Any Gentoo Users on this list?

[I. Khider]

Hello Teddy, Marc et al, 

The reason I want to run Gentoo is so I can understand Linux. Yes,
Gentoo is a royal pain for a newb so I am going through a trial by fire.
I have a teenaged brother who installed my desktop system. He is a whiz
at linux/bsd/whatever--but get him to explain anything to you...well,
deal with a frustrated teenager see how far you get. 

So I have DWM as my GUI and I am learning console in the proccess. No
KDE, no Gnome--just the more user intensive way of doing things. (Prior
to that I ran Ubuntu with Gnome, KDE and XFCE.) With Gentoo, guess what?
I am learning how the system works. In a perverse way, I like DWM more
than any other GUI I used. 

I want an optimal desktop system and to learn to use Linux, Gentoo is
perfect for that. Now getting my graphics card configured, the damn
printer to work, or find my music files on my hard drive is another
matter. I am optomistic I will get those things working in about a year
or so. Now I just e-mail files to print, run to a net cafe and print out
the documents there, listen to the radio more often and read books. 

When I ran Ubuntu--I would have apps mysteriously not working. So I
figured, 'okay, just learn Linux already so I won't have a fit everytime
something doesn't work.' 

I guess I will have to wear a hair shirt or whip myself for Linux next. 

-Ib-



On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 15:42 -0500, Teddy Mills wrote:

> Our Linux ISP datacenter at one point was 80% Gentoo.
> Clients servers as well as our own.
> 
> Now the swing I see is towards Ubuntu-servers.
> 
> I got tired have having 8 miles of compiling to do.
> 'People cycles' are more important than 'CPU cycles'.
> 
> /teddy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> lanctot-yfeSBMgouQgsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I would happily help you install it. I've done it at least 5 times.. 
> > probably around 10.
> >
> > However, I would like to know why you're considering Gentoo. Based on 
> > my experience, I would personally recommend against Gentoo in most 
> > cases. Gentoo was among my list of distros that I kept going back and 
> > forth between but now it's no longer in my good books.. last time I 
> > installed it I felt like Gentoo had gone downhill for good. I'm 
> > replying to the list in the hopes that if some of my dated knowledge 
> > is in need of correction. I mostly used it as a Desktop not as a server.
> >
> > I don't want to start a flame war or anything, but I'll list why I 
> > think so in the form of bullet points with a summary paragraph at the 
> > end.
> >
> > - USE Flags
> >
> > As Colin mentioned maybe the biggest pro for Gentoo is the USE flags 
> > which I have yet to see on another of the major Linux distros. Like 
> > many things in Gentoo this seems to be a pro at first (wow, hey, I can 
> > customize my Linux installation!) and it does its job mostly well. So 
> > if that's what you want then great. If you don't want any KDE apps or 
> > all the libs you can prevent them from being installed and any other 
> > packages that use them optionally can turn off support for them. Let 
> > me not undermine the versatility of these flags; you can override them 
> > on a per-install basis. So if you want some apps to have X capability 
> > built-in and some not then you have a default USE flag which you 
> > override whenever you need X.
> >
> > Several months down the road you hear about this cool new KDE app, in 
> > my case it was some Movie editing software-- name is escaping me-- 
> > that Marcel Gagne wrote about in a Linux Journal article. Guess what? 
> > I had to wait overnight for it to install because I'd disabled KDE 
> > apps and libs up to that point so I had to build something like 50-100 
> > of them.
> >
> > Now I have KDE installed but none of my previous apps built with 
> > support for KDE. So I have to rebuild them all with KDE support, which 
> > I can do nicely with emerge on a good day, but it will still take 
> > forever.
> >
> > - Blocking packages, blocking updates, custom versions
> >
> > Another cool feature of Gentoo is that you can block unwanted packages 
> > quite well.. you can even do it by specific version numbers. So if you 
> > do an update but you don't want your Java version to be touched then 
> > you can add a rule that blocks Java from being updated. You can even 
> > block packages altogether, and you can install specific versions too.
> >
> > - Bootstrapped Linux
> >
> > One of the coolest things about Gentoo was their idea of stages. You 
> > had three installation stages, stage1, stage2, and stage3 install. The 
> > first stage was the bare bones of the system such as coreutils and 
> > gcc. Stage2 was more of the core, and stage3 was the rest. The great 
> > thing was that you could choose to build every one of these stages or 
> > download pre-built binaries. Doing a stage1 installation meant that 
> > all your coreutils, gcc, everything you'd need to compile the kernel 
> > would have your CPU's optimizations, and then you'd proceed to build 
> > everything in stage2 using your optimized stage1 binaries, etc. If you 
> > were short on time you could download pre-built stages and start 
> > building from a further point.
> >
> > They dropped support for stage1 and stage2 installations last time I 
> > tried (on x86 and/or amd64 -- very common arch!). So the coolest part 
> > of Gentoo was just thrown away.
> >
> > - Package system (emerge vs. apt and yum)
> >
> > emerge downloads a source which is then built rather than downloading 
> > binaries. This, in theory, is one of the coolest things about the 
> > distro because it allows you to do customizing via the USE flags *and* 
> > allows you to compile the source with optimization flags according to 
> > your architecture. In other distros you're download pre-built binaries 
> > meant to work on all versions of your architecture, so ie. x86 may not 
> > have anything more than 386 CPU ptimizations in it (so packages are 
> > build for many archs, like the kernel, but most not). So at first this 
> > make you think that everything will run faster, but studies show that 
> > there's hardly a difference if at all. In fact Debian often beats 
> > Gentoo in the performance tests.
> >
> > The biggest problem I had with emerge is I found a lack of maintenance 
> > for packages. This one package didn't install because one of the 
> > source files was missing a newline character at the end of it (or 
> > something as trivial) and my gcc version marked that as an error 
> > rather than a warning. bugs.gentoo.org had a bug fix that was dated to 
> > several months before. It boggled my mind that such a simple patch had 
> > not been submitted to fix the build script in that amount of time. 
> > This is only one such story, but in general emerge failed more often 
> > than both apt and yum in my experience. Most of the time it's a quick 
> > fix, but it does get annoying.
> >
> > One plus of portage/emerge is that you can mix and match stable and 
> > unstable packages by overriding a flag when using emerge. Again this 
> > is customizable on a per-package and version range basis.
> >
> > Last time I checked (over a year ago) most amd64 packages were still 
> > in "unstable". Most distros had the same packages in stable by now. 
> > I'm not talking about rare unheard-of packages, I'm talking about 
> > mostly common ones. That was the last straw for me because it just 
> > seemed to me that Gentoo was getting nowhere by then. This was 
> > slightly after their main president/leader had left. Sorry I don't 
> > remember his or her name.
> >
> >
> >
> > So in summary Gentoo seems like it might be a fun toy. If 
> > customization is important to you then Gentoo will be a good distro as 
> > long as you're patient enough to wait for emerge to build packages 
> > (updating your packages is usually an overnight thing too). But 
> > nowadays I'm getting the impression that Arch is the better way to go 
> > if you want something custom (though I've never tried it so don't hold 
> > me to that!). A lot of the cool things that spark your inner geek 
> > actually aren't as cool/good as you'd expect and that's only if it's 
> > still support for it. Package maintenance is good, but not as good as 
> > other major Linux distros.
> >
> > Marc
> > -- 
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> 
> --
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> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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