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eval_65
n00b
Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 3
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 Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2011 4:47 pm Post subject: Gentoo desktop users |
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I have been using Ubuntu LTS releases for some years on my desktop, this have been working great for a long time, but lately the distribution has not been flexible enough for my needs. I want complete control over my system so i always start with a minimal headless Ubuntu installation and the install the packages i need from there. When i bought a SSD disk and wanted to align LVM2, LUKS and the filesystem properly from the installer, this was very awkward because everything had to be done through partman. I am running a custom kernel and now i really like to remove dbus support and other things from the installed applications, and this just seems to difficult with Ubuntu som now i am looking for a more flexible distribution.
I have a little experience with Gentoo, as i installed a server many years ago. The handbook was followed and in a couple of hours the system was ready, i put the machine back into the server room, and almost forgot about it, the only thing i did was to run glsa-check on it every month or so, but it never found anything needed to be fixed. When the server was taken down, it had an uptime on one year and a couple of months. So i have a vague idea of the Gentoo concept, but no deep knowledge.
1. When a new version of Ubuntu LTS is available i used to reinstall the desktop machine. So far as i know, this is not the case with Gentoo as packages are updated on a regular basis. Does this generate a lot of work on a daily basis?
2. I would like my desktop to be as slim and minimal as possible. When compiling packages ex. openoffice.org or something similar, this would require about 1 gigabyte of dependencies on Ubuntu, the majority are dev packages that is only needed at compile time, but still has to be installed. How does this work in Gentoo? is packages only needed at compile time removed afterwards? if this is not the case i would guess that a Gentoo system would be very bloated in a short amount of time. |
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Kollin
Veteran
Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 1139
Location: Sofia/Bulgaria
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| Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2011 5:17 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| eval_65 wrote: | I have been using Ubuntu LTS releases for some years on my desktop, this have been working great for a long time, but lately the distribution has not been flexible enough for my needs. I want complete control over my system so i always start with a minimal headless Ubuntu installation and the install the packages i need from there. When i bought a SSD disk and wanted to align LVM2, LUKS and the filesystem properly from the installer, this was very awkward because everything had to be done through partman. I am running a custom kernel and now i really like to remove dbus support and other things from the installed applications, and this just seems to difficult with Ubuntu som now i am looking for a more flexible distribution.
I have a little experience with Gentoo, as i installed a server many years ago. The handbook was followed and in a couple of hours the system was ready, i put the machine back into the server room, and almost forgot about it, the only thing i did was to run glsa-check on it every month or so, but it never found anything needed to be fixed. When the server was taken down, it had an uptime on one year and a couple of months. So i have a vague idea of the Gentoo concept, but no deep knowledge.
1. When a new version of Ubuntu LTS is available i used to reinstall the desktop machine. So far as i know, this is not the case with Gentoo as packages are updated on a regular basis. Does this generate a lot of work on a daily basis?
2. I would like my desktop to be as slim and minimal as possible. When compiling packages ex. openoffice.org or something similar, this would require about 1 gigabyte of dependencies on Ubuntu, the majority are dev packages that is only needed at compile time, but still has to be installed. How does this work in Gentoo? is packages only needed at compile time removed afterwards? if this is not the case i would guess that a Gentoo system would be very bloated in a short amount of time. |
You can trim down OO deps with the useflags 
| Quote: | emerge -pv openoffice
These are the packages that would be merged, in order:
Calculating dependencies ... done!
