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Naib
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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 Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 11:45 am Post subject: |
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The zen of gentoo would state there are no failed installs just longer installs.
My 1st gentoo install took a weekend partially because it was a P4 and it was left building overnight... There were a number of points where things didn't go as expected but ... reboot, chroot, continue from a different point in the manual.
Griz (R.I.P.) imparted onto me his dnd install and so when I re-installed due to 32b to 64bit it was booting in 30min.
So really a failed install is one where people have tried and have given up & that number would be very, very hard to quantify
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leifbk
Guru
Joined: 05 Jan 2004
Posts: 415
Location: Bærum, Norway
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Naib wrote: | | My 1st gentoo install took a weekend partially because it was a P4 and it was left building overnight... There were a number of points where things didn't go as expected but ... reboot, chroot, continue from a different point in the manual. |
Heh - my first Gentoo install was on an old 266 MHz Pentium II laptop, it took about 8 days from stage 1 to the KDE login screen. But it was a clean run; all I did was follow the instructions and I was very very impressed with the quality of the documentation.
| Quote: | | So really a failed install is one where people have tried and have given up & that number would be very, very hard to quantify |
Indeed. But probably those of us who started computing at a blinking command prompt fare better than the lot who've grown up with GUIs.
| greyspoke wrote: | Not sure about your list of two groups it is "designed for". There is the "enthusiastic amateur" class (of which I am one*) who use it and enjoy doing so. I did try a couple of binary distributions. I get the impression from the way Gentoo documentation is written that it attempts to engage a somewhat broader audience. Your earlier comment about a willingness to learn is key I think (possibly some basic aptitude at learning this type of stuff is also important).
*My programming is restricted to basic scripting and the only system I administer is a tiny home network. I did write my first programme in about 1973 at school on a punch card type of thing, but I didn't carry on with it until much more recently. |
You can add me to that group, although I've done a fair amount of P* scripting, and for a few years I had a computer running Gentoo at work as I did some duct tape jobs for porting data between a mainframe and some Oracle databases. I started with programming in the 80s with Basic and Turbo Pascal, but never got the hang of OOP.
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Buffoon
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Joined: 17 Jun 2015
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 12:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | But probably those of us who started computing at a blinking command prompt fares better than the lot who've grown up with GUIs. |
Those who grew up with blinking cursor also had to configure the pre-PnP hardware with jumpers. Had to know at least something about hardware. Nowadays even technically minded users believe there has to be a driver for hard drive ... |
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Naib
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Joined: 21 May 2004
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2016 12:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Buffoon wrote: | | Quote: | | But probably those of us who started computing at a blinking command prompt fares better than the lot who've grown up with GUIs. |
Those who grew up with blinking cursor also had to configure the pre-PnP hardware with jumpers. Had to know at least something about hardware. Nowadays even technically minded users believe there has to be a driver for hard drive ... |
some of us have bitbanged IDE's with fpga's 
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Buffoon
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 11:02 am Post subject: |
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| When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
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pilla
Bodhisattva
Joined: 07 Aug 2002
Posts: 7729
Location: Underworld
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 11:09 am Post subject: |
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| Buffoon wrote: | | When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
Today? Disks still have embedded controllers on them to talk to the bus they are attached in.
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Naib
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 11:39 am Post subject: |
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| pilla wrote: | | Buffoon wrote: | | When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
Today? Disks still have embedded controllers on them to talk to the bus they are attached in. |
That is a bus controller, not a protocol controller. Something still needs to pack the bits correctly
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pilla
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Joined: 07 Aug 2002
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Location: Underworld
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 11:45 am Post subject: |
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| Naib wrote: | | pilla wrote: | | Buffoon wrote: | | When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
Today? Disks still have embedded controllers on them to talk to the bus they are attached in. |
That is a bus controller, not a protocol controller. Something still needs to pack the bits correctly |
OK. What about SCSI disks?
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Naib
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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| pilla wrote: | | Naib wrote: | | pilla wrote: | | Buffoon wrote: | | When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
Today? Disks still have embedded controllers on them to talk to the bus they are attached in. |
That is a bus controller, not a protocol controller. Something still needs to pack the bits correctly |
OK. What about SCSI disks? |
Ahh that's different yes a SCSI controller does abstract away a lot of the low-level harddrive access, and then some.
