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Gentoo review


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I was having some problems with Mandrakelinux 10.2 Cooker (my fault I admit it .... never play too much with Cooker :P) and I wanted to try something different (no, not Winblows Longhorn :)) I didn't know if I could install the distro or configure it but I decided to give it a shot. I downloaded both the Universal Live CD and the packages CD (which I never used).

Installation

 

I booted the LiveCD and decided to go for a stage2 install (not too easy, not too hard ;)) The base system install took me some hours (figuring out stuff, understanding and setting use flags, configuring and compiling the kernel etc). The handbook was very helpful, I understood everything. In the end I had a bare bones system without GUI, only the very basic stuff running linux-2.6.10-nitro2 (finally I managed to build a fast and stable kernel by myself).

 

I compiled everything (Gnome, Firefox, Xorg, XMMS, MPlayer, OpenOffice and a lot of other stuff) using Gentoo's package manager, Portage, from source with aggressive flags :cheeky: . It took my Athlon XP 1800+ CPU about 2 nights.

All configuration was done manually (lilo, network, fstab, make.conf etc).

Package Management

 

There are 2 ways to install things: either get the compiled stuff from the packages cd or download and compile everything from one of the Gentoo mirrors using emerge. I believe that getting the sources is way better than binary packages.

 

Here are some advantages/disadvantages for the Gentoo package management system:

 

+ your compiled binaries will be perfectly optimized for your system (much faster and smaller than normal binaries)

+ you always have the sources and can make whatever modifications you want

+ deltup helps people with dial-up or limited bandwidth (like me) upgrade. Emerge just downloads and patches the existing sources with a small dtu file and then compiles it. This way I didn't have to download linux-2.6.10 (~36MB). Emerge just patched my existing linux-2.6.9 with a small dtu file (~3MB).

+ you get the l33t feeling, lol :cheeky:

- & + it may take a lot of time to compile on slower CPUs, but there us a way to get around that. You compile the entire system once, then you tell emerge to build binary packages as well, for all your software. This way, the next time you install Gentoo you will have fully-optimized binary packages that install as fast/or faster as/then rpms. NOTE: Your CPU type must be the same. Example: Athlon XP optimized packages aren't optimized for an Intel or Athlon MP CPU.

- you have to keep an eye on the installation process since it might stop because of compile errors

- not for the faint hearted

 

Almost forgot, Portage has a GUI application called Porthole which makes installing software easy.

 

Features

 

Gentoo is fast, lightweight and flexible. You have total control over the system and you can tweak just about everything. A big community of fanatics is always there to help you if you get in trouble :lol: .

One disadvantage I see is that it is aimed at the tech savvy.

Conclusions

Gentoo replaced my Mandrakelinux installation and is my main OS, now.

If speed and performance is important to you, if you like to tweak your system than Gentoo is for you.

 

What can I say, it's the best distro I've used so far ! :cheesy:

Gentoo rulz. :cheeky:

Edited by a13x
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almost everytime someone tries a new distro, he says "this one will replace my old distro". especially, if it takes such a long time to compile like gentoo. people are proud of these systems until they run into serious trouble. i remember phunny, who was happy with arch after compiling it until things broke badly (and he switched back to windows, as we all know...).

personally, i wish that it works well for you. i ran did a stage one install once myself but i wasn't too happy with the system although everything worked. the long compiling times for every update were somewhat frustrating for me, as i need my boxes for work and not for "watching stuff compiling for hours and hoping it doesn't break". The speed advantage was minimal, so i killed gentoo after just two months. i never regretted the move back to .deb and .rpm based distros.

 

just my three cents. :)

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Just to say that my problems were nothing to do with compiling anything! I suspect it's a hardware conflict.

 

Plus you spell phunni with an i...

 

Plus, I'd been running somthing like gentoo or arch for ages before returning to windows (mostly for my wife's (and therefore my) sanity) - so it's nothing to do with running for cover at the first sign of a problem!

 

Plus - I'm still here! Don't talk about me as if I'm long dead or something!

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Gentoo is a fine distro.

I found no speed increase, but most with newer faster machines do not.

The binaries are not auto smaller. Depends on your opt flags....in fact, they are usually larger for most.

I stopped using gentoo because I'm very impatient and found that by the time compiles were finished urpmi or apt could have installed a few nore dependencies. Having compiled so many kernels/apps and LFS a compile did nothing for me...therefore gentoo was useless and no thrill to me :cheesy: I just want it to work and do it quickly.

 

Have fun in gentoo! :D

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Plus you spell phunni with an i...

:oops:

 

Plus, I'd been running somthing like gentoo or arch for ages before returning to windows (mostly for my wife's (and therefore my) sanity) - so it's nothing to do with running for cover at the first sign of a problem!

 

Plus - I'm still here! Don't talk about me as if I'm long dead or something!

i wasn't talking about you as if you're long dead... at least i did not want to and if it sounds that way... errm... mhmhm.. sorry... :woops:

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Patience is a virtue :D.

 

In my case, packages are smaller because I have no KDE installed so they are Gnome-only.

 

I'm very busy too but I have enough time for the upgrades: I just leave the PC on in the night. First, it downloads everything needed, than it starts compiling. The next day I check for errors and resolve them. This is how I do all my massive downloading, upgrading etc.

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I tried it about 2 years ago (I think) on a K6-400. I just gave up after a few days when there was no end of building the "minimal system" in sight. To be fair I had a poky harddrive (5400rpm over ATA33) and the absolute minimum memory .

I find urpmi to be too slow at times, so I guess Gentoo is not for me. Mdk is optimized for i586 which is at least a first step in gaining speed vs an i386 build.

