Gentoo Addictions

wormstrangler · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2003 Posts: 12

I like to fiddlde.

Ive installed serveral distros lots of times..but I never stick around long before heading back to windows, don't really know why...I guess I just don't like change..

madchaz · Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 11:03 am Post subject:

why not try it out in vmware?
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wormstrangler · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2003 Posts: 12

Don't you have to pay for vmware?

I'll give it a go next time I install gentoo :twisted:

Jet Dee · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 50 Location: Bham, UK

Hehe. I think I'm similar. My first install, from stage 1, failed due to networking problems. So two days after that, fed up of trying, I decided to delete my gentoo partitions and reinstall from stage 3. Now this, woah, this install worked, but boy was it slow... it made Win ME seem a speed demon in comparison. So I got rid of it, and then yesterday I tried once more with Gentoo, from stage 1.... this time I messed up the filesystems, which turned out to be an irrepairable error I only discovered at the very end of the "install" documentation, so that had to go too.... sigh, now i'll be going for it again tomorrow, fingers crossed it works....

maybe on some sub-conscious level i too am secretly addicted to installing gentoo
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Xiol · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 209 Location: UK

I've only done 3 Gentoo installs so far, 2 native on my main machine, and one in VMware under Windows.

My 4th is coming up soon, gonna put Gentoo on my mothers PC... And she'll damn well love it.

I'm quite looking forward to it.

Edit: Yay, no more n00b.

Xiol · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 209 Location: UK

GeneralKane · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Posts: 77

How do people get addicted to a gentoo installation?

If I had to do it again I would find an excuse not to. Though I must say I found my efforts rewarded.

ebrostig · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2003 12:54 am Post subject:

You know you have installed Gentoo too many times from scratch when you, as me, never looked at the installation instructions during the last install

Erik
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Yossarian · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2003 3:09 am Post subject:

I installed it a few times before getting it to work exactly how I wanted it. The second install was due to a stupid mistake on my part. I found that every time I installed it I learned more about the system and how it worked. Interesting.

Peace
Brian

gsfgf · Veteran Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 1266

a day's nothing. I can go form win2000 to gentoo+flux+firebird+oo-bin+gaim+xmms+abiword in 8 hours on a 333mhz compaq laptop. Then my dad messes it up trying to install windows98 :(. Ironocally it took 2 days to go from broken 98 install to winNT 4 sp6a + ie6.
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Minos · Apprentice Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 177

Squinky86 · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2003 11:52 pm Post subject:

Impressive. I've only installed gentoo once (many months ago), and I've been ecstatic ever since. Aside from knoppix-based distros, gentoo is the distro for me! (cd-based knoppix for when I need to show off some of my programs at my windows school

).
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Nylle · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2003 12:37 pm Post subject:

I like installing gentoo, it's fun.

I upgraded one of my machines from 1.0 to 1.4rc2 a couple of months ago, just to see if it worked. It took something like 3 days to recompile everything for gcc 3.x and fix up the configuration. However, as soon as I had finished it I re-partitioned and re-installed...

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TheCoop · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2003 9:41 pm Post subject:

dgt84 · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2003 9:17 am Post subject:

Man, i think i'm addicted to the install, too... Too bad it's changed again, and now i'm installing with the final 1.4, so i need to learn a few extra steps in the install i guess... going to read the docs now, using vmware as a test bed for ~x86 and the new kernel :twisted:

right now... if you are interested in free x86 emulators, bochs and plex86 might be able to help you.
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Giganight · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 31 Location: Plymouth, Ma

I'm totally addicted to the gentoo install, it's like boot camp for any linux user.... it was very cryptic at first but I learned a'lot from it, and between my varying machines(dual mp2400, alphaev56, dual P2, amd1300.... +others) I've learned many things make me as knowledgeable as I am now..... I even have 2 installs goping on as I type this, call me a masochist if you want but all I have to say to that is: thank you, may i have another....
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Mitchybums · n00b Joined: 29 Jan 2003 Posts: 68 Location: iowa

(slowly kreeping out of a dark corner)\
I thought I was the only nutcase on the planet.

I'm basicaly addicted to tweaking my system (IBM T20 Laptop)
If someone can put a machine to the test, it's me !
The poor thing hasnt crashed on me yet, but it sometimes endures 3 wipes a day.
I install windows to play a game, then I get sick and wipe and install gentoo. Then I realize I need something to do in windows, so another wipe.
I can basicaly write the manual myself without looking.

