"Are we losing users to Gentoo?"

phong · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 5:15 pm Post subject:

I'm sure I'll be repeating other things mentioned so far, but I want to followup on my promise to post my list of things that other distros can and should learn from Gentoo (in no particular order).

1) USE variables. These things are so cool. I don't have a printer at home, so I USE -cups. Boom, nothing wastes space on my computer or pulls in stupid dependencies by compiling in optional printer support. I don't think this would be even close to feasable on a binary distro. Everybody (espescially that Debian mailing list thread) seems to get stuck on CFLAGS, but USE is the real winner.

2) SLOTs. Many know little of their power.

3) Current packages. Gentoo is often the most up to date distro (occasionally to its detriment). Even if some particular package is lagging, many times it's simply a matter of renaming a .ebuild to reflect the new version number. Is it true that Debian folks are still stuck with KDE 2?

4) Choice. You have a choice of three different crons, and as many loggers, and more or everything else, you can choose if you want to run things through xinetd or not, etc. Most other distros (save LFS) don't allow nearly as much flexibility. Want the latest closed source, high performance driver from nVidia? That's your perrogative - if you want to grow a beard and stand up for Free software ideals, use the nv driver that comes with X. Can't find the package you want? You can write your own .ebuild - it's not much more difficult than doing compilation by hand. You can easily feed that back into the loop so everyone can take advantage.

5) Automatic dependancy handling and other advanced coolnesses of portage. Actually, this is probably a lesser deal with newer versions of up2date, apt-get, etc. that seem pretty slick, but portage is the smoothest thing I've tried so far.

6) Minimalist base system. The base system is really just that - almost no packages are installed that are unneeded on a Gentoo system, and anything that gets installed after that is chosen by the user. Virtually no daemons are running by default, and no network ports are listening.

7) Gentoo's RC system is simply the best I've ever seen. Very slick, highly underrated (and not well advertised).

8) Non-layered configuration. With something like Redhat, their's gui config tools, text config tools, web config tools, all of which make it easier to configure the machine. That's fine, but for someone like me, I want the flexibility of editing the files by hand sometimes. With all those config tools lurking (and always changing the way they work with every version), I don't know if I'm going to confuse them later because the config is different from some other file they're keeping somewhere else that I don't know about, or they don't like the way I formatted something or whatever. Maybe they won't see my changes and the next time I use the gui one it'll blow away what I did. Are they going to call my mother if I edit one of those files that says "DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE"?

9) The forums! Best in the world. A supportive, frendly to n00b community without all the ideology getting in the way. Reading that thread got me pretty pissed - why would I want to use a Distro with a conversation like this?

maw · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 5:19 pm Post subject:

I started with Slackware way back at Slackware 2.1, and I really liked it. But then at the time I didn't really know about different Linux distributions anyway. I was introduced to it by a friend and loved it, although at first I was aghast at the concept of not using Windows! Now I'm aghast at the concept of not dual-booting at the very least. How things change.

Anyway, Slackware is one I've come back to twice since then, with SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake all making appearences, but the one thing I always find about binary distros is that I manage to kill them somehow. With an RPM-based system I always muck up the package database. With Slackware, I just mucked it up full stop, although my Slackware 8 system ran for the longest time I've ever had a distro installed (so far).

However, eventually I decided I really needed to update from Slackware 8 with a new distro, and since Slackware's latest release didn't really cut it for me in terms of what was in it, I went looking for something else. FreeBSD's ports system had really impressed me (the same friend who introduced me to Linux is now a FreeBSD fanatic, although he also runs Debian on a SPARC64 box, and is hoping to switch to Gentoo on that one day), and I'd heard about Sorcerer, so I tried that and it was pretty good, but not quite there at the time... anyway, I went over to Mandrake 8.2 for a while, hated it as usual (it always crashes a lot on my computers for some reason), then I discovered Gentoo. Source-based, and Portage looked like a better packaging system than Sorcerer's I thought, even if the metaphors aren't as pretty, so I tried it. And I'm still here!