Edited by papaschtroumpf
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I've heard on a few occasions that compiling for i586 actually makes bigger binaries without any extra performance. Not sure how true that is.

 

PROGRAM POINTLESS RANT

 

It does seem ridiculous to me though, a system like mandrake really desires a 200MHz+ computer, which means the mmx extensions and an i686 system. IIRC i586 starts at about 90MHz and ends at roughly 150MHz depending on the manufacturer, whats the point in compiling for that tiny range when an OS other than mandrake would be by far a better choice?

 

END POINTLESS RANT

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I've been rockin with Gentoo for some time. I personally think its real more customizable. That may be the case because of the overwhelming group of tech savy that are on the Gentoo board.

 

Plus some of you old timers may have remembered my thread from ages ago about not wanted to upgrade every 6 months. With the exception of bvc :) most people have a hard time with upgrading to the next version on .rpm formats.

 

With the case of Gentoo - 1 install and your done. You can upgrade to the next release when it comes out without starting from scratch. See My HowTo

 

As for long compile times Ill admit its no where as fast as apt or urpmi but after a first install of the system it is not that long at all (on a fast system). Gentoo has binaries for the very large programs (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla).

 

Porthole is very good but limited in its customization. For me I find the program I want on Porthole then emerge via command line.

 

Another good for Portage - you can not have apt-get or urpmi running more than once at the same time. Ill have 3 or 4 packages emerging at the same time. emerge may take longer but Im doing 4 at a time. No file lock to deal with.

 

No hack on any Distro or .rpm stuff. Just wanted to point out some Gentoo goodness :cheesy:

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Another convert <MR.BURNS-VOICE>Excellent</MR.BURNS-VOICE>

 

Don't listen to all these whiners about the time it takes to compile - type emerge -u world, go to bed, and when you wake up your system is up to date. Wow, what an inconvenience, eh? And waiting a few minutes longer for a new program is so worth it. They can't find anything wrong with Gentoo, so they resort to whining about compile times. Pfff. (Not stabbing at anyone or being serious, relax :P )

 

Gentoo has been my main distro for almost two years now and I'm loving it - <SARCASM>No more urpmi-crap in Mandrake, no more of Red Hat's bastard child Fedora or the geek-snob, anal-retentiveness of the Arch community or even the backwardness of Ubuntu. </SARCASM> :cheeky:

 

Best distro since Slackware was first released ;)

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Best distro since Slackware was first released ;)

Yea, for techno heads, geeks, or those who have previous knowledge of Linux maybe. (no insult intended) But as a desktop/laptop distro it will always be used by the minority.

If MDK or RedHat were to vanish and all we had was the likes of Gentoo it would put promoting Linux on the desktop back 20 years IMO.

 

a13x

Thanks for the review. As a bit of a geek myself it was an interesting read. :thumbs:

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Another convert <MR.BURNS-VOICE>Excellent</MR.BURNS-VOICE>

 

Don't listen to all these whiners about the time it takes to compile - type emerge -u world, go to bed, and when you wake up your system is up to date. Wow, what an inconvenience, eh? And waiting a few minutes longer for a new program is so worth it. They can't find anything wrong with Gentoo, so they resort to whining about compile times. Pfff. (Not stabbing at anyone or being serious, relax :P )

...

if you have the time for compiling, that's okay. i for myself simply can't say: "okay, compile if you want during the night and maybe even longer", because my boxes are needed for work the full 24 hours. so i cannot spend 6+ hours for compiling. but that is just me. :P

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if you have the time for compiling, that's okay. i for myself simply can't say: "okay, compile if you want during the night and maybe even longer", because my boxes are needed for work the full 24 hours. so i cannot spend 6+ hours for compiling. but that is just me. :P

You can work on a machine while it is compiling thins, so that shouldn't create any problems unless the work you are doing is resource-intensive in which case compiling might slow things down.

 

Yea, for techno heads, geeks, or those who have previous knowledge of Linux maybe. (no insult intended) But as a desktop/laptop distro it will always be used by the minority.

If MDK or RedHat were to vanish and all we had was the likes of Gentoo it would put promoting Linux on the desktop back 20 years IMO.

I fully agree - there need to be easy, simple to use distros like Mandrake if Linux will become a significant desktop OS. I was merely expressing that for my uses Gentoo is far superior. I also believe in progress - so once you've got the easy-to-use distro down, why not move onto to something more challenging? (and therefore usually more rewarding - in this case, definately).

 

Thing is, Gentoo might be more time consuming to setup, but it is NOT difficult.

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You can work on a machine while it is compiling thins, so that shouldn't create any problems unless the work you are doing is resource-intensive in which case compiling might slow things down.

as i have to work with resources-intensive graphics you might bet it slowed things down. this is why we switched back to debian. from a stability standpoint i never had problems with gentoo.

Thing is, Gentoo might be more time consuming to setup, but it is NOT difficult.

it is not difficult if you have some basic knowlegde about linux. if you are a complete noob, it is (imho) like building a jumbo-jet without knowing anything about mathematics and physics.

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...it is not difficult if you have some basic knowlegde about linux. if you are a complete noob, it is (imho) like building a jumbo-jet without knowing anything about mathematics and physics.

 

Well I had a friend who used Gentoo as his first distro ever and had no problems installing it. Really, all you have to do is follow the instructions carefully. It might be time consuming, but it's certainly not difficult.

 

Debian is a great distro as well (they all are, depending on what you want to do) - Debian is IMO, also more _difficult_ to install than Gentoo.

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