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.
10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:2, Funny)
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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
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.
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I'm not sure what your definition of "first timer" is, but all the Linux distros I've used are *much* easier to install than Windows. Really, the hardest part for newbies is figuring out how to burn an iso.
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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.
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Actually, you probably did do something wrong. If you're not talking about the GUI install, you're basically a liar (as the CLI install has you do your own partitioning :-), and if you're talking about the GUI install, well, as someone who's been "messing with computers for 28 years" you should have done the CLI
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What the hell are you talking about? Kernel config? I'll agree that it isn't the easiest thing to do, but get real: most users won't have to bother - a well-configured distro will have everything available, driver-wise, and hotplug or another similar driver-helper will automatic
Re:10-Day Installation Agony? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Gentoo for what I guess about 100 days now, and except for me totally screwing something up early on (I think it was the X server) and having to reinstall the entire thing, I've had a good experience with it.
Something you might want to do. Once you get your base system (plus X, KDE/Gnome/whatever) installed, do a stage 4 backup.
Basically, just make a tarball out of your partitions.
If you have to reinstall, just boot off the CD, mount your partitions, chroot, copy the image over and untar it.
Reboot, and you're good to go. Saves a lot of hassle with reinstalls.
Quick, cheap and dirty, but it works well.
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.
Which fanboy are you? (Score:5, Funny)
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandella, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
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You lovingly maintain a 12-year-old Mac Quadra 950 whose only purpose is to run ResEdit and baffle all those young punks (i.e., anyone under 40) who think they know shit. You like to brag about the uptime on your Windows 2.0 box and how you've got better "lockdown" and a "more hardened system" than those BSD clowns; nobody you brag to is old enough to recall that networking wasn't an option on Windows 2.0 and no apps were available. Your Linux is Slackware 3.1 becaus
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After 3 years of happy debian using, you apply and become a Debian Mantainer. Now you waste your time fiddling with debian/rules file, to address stupid lintian warnings to comply with obscure parts of the Debian Policy.
Meanwhile, some people waste your and others [livejournal.com] time with endless discussions. While you are deleting^H^H^H^H^H^Hreading the latest 400-email-long
Debian Immigrant? (Score:3, Funny)
You have learned about Knoppix from a new software engineer guy who keeps laughing every time you bring up a new feature using Internet Explorer. The software engineer guy tells you what a "Distro" is. Your parents tell you that Linux is Evil, and Knoppix is the anti-christ. To make a copy of the Knoppix's ISO image, you bought a stack of 100 CD's. When learning to install Knoppix to your hard drive you believe that Knoppix is actually 3 distro's; Debian, Knoppix, and Beginner. Fearfull
Odd (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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: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:10 days (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Well, I've run into a couple instances where the directions didn't work, but the Gentoo forums helped a lot. If you run into a problems, search for the answer in the forum. If you don't find an answer, post your question. You'll get a pretty good answer pretty quickly.
No, admittedly, Gentoo is not the quickest/easiest way to get a working desktop linux install. If that's what you're looking for, use a different distro. But if you're want to learn about Linux and are willing to put in the time and effort, I can't really see a complaint that you can't get it working.
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!)
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.
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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
Re:10 days (Score:5, Informative)
Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.
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 th
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" MPlayer: The project from hell [sys-con.com]"
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.
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Re:OH NOES!! (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Informative)
It's really not complicated, just tedious.
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Don't get tired. Don't miss a step. Don't loose patience.
I missed a step... so it was dig through network details, restart from
the beginning, or, take a beat, be up with ubuntu in another
20 minutes.
Another happy ubuntite.
ps. I'll dig in to gentoo on another project that is more
performance oriented (and where I'll have a gentooguru on call)
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Funny)
Heck, it doesn't even have to be that tedious.
From bash.org:
it only takes three commands to install Gentoo
cfdisk
that's the first one
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That was the joke going WAY over your head
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:4, Funny)
That was the sound of the "overused clichê" anvil falling on you from a great height.
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:5, Funny)
That was the sound of the grammar nazis marching in to take you for using the wrong accént.
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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
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: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.