[ebuild N ] sys-libs/db-4.8.30 USE="-doc -examples -java -nocxx -tcl -test" 22,351 kB
[ebuild N ] dev-perl/Archive-Zip-1.30 193 kB
[ebuild N ] media-libs/vigra-1.6.0-r1 USE="jpeg png tiff zlib -doc -fftw -test" 16,139 kB
[ebuild N ] app-office/openoffice-3.2.1-r1 USE="bash-completion cups dbus gstreamer gtk kde ldap nsplugin opengl pam templates (-aqua) -binfilter -debug -eds -gnome -java (-kdeenablefinal) -odk" LINGUAS="en -af -ar -as_IN -be_BY -bg -bn -br -brx -bs -ca -cs -cy -da -de -dgo -dz -el -en_GB -en_US -en_ZA -eo -es -et -eu -fa -fi -fr -ga -gl -gu -he -hi_IN -hr -hu -id -it -ja -ka -kk -km -kn_IN -ko -kok -ks -ku -lt -mai -mk -ml_IN -mn -mni -mr_IN -nb -ne -nl -nn -nr -ns -oc -or_IN -pa_IN -pl -pt -pt_BR -ru -rw -sa_IN -sat -sd -sh -sk -sl -sr -ss -st -sv -sw_TZ -ta -ta_IN -te_IN -tg -th -ti_ER -tn -tr -ts -uk -ur_IN -uz -ve -vi -xh -zh_CN -zh_TW -zu" 446,458 kB
[blocks B ] app-office/openoffice ("app-office/openoffice" is blocking app-office/openoffice-bin-3.2.1)
[blocks B ] app-office/openoffice-bin ("app-office/openoffice-bin" is blocking app-office/openoffice-3.2.1-r1)
Total: 4 packages (4 new), Size of downloads: 485,139 kB
Conflict: 2 blocks (2 unsatisfied)
* Error: The above package list contains packages which cannot be
* installed at the same time on the same system.
(app-office/openoffice-bin-3.2.1::gentoo, installed) pulled in by
app-office/openoffice-bin required by @selected
(app-office/openoffice-3.2.1-r1::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by
openoffice
For more information about Blocked Packages, please refer to the following
section of the Gentoo Linux x86 Handbook (architecture is irrelevant):
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1#blocked
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And there is always and oo-bin as you can see from the above
_________________
"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..." |
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Frustie
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 31 Aug 2007
Posts: 102
Location: My own little planet.
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| Posted: Fri Jan 14, 2011 9:29 pm Post subject: |
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@glsa-check
im not sure running glsa-check without updating your repository works, it would probably have found more if you have done emerge --sync once a month too |
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BitJam
Advocate
Joined: 12 Aug 2003
Posts: 2508
Location: Silver City, NM
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 2:50 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| eval_65 wrote: | | 1. When a new version of Ubuntu LTS is available i used to reinstall the desktop machine. So far as i know, this is not the case with Gentoo as packages are updated on a regular basis. Does this generate a lot of work on a daily basis? |
I try to update my system about once a week. Most updates go through without a hitch. Some require more effort. I would suggest you update weekly and budget one hour per week for the upgrades. I think my average is much lower than that, but I've been doing this for a while. If you only update every six months or so then you are likely to run into difficult problems. Best to stay with the herd and not straggle too far behind.
| Quote: | | 2. I would like my desktop to be as slim and minimal as possible. When compiling packages ex. openoffice.org or something similar, this would require about 1 gigabyte of dependencies on Ubuntu, the majority are dev packages that is only needed at compile time, but still has to be installed. How does this work in Gentoo? is packages only needed at compile time removed afterwards? if this is not the case i would guess that a Gentoo system would be very bloated in a short amount of time. |
Well, I think it depends on how you count bloat. The Gentoo USE flags allow you to adjust what features are added at compile time. ISTM this makes Gentoo less bloated than binary distros that basically have to always compile in every feature users might want. On the other hand, Gentoo does tend to use up way more disk space than binary distros so if this is how you count bloat then Gentoo is very bloated. Also, since almost all packages need to be compiled, Gentoo uses vastly more CPU cycles than binary distros. In this respect Gentoo is extremely bloated.
If you want to run on minimal (or outdated) hardware then I would suggest you steer clear of Gentoo and use something like antiX which was designed to run on small systems. For me, the appeal of Gentoo has always been the amount of control I have over the system. I also like how easy it is to use the SVN version of some package and how easy it is for me to add my own patches. Gentoo is designed to make these things easy. The trade-off is that this means Gentoo requires more effort to maintain. Sort of like the trade-off between an automatic and manual transmission.
ISTM if you want a "slim and minimal" desktop, your choice of window/desktop manager will trump all other concerns. I use Enlightenment e-16, which I love. OpenBox, IceWM, Fluxbox, XFCE4, and LXDE are popular choices. I believe the tiling window managers are even slimmer and more minimal. Too minimal for my tastes but some people swear by them. I think the choice of window/desktop manager is highly personal. What one person loves another person may hate.
