Advice needed on Gentoo

[Havin_it]

'ning all,

 

After (nearly) a year of Mandrake, I consider myself well-enough versed in the core widgets I need to understand to get my laptop + devices working smoothly.

 

That, to my mind, makes it - TIME FOR A CHANGE!

 

No other distro interests me more than Gentoo right now: I like the idea of building my whole system from source and the optimisation that could bring. MDK/MDV RPMs are made for i586, but if I understand everything correctly (which isn't a given), my Celeron 'Northwood' 2.6GHz qualifies as an i686, so it'd be nice to see if this made much of a difference.

 

I'm hoping any Gentoo veterans here can give me some thoughts on what I'm letting myself in for. Some questions:

 

- Just how long does the base install really take, given the above CPU + 512MB RAM? (I've heard it quoted in days )

 

- Given my Mandy background, what things might catch me off-guard during the install?

 

- Should I research what compiler switches/flags are appropriate for my system in advance (if so where can I get such info), or does the installer detect/advise me sufficiently?

 

- What's the package repository landscape like compared to Mandy? Are some things (like PLF-type stuff or jpackage) not included? Is it easy enough to use 'alien' packages with Portage?

 

- My Linux partition is currently 7.5GB not including swap. Could I need more than that?

 

Can't think of any other biggies at the mo', but will add if I do. Thanks in advance for any wisdom you care to share...!

[arctic]

although i used gentoo only for a rather brief time ( three months), i will give you my opinion on some stuff.

- Just how long does the base install really take, given the above CPU + 512MB RAM? (I've heard it quoted in days  )

it depends on how many apps you want to integrate into your system and which desktop environments you want to build on your box. if you go for the full install (with kde and gnome flags), it can last more than one day, i guess

- Given my Mandy background, what things might catch me off-guard during the install?

as long as you don't use very unusual hardware and stick to the install-manual/documentation, there should not be many problems... except errors resulting from lack of concentration. make sure to drink enough coffee. :D

- Should I research what compiler switches/flags are appropriate for my system in advance (if so where can I get such info), or does the installer detect/advise me sufficiently?

definitely yes. you should think one or two days on what you really want and need. detailed information on flags is in the documentation (make sure to have a printed copy next to your box)

- What's the package repository landscape like compared to Mandy?  Are some things (like PLF-type stuff or jpackage) not included? Is it easy enough to use 'alien' packages with Portage?

the number of packages is very good. i think it is somewhere between 5000 and 6000 packages currently. every important and frequently used package should be there, i guess.

- My Linux partition is currently 7.5GB not including swap.  Could I need more than that?

enough space for a "normal installation".

[Lowe]

It's better to just do the base install, which takes about 2 hours. Then install one destop enviroment, gnome-lite didn't take very long maybe about an hour but then again i have a pretty decent pc. The hardest bit for me out of the whole installation is that stupid GRUB, i manage to screw it up almost everytime i've installed gentoo.

 

Packages, well there is an insane amount of good packages, you see with debian there is a lot of packages but debian doesn't include all those multimedia apps, where gentoo does. You don't need to add another repository or anything, from the moment your system is installed you can emerge stuff like mplayer and w32 codecs.

 

I just couldn't be bothered tinkering with stuff every day, gentoo is damn nice, i only really liked it because of the great packages you can get. Not to put you off, but it does seem almost everytime you upgrade the system something will break. If you have a lot of time and patience, it might be a good distro for you.

[Havin_it]

Guys, thank you both for your viewpoints. arctic, it's particularly good to be told explicitly to take careful 'rehearsal time' over configuration - I need this because I am a cardinal sinner of blattering straight in without preparation. MDK lets me off with such transgressions, of course :)

 

I think setting up LAMP will be one thing requiring a lot of thought. Apache alone must have at least fifty configure switches, which is the sort of thing I've never had to worry about before...

 

I read some reviews over at linuxquestions.org and one phrase kept coming up, about having to do things "the Gentoo Way" [their inverted commas, not mine]. What exactly does this mean? Are they just referring to the business of actually building everything from source, or is there some darker secret?

[Lowe]

I read some reviews over at linuxquestions.org and one phrase kept coming up, about having to do things "the Gentoo Way" [their inverted commas, not mine]. What exactly does this mean?  Are they just referring to the business of actually building everything from source, or is there some darker secret?

Not sure what that means, but aslong as you follow the guide step-by-step it's pretty straight forward, i was always put off by what people said about gentoo being so painful to install, i was glad to find out they were just silly rumours. They probably just mean building from source, like you said or they could be talking about the admin tools like runlevel editing like "rc-update add hotplug defaults". I only had gentoo installed for about 2 weeks, but i learned a lot in the short amount of time i used it. Goodluck. :P

[ac_dispatcher]

May want to consider a VidaLinux install.

 

It usually takes me about a day and a half to get a full KDE system up and running.