Best bits of Gentoo are, for me:
- source compilation
- how easy it is to mock up new ebuilds for new versions of stuff to get them installed before there's a proper ebuild in Portage, but without breaking the packaging system (which reminds me, one of those I should submit...)
- automatic dependency resolution
- emerge rsync

- the init system, which is literally the best I have ever seen
- ebuilds which include nice patches for things (Xft Mozilla!)
- gentoo-sources kernel tree

Worst thing so far is some things are easier to muck up than they should be, and I'm still not sure if the slots system actually works right...
_________________
Your Gentoo woll sle me sodenly!
I may the beaute of it not sustene
(to misquote Chaucer)

simulacrum · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 7:50 pm Post subject: I must be strange

I keep hearing everyone talk about the package systems in distros. I've used a variety of distros myself, and I've never really used the package systems with them. Granted, once in a blue moon I'll an install an RPM because it's the only available format, and sometimes I'll use Slackware's pkgconf to install something because they're the only ones who got that package working for Slack, but generally, I've always compiled from source.

I guess I had kinda assumed this was the norm. Perhaps I don't hang out with Linux users enough and perhaps I hang out in the open source world too much, but am I wrong on this? Do most people rely on say...Redhat to provide a RPM for their software? That just seems silly to me.

Gentoo is the first distro where so far I have relied on the package system, and part of my "evaluation" i guess is to see how it goes. The one thing that I've always been irked by is the lack of an uninstallation system. I've thought about some kind of package wrappers were you could track newly installed files, but I haven't seen anything like that. So far I'm extremely impressed with Portage.

solatis · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 8:16 pm Post subject:

I think it's not only the function to automatically configure a package for you, but it's more... it's maintaining directory structures, it's auto-booting what needs to be auto-booted, and most important: it's ease...

Redhat users can use up2date to download new RPM's, and redhat does the rest - mainting firewall if the package needs a port open, if it needs to be auto-booted, it adds it to the rc.d/inetd config, etc etc...

And Gentoo just does it in the way i want - nothing by default, but options to do it. That's why I like gentoo

_________________
Grtz,

Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/

slougi · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 10:40 pm Post subject:

Techie2000 · Guru Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 344

I started with SuSE but switched to Gentoo. Not because of optimizations in compilation, or going faster, but because I wanted an easy way to keep all my packages updated to the latest versions, and clear out any packages i don't want or use. However I very much like the optimization part, and well portage is the best...

_________________
"And I'm right. I'm always right, but in this case I'm just a bit more right than I usually am." - Linus Torvalds

guero61 · l33t Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 811 Location: Behind you

li1_getoo · l33t Joined: 20 Oct 2002 Posts: 661 Location: Queens , NY

gentoo room in irc is one of the busiest rooms out there and the most helpfull

TheCoop

dreamer3 · Guru Joined: 24 Sep 2002 Posts: 553

Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

'qpkg -q foobar' is the command for it in CLI...

Unfortunetally, it doesn't exactly work right.

sterni · Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 2:44 pm Post subject: Evolution!

I don´t think that there is the "best" linux distribution. The idea is that
there are a lot of solutions for even more different tasks and users with
different opinions. And I know that of course senior slackware sys-admin could
run a better machine then a newbie gentoo user.

Let everybody use the things they want and to break a tabu. If you are
lucky with MS, then use it. The only think I prefer is that
in the world everybody should be able to play which each other. And in the end
we will see if Gentoo, Redhat, Debian, FreeBSD, Hurd, Plan9 or
whatever will survive. I think this is evolution.

And this way to see the world seems not very popular in the
debian community, the most debian guys I met, are against a world
of competition, and fighting against every distro (and of course against
every user of this enemy distros)

But to go back to the original topic gentoo vs. debian. Gentoo has big disadvantages
if you look at things like kickstart or farm-computing, here debian has a lot to offer.
The advantage of gentoo is not to alter the packages, and to use the original
versions (the tarballs which are released from the author).

bye!

