It adds up after a while...

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KShots · Post by **KShots** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 3:33 am

Good concept, but perhaps not yet ready for stable systems. I may try again later, but I'm kinda burned out now. Took me 6 hours to find a usable emerge to compile apache2 yesterday, and that's with most options disabled. At the moment, it seems the portage tree in the stable branch is full of problems. I think that's the one that finally caused me to make the decision - I'm going to try out Free BSD on my server and see if that works out... More for the learning experience than anything else.

As for my desktop... well, it's facing a multitude of multimedia problems, but they seem to be settling down... After several months, I got the ATI drivers working (turned out to be a cabling issue... you guys were a great help and resource for the other issues that would have prevented it from working). Most things, however, perform as they should... and as they're optimized for my architecture, I think I'll keep it around. The server, though... it needs stability... and I've found that to be difficult.

Again, Gentoo is a great, wonderful, really awesome idea (I really learned a lot here). I just don't think it's ready for my server yet anymore. Again, I may try it later - the problems I'm facing may only be a "burp" in the system (and probably are), and completely gone in a few months... There's just too many, though, for me to deal with at the same time. Thanks to all of you great people who helped me!

thrasher6670 · Post by **thrasher6670** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 4:44 am

Wow, seems like you had some serious problems....

I dont know what to say, but you may want to give a fresh install a chance.. I find when people have that many problems with a server it is because they made a mistake in the beginning. Some underlying problem.

I currently run 3 gentoo boxes with no problems:
1. A Desktop machine, everyday use
2. A mythtv box for my tv
3. A server (gentoo-portage.com, up 62 days and counting, 0 reboots)

If you would like some help going through a new install you can find me at #gentoo on efnet, I can give you a hand.

KShots · Post by **KShots** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 6:24 pm

Thanks, I really appreciate the offer! I had recently restarted an install from stage 1 on a 2004.1 CD... I ran into the MD5 sum error on the blackdown app's doc file that many people were running into. Found the solution while restricted to a links2 text browser and continued (sun moved to an SSL encrypted server to grab that file, btw... and links2 doesn't support SSL on the 2004.1 CD... possibly not even an option (I don't know)). Ran into several other problems that I got around by not including kerberos in the USE flags, though I'm trying to attempt to run the most secure server I can manage to set up. Eventually got hung up compiling cyrus-sasl, which tried to compile with kerberos support even though I asked it not to, and got a bunch of undefined kerberos symbols... or if I let it try with kerberos, it complained about not having libcom_err.so (every package that complained about that stopped when I disabled kerberos). Basically, it was a very long day sitting at the keyboard because I couldn't trust the long compile process to work out on its own. In the end, I ended up with a box that worked much better than what I had before, but without the packages I wanted (and some that I needed).

One thing you guys are good at is fixing problems once they appear - you've got a pretty good record there. But a lot of emerge problems appear without the use of the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" flag set.

Like I said above, I'm going to continue using gentoo on my desktop - I've only got a couple of problems with it, and they are very minor. Also, being my personal desktop, I'm willing to toy around with settings in an unstable environment. However, I want my server to be 100% stable (or as reasonably close to that as possible). I don't want to toy with it to fix package problems in the stable portage branch.

As this is the feedback forum, I'm just trying to leave some usable constructive feedback - I really think you guys are doing a good job considering the size of the undertaking! I also think you will succeed very soon in fixing whatever instabilities are in the stable portage tree.

Xoalin · Post by **Xoalin** » Mon Jun 14, 2004 7:03 pm

When I first tried Gentoo, I botched the initial install on a stage 1 pretty bad. If you break it you can fix it. These forums are absolutely great source for information on issues you may have. As I found out if you can break it, someone already has. However once you get used to emerge there is no turning back...

Check out this comment by robmoss2k in refferencing some emerge issues. That thread is actually a good source of information of what to do with emerge and what _not_ to do with emerge.

Also watch your use flags for packages with etcat -u <package name>, see what the use flags are that it takes and or was compiled with. Some of the problems you could be experiencing may be the fact that ebuild was not built with something it needed. For instance you want to run Apache with php and mysql. Make sure you have the mysql use flag or php_mod will not know what to do with mysql calls. So if you have a situation like that, add the use flag to /etc/make.conf and rebuild.

When I first set gentoo up, I had a bunch of little "nuances" to the system that I had not expected. The bulk of the system has been rebuilt since, with proper use flags and compiler options. I never do emerge --deep world anymore. I attribute that as part of the "nuances". Also watch etc-update, check each file one at a time (you come across fstab being replaced once to often in the forums). However been very stable for the last six months and incredibly stable for the last 4-5. So hopefully I won't find any more "new user" pit falls ;) Hope some of my "new user" pit falls help :)