10-Day Gentoo Installation Agony 540
lisah writes, "The Linux distribution Gentoo has a hard-core following, and with good reason. Gentoo is known for its configurability and choices. It's not known, however, for its easy installation. NewsForge's Joe Barr outlined his painful installation experience with Gentoo in an article that explains why, after 10 days, he finally gave up and went with Debian Etch. From the article: '[B]ack in the day, Gentoo users first had to rip the source code from the bone with their teeth before compiling and installing it, but now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it... I exaggerated the ease of installing Gentoo.' And: 'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'" Slashdot and NewsForge are both owned by OSTG.
OH NOES!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy wants everything handed to him, and there are plenty of distros for that. What I don't understand is that he complains about having to RTFM, then he installs Debian. I could have sworn they were the worst offenders for telling noobs to RTFM.
Live CD's, Sissified? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Try binary install (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a former gentoo user (Score:5, Insightful)
Install wasn't my problem.
Maintenance was my problem. As one of the commenters from the article pointed out, you were basically compiling an update constantly. It could be a minor bug fix but if it was in a big package like glibc, it would take a while to compile. You could go about your business, but you noticed it. The next day would bring about another big compile (say, X!?) and on and on it went. The endless cyle of updating. Some would argue that this was a feature of it. Sure, you're always getting the latest of everything. But it was a little bit of a PITA. The worst was when I went away, came back to a LOT of updates. Those updates (during the end of my time on gentoo) started to break things unfortunately. QA went downhill as the distro got too big.
Anyways, I still think gentoo is kewl, with its configurability. However, I've traded some of that control in for maintenance sanity and am currently on Ubuntu for my desktop and debian on my server.
Thanks to the gentoo community for the fun few years. #gentoo was always lively
not for newbies (Score:2, Insightful)
go install your Fedora or your Ubuntu and leave the hard-core pipe-hittin linux to the gentoos.
-DB
Re:It's a shame (Score:0, Insightful)
Gentoo could really use a good installer... (Score:2, Insightful)
However, installation really is a bear, and AFAIK the ill-publicized alpha GUI installer is still not stable or reliable (don't want a crash while repartitioning a drive that has a WinXP part to wipe my table). Also, Ubuntu beats it on stuff that Works Right Out Of The Box(tm).
Can I have a distro that's as easy to install as Ubuntu, but uses Portage and standard Linux config files and doesn't give me political hassles? That would be nice.
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Gentoo of today, starts you off with either a gui install (have not tried it yet) or CLI...but, they start you off with a stage3 tarball...and you actually get a running config quite rapidly. I actually had to research to find out how to get it to bootstrap like it did in the old days and built "everything" from scratch from source. (That link HERE [gentoo.org] .
But, really...as far as Linux installs go...Gentoo is about as easy as any I've tried. With any of them, you often have to do a little research on the chipset of some component you have on board...hell, you need to know that for many items on a simple kernel config....and everyone has to do that sooner or later....
Gentoo has a built in dumbshit detector (Score:1, Insightful)
maintain the distribution.
Seriously, though, all he does is say that things failed to emerge properly
or that he was too scared to try to fix his X resolution. He says he's used
about a 1/2 dozen distros, which I guess is supposed to mean that he understands
this kind of thing.
But if he understood Linux and compilation of software, he'd be able to tell
why zlib wouldn't install, and he'd be able to figure out how to set his monitor
resolution without fucking up his computer. So, really, he's just a dumbshit
that likes to bitch about shit he clearly doesn't understand and has no willingness
to learn about.
Stop posting this crap. Or do you need the eyeballs to boost ad revenue?
what a quitter :) (Score:4, Insightful)
The instructions have been tested by hundreds of thousands of people. They work.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:1, Insightful)
He has a point (Score:1, Insightful)
Linux and BSD are both needlessly hard to install and configure -- even for basic tasks. Want a webserver with PHP/Apache/MySQL? Everyone says it's easy, but there's dozens of different ways to do it, some right and some wrong. Want to add SSL? Dozens more. Want secure e-mail with anti-spam and anti-virus? Triple the time for the install to do it the safest and most-secure way. The right way. I've spent weeks in endless cycles of configure,make, make test/check, make install. If anything goes wrong...back to Google and, gulp, the rudest user forums on the planet.