One trick I've found is that it is often extremely informative to try a distro just based on its default D/WM because the default one almost always comes pre-configured. If you like it then you can use their configuration as a starting point on your distribution of choice. |
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phajdan.jr
Retired Dev
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1777
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 11:03 am Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| eval_65 wrote: | | the only thing i did was to run glsa-check on it every month or so, but it never found anything needed to be fixed. |
You should run emerge --sync before glsa-check.
| eval_65 wrote: | | 1. When a new version of Ubuntu LTS is available i used to reinstall the desktop machine. So far as i know, this is not the case with Gentoo as packages are updated on a regular basis. Does this generate a lot of work on a daily basis? |
On a daily basis... depends how often you update. You don't have to update daily. However, updating less often than a couple of months will make the update more complicated, although still possible.
| eval_65 wrote: | | I would like my desktop to be as slim and minimal as possible. When compiling packages ex. openoffice.org or something similar, this would require about 1 gigabyte of dependencies on Ubuntu, the majority are dev packages that is only needed at compile time, but still has to be installed. How does this work in Gentoo? is packages only needed at compile time removed afterwards? |
Gentoo has no -dev packages that binary distros have. When you install a library, it always installs both the .so and .h (header) files. They usually don't take much space.
openoffice.org takes ages to compile, so you may want to try openoffice-bin instead.
Finally, Gentoo can unmerge packages that are no longer needed, read more about emerge --depclean --ask.
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54237
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 12:21 pm Post subject: |
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eval_65,
Welcome back to Gentoo - we knew you would come.
If you want to use your system, rather than tinker with Gentoo, you need a bit of disapline.
You can update daily if you want too, more frequent are frowned on bur you don't need to.
Weekly or monthly is enough.
With any source based distro, you occasionally get a bit of upheavel, when major packages restructure or change their ABI and break backwards compatibility.
I can think of about three instances in my eight years with Gentoo. If you use stable, by the time you are exposed to these updates, the update path will be documente and you will know its coming. If you use testing, I always have, you may be taken by surprise once in a while.
Gentoo keeps the downloaded source tarballs unless you explicitly remove them. This is about the only source of bloat. This is done for several reasons.
1) You are in charge of your system
2) if an installed package changes and a patch file is provided, you don't have to download the tarball again to build the update.
Lets use OOo as an example. The sources are
| Code: | -rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 14547953 Sep 2 14:33 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo-build-3.2.1.6.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 7270281 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-bootstrap.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 9709421 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-calc.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 5952605 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-components.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 14848212 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-extensions.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 46207466 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-extras.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 10813334 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-filters.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 44942313 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-help.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 3557296 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-impress.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 27402181 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-libs-core.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 105286982 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-libs-extern-sys.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 39868106 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-libs-extern.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 11516639 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-libs-gui.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 19519 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-postprocess.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 1564775 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-sdk.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 51257614 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-testing.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 5104236 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-ure.tar.bz2
-rw-rw-r-- 1 portage portage 9021103 Aug 20 2009 /usr/portage/distfiles/ooo310-m19-writer.tar.bz2 |
These are downloaded to /usr/portage/distfiles
When you build it, they are unpacked in /var/tmp/portage/... Almost 7Gis required here for the build.
During the build process, the final binary files are copied to the correct locations on your filesystem.
Lastly, the space used (almost 7G) in /var/tmp/portage/... is reclaimed. However, when a build fails to complete, the remains are left in the build location.
Thats useful for debug, continuing and so on. You can remove these failed builds as long as emerge is not actually running.
