New to Gentoo

[Bunzinator]

Hi Folks,

I'm a long time linux user, having used Slackware, Redhat, (K)Ubuntu and LFS over the past twenty or so years. With Ubuntu's decision to adopt systemd, I find myself needing a new less inflexible distro, and Gentoo wins.

If anyone has any experiences, gotchas or hints in adapting to Gentoo specifically from Ubuntu, I'd love to hear from you. If not, all good. I'm off to start R'ingTFM when I finish posting this.

Bunz

[Jaglover]

Welcome!

These forums, Gentoo Wiki and Google will be your friends.

Adapting from Debian/Ubuntu - I'd say instead of doing it for you Gentoo will ask you what to do.
_________________
My Gentoo installation notes.
Please learn how to denote units correctly!

[The Doctor]

Welcome!

One big hint is don't use the minimal install CD. The hardware support kind of sucks. The System Rescue CD is a much more useful install media. It will not change anything in the handbook, but it will give you a nicer environment to install from and better hardware support.

Two potentially big ones are sys-apps/smartmontools and net-misc/openntpd. These are not mentioned anywhere in the Handbook but are really handy. Smartmontools will monitor your drives and can help you detect an imminent failure and/or test the drive function. Openntpd will set the clock. Both have wiki entries and you don't need to worry about them until after you have a bootable system.

You may also want to look into eudev. It has 2 main advantages over udev. The first is that it doesn't require any special configuration to retain the old network names (ie, eth0 and wlan0). The second advantages is that $upstream is no longer LP. There is no real functional difference, so other than the political statement it really isn't worth mentioning.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[ct85711]

Like Jaglover mentioned, if you have any questions or issues, just ask in the forums or in IRC. Both the Gentoo handbook (to get your base system setup) and Gentoo's wiki are very useful to get you started. Beyond that, let portage worry about all dependencies for the packages you want. Portage is really good to usually solve most dependency issues automatically, the few times it will tell you want USE flag you need to add to allow a package to be installed. The rare times it can't, just ask in the forums; however, please put the entire portage message in the post (it will save you and everyone else time).

Using -pa will make it significantly easier for you to monitor what portage wants to pull in too.

[WWWW]

the THREE programs I reccomend to used from the beginning:

eix
portage-utils
gentoolkit

Basic eix usage:

For any package:

[NeddySeagoon]

Bunzinator,

Welcome.

Gentoo will give you two things. The packages you ask for and tho packages you need to support the packages you asked for.
Keep in mind that the converse is (mostly) true too - if you didn't ask for it, its not installed.

The well trodden path is install the base system, including selecting a profile that matches your use case.
Reboot, install and configure X, test X, install your desktop. Configure X way be a NOP.

This should mostly JustWork - the profile will set some useful USE flags for you. If you use emerge -av, you can decide if you need to change any USE flags to suit your taste befare emerge runs.

Gentoo is portage and the ebuild tree. Everything else is $UPSTREAM. As such, its a toolkit you use to build and maintain your own distro.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Bunzinator]

Thanks for all your replies, folks. All most useful. I was hoping to get stuck in over the weekend, but things got in the way. C'est la vie. Maybe tonight.

Bunz

[hasufell]

Advice: don't use portage, but paludis. It's easier that way than switching after ~2 years or so.

Portage:
pros:

• user friendly in a sense that it provides a lot of functionality (for better or good) that isn't related to the dependency solver
  
• it is fully supported and handles lots of corner cases and junk input (like very bad ebuilds that shouldn't be in the tree)

cons:

• the code is a pure nightmare and almost no one understands the immense complexity, indirection and side effects happening there
  
• the code is not modular (repoman is still part of portage)
  
• the resolver often misses packages and is highly undeterministic (running the same thing twice may yield different results)
  
• the user has VERY poor control over the details of the resolver compared to paludis
  
• dynamic dependencies are not only supported, but still default (this MAY change in the future), although they are dangerous and cause all kinds of weird side effects and inconsistencies in your vdb
  
• autounmask is regularly broken and dangerous
  
• you get TONS of weird and impossible to understand error messages on non-trivial dependency-solver problems
  
• merging is not entirely safe afair, see here, but I'm not entirely sure whether that's still a problem
  
• portage appears to do some unpredictable automatic directory creation, see here but as before I'm not entirely sure if that's still a problem
  