How do you do that on Windows or a Mac? Double-click. Wait. Configure a GUI. Sit back. Enjoy. Sure, you pay for the privilege, but the software actually works when the installer says it's finished.
Remember, the majority of us want solutions that work best. The tools work best on Linux/BSD/Unices, but they're such a pain in the ass.
I have a wife that I love to spend time with and a son who's growing up too fast. I don't want to fuck with your software all day -- I want solutions that work. I am willing to pay for your products (and I have), but I want my time to be worth something to the developer whose software is causing me discomfort.
I speak for the majority: guys (and gals) give us tools that actually work. Give us installation instructions that actually work. And, give us the opportunity to tell you that the software is actually broken and could be fixed to make our experiences a little easier. Stop screaming at us on support forums, stop telling us to read documentation that isn't there (or is so incomplete/out-of-date to be of no use), and stop making excuses for the cost of your software.
My $0.02 cents from a sysadmin that's been doing this for eight years on Solaris, Open/Free/NetBSD, Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Your turn...
Lame?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:4, Insightful)
What this article fails to mention is that done right, Gentoo rivals FreeBSD in the stability department. That isn't to draw flames either. When you're counting 9's, that is just plain awesome.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, it's not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla install with exactly and nothing but the recommended options. But I was doing stuff like that with Linux before there was even a gentoo, just for fun. It is fun, for a certain type of person. But, like masturbation, it's a very personal kind of fun that doesn't contribute anything very useful to society at large. And most normal people really, really don't want to hear the gory details about how you did it and how much fun it was.
That's why there are so many distros (Score:4, Insightful)
It is silly to bitch about Gentoo not being an easy-peasy install. That is not Gentoo's mission. If Gentoo-ites spent all their time making Gentoo all soft and cuddly it wouldn't be Gentoo any more. Likewise, if Ubuntu was as configurable as Gentoo it would be a bitch to use and would no longer be Ubuntu.
Be thankful you have choices. In MS land you get exactly no choice at all.
10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
But seriously, Joe Barr:
1. Did not RTFM
2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.
There are alternatives. I have used a chroot approach to building a system while running under another distro. This works well, is low risk and is documented.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you took a look at the install instructions doesn't mean you are able to judge the distro, gentoo is easily the most powerful operating system I have ever encountered, the amount of control it gives you is way beyond anything else out there, seriously better than debian, any bsd, solaris, AIX, hp-ux.
Yes the installation used to be fairly complex (although a great way to learn more about the inner workings of linux), but it has become simplified over the years, and now although I still wouldn't recommend it to a complete newbie, it is ready for a basic user.
Debian with apt cannot compare to portage, and as for features that should be enabled......I disagree, when installing imagemagick I may not want certain features like perl bindings or jpg support, gentoo doesn't just let me add features it also lets me disable them, this in turn reduces clutter on my system and makes life that little bit easier.
I'm a current gentoo user (Score:3, Insightful)
I've tried Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, etc.. and I've settled on gentoo as my desktop OS of choice for both home and work. Here's why:
1.) Gentoo has *the best* documentation available out of any linux distro I've used (even most of the conf files are fully commented) http://www.gentoo-wiki.org/ [gentoo-wiki.org] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml [gentoo.org]
2.) Installing / maintaing gentoo has taught me many things about linux that I didn't know before. (I enjoy learning about linux, and Reading The Fucking Manual). Hell I'd never even compiled my own kernel before I used gentoo.
3.) I dont have to reinstall the entire OS every 6 months (Fedora/Ubuntu) to get the latest version. I always have the latest version.
Yes, it was a pain to stripe my drives with software RAID the first time I installed gentoo. And yes, sometimes its a pain to update/maintain the system... but I dont really mind because everytime I have to fix something I *learn* something.
I love gentoo the way it is, but as with anything else, its a matter of personal taste, if someone else doesn't like how gentoo works, then they should use another distro ;)
Personality conflicts.. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a perfectly valid complaint about a product that it doesn't work if you didn't follow the directions TO THE LETTER. Imagine a cake recipe that was inedible if you cooked it for 9 minutes instead of 8 1/2 minutes, or at 420 degrees instead of 425 degrees. It's often difficult to follow directions perfectly, especially when there's
a lot of different and complicated ones.
