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kernelOfTruth
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:18 pm    Post subject: STILL COMPILING - 4 YEARS of Gentoo is NOT ENOUGH. Reply with quote

Hi guys,

to create an anti-pole to the following thread I'M DONE - 4 YEARS of Gentoo is ENOUGH.

I'm starting this:

I'm now using Gentoo for 6 years

I decided several times to ditch it for good for Fedora, openSUSE, *buntu but every time there were tons of obstacles in the way preventing me from being able to productively
work with those Distributions:

some examples:

*) Fedora:
- driver-installation is somewhat tricky, often there are permission problems of /home hindering me from using it, selinux-stuff too strict / not compatible with reiserfs, often rpms missing for programs I need
- security stuff galore - I like it, unfortunately there are always problems getting it to run in the long run: driver installation (after installing the graphics drivers, black screen or hanging), permissions (selinux, file permissions), ...

*) openSUSE:
- pretty unstable, I don't like the customizations, several important programs (rpms) missing in their build service, slow package management

*) *buntu:
- I like their selection of software (almost) all what I need - if it works it works - if not you're screwed: e.g. this time: encrypted /home and / partition: usplash hangs during input of password and lets it time out; last year it was a problem with the password being displayed in clear text
- security is not their priority
- almost everything works - if it doesn't - forget it



Gentoo:

everything "Just Works" and when problems arise they're usually fixed in less than 2 hours (max.)
printing is even twice or several times faster than any Linux-Distribution or Windows-System (maybe due to my "ricer" flags :lol: )
the most stable and responsible system EVER - MOST control EVER
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ikshaar
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Joined the Gentoo revolution in 2002.... going on my 8th year - using at home and at work. Not sure what I would do without it.

But it's clear Gentoo is not for everyone. Not to be obnoxious. Just to say it's a distribution for people who like to control their OS. And it's compromise between that control and the need for something to "just work" that some people look for in some more polish UI like OpenSUse or Ubuntu.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ikshaar wrote:
Joined the Gentoo revolution in 2002.... going on my 8th year - using at home and at work. Not sure what I would do without it.


Ditto.

I've been really lucky to be able to use it on my workstations since about 2006 or so. My productivity has gone way up since ditching $(other OS).
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aCOSwt
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

beandog wrote:
My productivity has gone way up since ditching $(other OS).

<joking>
16 commits on Tuesday -> 3 yesterday -> 1 today...
"way up" you wrote ?
</joking>
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 10:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I joined Gentoo somewhen end2003/beginning2004 coming from 1 Year of SuSE and RedHat experince (RPM Dependency Hell FTW :D )

I had only one serious try to use Ubuntu, as my Workstations harddrive died, and I wanted the System back up and running as soon as possible. Well, it only took some weeks, and I had to reinstall Gentoo, as Ubuntu was (still is?) too limiting for my taste.

Yes, running Gentoo and try to tweaks bits and pieces here and there is not really beneficial to productivity - but I came over it.

Reinstalling Gentoo, because it stopped working: never

just my .02$
V.


Or to quote some users here in the board (from memory), how I experienced Gentoo...
X Years watching shit scroll by.
One more emerge, then I quit
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Jaglover
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was a long-time Debian user. It was back in 2004 when FAM went berserk in one of my boxes. I thought oh well, i can live without it and wanted to uninstall it. And that supercow apt-get didn't let me ... I found out the only way to get rid of it was by creating a fake deb package in Debian ... or switching to Gentoo. :wink:
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Kingoftherings
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 3:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started using Linux back on Fedora Core 4 which would have been 4 years ago. I switched to Ubuntu 6.06 and I used Ubuntu up until 8.04. I couldn't get that version to run on my computer for some reason. I think it had something to do with a busybox error. So I started trying other distros. I tried Debian/Sidux, tried going back to Fedora, Suse, etc. I either couldn't get them to work, or I just didn't really like them. The last one I tried was Sabayon, which I also couldn't get to work. At that point about the only thing left that I hadn't tried was Gentoo, so I installed it and loved it ever since.

It was cool that it was one of those "advanced" distros and that I was capable of installing it while all these other distros just wouldn't work for one reason or another.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 4:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm back to using Gentoo again after SMGL on amd64 just failed horribly during install ;)

Plus, I kept typing "emerge" instead of "cast" in bash.