It's sick, but when I install some tryal version or something I remove later in windows, I dont like the crap thats being left behind. Same thing for Gentoo.
Try gnome, dont like it, emerge -e world with KDE enabled or not.
Still Gnome folders on system
I hate that. A lot !

Is there any snapshot software availiable that can show me a list of ALL files being put on, including folders and stuff ???

(i hate dual boot, and it's too much of a pain to take the harddrive out and put another in, but thats prob the best solution)

Artie_Effim · n00b Joined: 14 Nov 2002 Posts: 25

z28James · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2003 Posts: 69

rootkit · Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 5:16 pm Post subject:

I'm a big backup advocate I do full system backups so I can quickly restore; here are the steps to copy to another hard drive or partition; then I use tar and bzip2 while aways preserving file and folder attributes for burning to CD. Below is the original article that I found
on linuxquestion.org explaining the steps which you can modify to your situation; the great part about it is no special software is needed and it works on any distro.

HOWTO: How to install a new hard drive and copy your linux install without loosing any data.
Posted by Bern on Saturday, December 21, 2002 - 09:17 GST
Slackware Linux I have (had) Slackware installed on an 8.4gb Quantum Fireball and a 12.9gb Seagate, both drives were about two years old and I was running out of room, so it was time to do a hard drive upgrade. I chose a Seagate Barracuda IV 80gb 7200rpm ATA100 as my new drive and the following article details how I migrated my Slackware Linux 8.1 installation to the new drive without loosing any data or settings. Most of the information contained in this article is from the Hard-Disk-Upgrade Mini How-To, I strongly suggest you read this first but it was last updated in April 2000.

The first step is to install the new drive to a spare IDE controller, as I already had two hard drives, a DVD-ROM and CDRW installed I had to remove one of the optical drives first, I chose the CDRW.
Note: Don't forget to set the drive jumpers.

After the installation you will need to partition and format the new drive, boot to runlevel 3, login as root and run cfdisk to create your partitions, "cfdisk /dev/hd*", where * is the location of your drive.
The How-To recomends unmounting all non-linux partitions and network drives at this stage.

Format the partitions in your prefered filesystem, I use ReiserFS so the command is "mkreiserfs", if you use ext2/3 then "mkfs" is the command to use, to format your swap partition use the "mkswap" command (see the man pages for the full options).

Now we need to mount the new drive, the following is copied from Part 6 of the How-To and assumes you have chosen ext2 as your filesytem.

6. Mount the new disk
Create a directory where you'll mount the new disk, for example /new-disk,
and mount it there:
mkdir /new-disk
mount -t ext2 /dev/hd** /new-disk

If the new disk will have more than one Linux partitions, mount them all under
/new-disk with the same organization they'll have later.
Example. The new disk will have four Linux partitions, as follows:
/dev/hd*1 /
/dev/hd*2 /home
/dev/hd*3 /var
/dev/hd*4 /var/spool

You must create the mount points for each level before you mount the
partitions at that level.
Example.
mkdir /new-disk
mount -t ext2 /dev/hd*1 /new-disk [1st level]
mkdir /new-disk/home
mount -t ext2 /dev/hd*2 /new-disk/home [2nd level]
mkdir /new-disk/var
mount -t ext2 /dev/hd*3 /new-disk/var [2nd level also]
mkdir /new-disk/var/spool
mount -t ext2 /dev/hd*4 /new-disk/var/spool [3rd level]

If you've created a mount point at /new-disk/tmp, you'll need to correct the
directory's permissions to let all users access it:
chmod 1777 /new-disk/tmp

In my case I had / on the quantum (/dev/hda1) and /home + swap were on the old seagate (/dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdb2), so I created two 20gb reiserfs partitions and a 512mb swap on the new drive, when I decide what to do with all the extra space I'll create the needed partitions out of the unallocated space (I may use some of the room for backups - but that will be another article:-)

mkdir /new-disk
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdd1 /new-disk
mkdir /new-disk/home
mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdd2 /new-disk/home

After this my directory tree looked like the following,
/bin
/boot
/dev
/etc
/home
/lib
/mnt
/new-disk
/opt
/proc
/root
/sbin
/tmp
/usr
/var

