Thank you Gentoo folks - 5 years on and more reliable

Message

galahad7 · Post by **galahad7** » Sat Nov 29, 2008 11:16 pm

Just to say thanks... I've been using Gentoo on a number of servers for about five years and just want to say thanks to everyone who is responsible for providing this distribution.

I've just upgraded the file/mail/application server here (525 packages) after a year and a half with pretty much no attention to the box. It went really well - no broken packages. Often we only write in when things are broken, so here's a post to say I think you're doing a fantastic job. In the early days of me using Gentoo (approx 2003), it was quite common for several packages to be broken when doing a --deep --emptytree update, and it might take a week or more for the packages to be fixed. However for the last year or two (multiple servers/machines on Gentoo), I haven't hit one show stopper.

So release management in the portage tree is definitely better now. And yes, 5 years on, and I'm still putting Gentoo on servers so that says it all.

Thanks and you're doing well
Stephen

danomac · Post by **danomac** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:30 am

I second this. I maintain 4 servers and I only ever had one update break since 2003, and it was a chost change. Wasn't hard to fix. None of the servers I install have GUIs installed so there's no dependency mess there.

Zev · Post by **Zev** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 2:55 pm

danomac wrote:I second this. I maintain 4 servers and I only ever had one update break since 2003, and it was a chost change. Wasn't hard to fix. None of the servers I install have GUIs installed so there's no dependency mess there.

Me too. I have 1 desktop, 6 servers, 6 virtual servers(Xen). The problems that do occur are easy to fix, and if not there are usually a solution on the forums. The scariest thing was when /bin/tar disappeared, don't know how. All portage did when installing packages was removing files. When /bin/tar didn't unpack it just went on and removed the installed package. Luckily I noticed that before doing a update of the whole system.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Sun Nov 30, 2008 4:18 pm

Zev wrote: The problems that do occur are easy to fix, and if not there are usually a solution on the forums.

In fact, the forum is awesome here

merky1 · Post by **merky1** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 12:15 am

I thought I'd drop a me too here. I've had more problems with HW (Drive failures) than I have had with gentoo. I would be hard pressed to name any other way to run modern software (mysql, privoxy, squid, amavis) without re-installing every few months for "updates".

MPC2000XL · Post by **MPC2000XL** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 12:31 pm

I've been using Gentoo for 2 years now.

Sometimes when I do...

emerge --sync
emerge -vuDN world

...I secretly hope that something will break so that I get to fiddle around some.

But it very seldom does.

Gentoo is easily the best distro I've tried, and probably the best OS experience out there.

Thank you developers and forum-people! Sometimes I can't believe that I'm not pirating, or paying for, this.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Mon Dec 01, 2008 12:35 pm

MPC2000XL wrote:...I secretly hope that something will break so that I get to fiddle around some.
But it very seldom does.

Maybe you should use the ~arch and a couple of Overlays

Headhunter · Post by **Headhunter** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 12:05 pm

d2_racing wrote:
Zev wrote: The problems that do occur are easy to fix, and if not there are usually a solution on the forums.
In fact, the forum is awesome here

This is so true! When I get an emerge error, just search for it, and you will get an answer.

Kudos to the Gentoo community and this forum! Keep it up!

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 12:09 pm

I'm running on a stable AMD64 arch with my Quad Core Q9550 and because of the stability of my Gentoo, I have time to help here instead of debugging my own box

Simba7 · Post by **Simba7** » Tue Dec 02, 2008 4:23 pm

I agree. Gentoo has been incredibly reliable, even on older hardware.

I have a Dual P3@1GHz box as my router and it's been running nicely. Only problem I had was the Atheros driver running in Master Mode, but I got that fixed thanks to the forum. As for the pair of K6-233 Heinz57 (because they're setup to do EVERYTHING) boxes (one for each set of Grandparents), they've been tortured and are still demanding for more. Even my Portage Server (an old PMMX@233MHz w/128mb RAM) is purring along just fine.

..oh ya.. All of the boxes are using Reiser4 w/gzip compression.. Performance hit is *slight* to say the least, even on the older systems.

As for the portage tree.. Damn.. Even when I was using FreeBSD, the tree wasn't updated as often as this one. Definitely a thumbs up.

All I can say is.. Keep up the awesome work!! I'd never thought I'd switch over to Linux.. That was before Gentoo.

NetHawl · Post by **NetHawl** » Wed Dec 17, 2008 3:29 pm

Nice thread, I thought I'm gonna join the party!

I've been into linux for almost 6 years now, been drifting around the distros like a mad man, every 1-2 days had a new distro on my PC.
Well, app 5 years ago I came to Gentoo. I still tried some other flavours (curse me for that

) and allways did I end up back at Gentoo.

This really is THE best distro out there.

Thanks to everybody here, the developers, the council and the users, all of you, THANKS!
They say home is where the heart is, well if that is so, Gentoo is my home.[/u][/i]