Started with rh6 when win98se came out. Tried SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, (a few others), the discovered Sorcerer and loved it... but Kyle had some disagreements with the other devs and the distro just shrank. I found Gentoo during the 1.4rc phase iirc.... once I got into Gentoo I had found my type of distro. A few of the changes in portage have annoyed the hell out of me though.

We used to be able to just "emerge doom3" and have it install the game sans main files. So we'd just cp the files over from the game disks after install. Now with keywords, and masking, and... well I'll just say that I no longer emerge games. I just dl the installers and leave portage out of it.

The switch from xfree86 to xorg was a bit of a PITA too, but not such a big deal.

There were some changes to portage that annoyed me to the point of going back to a sorcery based distro, and the only one with any active development was SMGL. And now I'm back to Gentoo.

I think 11 years now in Linux, with 9 in source based distros.

Of course Gentoo > *
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 10:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have also used them all, but I always keep a running Gentoo system (since version 1.0 ~2002 time frame). It is so much easier to use and add packages that might not be in portage, as well as all of the overlays... I will say though that Arch is my second choice for a Linux desktop, where FreeBSD is my second choice for a server.
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krinn
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 10:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

for my own story, i was using redhat (it was 7.2 i think) when i switch to gentoo (i don't know the date, but it was close to redhat 7.3 release), why ? Well just because redhat gave me a freaking hell with gcc : they were using by that time a gcc version 2.95 or 2.96 that was a version redhat numbered themself or something as bad as that.
Well, i was so bore already by the rpm dependencies issue (not to kick off redhat's ass, but at this time, it was so hell that i prefer compile everything i download from source file). And anything i was trying was complaining about my gcc version that was too "special" & buggy...

So i moved my server to debian distro and my desktop to gentoo (i love gentoo at first sight, the compile everything yourself was sugar for me, but i also saw at first sight that this distro will need real better skills than ones i own by that time to handle it, so i choose debian for my server until i would be ready to switch if gentoo was giving me what i was feeling about it).

I suppose as i'm still using gentoo, that might be a proof i still like it.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 19, 2010 11:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started using Gentoo about 1.5 years ago. I had tried Red Hat (or was it called Fedora?), and Mandrake several years before that, and, deciding to reinstall Linux on my computer, I tried Ubuntu first. However, my sound card didn't work, and according to the Ubuntu forums at the time I needed to perform some convoluted measures including switching to O.S.S. and otherwise editing and recompiling the kernel to make it work. I did so, but after this, my wifi carded stopped working, so I decided that if I was going to compile kernels and edit (at it seemed at the time) arcane configuration files to make it work, I may as well just install Gentoo. I did so, and have been mostly happy with it ever since.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:12 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm using Linux since 1999 and Gentoo since 2005.

I played a lot with Debian and I found Gentoo in december 2004. I double checked the doc and in April 2005 I went with my first Gentoo box.

I also played with Arch Linux but my personnal box and my box at work are Gentoo.

So, I'm pretty happy to use Gentoo at work :P
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col
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 4:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am posting from a gentoo installation I did way back in 2004. Have not re-installed since....now running kde4 & kernel 2.6.30

Only minor problem it is 32 bit as back then a 64 bit cpu was super expensive.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 5:24 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started with mandrake, but tried a few other's unsuccessfully at the time since I was clueless although it worked (I think).

About a year and a half of mandrake I got sick of the lack of support/help which got even worse when they went to that pay system. I was also fed up with being stuck with only the mandrake packages available, since there were some I wanted that they didn't have/support. I had been looking around and watching gentoo, sourcemage (I think), a few others. As soon as 1.2 was released is when I did my first install. If I remember correctly I re-did it a couple times to get it right, nearly gave up at first, but have been very glad I didn't. The join date in my info there is pretty close to when I first tried gentoo (maybe a month or 2 before the join date). I still have that old pentium I system in the crawl space not doing anything atm.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 20, 2010 3:40 pm    Post subject: My outing for Gentoo Reply with quote

Hi Guys,

i started my computing experience in 1986 with a Amstrad PC 1640 and with an OS called GEM [url] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager[/url].

But most of my life i spent as a Windows-prisoner ( i switched to with version 3.0, and used every new version issued until xp included).
What a waste of time, from my point of view now!
But if you are caged long enough, and someone let the grid open, you are anxious to leave it!
That's why i never tried a distro before, although i get in contact sometimes included in a magazine or something similar.
Beside from a Fli4lan router i've built seven years before (with QOS and my own filter rules, for bandwidth management), which you can't tell a distro.
That was the first time i discovered the possibilities and reliability of Linux.

