New User

[dandennison84]

Hi everyone,

I've spent the last few days installing and configuring Gentoo and wanted to introduce myself. I was using Ubuntu for about a year on a USB HD. When I upgraded to a new computer late last year, I decided to go Linux all the way and bought a System 76 Gazelle laptop. I went to Slackware and enjoyed it quite a bit and still do. I like the rock-solid nature of the OS. But I love to tinker and learn new things, so I started building LFS but keeping it up-to-date is enough challenge to consume hours of my day. I just wanted to post and say that I really love Gentoo so far. I think it is the perfect fit for letting me tinker with dependencies like I want them but still take care of the plumbing for me. So great to here and I'm looking forward to learning more about Linux!

My laptop is this: https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/gazp8

My disk layout looks like

[LoTeK]

Hi, welcome to gentoo!

Thanks for posting this link, a great step forward!! But unfortunately it seems that one have to buy it with a preinstalled ubuntu (which is of course way better than a preinstalled windows but still not quite "the real thing", but the ubuntu key is nice than the windows key )

If I understand this correctly than besides the installed OS everything else is like all other laptops (no open firmware / hardware ?!) But the design looks nice, maybe I'll buy my next computer there too...

Besides the "dependency-pain" was it hard to install LFS? I've never tried slackware, but I've heard that one has to pay more attention to dependency problems than with gentoo...
_________________
"I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language!"

[dandennison84]

Well, at the time I bought it, seemed like a good fit since that was the distro I was using. Also, for someone like me who didn't and doesn't know a ton about the kernel and drivers and how linux works (who would have thought that every single distro I've tried seems to have its own initialization/startup thing?), it was easy to jump start into other distros from it.

Other than that, System76 is pretty much stock hardware. I didn't even know about "open" hardware/drivers before I bought it. The reason I bought it was for Ubuntu really but because it was better quality hardware than what I could find elsewhere at the time. At least it seemed that way to me.

As far as LFS goes, it isn't any harder to build than Gentoo. But it takes a LOT of time. What portage is doing is basically what the LFS book sequences for you. You just run the commands manually. You really have to know what you are doing though if you want to deviate even a little bit. Also, you have to really know the ins and outs of the products you are using. Which deps should you use? What goes with what? It gets really complicated once you are in BLFS. Way beyond a newbie like me. For package management, I just used Slackware's pkg configuration tools in LFS. Worked like a charm. I think of Gentoo as an automated version of LFS.

Slackware is a very conservative distro and comes out-of-the-box with all the major desktop environments except Gnome. Which is what I wanted since I wanted to play around with all the others and could switch between them easily. Stuff just works. It is very low tech though. You manage package dependencies. Since Slackware is a conservative distro that only changes rarely, they assume you know what you are doing when you do upgrades. The package manager is a set of bash scripts that builds, configures and installs the software. You can also use slackpkg to update installed packages. Dependency management is in your head. If you pull down slackbuilds from slackbuilds.org, each package there has a link to all the dependencies you need. It really isn't all that bad once you get use to it. It is also a snap to build your own slack packages from sources.

I haven't tried that yet in Gentoo to see if the same holds for software that Gentoo doesn't have?

I just really, really love the control that portage and emerge give you. I also think the Gentoo initialization layout is way better than other distros for configurability. Everything is in obvious places, you can override stuff easily. Gentoo is "just right" for me! Also, Gentoo documentation seems really stellar so far. Very, very good stuff. So far, for me, Gentoo is my favorite distro.

[666threesixes666]

lfs is a piece of cake, its just a basic bash terminal, good for servers, nothing installed, just bash, compiler, linker.... BLFS is the nightmare, lfs is just the tip of the ice burg. blfs has you installing xorg by hand, has you installing gnome by hand. it will make you a pro at installing from sources by hand.

./configure --help



slackware is like LFS built for you with some blue menu screens (cant think of the name of the package that generates the bsd style blue menu screens.) slackware has tgz prebuilt binaries and slackbuilds.org, it also supports RPM.

im pretty sure you can go 1/2 way done with LFS and then start merging portage to it also.

if i have a problem getting a package to compile, i refer to the lfs online manuals..... lfs is good documentation, you can even do some of it in other distros, im using LFS ps1 in bash terminals in gentoo.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/

[LoTeK]

[dandennison84]

Yes, I should qualify LFS. When I was speaking about it, I really mean LFS + BLFS because LFS by itself is relatively useless. LFS is roughly 60 low-level packages. Doing LFS is worth doing just for the experience. You have to learn about configuration and initialization scripts and how to build software (esp ./configure --help) and understanding what the options mean. Pros/cons of static libs vs not using them. etc., etc., etc.

BLFS, on the other hand. Well, you are managing your own distro at that point. You get stuck trying to figure out what to install first cause so much depends on each other. BLFS is on an SVN version, so about every week, the packages change. After a while, it sort of loses its appeal

[666threesixes666]

yeah, not nearly as clean and easy as "emerge --sync && emerge --update world"