From the "Your Feet are too Big for Your Shoes"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make (The author of the article makes it as well). They write these articles from the perspective of, "This OS sucks because..." or "The BEST OS in the world is [insert OS here], because...". Sorry folks but it really comes down to, "This OS sucks for ME because..." or "The BEST OS in the world for ME is [insert OS here] because...".
I love Gentoo. It's my favorite OS experience (and I've been through quite a few in the Atari, Commodore, Mac and PC worlds) because it gives me EXACTLY what I want: complete control and customizability from the ground up and high performance on old hardware. I don't like having to buy new hardware every few years to use new software. In my world view a ten year old box should still be able to run a modern word processor and web browser at a minimum. And that's what I've got at home... an old dual PII with 768 Megs of RAM that does everything I can do on a P4 that I *WANT* to do. Word processing with OpenOffice, no problem. The latest Firefox and Thunderbird? Absolutely. Including plugins for media? Sure thing. Ripping my CDs and DVDs for my digital music collection? Most definitely. At decent speed? Yes. Editing photos at a reasonable speed with GIMP? Without a doubt. OpenGL screensavers that look cool? (this really has more to do with GFX borads, but.. there is some CPU involved) My wife and I lock our virtual desktop screens with them every day. I have a Linux based Media Center PC based on Gentoo running on a P3 800 with 512 Megs of RAM. I watch DVDs on it, record TV. Pause live TV. Etc... (again, I've got a Hauppauge which offloads the encoding from the CPU)
So, Gentoo gives me what I want. Long life for my boxes with the ability to still run the latest software at decent speeds. It also gives me the ability to do a ton of things I couldn't do in Windows. But that's all me. I'm the sort of person that "gets" Gentoo. If you don't "get it" then you're never going to see the beauty in it. I also "get" Windows, I just don't see the beauty in it because I don't need the hand holding anymore. Not only that, but I don't WANT it. That's the biggest difference between the Windows and Mac users and the Linux users of most flavors (Ubuntu, Lycoris and Linspire excepted). So don't rag on Gentoo. If it didn't work for you, go find another distro. Don't go on a campaign to try and make the shoes fit your feet. If you've got big feet, get bigger shoes!
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you haven't tried many then. I've installed Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, Mandrake, Freespire, PCBSD (not a Linux, whatever), ELX, and.... I don't even know what your talking about. Ok, so arguing that I know less than you isn't the greatest retort, but you're seriously out there if you think that anything you've said qualifies as "easy" even for Linux.
A linux fan that hates gentoo.... And why! (Score:2, Insightful)
2) Portage as it is now is a bloated and hacked whale that instead of fixing problems via a re-write is just being held together by more duct-tape. There are so many use flags I can't even remember them and frequently the core flags are altered so that something that used to be "included" requires a new flag. This makes it impossible to use your previous knowledge of configuring the system for anything. Its just like being a newbie every time you install it!
3) Packages are being added much faster than they are being tested for compatibility, and sometimes they're not being added fast enough when there are critical improvements in the next release. Despite what the Gentoo Devs are thinking the people that use Gentoo typically want leaner and meaner but only so lean as not to be crippled in any way. Debian would be good, but they bork the process by being slow to the power of assinine. Debian could be BETTER than Gentoo if they'd ever get in the race. I've used the utilites in Knoppix and apt-get is defintely more useable than portage and faster but I would never install it because stable is too far behind the technology curve. Compiling Gnome, or KDE... STUPID... There are no "processor optimizations" in these apps, and any optimizations would give trivial gains. They're pre-compiling a lot of these packages now... but this is years later....
4) Breaks in Gentoo are TOO extreme. Like one day they decided to change my boot files, and my system didn't come up. I'm good enough to know how to fix it, but most people aren't. We don't have "random days" to just tech support our computer, and this was happening far too frequently. I was losing five days a month to random borks. Most people faced with this problem don't figure it out.. They just reinstall windows... Which is exactly what I did. I love linux, the tools... but if you think I can be down when I have work to do well guess again! I basically found myself installing Gentoo dealing with problems repeatedly and getting fed up repeatedly... I tried Gentoo 3x... that's more than most people would eh? Sorry kids, we gotta get past our open beta at some point.
Well that's all for now thanks for bearing with my aggrivation.
- Mind
ATI's Driver Install is Like That... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree in every area except partitioning; most linux distributions have traditionally made this at least as difficult as it is in DOS; sure, to you and I it's a doddle, but to the masses it might as well be written in sanskrit.