S_aIN_t · Guru Joined: 11 May 2002 Posts: 488 Location: Ottawa

There whole OS was thing is getting old. The last thing we need is a war between Debian and Gentoo. It is true that many of the Gentoo users are past Debian users. So, there must be a reason why all these people are switching to Gentoo. Because Debian is not satisfying their needs. No single ditro can make everyone happy.

Portage was the single reason I tried Gentoo. I was using FreeBSD as a destop for a long enough time to learn a few things. I didn't want to switch to Linux because it meant that alot of the stuff i learned was no good (that ia not as true now, because i have a router machine that runs fbsd). But thanks to the great documentation I was able to intstall Gentoo 1.2. That system has been running since the summer, about 6-7 months. I have upgraded to 1.4. Sure, it took forever, because my computer is slow by today's standarts (p3 550). But thanks to the docs, the forums and the IRC chan everything went smoothly.

I find the lack of elitism in the Gentoo community very refreshing. I am glad we can do our own thing and be happy with what we are doing.

Theads like the one on the Debian mailing list is a waste of time. And the reason i am replying to this is to say, "Thank you" to everyone who has contributed to Gentoo Linux and made it in to the wonderfull thing it is right now.

Pluvius · Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 7:54 pm Post subject:

I agree whole-heartedly. The main reason I got a forum account was to see if I (as a nOOb) could help answer some of the more simple questions.

All the questions I had when installing 1.2 and now 1.4rc1 were already covered in the forums.

Thanks for all the support Gentoo forumers.

zez · Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2002 10:14 pm Post subject:

I remember life before Gentoo. Everybody would argue between Slack and Debian, with Debian being arguably the "cooler" choice because of apt-get, while Slack was the "traditional/BSD-like" distro. Well, the Debian zealots are just sulking because Debian is:

1.) No longer "new cool whizbang 1337" distro
2.) No longer is the only distro with advanced (post-RPM) package management

This doesn't mean that Debian is a bad distro, not at all. But Debian used to have the level of hype and advocacy that Gentoo is now enjoying, and they miss it. I use Debian on an old P133 router/print server because installing Gentoo would be torture, and I still want a mature package-management system. But Gentoo for me is better suited on newer systems, and that's where I use it. Also, I tried FreeBSD once for a day or so, and after using Slackware and Gentoo, it didn't seem much different at all :lol:

Becks · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 90

Just saw this thread while searching for other informations about gentoo, but here are my 2 cents:

A friend of me told me about gentoo - just 4 days before i crashed my redhat system (*). I thought: well, give it a try - and as far as i can see at the moment: gentoo works very well.
Personally i don't care about "hypes" and distros which are 1337 - they just have to work properly and let me run the programs i need.

Btw: my friend (computer seller) runs gentoo on all servers he is selling just because the system can be exactly adapted to the hardware he is using. It's easier for him than searching for each rpm-package until he has found what he needs to install the machine.

Alex

(*) How to crash a system: move the root-drive to a bigger hd by creating a partition on the new drive and copying the bootblock and the rest using dd. Such a system runs fine until you try to install a new kernel and run lilo. Lilo will find a mismatch in the partition size and wreck the bootsector while installing...

Al Al Cool J · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 25

Reasons I switched to Gentoo (from Mandrake):

The number one thing about Gentoo that has totally me blown away since switching:

The forums

metalhedd · Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2002 1:58 am Post subject:

