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.
installation (Score:1, Interesting)
A few points... (Score:5, Interesting)
2) A lot of the recent headaches (incuding #1) come from the fact that the project is just too damn big. It was a blast during that year or two when Gentoo usage skyrocketed, but the whole developer/support/user system hasn't scaled well.
3) *The* key to installing Gentoo -- unless you really know what you're doing, you need to install some other distro first and copy the xorg.conf, fstab and grub.conf files to use, or at least reference, for your Gentoo install. I can write an fstab by hand, if necessary, but there's no way I could do that for xorg.conf.
Re:Odd (Score:4, Interesting)
I took me less than 10 days for my very first Linux install (the author mentions using about nine different versions of Linux) using Gentoo a couple of years ago.
This was a Stage 1 install (the one that takes the longest and requires the most user input/interaction) on an old AMD K6 laptop with some heavy optimization, and included building X and a bunch of useful apps (I can't remember which ones I compiled at the moment), and it really did exactly what I told it to do. Which is what I would expect.
Maybe I just had a better experience than the author.
I'm preparing to switch to Gentoo, actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
But why the switch?
I've been using Fedora Core and before it Red Hat since version 5 (when I swtiched away from Slackware, for good, it would seem). I like it a lot. Fedora Core, in particular, is a no-brain-necessary sort of Linux. I haven't had to touch a configuration file in god only knows how long.
BUT... It's slow. I've had the inkling that it seemed to make my PIIIM 1.2GHz machine just a bit sluggish for my tastes. Gentoo has tempted me for several years as a result, but I always thought to myself: "Well, for a 10% increase in speed as the result of recompiling an entire system, it's probably not worth it..." I've always built my own kernel with proper CPU optimizations and just left it at that.
Then the other day I stumbled on to Swiftfox (do a Google search), which is basically a set of precompiled Linux Firefox builds for specific CPU architectures. I downloaded the PIII Mobile version and launched it in place of the Fedora Core 5 Firefox build.
WOW. The speed and interactivity benefits sure feel like more than 10%. I haven't done extensive benchmarking, but my subjective impression is that Swiftfox is maybe 80% faster than the Fedora Core Firefox build on my personal machine (a Thinkpad T23). It's not just obvious, it's the sort of thing that will make me want to gnash my teeth if I have to go back to the standard Fedora Firefox build.
And now I'm thinking to myself: that's just one app. What about glibc? What about kdebase? X.org? Could I be missing out not on 10% speed gains, but on 40-50% speed gains, or more? I don't know, but I think maybe it's time I dust off my inner geek and find out, and Gentoo seems like the place to do it.
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard that about the Debian forums. That is one very nice thing about Gentoo....the people on the forums are very nice, and helpful...yes, even on questions that have been asked 100's of times before.
I do with the search on the forums was a little better...I often find it deletes some of my search terms...and I dunno why.
Gentoo is not easy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly they guy doesn't have the true grit to do gentoo. Gentoo is *NOT* rolling your own distro. Have you ever tried compiling mplayer with all these extensions and libraries? You do need to know your own stuff, but you don't need to get mired down in downloading your own packages and matching them up and compiling them in the right order with right compiler, and have the right kernel branch with proper patchset.
So the guy has it installing, and thinks it is not fast enough, going to try to reinstall it? How clever is that. Yes gentoo is overly flexible, downside being that sometimes you really have to know how things suppose to work. Like configuring Xorg. I was in similar position, but I'll never give up flexibility of gentoo for power desktop.
Gentoo is a hobby, some tell and I agree.
Good night and Good luck,
2c.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was my very first attempt at Linux, and it worked great. In fact the difficulty of the installation process causes me to recommend it to new users, because it forces newbies to learn the ins and outs of the system from the get-go.
As a hardcore Gentoo fanboy [funroll-loops.org], I was also greatly saddened that they "sissied" the process with the fancy GTK installer.
Love hate relationship (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a Love&Hate relationship with Gentoo. I switched to it from Redhat a rather long while ago, on my server. Ran it that way on a Pentium 200mhz for a while -- it was painful, but I wasn't really tired of it yet, and I could stand it compiling junk for days, it was only my personal server.
Then I got it on an old Athlon Tbird, and that was better.
And one day, it reached my workstation. And then all of my servers, including that strange, obscene HP LH4r. Quad Xeon machines can have scary clock issues.
I still like it immensely, portage is awesome. But, but but, compiling things got tiring after a while.