Anyway it needs a special impulse for me to leave my cage, and to try out my first real distro in june 2006, That's when i dammed all of my windows versions on every PC out of my house!

It takes for me one year of trying out 30-40 different distributions, to discover the differences, the advantages and disadvantages, the graduation of control, and of course how the basic works, until i found out what you can do with linux, and what are my needs.
Then my search ends, and now i'm at home peacefully.

Here the reasons why i came to gentoo:
Performance and flexibility for optimization in any way:
In my opinion it gives me the best possibilities to control everything i wish, e.g regarding optimization for the specific arch it runs on.
The flexibility and the freedom for choosing which options the software should support and which not, combined with the most possible comfort to do this!
Different versions of the same packages or libraries could be installed at the same time, and it works!

Comfort, why comfort, would ask someone who doesn't know gentoo, as we who like it, do.

Cause if you want do it, cause you can do it, you do it as most comfortable as it is possible, with most of control - only with gentoo! :wink:

- e.g. resolving dependencies automatically, (not as in other source based distris), while choosing all i mentioned above.
- all settings and options stay as you declared it, also if you update the whole system (our world :lol: )
- no reason to reinstall, cause if you build your system by yourself, you know how to repair it from command line, or via chroot. And rolling releases of course.
Ok, the annoying compilie time! - But nothing comes from nothing, and good thing takes time! Considering of the advantages!!! :lol:

Not everybody needs all those things, and is not willing to spend time to get things run - that's why gentoo is not for everybody.

But if you expect the most from a distro, then you have to choose Gentoo!

I hope every gentoo lover confirms to me, an please excuse my bad english, i'm no native speaker.

Andy.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 9:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't posted nearly as much as I'd like of late, but this thread seems fun.

Prior to gentoo, I've run everything ranging from NEWDOS/80 on a TRS-80 Model 3 to OS-9 Level II on a Color Computer to an Atari 520 ST to a PC running MS-DOS 6/windows 3.1 and, eventually, windows 95. I was sick of MS-DOS and windows from the beginning. I just grew up on the command line and preferred it. Also, the multitasking in Windows paled in comparison to what could be done with my dinky CoCo.

I tried installing Slackware (from floppies) at one point and didn't manage that. Later somebody gave me a Mandrake install CD which worked fine and I dual booted that and my windows 95 machine. I had heard about Gentoo, but only really tried it out when I got a new computer in 2002 which arrived at around the same time my old one bit the dust.

Since that time, I've run Gentoo on my home system and on my server at work. My work desktop is Kubuntu, namely as I simply needed something up in a hurry which I could quickly upgrade. Mind you, because I still have to deal with windows, I run virtualbox under Kubuntu.

While it's working out fine for me, I still, by far, prefer Gentoo to Kubuntu. I like starting off clean and building up as opposed to starting with a bunch of crap and whittling down. Moreover, in my experience, Gentoo is far easier to recover from major foul-ups than *ubuntu.

Best,

Alex
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 9:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I started with gentoo!!

Completely linux new and I managed to install it from the documentation - after that I tried debian and ubuntu to see what the fuss was about and found them both lacking in support for my motherboard at the time (which wasn't very new, just different) and so i stuck with gentoo

lots of years later (about 7?) and im still running on that install (well, kind of, I reinstalled to another hdd from the running one due to the hdd dying) - wonderbar!.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I replaced windows 98 with Gentoo on an aging p3 back in 2002, funny thing is this install is still up and running. I expected the hardware to die years ago.
Before that I used mostly redhat and debian, also suse on my Ultra30.

It was in January 2005 when I got my first amd64 and no other distro allowed me to run 64bit on that hardware at that time and so Gentoo became my main OS and is it since then.

Gentoo was the first implementation of a source based distro which could convince me with it's concept. And till today I see it as the most advanced and comfortable implementation thereof.

There is certainly room for improvement. I'm glad that finally the oldstyle networking is about to die with baselayout2, a major pain as intuitive and well documented as alsa itself.
The PMS is another aspect I want to mention in this context. A great idea with lots of benefits, unfortunately the acceptance could be better.
Another project I'm really fond of is gentoo-hardened. It still has a long way to go and seems to be quite understaffed. I hope this will change.

