Jamie French wrote:

As we are talking about Gentoo, anyone tried the Live 1.4 cd? Tried to install last night, but found the install instructions did not always relate to the installation and some of the noted commands failed to execute i.e. not found. This may be due to the fact I tried it on a Tosh Tecra 8000, so I gave up a installed Debian woody which worked but took an age and generated many errors and no I did not write them down, got to late to care :)

Will probably try Gentoo 1.2 when a chance. Not entirely sure which tarballs to use as what does it mean when stage 2 installs some of the system?

Probably trying to do to much to late, tired eyes and all that :)

Folks... RC means?

Take care, and stick to properly tested stuff...

Adam Bower wrote:

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 10:25:11PM +0100, Laurie Brown wrote:

...

Folks... RC means?

Really Crap ;)

...

Take care, and stick to properly tested stuff...

I tried 1.2 before, it didn't get as far as 1.4 it kept refusing to build X windows =( I think I will spend a bit of time this weekend trying to fix up this crate but if it doesn't work out I think I will be moving back to Debian though.

Hey! We're running this stuff commercially, and we wouldn't be doing that if we had had grief. We looked long and hard at gentoo before we made the jump, and we don't regret it yet. Stick with it, it's a learning curve, but some us us remember how hard it was walking away from the sirens of MS to the nirvana of Linux...

Gentoo is really, really, worth the effort...

Wayne Stallwood wayne.stallwood@btinternet.com wrote:

It is really worth the additional hassle (if there is any) Are there really any speed improvements or are they subjective

I have heard that 90% of the speed improvements can be obtained for Debian users by selective use of apt-build with a compiler optimised for your platform and then you get the benefits of debian's wonderful package management tools, too.

I have not attempted to verify that. Anyone?

MJR

Wayne Stallwood wrote:

On a 'sort of' related note.

I've been thinking about giving Gentoo a go

It is really worth the additional hassle (if there is any)

The main "hassle" is the learning curve. It really isn't for newbies. That said, my Linux knowledge soared when I started playing with it. The second one is downloading every package and compiling it. I've got cable at home, and I run a full mirror (~27GB, but a build is nowhere near that big) so my builds are done on a 100MB switched LAN. If I had a modem, I'd think twice about it, I think.

Are there really any speed improvements or are they subjective

There are real speed improvements, definitely. The downside is that it can take a long time to compile everything, especially is one uses X & KDE. Our server build is fully automated, we boot from the CD, answer about 10 questions, and walk away. On an Athlon 1800XP with 256MB and an ATA133 HDD (our standard server) it takes almost exactly 3 hours to build a system with mysql, apache, php, postfix, etc., etc. including an optimised kernel. Obviously, we don't use X. On an older box, say a PII 200, ATA33 HDD, and with X & KDE, you might be looking at 24 hours! *Everything* is built from scratch! That said, with 1.4, there are ready-built packages for every architecture, and build time is considerably reduced with little compromise in final system speed.

How recent is everything, and can anyone explain the package management system (or whatever the equivalent is) briefly.

Everything is as recent as you want it to be. There is some pain in being bleeding edge, because sometimes people make mistakes in the packages and things can break. That said, unless you lose portage (Adam!) it's easy to rip packages out and put them back. The support fora are very good too (they run on phpBB2).

It's all driven by a thing called the portage tree, which contains references to the specific versions of the 2531 (and growing daily) packages available. If you update the tree (emerge rsync), then you will, if you want, build the latest version of everything (emerge --update world). We keep our own tree, so we can manage the changes properly. Frankly, the best place to go for Gentoo info is the site itself. The docs are very good: http://www.gentoo.org

Cheers, Laurie.

Laurie Brown wrote:

The main "hassle" is the learning curve. It really isn't for newbies. That said, my Linux knowledge soared when I started playing with it.

Hi Laurie,

I agree, not really for newbies, being a relative newbie :) But as you say knowledge can soar, which it is for me so I may pursue Gentoo instead of just settling for a simple installation and working SuSe 7.3 solution :) This is not to say SuSe is bad.

Take Care,

Jamie

Wayne Stallwood wrote:

On a 'sort of' related note.