Uh no. I guess you haven't tried many then. I have owned several pieces of hardware that were even based on the same chipset as some supported hardware, but wouldn't work without significant driver hacking/kernel mods.
Re:Then it ain't for you! (Score:3, Insightful)
But "control" over your system? Let's be honest, for most folks that use gentoo, that's like the ricer who says his "Type R" emblem makes his Civic go faster. It's hours of effort for
Re:10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the big one.
I'm an Ubuntu convert, but I was exclusively a Gentoo user for two or three years, and I recall there being extremely good documentation that, if followed exactly, would result in a working system in 99.99% of cases.
The only way you could screw up a Gentoo install is to be one of those people who always got an "F" on those following-directions assignments in grade school.
Re:Personality conflicts.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine for a second utilizing a metaphor that makes some sense. What you're talking about is baking a fucking cake, it's an inherently analog process and it responds well to tweaking. Let me use as an even simpler example making pancakes from a box. Do they ever put enough water in the recipe to get it to flow out right? No. But once you've made pancakes a couple times you know what the consistency is supposed to be like.
Computer don't work that way. I'm going to wade out into the dangerous waters and make an automotive analogy here. If you are working on an automatic transmission, you had better get every little piece and part in the right place, and there's TONS of them. For instance, automatic transmissions are chock-full of check valves, which are constructed from a spring and a ball bearing. Eliminate just one of those (the spring, OR the ball bearing) and your transmission doesn't work right.
Well, your distribution is orders of magnitude more complex (in terms of functional units) than an automatic transmission. Do you think that maybe, just maybe the way you put things together might be important?
Anyway, it's a bunch of bullshit, because while I followed the directions to the letter during my very first gentoo install, I have not done so during any subsequent install, and they have all been successful installs. Of course, that's because I know what I'm doing. I've been messing with this Linux shit for a long time now, and always from either a hobbyist or IT perspective. Constant tinkering has a way of teaching you, mostly by negative example :)
The point is that gentoo is intended for a certain class of user. There are other distributions out there. If you don't need the things you can get from gentoo that you can't get anywhere else, run something else. See how easy that was?
Re:Exactly! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't update frequently, almost 100% of the updates fail. And the cause of the failure is probably incredibly obscure, and nobody has ever experienced the problem before.
Still looking for a replacement... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've slowly watched all of the reasons I prefer Gentoo be eliminated by other distros. Here's the original list:
Here's what still keeps me on Gentoo:
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's only dumb because they're not adding a front splitter as well. You don't want to push down the front and not push down the back, the back will get even more bounce-happy and the car will become uncontrollable. So yes, you want a big rear spoiler (you gotta watch those typos, I was trying to figure out if "nig" was supposed to be a racist epithet) on a FWD car if you're going fast enough to actually need one, but not without your bigass front splitter to provide you front downforce.
Fine! Now what does it take to get you to quit bitching and whining about gentoo users? Why don't you just let them run their OS, and you go run yours, and everyone can live if not in harmony, at least without pissing in one another's wheaties.
Re:I'm a former gentoo user (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoa, whoa, wait, hold the fucking phone, full stop: you normally do a fresh Ubuntu install every six months? Holy shit, I thought that stuff was only for Windows. I can't imagine reinstalling Linux ever, at least since I switched to Debian, much less every six months. Is this what Gentoo and Ubuntu have done to Linux? Turned them into Windows clones?
I used to be able to appreciate the "control" and "performance" you supposedly get with compiling everything from source. Heck, back when I still had the "gcc -O99" fever and compiled everything from source, it was with Slackware because Gentoo wasn't around yet. Did I learn a lot? Sure. Did I waste a lot of time and CPU cycles? You betcha. I'm better now, and what with a full time job (programming), and a life, and a wife, I don't have time for that anymore.
Not to flame on the Gentoo community (it's nice to see other Linux users besides me who can appreciate BSD's portage), but you guys shouldn't get so offended so easily and realize that Gentoo isn't for everyone; it fills a niche, a very small niche, and unfortunately, it has attracted the ricers and other losers who don't know better. That's what turns people off to Gentoo. That and regular six month reinstalls or neverending upgrade/compile cycles.
funroll-loops.org (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I really like gentoo. Or maybe gentoo fanatics still take anything less than unconditional support as an outright attack. If you've been part of the gentoo community for long, you would know that gentoo supporters started the whole "gentoo user as ricer" meme, to make fun of the people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and just wanted to look cool. You've seen funroll-loops.org [funroll-loops.org], right?