The next step is the big one - copy the files to the new disk! Change to single user mode before you go any further with "telinit 1", when we do the copy we want all directories and files (including links) but not /new-disk or the contents of /proc. The How-To provides three methods for the copy operation, I used the third option, "cp -a".

cp -a /bin /boot /dev /etc /home /lib /mnt /opt /root /sbin /tmp /usr /var /new-disk

You'll notice that I left out /proc and /new-disk ( the /new-disk entry at the end of the command is the target), that's because /proc is a virtual filesystem and only contains information on the services running on the system, we create the proc directory after the cp command has completed, and we leave out /new-disk because otherwise this would copy it to itself. Now go and make a cup, no make that a pot, of coffee, it's going to take a while to completely copy everything to the new drive.

After the operation has completed create the /proc directory, "mkdir /new-disk/proc"

Next we need to edit /new-disk/etc/fstab to reflect how our new drive will look when it's the only drive installed, mine is connected to the primary master ide controller (/dev/hda), do "mcedit /new-disk/etc/fstab", and make the appropriate changes.

The next two sections in the How-To deal with preparing lilo and making a boot floppy to boot the new drive, I skipped both of these chapters and went straight to Part 11 of the How-To.

11. Remove the old disk(s).
Shut down the system and remove the old disk(s). Remember to modify the
disk jumpers and the BIOS information to reflect the changes.

On a modern system with the bios set to auto detect ide devices your new disk should appear without any changes needed from you, however it's a good idea to check the settings anyway.

Now we need to boot the new drive, turn on the power, go into your bios and make sure your new drive is detected correctly and that you are booting from you CD-ROM before your hard drive, reboot with your Slackware-8.1-install CD and when you get to the boot: prompt type "Linux root = /dev/hda1" (to boot Linux on the first partition of the primary master drive - change this to whatever is needed for your setup), login as root again and edit your /etc/lilo.conf or grub config (don't forget to run lilo after making changes to lilo.conf), and the job is finished.
You should now have your system running on your shiny new hard drive, for those that are interested here are the specs of my new drive (as provided by hdparm).

root@grendel /$ hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.80 seconds =160.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.97 seconds = 32.49 MB/sec

root@grendel /$ hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Model=ST380021A, FwRev=3.19, SerialNo=3HV4050F
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=1
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: device does not report version: 1 2 3 4 5

root@grendel /$ hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
multcount = 1 (on)
IO_support = 3 (32-bit w/sync)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 9729/255/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0

Thanks go to Yves Bellefeuille and Konrad Hinsen for the Hard-Drive-Upgrade Mini How-To.

markfl · Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2003 8:02 am Post subject: HELP, I'm addicted to gentoo

This distro is way too addictive. update my system daily on ~x86 and theres always something in emerge sync for me. On a better note this is a good thing because i now have all the latest packages.
What do you guys think? Is gentoo addictive?
MJ
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ragnoroc · n00b Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 49 Location: Columbus, OH

Not to burst your bubble but if you keep doing that you could run into some seriousproblems.

The most recent example I can think of is going to GCC 3.3.3 and not being able to recompile the kernel due to changes in the handling of variable types.

Then waiting for a kernel patch so I could recompile the kernel.

I personally do a emerge -p world and then update the packages I feel need updating.

Just be wary of what you update.

As for gentoo being addictive? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Having used it for so many years without a thought to windows I just see it as an everyday tool. Nothing more.

sheardjr · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2003 Posts: 3

I suppose anything that can be tweaked to a large extent can be addictive, but somthing as complex as an OS can take this too far...

:roll:

ColinK · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 142

I lately read a desktop-wallpaper saying "linux addicted".

And as I looked at myself, I realized I am addicted. Maybe addicted to Linux, but especially addicted to Gentoo.

My Symptoms:

I regularly check for any new updates to install - and if there are new updates - I'm quite happy for about as long as one emerge.

As I'm still 'quite' new too Gentoo and Linux (History: Win, SuSe, Win, Gentoo, Win, Gentoo ..), solving 'Problems' kept me busy for the last 3 months. But as I'm currently running out of Problems I watch myself searching for new 'Problems', for new Tasks, and more often for new Updates.

Neither last nor least I began reading alot about Gentoo/Linux related stuff, let it be explanations on d-bus, hal, fam, .. or 'preloadig on boot', 'gentoo on xbox', 'GPE on smartphones'...

I've got bitten by the bug.

I guess I'm addicted.