What distribution will *YOU* switch to?

Message

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 9:56 am

Dralnu wrote:
desultory wrote:
RazielFMX wrote:Can you point me the right direction?
To point out some options, I suggest reviewing both topic "[topic=312817]HOWTO: Easily make a full system backup (stage4)[/topic]" and topic "[topic=534039][Howto] Creation of a Stage 5 archive[/topic]".
I'd go stage5 personally. Stage4 vs. Stage5 is a hairy arguement.

Maybe you should go through and document everything you did/followed for future refrence

definitely do that

I saved almost all important configuration files I modified / created & this makes a new gentoo installation a breeze (+ stage4 -> really fast)

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 3:41 pm

In fact, when I created the Stage 5, I created a Monster.... damn it

This is not my intention

Dieter@be · Post by **Dieter@be** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 4:04 pm

How do you mean, d2_racing ?

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 5:30 pm

d2_racing wrote:In fact, when I created the Stage 5, I created a Monster.... damn it

This is not my intention

With all due respect, Stage5 is pretty much just a tar-cjvf /

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 12:35 am

There a lot of people that argue about the Stage 4 vs the Stage 5.

In fact, the Stage 5 is only a tar of a partition

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Wed Jun 27, 2007 7:25 pm

I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too

.

antik · Post by **antik** » Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:15 pm

Aniruddha wrote:I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .

You should read /usr/ports/UPDATING before start whining about your "disaster".

VincenzoVega · Post by **VincenzoVega** » Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:27 pm

Aniruddha wrote:And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .

Code: Select all

make BATCH=yes install clean

Done.

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Wed Jun 27, 2007 10:28 pm

antik wrote:
Aniruddha wrote:I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .
You should read /usr/ports/UPDATING before start whining about your "disaster".

I have read and followed it,

fidel · Post by **fidel** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:36 pm

I "had to" work a little with FreeBSD, because some servers we manage have this on them. I now know, I would never voluntarily install this on any computer I have. Would you really want to get rid of all those nice filesystems in favour of... ufs..? [puke] Would you really want to get rid of portage in favour of ports?... No use flags anymore, just stone age ./configure; make && make install? Not me! Besides, the binaries on there are exceptional for the pure os, or am I wrong there?
I tried a little Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS...
After about 5 years of working and playing with Gentoo, I will not switch to any other distro! Of course one would like to install & upgrade quicker than having to compile for hours. Especially for older / slower machines this can get annoying, but the fact that portage is about the best "package manager" I've ever seen out there, the point that I can totally easily manage use flags and have those abilities on my system I really want, the fact that a carefully setup Gentoo really rocks hardcore stable and reliable, the "flow" of continuous versions of software (not the silly V-2.3.1 of an os) just make me really sure to stay here! I would most probably switch to Ubuntu, if I would ever go sick of compiling every single tool I need, since if I would get to this point I would be looking for an easy click and pray system, so I would not have to bother about dependencies and so on. Until then though, nothing else than beloved Gentoo on my machines!

red-wolf76 · Post by **red-wolf76** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:31 pm

fidel wrote:I would most probably switch to Ubuntu, if I would ever go sick of compiling every single tool I need, since if I would get to this point I would be looking for an easy click and pray system, so I would not have to bother about dependencies and so on. Until then though, nothing else than beloved Gentoo on my machines!

I never used it, myself, but isn't sabayon heralded as the Gentoo-based stairway to binary heaven?

I think the trouble with binary stuff is, that one is so used to compiling things to need using gentoo, any binary distro will automatically suck, simply because it lacks the versatility in scaling down packages. Providing the same binary package seven or eight times over to account for different capability combinations is not something that will happen anytime soon for any binary distro. Maybe they'll provide two. One "with everything and hot sauce" and a minimalist binary with bare functionality, but I think maintaining a tree while catering for different combinations is about as close to maintainer hell as I can imagine.

Dralnu · Post by **Dralnu** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:37 pm

red-wolf76 wrote:
fidel wrote:I would most probably switch to Ubuntu, if I would ever go sick of compiling every single tool I need, since if I would get to this point I would be looking for an easy click and pray system, so I would not have to bother about dependencies and so on. Until then though, nothing else than beloved Gentoo on my machines!
I never used it, myself, but isn't sabayon heralded as the Gentoo-based stairway to binary heaven?