• VERY poor overlay support... most people don't realize that, because they never tried paludis and depend on stuff like layman which doesn't solve the problem of dependency resolution across repositories
  
• configuration is rather limited and chaotic compared to paludis and sometimes has tricky bits not everyone knows of
  
• people are used to weird workarounds and stop caring why stuff happens, because no one can figure out what is happening
  

Paludis:
pros:

• clear distinction between dependency solver and client (cave) and modular design
  
• has actual API documentation
  
• the dependency resolver seems to be correcter and stricter in most cases
  
• the dependency resolver doesn't allow dynamic deps and doesn't allow to randomly break your vdb
  
• the dependency resolver does not make random assumptions about what you want
  
• the dependency resolver quits WAY "earlier" than portage if it's not sure what you want and as such often gives more reasonable errors/warnings
  
• merging files and folders is more strict/safe
  
• automatic directory creation is more strict/safe
  
• it's way stricter about broken configuration/overlays/packages and throws lots of warnings if things are messed up
  
• cave (the client to paludis) allows very fine-grained control over the details of the dependency solver, see here
  
• no misfeatures like autounmask or preserved-rebuild
  
• configuration is properly organized, explained and sometimes more powerful than in portage, also see paludis hooks
  
• helper tools are not scattered across 20 packages, but are mostly part of subcommands of cave (e.g. 'cave resolve', 'cave fix-linkage', 'cave print-id-contents foo/bar', ...)
  
• VERY good overlay support, including dependency resolution across overlays, no need for 3rd party tools like layman
  

cons:

• not consistently supported in gentoo... some devs may close your bug reports if you report them while using paludis (although they are not entitled to do so)
  
• since paludis upstream cares more about support for exherbo and says gentoo has to fix it's input... they won't add workarounds for utterly broken ebuilds like virtual/rubygems
  
• it's not particularly user friendly if you don't know what you want and is more difficult to handle at first (you should understand what the different resolver switches do etc)
  
• it's probably debatable whether it's because of missing portage hacks or just a bug, but "|| ( ... )" deps seem to cause more trouble in paludis than in portage (e.g. with those auto-generated haskell ebuilds, sometimes for perl as well)
  
• afais, support for subslots is still poor, see mismatched sub-slots don't trigger rebuilds of dependant packages
  
• a lot of 3rd party tools are written for portage and may only partially or not work at all with paludis
  
• no repoman equivalent afaik... but repoman still works ofc
  

Probably forgot a lot.

[krinn]

hasufell forget
Paludis:
pros:

• kick ass support given by hasufell that is a dev
  
• awesome friendly to use when you're back from a drunk party
  

cons:

• poor support as only hasufell is mad enough to use it as-is, few users can also provide random support because they are drunk.
  
• no better package manager if you don't plan to give your liver to anyone.
  

[Ant P.]

[hasufell]

[Fitzcarraldo]

[yngwin]

While it may be technically less correct, portage is the only package manager that gets full support on Gentoo. Generally it is also faster, and has a huge and friendly community that can help you with it.
_________________
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

[mrbassie]

[hasufell]

[NeddySeagoon]

/me bangs a few heads together for derailing topic.
This is not the thread to use for evanglising over package managers.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[hasufell]

[a3li]

[hasufell]

[Hypnos]

Buzzinator,

Welcome. The virtue of Gentoo is that flamewars don't affect you directly, since you have so much choice in how you want to set up your system.

FWIW, I use eudev and Paludis.
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Personal overlay | Simple backup scheme

[jenkler]

Welcome Bunzinator, I used Slackware in the far back But stuck with Gentoo since 2002
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Hello from me: Jenkler IT AB (swedish) (use google translate). Check out my Linux manpages for web in english.

[Naib]

*sigh* some people


Welcome Bunzinator, I hope you will enjoy gentoo. I learnt more in the weekend installing gentoo than I did running RH/Mandrake for a couple of years prior to trying it.
Gentoo is primarily about choice not only in the USE flag "I want python but I don't want tk support" but equally in packages. FFMPEG or LIBAV (complete dropin), init system (OpenRC, SystemD, etc ) , libc ...or even package managers (portage, paludis, pkgcore [needs some love to bring up to speed]).
It has a reasonable separation of stable & "bleeding edge"

My advice is stick with stable, use portage, get familiar with tinkering and how things can break before you consider trying some of the alternatives for some packages (especially since the motivation for using an alternative is highly politicised)
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[hasufell]

[steveL]

[steveL]