Lone Coder: VirtualBox on Vista with a Gentoo Guest

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 04:00:28PM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> That wouldn't/didn't teach me a thing about how to do bootstrap  
> installations.

Something no sane person should ever want to do.  And if you want to see
how it is done in a proper installer, go look at the sources.  I have,
I have even made some fixes to the installer process in the past.
I learned a lot of useful stuff from it.

>> Watching a compiler and make do it's thing teaches you
>> nothing useful.  It is quite boring in fact.
>
> Agreed, that part wasn't a particularly useful learning exercise.  
> However, getting Gentoo to the point where I could boot a Gentoo kernel  
> was a worthwhile learning experience for me. Much of the complexity of  
> installation is hidden behind tui or gui interfaces in most other  
> distros (and that's a good thing) but it was useful to learn what goes  
> on behind the scenes.

Except what gentoo does is NOT what goes on behind the scenes.
What gentoo is doing is what might be going on (if your definition is
loose enough) at the build server or package maintainer.  It is not what
the installer would normally be doing.

> With a "proper" system, the cost of reinstalling won't be so high that  
> you think that "rolling updates/upgrades" are The One True Way. Having  
> the option, but not the obligation, to do repeatable, fresh installs is  
> a very good thing. That shouldn't preclude you from doing in situ  
> updates and upgrades.

Seems many distributions consider it a good enough solution that rolling
upgrades don't have to be supported though.  Perhaps making sure the
upgrade method works first and best, before implementing the other part
works out for the better.

> It isn't "an excuse for why you don't have to support upgrades  
> properly". You can still do in situ updates/upgrades with yum, just like  
> you can with apt-get. Cobbler helps manage that. I can wake up a machine  
> across the network and do a repeatable install or update without  
> touching that machine. I know about and have done preseed installations  
> for Debian/Ubuntu and aside from the fact that they're more complex and  
> not as well documented as kickstart, I don't know of a tool like Cobbler  
> for Debian/Ubuntu. If one exists, we'd use it because we happily use  
> Debian and derivatives, too and we need something like it there.

Then why do I keep reading about fedora upgrades going splat and people
always just doing fresh installs?  Strangely seems to happen to ubuntu a
fair bit too.  Perhaps the real issue is a lack of testing and too much
preasure to release on a given date.

> The creators of Red Hat and derivatives have made more effort addressing  
> manageability than the creators of Debian and derivatives, which isn't  
> surprising given that Red Hat targets and is used by organizations that  
> are bound to have such problems to address. I think Debian is used in  
> some large compute clusters where the manageability problems are  
> similar, hence debootstrap, but there are capabilities missing in  
> debootstrap that tools like Cobbler and Spacewalk are attempting to  
> address. Ubuntu, despite what Canonical may claim, isn't really ready  
> for "the enterprise". We have a client with a Canonical support  
> contract. It's a waste of money as far as I can tell because the moment  
> you stray away from what they consider to be "the standard", e.g.  
> deploying PHP apps via fcgi vs. mod_php, they throw up their hands and  
> say, "Oh, we can't provide support for that."

Well I don't care much for ubuntu.  It has good ideas, but also a lot
of flaws.

I suspect debian is just mainly used in places that don't need a support
contract because they know what they are doing, where quality of software
and mangeability of the system matters more than having a support contract
for help and someone to blame when things don't work.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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