ATI's Driver Install is Like That... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Follow the Directions! (Score:4, Funny)
But seriously, Gentoo users are generally like "ricers," gearheads who put park bench rear wings onto toyota celicas. They focus far too much attention on getting far too little benefit, when there are better solutions out there. When was the last time you heard of some big corporation going with gentoo? Never, because big corporations don't have that kind of time to waste.
But if you do have some spare time, give it a try. You will learn something. Gentoo is a gearhead's distro. Just because 9 out of 10 gentoo users are like ricers who haven't the foggiest idea what they are doing or why, that doesn't mean that someone smart and motivated can't get something out of it. I did. I wouldn't use it as my primary desktop distro, but for getting into the nuts and bolts of the applications you use, there's nothing like it.
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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 goin
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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 anyo
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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USE="-perl -jpeg png" emerge imagemagick
Rather than:
make
make test
make install
Then later you want to uninstall if you compiled from source you are up sh*t creek with gentoo:
emerge --unmerge imagemagick
Besides this is just one example when you expand this to hundreds of packages your life becomes a hundred times easier.
Additionally you compile
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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 person
Really? It was easy for me to install (Score:3, Informative)
Just because one guy can't install it successfully doesn't mean the entire thing is flawed.
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
It's a shame (Score:2)
(I'm sure someone will suggest that someone has...)
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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 tryin
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
Re:I'm a former gentoo user (Score:5, Informative)
I just posted a similar set of complaints, but you've touched on one I'd forgotten. The Portage system still works well *if* you're a Gentoo obsessive and emerge sync; emerge -uD world at least once a week. If you get behind, and need to update Portage, layouts, gcc, X and the kernel all at once, you start running into all sorts of really nasty collisions and breakages.
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)
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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
Whoa... this is news to me (Score:2)
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.
Yup, it's painful (Score:2)
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
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 repartit
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Don't you still have to compile or install those with Gentoo? How is that different than the other distros that you have to install that stuff, or better than the distros that automatically install them?
I went through the same thing a week ago.. (Score:2)
linux is great for servers, i wouldnt want anything else. however in general i think we still have a ways to go..
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.
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what a quitter :) (Score:4, Insightful)
The instructions have been tested by hundreds of thousands of people. They work.
You can install gentoo in an hour (Score:3, Informative)
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.
What's the Trouble? (Score:2, Informative)
In fact my biggest difficulties installing Gentoo are pretty much common to all Linux distros I've tried. The
Lame?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought Red Hat 7.3 was bad... (Score:4, Funny)
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Gentoo has ALWAYS used a liveCD (Score:2)
Since the author does not seem to understand the difference between a liveCD and a graphical installer, I for one, am not at all surprised he had problems installing Gentoo. It is not for the computer illiterate.
The last I heard the Gentoo Graphic Installer sucked bowling balls and ate existing partitions. To be fair, I found the newish Ubuntu Graphical Installer to totally suck also. It seemed to require
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.
Debian apt-build (Score:3, Informative)
With that said choice is still good.
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:
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.
How hard core am I? (Score:3, Interesting)
It ran great after it was all done.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The literature today ONLY supporst stage3 installs...you actually have to 'dig' to find how to do it from stage1 these days...so, it is much easier than before.
Re: (Score:2)
I, personally, don't care for the gui installation method of modern gentoo live cd's because they are not geared toward complex installations (doesn't use LVM, no raid options, etc.)
I found myself helping my brother with EVERY step of the installation process. The only part he was ab
You're right (Score:2)
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I hear that a lot. People who swear by portage and how it's the greatest package manager ever created. Having only used it briefly I'd like to ask what's so great about it? What's the benefits over rpm or deb? Yes, rpm-hell is real but that's the package-managers fault. Portage does similar things. I installed something called
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Gentoo is about a l
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2c.
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.
Re:Exactly! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Gentoo for 2 years now and the only RTFM I've gotten was a 'Read the forums, man'. One quick search on forums.gentoo.org, and the answer was in the second post, spelled out step-by-step. Every problem I've had on any of my Gentoo boxes has been answered on the forums. 95% of the time the answer is already there and you just have to post the error string into the search box.
Either this guy doesn't know Linux as well as he thought, or this story is just trollbait.
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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.
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