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Why I love Gentoo


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People always say they hate the compiling and while I admit it gets annoying at times Gentoo also makes me think a lot and have to research and I enjoy that.

 

Here's what I've had to do this past week. It started with my UPS and trying to get it working. The linux software from Belkin didn't work so I took the suggestion to try nut. Well after getting it all configured it seemed like it just couldn't find my serial port. So I checked my kernel .config and sure enough when I had compiled my kernel the last time the driver 8250 for serial ports had errors. So I decided to upgrade my kernel and recompile. I used my old config but there were a lot of errors during make so I decided to start with a fresh .config. I am using gentoo-sources. So then I had to think of all the things I needed to compile in. No errors in make, ran lilo and booted. Oops, alsa couldn't find my sound card. Easy to fix, but then I had another error, I don't remember what it was but it was something that needed to be compiled into the kernel so I googled and found out what it was. Now the fun of finding it in make menuconfig. Ok, got that done.

 

Still no serial port connection. This is where the nut developer came in and told me I needed a different driver which wasn't in any linux software yet because my UPS was so new. So working with him for a few days and I was able to get my UPS working. Now, not being satisfied I wanted to be able to access my UPS online via localhost. So I asked the developer and he told me how. I had to emerge nut with the cgi USE flag. But even though the ebuild didn't failed I got an error that it couldn't find libgd. So I emerged gd and it failed to build libgd. So I posted on the Gentoo board and they told me that I needed to build GD. Duh, I already told them that. So I searched the gentoo board and found out that I could put libgd in make.conf as a use flag. So I did that and it worked. Cool!

 

But during all this time I realized I hadn't done my world updates in about a week. I do the deep world updates which not only upgrades packages but there dependencies. I had 66 programs that needed compiled including several kde ones. So I just let it run over night and I had a message that I had 5 config files that needed to be updated and to run etc-update. Well, as any Gentoo user knows you don't run etc-update until you know what it wants to overwrite. An example is when you have a new xorg and it wants to overwrite you xorg.config. So I ran my little script that I have. Looked over what needed to be upgraded and thought I was safe. Then I had to reboot. No kde, just a bunch of errors. So I did startx which takes you into the Gentoo default wm which just consist of a black screen and three terminals. Right clicking on the desktop gives you nothing. So then I had to figure out why it wasn't working. I checked my config files and somewhere along the way they changed the default config files where you set you XSession to kde. So I made sure that was ok. Them I set kdm for login. But .kderc was overwritten. I don't use the modular kde so the easiest thing to do was to emerge kdm and see what packages were blocking it and then reemerge that one. As I suspected it was kde-base. I remerged it and cool. I could now log into kde. Now you ask why do I love Gentoo because off all these problems. Well it's fun! Frustrating but fun. I spent a lot of time looking for answers. And then getting it all worked out was satisfying. So now I have to break something else so I can fix it and hopefully learn more. Yes, I am crazy!

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But lets not forget that in another distribution you might never have got it working ;)

 

Seriously, the Gentoo community is way active and I've gotten things right with bleeding edge packages in Gentoo that I haven't managed in any of the other distros I regularly use.

 

I love Gentoo too, for its flexibility amongst other things. And I don't mind the compile times at all. Couldn't bother me less.

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But lets not forget that in another distribution you might never have got it working ;)

 

That's true. I don't know if you read my other thread about trying to get my UPS working but because it's so new the driver isn't in any linux packages. So the developer helped me download the parts of the driver that when compiled made the driver I needed. And all I had to do was take the tar.gz, untar it, add the files to the drivers folder, put it back and compile.

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might want to fix your enter key, it looks like your paragraphs were not put in

 

:cheeky:

 

James

 

lol -- I agree with phunni though & as well as energy I suppose it's time. In the world we live in now-a-days it's all go, go, go. I remember the story of a wife who was in a hurry to meet some friends which meant that she had no time to cook a meal for her hubby. Anyway being the nice lady that she was she left a microwaveable meal next to the -- microwave with a letter of apologises. When she got back later that evening the meal was still next to the microwave untouched. Apparently the husband moaned that he didn't eat the meal cos the instructions stated that he had heat it for 2 MINUTES then come back turn it OVER then heat it for another 2 MINUTES... I think you get the jist.

 

We've become programmed now to expect things to just appear - we want to watch something we switch on the telly - hey presto! - drive throughs - drop in clinics - & the list goes on..

 

Having said that good on you mystified - someone's got to do it! :)

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I've currently got two anti-spam servers running Gentoo, and recently upgraded from 2006.1 to 2007.0. I've also got my desktop system that has Gentoo 2007.0 on it as well. And real easy to upgrade from one release to another, without even a reboot!

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Gentoo also makes me think a lot and have to research and I enjoy that

You know, this isn't in any way specific to Gentoo. Gentoo does nothing that makes this more necessary than any other "advanced user" distribution.

 

I tried to read the rest of your post mysti, but, it just looked like garbled text. Something about it not being a Gentoo thing, but more just an advanced distribution thing, and the smell of distro-evangelism...I don't know. I figure it best I not finish or else I might have to go on about what's wrong with Gentoo, but I won't :P

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