As for maintainability and stability, I'm running multiple installations for many years and haven't done a single reinstall so far. Uptime is basically only limited by kernel upgrades or battery lifetime. So I'm not foolish enough to set ~arch on global scope.

As for capabilities, often the own knowledge is the ceiling opposed to the distribution itself.

As for design, let's take java as example and you likely won't find a distribution which handles this mess even half that nice.

As a development platform it beats everything I've seen.

Finally, I want to thank all contributors which made Gentoo what it is.
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aCOSwt
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 8:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

sera wrote:
Finally, I want to thank all contributors which made Gentoo what it is.

Well... I think... I will start with this "finally" :lol:
So that... the most important being said...
One cane easily forget about what follows...

For 30 years, I have always been compiling... with three exceptions...
1 : My Pascal UCSD under a Pascal MicroEngine (Who can remember)
2 : My ATT SYS V and my VRTX under a VME / MC68000
3 : My NT4 under a...

Compiling is just great.
Of course not because of supposed sensations of hypothetically saving one byte and one microsecond with more clever optimization flags. :roll:
Just because... in case of... you get the source code !
I have been several time in the situation to dig into it and solve the problem and several time in a situation to "see" where the bug was in NT4... incapable to do anything against !

Having the code is having the guarantee it may work ! That is simply great.

Apart from that... well... what was sera writing ? well...

Thank to all contributors which made possible... things I cannot achieve... under FreeBSD ! :twisted:
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 4:46 am    Post subject: stillcompiling Reply with quote

I must post in this thread, not least because my email address is stillcompiling@gmail.com :)
(I'm a C programmer)
I was a DOS/Windows user until I read that windows XP would be including a "feature" that disabled the OS in 30 days unless it was remotely authenticated. I bought one more OEM copy of Win98SE (I still have the disc), and shortly thereafter bought a Linux Magazine that included a copy of Mandrake.
I started with Gentoo because I had been took a "unix internals" class in college, and we were all required to install a Linux distro and give a report on it.

My report was on Suse, and I can't remember anything about it, except that they have a mascot named Geeko.

One of my classmates, on the other hand, presented Gentoo, and the last words went like so:

"Do you love pain? Gentoo Linux may be for you!"

i took that as a direct challenge, and three days of struggling and compiling later, my first gentoo system was launched.
I've never found as good a fit for my needs in any precompiled distro.

ALL HAIL GENTOO LINUX - MAY YOU COMPILE FOREVER!
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 9:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
As a development platform it beats everything I've seen.


that and USE flags are the two main things that don´t let me change to other distros.

cheers
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:08 pm    Post subject: Re: STILL COMPILING - 4 YEARS of Gentoo is NOT ENOUGH. Reply with quote

kernelOfTruth wrote:

- almost everything works - if it doesn't - forget it


This is true - the first part more or less - for any binary distro I tried throughout the year.

I started in the Linux world with SuSe in the mid-nineties, used it for years. But I learned more reading the Gentoo installation handbook once than using Suse for years 8O And back then the Installation of Suse was not quite as "simple" as today. They shipped with a quite good handbook for linux installation and usage at the time.

I'm using Gentoo since 2003 and tried other distributions in parallel once in a while. Nowadays they are easy and fast to get up a "working" system. Where "working" depends on the target audience. And I don't seem to fit in any of these groups. :wink: In just a few minutes I always found several things that do not work out of the box or are simply annoying.

With binary distros it took me 45 minutes tops to bring the adjustments to the system to an emergency halt because some adjustment is just not intended to be made.

As soon as you begin forcing your wanted/needed config onto a binary distro you are wasting serious amounts of time to search how this is possible besides the presets/automatisms of the respective distro.

If you know what you want and what you are doing most likely you are easier off/faster installing Gentoo to be a perfect match the first try.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I discovered Linux in 1992.
Bad luck : my computer was a 286.

Then I installed Suse Linux in 1997 and was quite happy with Yast and SAX.

I tried many distributions, but I didn't manage to run any of them during installation, or more than 30 minutes after the installation.

I discovered LinuxFromScratch in 1999 and used it until I discovered Gentoo in 2004.

Gentoo (and LFS) is the only distribution I can use, and if it crashes, I can fix it. I run Gentoo on all the home computers I touch.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You ran LFS for more then 4 years ?

Since you ran LFS, how did you handle the updates ?
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I did no update : I installed it 2 times. And I would upgrade the 2nd installation. Then I saw the Light 8)
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