My installing of gentoo had nothing to do with hype, I had never heard of it before stumbling across it doing a google search. I had tried Mandrake and redhat, encountered RPM Hell, and decided they were garbage. Tried Debian several times, always ended up breaking it, plus the software was WAAAY too out of date, and the mailing-lists/irc channel were full of arrogant dicks. I ran OpenBSD on my firewall so I decided to try it on my desktop... bad idea. no accelerated X, for my Geforce2MX and just nothing noteworthy about the experience, it just seemed to be lacking somehow. I tried freebsd shortly after but I wasn't really satisfied it either, I guess i can just chalk that up to my unfamiliarity with the BSDs. thats when I found gentoo and read the description on that page with Larry the Cow, everything sounded interesting, portage seemed like the greatest idea Everrrrrr.. (and I wasn't disappointed) I Downloaded and install 1.2 and never looked back. I've been happily running it since around May, and sure I've borked it, and had to reinstall a couple times, but I've learned a ton and I feel like a relatively competent linux user now. I owe it all to that genius Daniel Robinson. Being such a new Distro I expected to have alot of problems, but i think it was the first Installation of a free OS that i've ever done without _ANY_ Problems. I had a working kde3 desktop w/ sound and everything I needed working within 2 days. I immediately decided that gentoo would be my OS permanently. no more windows. So I Still keep the dual boot around and Only use it for VB Programming which I need to do for school, but other than that, its strictly gentoo... well, once in a while one of my idiot friends reboots it into windows to check their email.. hotmail of all things... i'll never understand how someone can feel so uncomfortable with Linux and KDE3 that they feel the need to boot to windows to use a damn browser... come on now... even if theres a browser window open. I've got Kazaa Running under wine too, and sometimes it gets booted to windows just to download songs. really aggravating. but this is quickly getting OT so I'll just end it there.

Curious · Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2002 2:20 am Post subject:

I always have a good laugh looking at the Debian guys, still running in circles after all these years, blindly chanting that their way is the Right Way. The state of the art has moved on - not only are other distributions rapidly encroaching on Debians ease-of-maintainance, they're actually paying attention to things Debian steadfastly ignores, like desktop usability, and dare I say, software that doesn't belong in a museum ( or in some cases, a mauseleum! ).

I used Debian for three years, and while APT was nice, it is the single redeeming feature of the distribution. In my opinion, Debian is redundant, and it's only place is as an easy to deploy distribution for M68K and Intel HURD. ( HURD and Debian are a match made in heaven, in my opinion. With HURD, there's no software to get out of date with. )

IMHO, the biggest problem with Debian is that their community acts so arrogantly that you'd think the rod up their collective ass must have a rod up its ass. I have a friend who runs Debian on one of his Aptivas, and is subscribed to one of their allegedly newbie friendly lists - apparently it gets pretty abusive. I couldn't even take part in the lists - I can only take so much "rtfm" before my gorge rises.

Goodbye and good riddance, Debian, thee OpenBSD of Linux distributions. Enjoy wearing your suspenders and growing your beards out like the Unix Guy from Dilbert. Perhaps something like LibraNet can forcibly impose a clue on you, but I am not hopeful. Flame on! ;-)

-- Curious
_________________
Are you down with the Hawk?

metalhedd · Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2002 2:32 am Post subject:

Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

Curious · Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2002 2:43 am Post subject:

Mnemia · Guru Joined: 17 May 2002 Posts: 476

metalhedd · Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2002 3:01 am Post subject:

IWBCMAN · Guru Joined: 25 Jun 2002 Posts: 474

First off I have never used Debian- unfortunately, every Debian user I have ever met has been an arrogant prick- their attitude simply blew me away. Additionally the datedness of their packages discouraged me-and altough I can appreciate the bug-fixes and security enhancements that come with a dated distro, these *features* would only be valuable for me if I was running a corporate server in buisness environment, where solid reliability and guaranteed backwards compatibility were of critcial importance.

I switched to Gentoo in may after having bee a loyal SuSE user since 1995. Much of wehat I learned using SuSE helped me when I started to use Gentoo, but in the space of six weeks I learned more using Gentoo than I had learned using SuSE over the previous 7 years.

Having recently become a sys admin at my university I am now using SuSE(8.0) again-at work and at home. I have Gentoo and SuSE(8.1) installed on both of my machines(desktop and laptop). I have heard so much about ease-of-installation issues with Gentoo, but neither of my machines would boot with the SuSE installation CD/DVD, on one machine because it was P4 based, which baffeled my last SuSE version(8.0)-and to resolve this prolem I needed over a week, and the newest version refused to boot on my laptop due to PCMCIA issues.

