp is required.

      • Re:Waiting for a floppy install (Score:5, Funny)

        by MyHair ( 589485 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:56PM (#4435094) Journal
        i installed using a GRUB boot floppy to netboot a kernel

        Oh yeah? Well I hand-weaved a linux 1.2 kernel using only the lint caught in the fan guard and installed from that.

        Seriously, GRUB netbooting is cool and I want to try it. Do you TFTP an initrd, too, or do you just grab the kernel and magically make it work?
        • i believe it tftp'd an initrd image after getting the kernel using bootp. i did what was documented in the install docs for 1.2. it was on a laptop with a built in eepro100 network interface (sony vaio z505s)

  • I love you! (Score:4, Informative)

    by fire-eyes ( 522894 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @04:24PM (#4434744) Homepage
    I've been a slackware user for 5 years. Only slackware. No other distro.

    Then I tried Gentoo recently. It's everything I wanted. the Ultimate power of customization (save LFS), everything from source, etc. The speed difference IS noticeable in every app, as long as you have a clue about optimization flags for your CPU.

    The only real problem is that two things are essential:

    1) Moderately fast system
    2) Fair connection to the ineternet

    I have dial up at home, so I brough my system to work and installed there. Ever since, I haven't had to download too many huge ebuilds (packages) over dial up. Things are good.

    Check it out some day.
  • Only a few months ago, I tried gentoo and had like 10 broken ebuilds while installing. That was too much for me, so I wiped it and put slack back.

    So, in August, I gave Gentoo another shot. Only had one faulty ebuild on the install, which is ok with me. Skip ahead a few weeks, I install the GCC 3.2 1.4 pre-release. Not a single problem during the base install, and no problems with anything else either(kde, gnome, mozilla, etc).

    Overall, I'm very impressed with how far Gentoo has come. Thanks to everyone who contributes to the project!

    ---
  • To all those who have mentioned the difficulty of the install, when I made the switch to Gentoo I had only installed maybe 5 or 10 other Linux boxen (Redhat, Mandrake, etc...), and Gentoo wasn't all that different.

    It was more INVOLVED, but not more difficult per say. If you print out the instructions from the site and follow them, good things will happen.

    For those who think that another distribution (especially a source-based one like this) is pointless and only for the uber-geeks, think again. The idea behind distributions like Gentoo is CONTROL. When you have finished your first Gentoo and compiled everything for your specific hardware it is a distinctly different feeling than throwing in a Redhat disk and pressing 'go'.

    Those attracted to Gentoo are those attracted to having everything just the way they like it on their computers (and arguably in their lives as well). It's an approach to computing that many have here on /.; if you don't have that approach then perhaps that is why you don't like Gentoo.
  • I have an old P166 CTX laptop with a 1.6G hard drive I got back in '98. I did the Gentoo download and bootstrap build approach a couple days ago. It started compiling around midnight, and was still gcc'ing away at 8:30 the next morning when I left for work.

    When I got home, it had aborted due to being unable to connect to their rsync machine (a problem that others have reported as well) so I kicked the whole process off again. This time, I think my poor old harddrive gave up the ghost from all the thrashing. Now I get nothing but hda errors, even when I boot from a tomsrtbt floppy. It's almost like Gentoo slashdotted my hard drive.. :)

    I'll give gentoo another try after I find a new laptop HD on ebay... (Anyone got a 2-6 Gig 2.5" notebook IDE drive that needs a new home?)

    So yeah, plan on some compile time if you have anything less than a speedy box...

  • Gentoo Linux 4 Newbies (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rdslater596 ( 472943 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @06:56PM (#4434826)
    Acutally, I tried Gentoo as a semi-newbie. I've nearly all the major releases working but, it wasn't until I installed Gentoo that I really learned the inner workings of Linux systems. That was a HUGE benifit. If you are an 'experienced newbie' I would suggest if you have the Phat Pipe (TM) and l337 Hardware (TM), then wade into this full blast. Even if you don't keep Gentoo as you distribution of choice--You'll be better for the experience. The task is challenging but the documentation is good. I also personally like the non-bloatware feature and portage system (I admit nothing about being a BSD user!--you have no proof!).

    Like I said give it a try. At the very least you can pick up some skills and that is worth the compile times (on a 1.2Ghz w/ 256DDR system takes me about a long evening start to command line--then emerge gnome or kde while you sleep).

  • The biggest advantage of Gentoo... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SlickMickTrick ( 443214 ) on Friday October 11, 2002 @07:17PM (#4434921)

    ...is the one they're not using.

    Gento is source based, meaning big compile times. However, it has the possible advantage of very small downloads. Imagine, that instead of downloading all the source packages for KDE 3.0.4, you simply had to download the patch level difference for the source from KDE 3.0.3. The diff file would probably be less than 500k.

    Of course, patch files would be too difficult to manage, so why not set up an rsync or cvs server, and use cvsup to grab the differences. Not from the production cvs, but from another set up by Gentoo. This would turn a bandwidth hungry dist into the lightest one of all. After downloading the initial sources, the updates would be noticably smaller than binary dists.

    Of course, gentoo doesn't do this, but I use it anyway. :-)

    • Are you sure? My /usr/portage/distfiles directory contains plenty of diff (.patch) files.
    • My system disk filled up a few weeks ago.

      It was a ~4gb volume; I found 1.5gb in the /var/dpkg/cache directory. About 9 versions of most packages. Every time you download a new version, Debian keeps the old ones.

      Remember Debian users, apt-get autoclean is your friend.
  • Gentoo has earned the position of primary OS in my personal computing space because it is the ONLY distribution that will do what I tell it to do. It is slightly more complex than point and click distributions like Mandrake, RedHat and Windows.

    But once you take the time to understand how it works you are truely in control of your own computing environment.

    The other nice thing is that Gentoo has attracted many experienced Linux people so issues that I have had with it have always been resolved thanks to all the smart users and developers.

    Gentoo also has a great community around it too.
  • Is it requiring a network connection.

    Yeah, I know I can download all of the packages that it needs and put them in /usr/portage/distfiles but first I have to find out WHAT packages it wants to just install.

    Plus I'm in one of the far corners of the world (Santa Fe, NM) that DOESN'T have broadband everywhere so I have to do all this downloading over dial up.

    I should just take my machine down to the lead guys house in Albuquerque and hook on to his hub to install. ;)

    Other than that, it looks pretty neat! nifty even.

  • Gentoo is my Primary Desktop OS (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zapdos ( 70654 ) on Saturday October 12, 2002 @12:49AM (#4436031)

    It has the flexibility I need, without any sacrifice in power.

    You can boot off of a old install cd and install the latest release. It has done all I have asked it to and no extras.

    I do not have qt ,arts or KDE installed I don't use KDE and I can still compile programs requiring SDL development libs, because I have sdl devel libs installed which did not require arts now try that with other distributions. I get to use the system logger, cron tool, bootloader, mta, etc that I want from the very beginning.

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