ATA were dumb blocks and needed alot of driver bitstuffing
SCSI are virtually autonomous & the only driver is just the kernel-hardware bridge (a driver non the less)
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luiztux
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Joined: 31 Aug 2015
Posts: 27
Location: /usr/portage/distfiles
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 1:06 pm Post subject: Re: percentages of people about failed Installations? |
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| amulet_linux wrote: |
When people try to install Gentoo.....
99% of people that had never used Linux usually fail
90% of Linux end-users usually fail
60% of advanced Linux users usually fail
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100% of them think that Gentoo installation is difficult before even trying. |
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1clue
Advocate
Joined: 05 Feb 2006
Posts: 2569
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Naib wrote: | | pilla wrote: | | Buffoon wrote: | | When was the last time you had a hard drive with controller built in? 25 years ago? |
Today? Disks still have embedded controllers on them to talk to the bus they are attached in. |
That is a bus controller, not a protocol controller. Something still needs to pack the bits correctly |
Today. Or would be if I hadn't returned it. I bought an external usb drive about a year ago because there were no internals available locally and I needed it right then. Took it apart when I got home, and it was USB right on the drive. |
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1clue
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| Posted: Tue May 24, 2016 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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And come to think of it, I'm going to say that SSDs have a built-in disk management controller that's probably more sophisticated than a SCSI controller. The wear leveling, self-test and all is non-trivial and driven by firmware. I have 3 SSDs which have had firmware updates recently.
Edit: Rather than adding another post, I'm going to mention Mellanox and other server-based drives for SAN applications. |
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Proinsias
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 06 Oct 2014
Posts: 133
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Wed May 25, 2016 12:34 am Post subject: |
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| I've given up on gentoo install a fair few times, it doesn't put me off. Each time I get a little closer. There always seems to come a point where the hour or so to install an all bells and whistles binary distro is the way to get something done fast, and each time I install gentoo the handbook looks less like cuniform. |
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greyspoke
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Joined: 08 Jan 2010
Posts: 171
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| Posted: Wed May 25, 2016 9:13 am Post subject: |
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| Proinsias wrote: | | each time I install gentoo the handbook looks less like cuniform. |
I'd check your locale and your clock [/coat] |
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davidm
Guru
Joined: 26 Apr 2009
Posts: 557
Location: US
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| Posted: Thu May 26, 2016 4:55 pm Post subject: |
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I think in theory any moderately competent Linux user could install Gentoo. The problem for newbies I think is it can be information overload with too much new stuff (Gentoo specific things) at once. Also in practice often something little is out of date in the handbook and this will cause a small problem which needs to be handled. Experienced Linux users have a far better chance of pulling it off when minor issues like this are encountered.
The hardest part of a Gentoo install IMO is probably doing the custom kernel combined with the boot loader. However a custom kernel is optional and a user can opt for genkernel instead to make the process easier (albeit at the expense of far greater compile time). One thing I think we could probably do to help new users more in regards to the custom kernel would be to add a section to explain how to recover. Things like instructing the new user on how to edit the grub2 kernel command on the fly could be very helpful.
That said once you get used to it things become easier. I've been able to transfer data (entire partitions) between OSs and filesystems, go from encrypted to non-encrypted and vice-versa, switch from openRC to systemd all pretty much without even having to use a rescue disk. I'm not some Linux badass. I'm just a moderately competent Gentoo Linux user who made good use of the available documentation and forum posts. Typically before doing something big like this I spend a few hours researching on the forum and wiki. New users would be well served doing the same thing. |
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amulet_linux
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Joined: 26 Apr 2014
Posts: 65
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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| davidm wrote: | | switch from openRC to systemd all pretty much without even having to use a rescue disk. . |
I used to use systemd, switching back to a pure openrc system was kind of complex, almost the same that switching to systemd.
though I had to login into Arch in order to end the switching because I had some issues with PAM that don't let me to use neither su nor sudo
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