I will say that the ratio of hackerness to riciness falls off pretty quickly the further from the core gentoo community one gets. By the time one is in slashdot country, it may not be 1 hacker for every 9 ricers, but it's pretty close, IMO.
Re:10 days (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm perhaps in the minority, but I did read and follow the documentation and almost was able to create a working system. But then, I couldn't get the X to start. The documentation is really friendly if everything works ok, but if something goes wrong, it doesn't tell you anything you could do. At that point I desided that I like better distros that work without my work effort.
What I would like is a distro that would install pretty much anything you want without you compiling anything (fast and easy installation), but it would also automaticly detect your hardware and deside optimal compiler options and allow you to select the packages you would like to compile and optimize for better performance. Or even better, it would be able to analyze my system usage and suggest me what packages I should optimize, based on how much cpu cycles/time is used for each of them, during daily sessions.
And it should be easy to use. For example I could see list of packages that would be worth compiling manually, and I could then select a package and system would compile and install it on the background, without requiring anything else from me, except a few mouse clicks. If a security release is released, system would install it and again allow me to compile the package again. It would be also nice to see reports about how much better performance did I get with the optimize, so that I would know was it work optimizing.
But I'm not sure if the speed increase is worth the work that is required to do something like this. A good start would be a software for Gentoo, which would make the suggestions about compiler options (unless there is one already, haven't tried it in years).
Re:10 days (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to be reductive here, but Gentoo is really just a platform for building programs from source code and then managing those programs after they are built. There's no mystery to it--most of the other distros install binaries that were compiled on other computers but that work perfectly well on yours. The only thing that is even mildly instructive about Gentoo is that you have an often extremely limited ability to control how you want your own binaries to be built by changing USE flags and compiler optimizations. But that's not going to teach you much in the end: Sure, that one application you just emerged has "jpeg", "png", and "tiff" USE flags. But you know, that's probably because it's an ACDsee-clone image viewing app. And one the program is installed, what then? You just use it the same way you would on an Ubuntu machine.
I guess what I'm saying is that Ubuntu and Gentoo really aren't that different from each other, and your learning experience with Linux is in no way diminished or enhanced based on the distribution you use. Besides, once you emerge gdm and gnome and make your wallpaper a picture of a bunch of multiracial people getting naked or holding their hands and singing kumbayah, you're pretty much there already.
And yes, before your panties get in a bunch, I am a Gentoo user, mostly because I like how it's basically Slackware with a package management system...(sorry Patrick!)
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:3, Insightful)
I love gentoo! I love gentoo users, too. I just see too many people (here, not really in the gentoo forums, or mailing lists or IRC channels) who read a story like this and start to get all defensive and say things like "This guy must be moron for not being able to install gentoo!" Sometimes gentoo users seem just a tad full of themselves. As if watching cryptic compilation messages scroll by for hours has made them a linux expert overnight, and anyone who hasn't, isn't.
You can run whatever OS you want to, but if someone has criticisms after giving it a try, what's the ponit in just writing them off?
My impression of Joe Barr has dropped (Score:3, Insightful)
If Joe can't install Gentoo, Joe shouldn't be reviewing Linux Distros, except from a pure newbie point of view. Cause it's just not that hard.
Re:Odd (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly why I prefer it, especially for servers.
No mystery (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the fact that there's "no mystery to it" is what makes installing Gentoo mildly educational. Sure, now you look at the install procedure and think "all you're basically doing is un-tarring a stage tarball, chrooting, and then making mild modifications to a few files." But the fact that that's all a linux install can be pretty eye opening.
Now, I admit that users unfamiliar with the Linux CLI probably won't understand what they're doing the first time and around and will blindly follow instructions, but there is an opportunity to learn there.
Hear hear! (Score:3, Insightful)
Life's too damn short to reinvent the wheel. 5% extra speed from a custom compile? Screw that! Give the slower binary and more time to live life, be happy, do my job, and get paid. With the time I saved on the 5% custom compile, I can buy a CPU that's 15% faster. Since time is money, I actually save money buying the CPU rather than doing the 5% custom compile.