 

Gentoo stuff:

 

Gentoo Wiki (One of the best out there)

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Main_Page

 

CFLAGS help:

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.1/gcc/...imize%20Options

 

Portage:

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/

 

If you need help with your make.conf file just ask

[ac_dispatcher]

By the way -

 

Welcome to the best of the best

 

 

 

 

./cybrjackle_flamevest

Edited June 25, 2005 by ac_dispatcher

[jlc]

By the way -

 

Welcome to the best of the best 

 

 

 

 

./cybrjackle_flamevest

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

Ok, I guess you want something :P

 

I've used gentoo for a long time from close to the beginning on several different arch's so I do have some experience with it.

 

Optimizations/gcc - unless you start becoming a gcc dev, leave the special flags for them. Most people load there CFLAGS down with crap they have no idea what it is doing and going off of another person in a thread that has 10 post (must know whats up) :)

 

If it's in i686 cpu, grab the stage 3, unload it and leave the CFLAGS alone. The majority of problems people run into are crazy flags. Check the gentoo forums and look for gentoo ricers.

 

I do think gentoo can be a good os, I just don't think it is worth it for me, plus it's not bleeding enough. I haven't used it in awhile, i played around about a month ago, and it was just like when I left. I really think the quality has been going down, ebuild's are getting nastier. (not all, don't blow this into something it isn't) I just think a lot of it isn't as clean as it used to be. The communtiy can be good at times.

 

For me:

 

1.) Rawhide

2.) FC4

3.) CentOS 4.0

4.) Ubuntu/Gentoo (kind of tied)

5.) Gentoo/Ubuntu (kind of tied) :)

6.) Debian

7..) slackware/arch

 

Gentoo can be fun, go play with it and see what you think. Someone else mentioned having problems with grub. cp your current grub and if you keep the same partion layout, you shouldn't have a problem. Or just read through the grub guide and ask on forum.irc if you still have trouble. As far as were are you now from a year of Mandy, dunno know. Have you been using that crack pot mcc :D then you will have a little more troubles but nothing horrible.

 

Just remermber, you can do the samething in all Linux Distro's

 

And what ever Flags you use and unstable file systems, it still wont make it ubber elite.

[Havin_it]

Heh... I weaned off MCC pretty quick after attempting to use Drakconnect a few times <grrr>. Guess I'd miss a couple of things from it though: browsing the packages with RPMDrake, and the Services panel being the main ones.

 

Guess I'll need to do a lot of reading to decide if I'm really ready for it. I mean if I can bugger up a MDK install (yes, really) I want to be better prepared if I go this route.

 

cybr, can you explain about stages? I saw something in the ISO repo's that mentioned Stage 1, but I'm not clear. Is Stage 3 corresponding to -O3 optimisation?

[arctic]

A Stage1 Approach

 

A stage1 is used when you want to bootstrap and build the entire system from scratch.

 

Starting from a stage1 allows you to have total control over the optimization settings and optional build-time functionality that is initially enabled on your system. This makes stage1 installs good for power users who know what they are doing. It is also a great installation method for those who would like to know more about the inner workings of Gentoo Linux.

Stage1  Pros and Cons

+  Allows you to have total control over the optimization settings and optional build-time functionality that is initially enabled on your system

+  Suitable for powerusers that know what they are doing

+  Allows you to learn more about the inner workings of Gentoo

-  Takes a long time to finish the installation

-  If you don't intend to tweak the settings, it is a waste of time

-  Requires a working Internet connection during the installation

 

A Stage2 Approach

 

A stage2 is used for building the entire system from a bootstrapped "semi-compiled" state.

 

Stage2 installs allow you to skip the bootstrap process; doing this is fine if you are happy with the optimization settings that we chose for your particular stage2 tarball.

Stage2  Pros and Cons

+  You don't need to bootstrap

+  Faster than starting with stage1

+  You can still tweak your settings

-  You cannot tweak as much as with a stage1

-  It's still not the fastest way to install Gentoo

-  You have to accept the optimizations we chose for the bootstrap

-  Requires a working Internet connection during the installation

 

A Stage3 Approach

 

A stage3 installation contains a basic Gentoo Linux system that has been built for you. You will only need to build a few packages of which we can't decide for you which one to choose.

 

Choosing to go with a stage3 allows for the fastest install of Gentoo Linux, but also means that your base system will have the optimization settings that we chose for you (which to be honest, are good settings and were carefully chosen to enhance performance while maintaining stability). Stage3 is also required if you want to install Gentoo using prebuilt packages or without a network connection.

Stage3  Pros and Cons

+  Fastest way to get a Gentoo base system

-  You cannot tweak the base system - it's built already

 

You might be interested to know that, if you decide to use different optimization settings after having installed Gentoo, you will be able to recompile your entire system with the new optimization settings.

 

the full doc (for ix86 processors) is at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml

[jlc]

Heh... I weaned off MCC pretty quick after attempting to use Drakconnect a few times <grrr>.  Guess I'd miss a couple of things from it though: browsing the packages with RPMDrake, and the Services panel being the main ones.

 

Guess I'll need to do a lot of reading to decide if I'm really ready for it.  I mean if I can bugger up a MDK install (yes, really) I want to be better prepared if I go this route.