Um, I think Arch is closer to the "binary heaven" you speak of then Sabayon is, mainly because from what I've heard, they are kind of insane...

red-wolf76 · Post by **red-wolf76** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:51 pm

Arch Linux... Sure, there was another! Thanks for the correction. As for "insane", I just recently saw someone post a make.conf that I can only describe as "stark raving bonkers". Plus, he claims that it came from Sabayon.

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:51 pm

Dralnu wrote:
red-wolf76 wrote:
fidel wrote:I would most probably switch to Ubuntu, if I would ever go sick of compiling every single tool I need, since if I would get to this point I would be looking for an easy click and pray system, so I would not have to bother about dependencies and so on. Until then though, nothing else than beloved Gentoo on my machines!
I never used it, myself, but isn't sabayon heralded as the Gentoo-based stairway to binary heaven?
Um, I think Arch is closer to the "binary heaven" you speak of then Sabayon is, mainly because from what I've heard, they are kind of insane...

Why worry about compiling from sources in the first place? Computer speed accelerates at such an insane pace that we might be able to compile within the blink of an eye 5 years from now. In my opinion Gentoo was (and is) light years ahead of it's time.

P.S.
People should experiment more with the

Code: Select all

FEATURES="buildpkg"

make.conf setting, in combination with 'emerge -k package' or 'emerge -K package' you will be amazed how good a binary distribution Gentoo is

.

red-wolf76 · Post by **red-wolf76** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 8:54 pm

Hehe, I hear you, but the trouble is we need some sort of tagging mechanism and some bittorrent like distribution mechanism to spread all that binary goodness around. That'd be a real hoot - decentralized userbox-based package repositories! With QA and md5-checksumming provided by the maintainers.

fidel · Post by **fidel** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:14 pm

Dralnu wrote:Um, I think Arch is closer to the "binary heaven" you speak of then Sabayon is, mainly because from what I've heard, they are kind of insane...

Haven't actually tried Arch yet, interesting though, will try out once I got some spare time. Sabayon comes with KDE (I like Gnome much more) and when I tried to install, it just failed right away, so I just dropped it. It might have improved since then, but I wouldn't want a desktop with KDE. Speaking of desktop, I can't imagine there is a better way to get a rocking stable server than with a hardened Gentoo setup! I mean, I got to know ISPs that setup CentOS, leaving things as they are: SELinux enabled with root logins on ssh enabled without iptables configured... and they really think their setup is more secure.... Of course, it's not a matter of the distro, still, knowing about Gentoo gives you more knowledge about the system than knowing about yum etc. So, another point for Gentoo, it keeps you up to date with knowledge, you just have to deal with it.
One big discussion always pulled in is the one about performance and what difference it makes compiling binaries from sources. I indeed experienced higher performance doing so, it's not about insane cflags, I am convinced though that a binary which is compiled and optimized for a certain cpu does get improvement. Not only performance matters, I also experienced more stability with self-compiled binaries and would say that this really matters, even more than performance does...

fidel · Post by **fidel** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:33 pm

Aniruddha wrote: Why worry about compiling from sources in the first place? Computer speed accelerates at such an insane pace that we might be able to compile within the blink of an eye 5 years from now.

Compiling glibc, gcc and whatsoever still takes a lot of time and cpu usage. Elevating cpu frequencies and the power of computers of course speed up compiling, still, you need to compile which takes time, you as well need to make sure the libraries stay "healthy" and need to run revdep-rebuild after an update. All those things need time and energy. But I agree!!!:

Aniruddha wrote: In my opinion Gentoo was (and is) light years ahead of it's time.

Aniruddha wrote:P.S.
People should experiment more with the
Code: Select all
FEATURES="buildpkg"
make.conf setting, in combination with 'emerge -k package' or 'emerge -K package' you will be amazed how good a binary distribution Gentoo is .

You still need to compile first and you can only use those packages for those archs similar to the one that compiled them... did I miss something?

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Thu Jul 05, 2007 9:39 pm

Aniruddha wrote:P.S.
People should experiment more with the
Code: Select all
FEATURES="buildpkg"
make.conf setting, in combination with 'emerge -k package' or 'emerge -K package' you will be amazed how good a binary distribution Gentoo is .