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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asturm
Developer
Joined: 05 Apr 2007
Posts: 8936
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 1:47 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| phajdan.jr wrote: | | openoffice.org takes ages to compile, so you may want to try openoffice-bin instead. |
It is probably though 'the' major package where you actually feel the difference of your personally compiled binary instead of the standard one. But the huge compile time makes me stick longer with a particular version when I'm satisfied, even though there are updates available. |
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XQYZ
Apprentice
Joined: 19 Jul 2009
Posts: 231
Location: Europe
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 3:09 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| phajdan.jr wrote: | | openoffice.org takes ages to compile, so you may want to try openoffice-bin instead. |
Just to clarify that for somebody out side of the Gentoo community:
| Quote: | patrick@aequitas ~ $ qlop -gHt openoffice
openoffice: Wed Nov 17 13:17:49 2010: 1 hour, 27 minutes, 37 seconds
openoffice: Fri Nov 19 19:07:40 2010: 1 hour, 2 minutes, 28 seconds
openoffice: Sun Nov 21 05:47:08 2010: 1 hour, 2 minutes, 5 seconds
openoffice: 3 times |
So it takes maybe an hour on my machine (AMD x4 w/ 3Ghz and 4GB DDR2 800 RAM) to compile, which I consider to be acceptable as the package is seldom updated. |
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eval_65
n00b
Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 4:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Frustie wrote: | @glsa-check
im not sure running glsa-check without updating your repository works, it would probably have found more if you have done emerge --sync once a month too |
I did that also, because i remember that the firewall was vey restrictive so i had to use emerge-webrsync, beside that not much care was taken for the system, but it never crashed and always worked as expected. |
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eval_65
n00b
Joined: 14 Jan 2011
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 4:59 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo desktop users |
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| BitJam wrote: | | I try to update my system about once a week. Most updates go through without a hitch. Some require more effort. I would suggest you update weekly and budget one hour per week for the upgrades. I think my average is much lower than that, but I've been doing this for a while. If you only update every six months or so then you are likely to run into difficult problems. Best to stay with the herd and not straggle too far behind. |
One hour per week do sound reasonable. I properly use my system fifteen hours a day, so one hour of maintaince per week is not bad.
| BitJam wrote: | Well, I think it depends on how you count bloat. The Gentoo USE flags allow you to adjust what features are added at compile time. ISTM this makes Gentoo less bloated than binary distros that basically have to always compile in every feature users might want. On the other hand, Gentoo does tend to use up way more disk space than binary distros so if this is how you count bloat then Gentoo is very bloated. Also, since almost all packages need to be compiled, Gentoo uses vastly more CPU cycles than binary distros. In this respect Gentoo is extremely bloated.
If you want to run on minimal (or outdated) hardware then I would suggest you steer clear of Gentoo and use something like antiX which was designed to run on small systems. For me, the appeal of Gentoo has always been the amount of control I have over the system. I also like how easy it is to use the SVN version of some package and how easy it is for me to add my own patches. Gentoo is designed to make these things easy. The trade-off is that this means Gentoo requires more effort to maintain. Sort of like the trade-off between an automatic and manual transmission.
ISTM if you want a "slim and minimal" desktop, your choice of window/desktop manager will trump all other concerns. I use Enlightenment e-16, which I love. OpenBox, IceWM, Fluxbox, XFCE4, and LXDE are popular choices. I believe the tiling window managers are even slimmer and more minimal. Too minimal for my tastes but some people swear by them. I think the choice of window/desktop manager is highly personal. What one person loves another person may hate.
One trick I've found is that it is often extremely informative to try a distro just based on its default D/WM because the default one almost always comes pre-configured. If you like it then you can use their configuration as a starting point on your distribution of choice. |
Very good point, maybe i should have used another term than bloat e.g. "things that i do not need". My definition of a minimal system is one that is fully customized to my needs and only contain the things i need. First time i compiled a custom Linux kernel i spent a whole week going through every option, learned what it did and then decided if it was something i might need. When i was done, this kernel was minimal in my world, but properly more bloated that other customized kernels. One thing that is really annoying me with Ubuntu is that VLC has been compiled with support for D-BUS, as i do not use, but this makes VLC pull some dependencies like libdbus-1-3 and others. This seems very quick to fix in Gentoo but very time consuming and awkward in Ubuntu. Therefore i am now collecting as much information about running Gentoo on the desktop as possible, pros and cons etc.
My current dekstop system is a Intel Core i7 with 6GB of RAM so it should not be a problem to compile even big packages. As for window manager i am using Openbox, i love the simplicity. |
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kernelOfTruth
Watchman
Joined: 20 Dec 2005
Posts: 6111
Location: Vienna, Austria; Germany; hello world :)
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