I fixed that by buying an Athlon X2. Dual core, MAKEOPTS="-j3" made compiling a breeze, and made me happy. Samba in three minutes was impressive to me.
But then, the quality of packages went to hell, upgrades begin breaking things more and more frequently. Circular blockers, if you felt bleeding edge and tossed a modular xorg in. Unexpected changes in configuration files that were only being mentionned on mailing lists, forum posts, and places where you wouldn't look.
Portage made it so easy to miss something important. Changelog entries are now sloppy. (I.E. "version bump" or "Added stuff from upstream").
And then, there are the slotted packages, that you don't really understand why they are slotted. There are the modular, split ebuilds for KDE. If you don't want the whole shebang, good luck trying to get 3.5 installed and also sucessfully rid yourself of 3.4 easily.
One Gentoo would have been fine. But I now had five. So I set up facilities. Central internal portage mirror (sync server), distfiles on NFS, to save bandwidth. distcc, for distributed compliling.
But I still have to spend the time to keep them updated. Let a gentoo linger in for too long, and it's going to be discouraging, and look more and more like a complete reinstall.
And somewhere in there, you'll do a quick baselayout. But then things will get depreciated and break on next reboot. Why change standards to be fancy?
There's also the -R283 syndrome, which was mentionned earlier by someone else. You get glibc, install glibc, live happy. It takes a while, but that's fine. Next week, you get glibc-r1. Ebuild was sloppy. You get to remerge it.
Then, there's -r3. Fixes an obscure Sparc bug. You still get it on x86. Remerge. ccache becomes your best friend. But it's still time consuming.
And then, there are the serious bugs that get marked as WONTFIX, or the part of the software that you're having a problem with that will just get removed until upstream fixes it, which is rarely done due to the crazy compiling flags one might have.
I now run Kubuntu on my desktop. I welcome updates, they're easier to manage. Also, my primary server will most likely turn into a Debian Sarge box. I haven't decided yet. I'll leave the Quad Xeon running on gentoo. But it's sad how quality lowered.
I really want to still like gentoo, if it wasn't so... time and ressources consuming, once you get more than one.
And these are my home machines. I also have my work machines to support and administer, and god knows I haven't become a network guy just to spend my whole life installing patches.
My problem with gentoo is not that it takes a long time to configure, it is that, if you aren't uncareful, you'll spend way to much time just
I miss when gentoo was a little less hectic.
Re:Live CD's, Sissified? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to have a dollar everytime I've heard that remark. I believe that remark is the reason users don't adopt Linux.
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo definitely is better for those wanting to Learn Linux because it forces you to get into the nitty gritty of a Linux OS setup. I started with Slackware 8 or so and used it through Slack 9, but never really grew comfortable with Linux until I installed Gentoo in 2004 for the first time.
For someone to say it took them 10 hours to install Gentoo is a bit deceiving though. It sounds like a long time but really, most of the time you aren't in front of the monitor. I'd say the longest bit of the whole thing is emerging X and OpenOffice and even today that doesn't take long on a P4 with 2Ghz or better. I did the majority of the work overnight while I slept.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's like Gentoo users get a kick out of making their install as complex and unforgiving as possible in some lame attempt to make their penis look larger. With my Debian install I can kick back, hit enter through all the screens and be done with an install in under a half hour depending on my network speed.
Gentoo has a definite target: that is, people that want to have as fine control as possible on their system, without using Linux from Scratch but with all the goodies of a package manager. Fine personal control and, overall, being always quite up to date means you have to go through pains (I'm 2-year gentooer and sometimes I sweared... the GCC 3.3-->3.4-->4.x transitions, for example) but it's your choice. If you don't like it, well, go to another distro (I use Gentoo at home, but Ubuntu at work because there I just care about having it all working without having to care about too much). It's not a problem of being ricers. It's the inevitable design of something aimed to total user control.
Re:It's a shame (Score:3, Interesting)
To which you replied "Windows XP? never had a problem except on the more exotic platforms. Seriously. At all."
Having a bunch of useless and vulnerable services enabled by default is not a "reasonable default configuration". Having a freshly installed OS automatically hacked within minutes of being online means it does not use a "reasonable default configuration"
I'm not even trying to follow the common slashdot anti-microsoft mindset here, it's just a sad fact that the default configuration of WinXP is extremely vulnerable to viruses, worms and trojans.
How hard core am I? (Score:3, Interesting)
It ran great after it was all done.