You still need to compile first and you can only use those packages for those archs similar to the one that compiled them... did I miss something?[/quote]

Your absolutely right, unless you have more then one computer

. You can also look for a Portage Binhost . However even if you have to compile once the "buildpkg" option is very handy. I can install and uninstall old Wine versions within seconds.

enderandrew · Post by **enderandrew** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 3:11 am

95% of what I've seen dismissed as insane works just fine for me.

I like to try things and see what works for me. For instance, the binutils devs refuse to include -Bdirect upstream because it might possibly break ELF standards, but SuSe compiles their entire distro with it with no major problems.

I'll be trying a Sabayon install soon, but likely I'll look at their config files and likely end up recompiling the world later. It just simplifies the install, and gives me a repo of binaries as well.

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:23 am

enderandrew wrote:95% of what I've seen dismissed as insane works just fine for me.

I like to try things and see what works for me. For instance, the binutils devs refuse to include -Bdirect upstream because it might possibly break ELF standards, but SuSe compiles their entire distro with it with no major problems.

I'll be trying a Sabayon install soon, but likely I'll look at their config files and likely end up recompiling the world later. It just simplifies the install, and gives me a repo of binaries as well.

Please post your make.conf.

welp · Post by **welp** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:33 am

Aniruddha wrote:I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .

It took me absolutely zero effort to get xorg-server-1.3.0 running on Gentoo/FreeBSD (Aside from the xorg.conf, which was easy peasy).

And Gentoo/FreeBSD uses Portage by default, so you won't need to babysit your compiles, either

(And, yes, I'm aware that you said FreeBSD, not Gentoo/FreeBSD, I'm just encouraging you to look into Gentoo/FreeBSD

)

Kasumi_Ninja · Post by **Kasumi_Ninja** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 8:51 am

welp wrote:
Aniruddha wrote:I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .
It took me absolutely zero effort to get xorg-server-1.3.0 running on Gentoo/FreeBSD (Aside from the xorg.conf, which was easy peasy).

And Gentoo/FreeBSD uses Portage by default, so you won't need to babysit your compiles, either

(And, yes, I'm aware that you said FreeBSD, not Gentoo/FreeBSD, I'm just encouraging you to look into Gentoo/FreeBSD )

Lol! Great post. You convinced me to test it out (in virtualbox for starters). I was thinking about it before, only the following questions held me back:

1 How serious is the Gentoo/FreeBSD project? Is it just a side project? Or a full blown project part of Gentoo?
2 Do all the x86 ebuilds work?

welp · Post by **welp** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:00 am

Aniruddha wrote:
welp wrote:
Aniruddha wrote:I just tested FreeBSD because I feel the Linux kernel has become very inconsistent lately. What a disappointment that was! It was like a visit to the stone age. Anyone who is complaining about upgrade problems in Gentoo should try to upgrade to Xorg 7.2 in FreeBSD, what disaster! And be prepared to babysit every compile to answer questions too .
It took me absolutely zero effort to get xorg-server-1.3.0 running on Gentoo/FreeBSD (Aside from the xorg.conf, which was easy peasy).

And Gentoo/FreeBSD uses Portage by default, so you won't need to babysit your compiles, either

(And, yes, I'm aware that you said FreeBSD, not Gentoo/FreeBSD, I'm just encouraging you to look into Gentoo/FreeBSD )
Lol! Great post. You convinced me to test it out (in virtualbox for starters). I was thinking about it before, only the following questions held me back:

1 How serious is the Gentoo/FreeBSD project? Is it just a side project? Or a full blown project part of Gentoo?
2 Do all the x86 ebuilds work?

1) It's serious.
2) Short answer: No, Long answer: we have almost all of Gnome keyworded, or available with patches in Bugzie. We have Xfce-4.4.1, too. I dislike KDE, but I'm pretty sure that was the first DE which worked on Gentoo/FreeBSD. And those are just the major DEs, we're keywording packages on an almost-daily basis. We have an (albeit small) team of Arch Testers, too.

I run it on my main workstation (which is a laptop), and it's pretty spiffy. I don't use any suspend software, so I'm not sure what the status of that is. I also use it on one of my main desktops, and it's all cool.

You can find us in #gentoo-bsd on Freenode if you hang out on IRC. I'm at school, so I can't get online atm. So I'm not there. Heh.

enderandrew · Post by **enderandrew** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:07 am

Aniruddha wrote:Please post your make.conf.

