Discovering Gentoo !

[aCOSwt]

Hello,

This is the shaggy dog story of an old ex system engineer discovering Gentoo !

A/ In the good old days, system engineers, well, I mean real-programmers, had a perfectly working system and they knew why !
B/ With MS miscellaneous thingies we discovered systems not working and we did not know why !
C/ .*BSD.* things appeared as being a somewhat viable alternative as long as, OK, systems were not working but we knew why !
D/ Before having to die, I decided to give Gentoo-Linux a try ! And then ! ! I just cannot trust this :
I do not know why... but... it works !

I just cannot imagine how !
Having spent years making one layer fully functional before piling another one on top, I just cannot understand how :
1/ I cannot manage to make Xorg work with the vesa driver but I can fire and forget nvidia-drivers and it works like a charm at the cost of 3 lines in a conf file !
2/ I cannot manage to test my sound stuff with things as simple as cat soundfile >> /dev/soundriver, nothing works with basic console players... But, pffft ! I just need to emerge KDE4 and... pswewt... I launch dragonplayer and... sound outputs properly !!

I am just astonished ! Do you think that the day is coming when I can expect some universe package in portage that I could emerge and that would put everything (kernel configuration included of course) according to what I personally wish ?
Has building a system become a top-down process with Gentoo ?

P.S : I sincerely apologize for item C/ toward true .*BSD.* lovers ! To tell the exact truth about this, .*BSD.* are perfectly working... as long as you are not requiring some unsupported feature... (Unfortunately... there are many of them !... )

[NeddySeagoon]

aCOSwt,

As an old systems engineer, I still put my gentoo installs together from the bottom, one layer at a time.
Thats the way I debug others broken systems here and on IRC too.

You are not foing to get the universe set but I suppose you could move to portage 2.2, write your own @universe, including your kernel config file and just do emerge @universe.

Of course since this universe would be centred around you, it wouldn't work for anybody else. Theres a Douglas Adams quote there but I don't recall it.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[d2_racing]

In fact, with the new set feature, sky is the limit.
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[aCOSwt]

[nativemad]

Hi aCOSwt,

i think the main difference between $bsd and linux is the fact that linux is just the Kernel and _everything_ is a moving target.
For example your sound issue... if you choose /dev/dsp to output the sound, you're probably using oss, or the oss-api from alsa. Some players (mpg123 as example) are using oss, while others use ALSA:default. There's always more than one way to do things, and gentoo leaves all the options open to you, with mostly working default settings. You don't have to rip everything apart to do something, but if you like to do some weird stuff, you'll find everything needed.

I also got astonished how well KDE4 detects everything and just works without having to configure anything special (suspend and automount are just two of them).
I found it even a bit depressive, when i discovered (after some hours configuring X with the right resolution) that it just works better without any configfile!

For me, its the same bottom-up process as it was years ago, but with a lightning fast elevator to reach the top. (once you've got familiar with make.conf and the USEflags )
_________________
Power to the people!

[aCOSwt]

[nativemad]

[d2_racing]

[NeddySeagoon]

aCOSwt,

Here is as much of my background as is in the public domain.
I need to update that as its trustee election time and I shall stand for re-election
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[djdunn]

i might have just been messing with this stuff for two long but even with my amdxp processor and before that my amdk650 i never took more than maybe 3 or 4 days to compile everything. I do have to say tho that the more you use it the more familiar you are with it, it will still break probably just as much, but by that point I have a pretty good guess about what happened.

I recently had some slowdown type problems. I was like wow this is kinda like a bottleneck with the hard drive, and 10 min later found out the read rate of one of my hard drives was at 10% of what it should be, so i popped it off the raid I just gotta get around to getting it replaced now.

I guess the moral of the story is.

If you want to build your own OS from ground up, and if you are always tinkering with it, you will eventually learn a lot about it. But honestly that takes years of tinkering.

I honestly love gentoo because of the pureness and lack of branding. The stableness of stable, the ability go to unstable for a few packages that I really want. And the easy of handling dependencies and keeping a rolling update going.
_________________
Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), "contented" means it has either just gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring. Take it from me, I'm an expert on penguins, those are really the only two options.

--Linus Torvalds

[Mike Hunt]

++ for ground-up and layered solid.

[aCOSwt]

Mike... about Douglas Adams... NeddySeagoon was thinking about... another one !

[Mike Hunt]

Okie, looks like I didn't get it. Oh well.

[aCOSwt]

[NeddySeagoon]

Mike Hunt,

I was thinking of something to do with the Total Perspective Vortex, that showed Zaphod, that the universe did indeed revolve around him, or something like that ... as it woukd be aCOSwts own @universe
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[desultory]

At the risk of necessitating a topic for pondering which quote it was, I thought you were referring to a different quote entirely.

[Mike Hunt]