Then there were the issues with recompiling the kernel- SuSE makes it just about impossible to recompile the kernel- it is not that it is impossible to do so, but that it is a very, very involved process, and SuSE explicitily discourages its users from ever doing so. To get things working under SuSE 8.1 on my laptop I simply compiled ther kernel I needed under Gentoo and usied that as my boot kernel for SuSE, works fine now with the latest acpi patches included in the 2.4.19gentoo-r10 release(finally intel8x0/nforce2 sound support).

The installation process with SuSE went fairly easily once I learned to disbale PCMCIA at boot time for the laptop, and once I had modified the init files for SuSE8.0 on the desktop to read i686 instead of i586. QAnd I must say that the new 8.1 release is smooth, at least under kde, where gnome2 leave much to be desired. Then of course there was the issue that much was installed that I didn't need, and much was not installed that I did need(ie. by defualt no compilation tools are installed-no gcc, make, etc.).

Then I wanted to get multimedia up and running. Suse does not offer xine or totem. Mplayer is installed as part of kde3 but it did not support DVD audio codecs. After much searchig on the internet, due to a lack of suse support forums, I finally found the packages I needed, but only because another kind soul had dedicated much time to making RPMs for these programs combined with the right codecs-but even at this point I could not get it to work perfectly-xine refuse to play my films due to the wrong region code(im in europe, some of my DVDs are american)- I had to deinstall the SuSE mplayer and download the source for lame and generate my own rpm to to get a working version of mplayer up and running(ie. simply compiling and installing lame didn't work-once I generated my own rpm the system was able to find the needed libraries).

At this point I realized exactly how nice Gentoo is-the USE flags makes things sooooo much easier. In all I needed over 8 hours to get my SuSE distro up and running multimedia-and this with the help of a webage dedicated to to getting mutlimedia stuff up and wunning with SuSE- If I had had to download the source of each of these files and manually do every step involved this would have taken me at least twice as long, i.e more time that was involved in the installation and compilation of Gentoo.

Certain things are nicer under SuSE, a lot of configuration stuff is taken care of automatically, including things like setting up the correct permissions for user to mount CDs. The screen savers with xscreensaver for SuSE is the best I have ever seen. But I went to search for help with the SuSE HelpCenter and wanted to generate an index for the local documentation and the machine went off into lala land-I actually had to reboot, and that almost reminds me of MS-SHIT.

Using SuSE now coupled with my Gentoo experience I am now able to do the things with SuSE which I had never managed to do before. Now I simply setup things in Gentoo and copy over the files I need for SuSE(/etc/dhcp.conf, /etc/squid/squid.conf etc.) -but there are limits here- the SuSE configuration stuff like YAST2 and SAX are excellent-but you must use these tools - modifying the config files directly becomes nearly impossbile due to SuSE/YAST2 specific stuff.

Gentoo managed to get me to stop dual booting, and although MSSHIT is still on my harddrive, I dual boot on average once every two months!!!!!!!. Seven years with SuSE did not enable me to break my MS dependancy. Now with WiNE I am able to run everything I ever needed MSSHIT for, and I now have my machines doing things I never imagined possible with MS.

A few negatives regarding Gentoo: I installed Gentoo on my laptop two weeks ago-I spent over 80 hours getting it up and running-I am not sure why it was so difficult, but the particular ebuilds then current were most troublesome(I had no such problems the previous times I installed Gentoo). Gentoo is only stable if you leave it alone, once you have got it up and running-the myriad of things you can play with can compromise stability(now I have two machines- this helps me to try out things n one machine and revert back if something goes wrong-I on my laptop I am using gcc3.2 and glibc 2.2.5- this combination is incredibly stable- whereas gcc 3.2 and glibc 2.3 is a PAIN in the ASS(above and beyond all regarding java) -and Gentoo is not faster than the new SuSE 8.1, even with custom optimizations.

To sum things up : when I boot up SuSE everything works ok and the machine is ready to use for doing work, but there is no degree of enjoyment present-as long as what I need is preconfigure and prepackaged no problems- I step off the beaten trail and loe and behold the feeling creeps up "I can't do this". When I fire up Gentoo I inevitably engage myself in a learning adventure, and this experience reinforces itself continuosly- "I can, I can, I can."