I'm at work, but here is an old make.conf I had on the web.

Code: Select all

# Enderandrew-Gentoo make.conf for AMD64
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" 
CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -ftree-vectorize -fno-ident -frename-registers -falign-functions=64 -freorder-blocks-and-partition -msse3"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -ffriend-injection"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -fvisibility-inlines-hidden"
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,-z,now -Wl,--sort-common -Wl,--as-needed -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--hash-style=both -Wl,-Bdirect"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/var/tmp
PORTDIR=/usr/portage
PORT_LOGDIR=/var/log/portage
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=" /usr/local/portage"
DISTDIR=${PORTDIR}/distfiles
PKGDIR=${PORTDIR}/packages
PORTAGE_NICENESS=10 
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.pudas.net/gentoo ftp://ftp.rhnet.is/pub/gentoo/ http://gentoo.mirrors.pair.com/ ftp://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://gentoo.osuosl.org http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo http://mirrors.tds.net/gentoo http://gentoo.seren.com/gentoo"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"
RSYNC_RETRIES="3"
RSYNC_TIMEOUT=180
MAKEOPTS="-j3" 
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
FEATURES="ccache distlocks prelink sandbox userpriv usersandbox"
CCACHE_SIZE="512M"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS="--exclude-from=/etc/portage/rsync_excludes"
CPU="amd gcj gcc glibc-omitfp mmx mmx2 nomalloccheck nptl nptlonly pic sse sse2 sse3 amd64" 
PM="acpi -apm" 
VIDEO="ansi avi codecs ffmpeg nvidia v4l" 
AUDIO="audiofile alsa dmix djbfft esd music openal svga" 
BLK_DEV="cdr cdrom cdparanoia dvd dvdr vcd" 
NET="dhcp ipv6 -nas network samba tcpd wifi" 
OTHER="cups gpm hal ide ieee1394 -pcmcia ppds scanner joystick usb videos xprint" 
HARDWARE="${CPU} ${PM} ${VIDEO} ${AUDIO} ${BLK_DEV} ${NET} ${OTHER}" ## 
# SOFTWARE # R
SYS_AUTH="pam" 
X11="X -accessibility artworkextra -gnome qt kde type1-fonts" 
MMX_OTHER="exif -gd gif imagemagick jpeg mime mplayer pdflib png tiff wmf" 
MMX_VID="avi divx4linux dv encode flash mpeg opengl quicktime real xine xvid" 
MMX_SND="aac dts flac mad mp3 ogg oggvorbis" 
WWW="css ftp javascript libwww mozilla xml xml2" 
PROG="bash-completion bzip2 bzlib java python zlib" 
MISC="cups spell cdinstall symlink tidy truetype unicode -motif" 
SOFTWARE="${SYS_AUTH} ${X11} ${MMX_SND} ${MMX_VID} ${MMX_OTHER} ${PROG} ${WWW} ${MISC}" ## 
## USE ## 
USE="${HARDWARE} ${SOFTWARE}"
INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse"
VIDEO_CARDS="nv nvidia vesa"

enderandrew · Post by **enderandrew** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 9:09 am

welp wrote: 1) It's serious.
2) Short answer: No, Long answer: we have almost all of Gnome keyworded, or available with patches in Bugzie. We have Xfce-4.4.1, too. I dislike KDE, but I'm pretty sure that was the first DE which worked on Gentoo/FreeBSD. And those are just the major DEs, we're keywording packages on an almost-daily basis. We have an (albeit small) team of Arch Testers, too.

I run it on my main workstation (which is a laptop), and it's pretty spiffy. I don't use any suspend software, so I'm not sure what the status of that is. I also use it on one of my main desktops, and it's all cool.

You can find us in #gentoo-bsd on Freenode if you hang out on IRC. I'm at school, so I can't get online atm. So I'm not there. Heh.

I heard that Gentoo-BSD got shelved due to a licensing issue.

Either way, I'm thinking of moving off a paid house to a server in my house. When I do, everyone keeps telling me BSD is the way to go on a webserver. I hear it is more secure, but I also hear that the BSD kernel doesn't have as many devs working on it, less hardware support, etc.

What advantages does the kernel have?

Should I have any troubles get apache, postgresql, php and the like up and running on it?