I've been thinking about giving Gentoo a go

It is really worth the additional hassle (if there is any)

Installation is a little bit "unrefined" if you go for it make sure you read the docs through at least once before you start, and when installing make sure you read each step through before actually doing what it says.

Are there really any speed improvements or are they subjective

Possibly, If feels faster than Redhat which I have on my work PC but about the same as Debian which was on the same PC, it may be a little faster but don't expect anything incredibly dramatic. As yet I havn't taken any benchmarks, and there are situations where trying to over-optimise a package could make it run slower.

How recent is everything, and can anyone explain the package management system (or whatever the equivalent is) briefly.

Things are fairly recent, some packages are a bit have been superseeded by newer versions in a few cases but nothing appears to be so new that it would cause major problems and nothing seems to be so old that it would be archaic.

Adam

Adam Bower wrote:

I do *like* gentoo, just my end user experience hasn't been very good so far. What they really need to do to make me extra happy if i get it working again is stick a copy of gphoto2.1 in the portage tree so I can get my digicam working =) (debian sarge has it!)

You mean this one?

http://www.gentoo.org/packages/media-gfx/gphoto2.html

:^)

(Although it is 2.0r1, I admit)

Jamie French wrote:

Hi Laurie,

What merits did and does Gentoo offer over other distro's for your business and personal use? Just interested to learn more :)

I used to be a SuSE user, was reasonably happy with it, and au fait with its foibles. Then they went all GUI on me, and it became less and less a server platform, and more and more a desktop one. The same appears to be true of all distros, who seem to think that the Linux market is limited to the desktop. We run few desktops of any description, but lots of Linux servers...

Then it started to be a pain to keep up-to-date with security stuff, RPM kept getting in the way of anything decent, and then the new releases came so fast our boxes were left behind. Then they started dropping support for "old" versions which were running happily on servers I didn't feel comfortable with upgrading, and didn't see the need to. What finally did me was when I applied a security patch to an application on a firewall with limited space. It decided it needed sendmail (I was running ssmtp on it), and automatically put it on the box, causing me loads of trouble.

We talked about Linux From Scratch, and went down the road a way, and then found Gentoo, LFS made easy (well, easier anyway).

Now we have an optimised kernel (and apps) for our architecture, not a 386 one. We have an automated build process so we can build identical servers easily and quickly from source for which *we* run the change control. We don't have hundreds of superfluous packages we don't need and often don't want, we get exactly what we say we want there. I think the bottom line really, is the control. It's easy to manage a system once you get your head around how it works. Adding new apps, removing old ones, and general package management is a piece of cake. We also have a vibrant and knowledgeable support community far better than SuSE's ever was.

If I have a complaint, it's that sometimes things break temporarily, which is why we change control stuff. Gentoo publish snapshots of the portage tree nightly, which we archive, and we make our own tree for our build, so we can control wersions easily. The fact that it's so easily automated means we can manage remote servers easily in terms of versions and build, and create new ones to an exact, known, controlled platform.

Cheers, Laurie.

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 09:21:29AM +0100, Laurie Brown wrote:

If you have trouble getting there, this is the important part:

/usr/portage/sys-apps/portage/files/README.RESCUE

that worked, well a variant did, the documentation on the system is a little out of date and the package is a different name now but it did give me a working emerge etc. I have had to rebuild make.conf by hand too now but the system appears to be relativly happy now. Its currently doing an emerge -u world so here is hoping it will work ok....

will let you know when X has finished building... sometime tomorrow i guess ;)

Anyhow thanks again Laurie Adam

On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 10:03:01AM +0000, Adam Bower said:

Upgraded to the Gentoo unstable 1.4 over the weekend and I now have gphoto2.1, but it won't behave =( the kernel and hotplug see my digicam (Canon Powershot A40) but gphoto insists it is not there! not even when trying to access it as root so it doesn't look device permissions related. Things are looking a bit better now at least though.

I'm not sure about switching to unstable in Gentoo at the moment...

Everything can't be that smooth yet? ;)

--

(o_ .----------------------------------------. //\ | Craig Butcher | http://www.wizball.co.uk%7C V_/_ | - Using Gentoo GNU/Linux - | `----------------------------------------'