 

cybr, can you explain about stages? I saw something in the ISO repo's that mentioned Stage 1, but I'm not clear.  Is Stage 3 corresponding to -O3 optimisation?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

 

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/hand...hap=6#doc_chap2

 

These are pretty much sane flags

 

http://www.freehackers.org/gentoo/gccflags/flag_gcc3.html

 

-O2 & -O3 are some trade offs, 2 will compile it faster, 3 will make it a little faster. If I remember correctly, most distro's use -O2, I beleive even like FreeBSD wont support in code that has been done with O3, I think anyway, could be wrong. Heck for that matter, if you have bugs in Gentoo and you show them your cflags and there all riced up, there going to throw it out too :)

 

This is an example of what fc4/rawhide uses for default builds on i686 systems:

 

optflags: i686 %{__global_cflags} -m32 -march=i686 -mtune=pentium4 -fasynchronous-unwind-tables

%__global_cflags        -O2 -g -pipe -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions

 

FORTIFY_SOURCE is a great thing, I don't believe it was introduced until gcc-3.4.3 and I'm not sure what Gentoo's latest stable version is during the build, I would assume it's up to 3.4.3 by now. WARNING though! I wouldn't use it unless you want to take more time hunting down ugly code and pushing bugzilla's upstream. ;)

 

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/fe...rity/#gcc-glibc

 

That actually might be interesting to compile Gentoo with the flags used in Fedora, which would be:

 -m32 -march=i686 -mtune=pentium4 -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -O2 -g -pipe -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions

 

I'm not sure if the order , but I would assume you'll find out sooner than later. :P

 

Edit: THis is from fc4 which uses gcc-4.0, so some of these might not work, I'm not + of about that. AFAIK, gcc-3.4.3+ and 4.0 share the same API so it is possible all these options were there in the 3.4.x , like I said, sooner than later. ;)

Edited June 25, 2005 by cybrjackle

[scarecrow]

The one and only Gentoo that has some point installing is a stage1 system (provided that you have the time installing it and maintaining it).

Else, any good, CPU optimized binary distro is equally fast or faster, and way less painless to maintain.

To sum it up, either do a stage1 installation (with sensible cflags choice), or do not bother about Gentoo at all.

[SoulSe]

Gentoo has the missfortune of being arguably the most bashed distro on this board. God knows why, but lets set some things straight:

 

I have been using Gentoo as my main distro for about two years now. The reason is simple: it's the best distro I have found (for me). In those two years I have tried Arch, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mepis, Red Hat Enterprise, SuSe and PCLOS. None of them come close (for me, I'm not bashing other distros, just stating a preference).

 

Contrary to what you may have heard, Gentoo does not break all the time. I ran on ~x86 (unstable) for most of the last 2 years and I had things breaking about four times. On stable I have never had a break (barring one small issue with nvidia, which was my fault). So much for Gentoo breaking all the time.

 

Another piece of BS: Gentoo is difficult to install. It isn't. It does take longer than other distros, but it is not difficult. I usually do a stage 2 install. It takes about an hour and a bit to get to a base install (and my internet is sloooow) about five hours later I have Gnome, Gaim, Thunderbird and Firefox. My advice: install it at night, set some emerges for your DE and basic apps, go to bed, wake up to Gentoo.

 

Compiling things does not waste that much time either. The initial emerges of big things like your DE will take a while, after that, things get upgraded in pieces, so no major waits, plus, you can carry on on your computer during emerges and even do more than one emerge at the same time (no locking). So while something big is emerging, you can emerge something smaller on the side if you need it quick.

 

In my experience, most people who bash Gentoo couldn't get it working. It can be frustrating. They should say "I don't like it because I couldn't make it work properly" instead of trying to raise non-issues. It certainly isn't for everyone, but I haven't found anything better for me. Just remember to take the comments on here with a pinch of salt ;)

[SoulSe]

The one and only Gentoo that has some point installing is a stage1 system (provided that you have the time installing it and maintaining it).

Else, any good, CPU optimized binary distro is equally fast or faster, and way less painless to maintain.

To sum it up, either do a stage1 installation (with sensible cflags choice), or do not bother about Gentoo at all.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Uh... no. Stage 1 isn't much faster either. Speed is probably the worst reason for installing Gentoo, it isn't noticeably faster than, say, Arch imo.

 

So whether you do a 1, 2 or 3 stage install doesn't matter.

 

What makes Gentoo special is Portage, USE flags and that it illustrates the all important choice provided by open source better than most. Also its stability and fantastic community. Not speed.

[jlc]

IMHO, the only reason to do a stage 1, is if you want to change the default toolchain.

Using a higher gcc/glibc, other wise, do a stage 3.

 

If your new to gentoo, do a stage 3, cause you might not know enough to be using higher gcc/glibc versions anyway. ;)

 

Like I said, install it have fun and see if you like it.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I doubt Soulse was talking to me, cause I bash all distro's even my beloved Fedora! I think I'm qualified since i used it since 1.0-1.1a ish to the 2005 era, on x86, amd64, sparc32, sparc64, hppa & alpha. So i've been around the block a bit! 8)