If it gives you pleasure, by all means, do the custom compile. Hell, even if the custom compile reduced speed by 5%, go ahead and do it if it makes you happy.
Me? Hanging out in the sunlight and fresh air makes me happy these days. The opportunity cost associated with the 5% custom compile just ain't worth it to me anymore.
FAQ immortalized mplayer devs as jackasses (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, while I haven't read his article about mplayer, criticism was warranted to that project. I haven't used it in a while, simply because there are other, better, players available now such as VLC, but I remember the install being pointlessly combersome. I also recall a lack of binary packages. Their player wasn't up to snuff, and the reviewer was doing a service to the community by letting them know not to waste their time with it.
Gentoo *DOES* teach the newcomers (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't start my unix experience on Gentoo (FreeBSD, rather) but I do remember what it was like to be completely new to the system.
Things that a complete newbie does not know:
When Gentoo sits you down and says "type this", any curious user will say "hm, what is this, what is it doing..." and learn a little bit in the process. Exercise builds skill. If you see it, you might get a little knowledge, but if you do it, you are actually learning. Kind of the hands-on concept.
I guess the point is that Gentoo is for people who are curious and interested in the workings of Unix. Yes, it is possible to use Gentoo if you pretend that typing some long crazy string corresponds to what would be a button click in another distro, but for that kind of user, there's no point. Non-curious users will simply type keystrokes and learn nothing. and then get fed up. and then quit and use a different distro.
Also, even at the later stage of emerging things, you do still learn various things thanks to "emerge portage", and "etc-update". Also, to get most daemon programs to run as needed you will need to edit their conf files, and play with symlinks, and edit rc.conf, and conf.d and friends. Heck, I never understood the Linux rc script system when I was using Debian, but I learned it pretty quick when Gentoo started changing things and adding boot-time messages like "/etc/hostname is depricated, use /etc/conf.d/hostname instead".
And, when a user finally gets tired of not having sound and tackles ALSA, they get to learn all sorts of fun things like /dev nodes, devfs, udev, modules.conf, lspci, recompiling the kernel with and without alsa built-in, or as a separate module, or as a userspace lib... and I'd better stop here before I start an ALSA flamewar.
And yes, not reading the handbook is suiscide, and the forums are the lifeblood of Gentoo.
Re:10 days (Score:3, Insightful)
- "The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general" -- If the shoe fits. Don't email the developer list asking questions that belong on the Mplayer-users list. Mplayer-Dev is busy enough without all that.
- "The journey began when I downloaded the latest CVS snapshot from the MPlayer Web site" -- A review of a CVS snapshot??
- "The first thing to bite me was the configure script itself. It refused to run after detecting gcc 2.96, which is the default with Mandrake 8.1." -- Errrm, GCC 2.96 [gnu.org]?? A review of a CVS snapshot compiled with a broken compiler, greeeaaaat.
- "It wants a file name on the command line." -- Duh.
- "I needed video files. That called for gnutella." -- Because we all know the only thing worth watching is stolen from P2P networks.
Etc, etc...My Gentoo odyssey [linux.com]
- "Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that." -- Funny, I don't remember being asked anything while installing Gentoo. There's no installer.
- "For a proper Gentoo install, you'll need to read the fine manual. Read it a couple of times. Cover to cover. Pay particular attention to the sections on USE flags and Portage." -- Uhhh, not really. The Quick reference [gentoo.org] is more than sufficient.
- "You will hear, see, and read "RTFM" dozens of times before you're done. But don't make the mistake of thinking that simply means having a copy handy as a reference during the installation, because by the time a question appears, it may already be too late. You need to RTFM before you begin." -- I don't even know what the fuck he's talking about there.
- "Study GCC and the options that govern the behavior of GCC version 4.1.1." -- Forget studying GCC. If you don't understand what you're doing use the recommended $CFLAGS.
- "After reading a few pages of the manual, I realized that the minimal live CD did not equal the Gentoo 2006.1 live CD. So I stopped and got the real thing." -- Dumb. You can bootstrap Gentoo from in Knoppix, that's what I always do. The CD you boot from makes very little difference. All you really need is bash, and something to download a stage tarball like wget.
And so on, and so on.. This isn't journalism, it's flamebait, and that's all it is. In the truest sense of the phrase.Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:3, Insightful)