Gentoo Forums

Posted: **Sat Apr 14, 2007 4:23 pm**

erm67 wrote:
Ateo wrote: From the linux on my desktops/notebooks perspective, I do believe I'll be switching to the Ubuntu way. It's just works and takes 30 minutes. I'm experienced enough to clean out the bloat.
I used it on my brothers pc and it is nice indeed, I will maybe try it on my desktop. But won't it be boring if everything always work out of the box?

Nope. Not at all. I'm sick and tired of dinking with Linux, Gentoo especially. I've learned enough and what I've learned is good and I will not forget. Having an OS that works out of the box means productivity within minutes of installation.

erm67 wrote:
In the end, Gentoo is a great hobbyist distribution. But you need to devote a lot of time to learn it but once you learn it, it's cake walk. I believe Gentoo is a powerful tool. It's not for everyone. For some, it is a great stepping stone. For others, it's a dangerous tool. For the rest, well, the rest are the ones that have 3 year solid Gentoo servers with 6 month uptimes... =)
This is exactly the point, besides Ubuntu guy are in the business of making money out of support and certification and this can leverage some burden from the sysadm shoulder.

I really have to go ...............

But that's the problem. I don't use Gentoo because I'm cool. I use Gentoo because it works. I can't hold my 'faith' in something that is riddled by 20 somethings who 's primary objective seems to be internet fame. Ebuild repository has gone to shit the last couple of years and I'm not willing to stick around to be the guinea pig when I need a serious operating system so that I can make money to put food on my table.

Personally, compiling from source is overrated and should only be used when it's really needed. To compile an entire system from source is perfect for the after school project in which the kid has all the time in the world. To me, time is money and Gentoo can't cut when the minimum installation time is about 6 hours, more for a desktop.

People brag about Portage being the heartbeat of Gentoo. Well, I'm over it. It's just as powerful as any other Package Manager these days (well, I can only compare to APT) and does the job in a fraction of the time (yay, no compiling)..

I really see no reason for me to use Gentoo anymore. I've outgrown it.

Posted: **Sat Apr 14, 2007 9:07 pm**

I can't hold my 'faith' in something that is riddled by 20 somethings who 's primary objective seems to be internet fame. Ebuild repository has gone to shit the last couple of years and I'm not willing to stick around to be the guinea pig when I need a serious operating system so that I can make money to put food on my table.

I have to agree that the war pkgcore vs paludis vs portage is at least embarrassing like the flame wars between devs and that that the ebuild repository is shrinking and loosing quality..... I particurarly liked (using it only at home) the great offer in games and I think still no other distro offers so many but that is changing too, lack of maintainers different decisions ... you already know, to pour salt on the wound is at least unproductive.

Personally, compiling from source is overrated and should only be used when it's really needed. To compile an entire system from source is perfect for the after school project in which the kid has all the time in the world. To me, time is money and Gentoo can't cut when the minimum installation time is about 6 hours, more for a desktop.

I always compiled php and apache from source on every distro. The "compile locally" is what I actually like more of gentoo and I am still convinced I want to use a system I entirely compile from source (at home) with my favourite compiler, my favourite options and libraries so I will probably give CRUX a try. It only offers 1000-1500 packages and is even more hobbistic than gentoo, pkg are updated slowly and so on. To make my own ebuild or crux port or deb or rpm for my favorite game is not a problem but only if I can count on a solid system, compiler toolchain and libraries otherwise would not be funny after a while. So I would prefer to see (in gentoo) maybe a smaller main repository well maintained offering the base system and a secondary one that contains so called user contributed ebuild for less important things.

The various *bsd offers a good port system containing scripts to automatically compile and install packages, but also that is not updated too often and I think that currently the linux kernel and glibc outperform their. Well currently the FreeBSD ports offers 16855 packages so it surpassed gentoo again. So we are slowly back to the point where drobbins started, his original idea was to have a system like the *bsd ports based on a linux kernel.

People brag about Portage being the heartbeat of Gentoo. Well, I'm over it. It's just as powerful as any other Package Manager these days (well, I can only compare to APT) and does the job in a fraction of the time (yay, no compiling)..

well compared to pkgadd of solaris is like science fiction:-). I downloaded Ubuntu sparc and I am going to install it on my Ultra2, there is no Ubuntu dvd for sparc and the repository is still tiny so I will have to compile many things. The machine is too slow for recompiling everything so I want to try a binary distro I read that Ubuntu has some sort of agreement with Sun so it will probably further develop it. Otherwise gentoo-sparc is really the only viable linux-distro for that arch, looks like I will have to give also netbsd a chance.

I really see no reason for me to use Gentoo anymore. I've outgrown it.

Good for you, good luck, try other distros, try also other architectures at some point you will miss at least the "compile yourself" thing, maybe with a bit of luck in the mean time gentoo has solved some of its problems.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 12:43 am**

Ateo wrote:To me, time is money and Gentoo can't cut when the minimum installation time is about 6 hours, more for a desktop.

yet you are posting on their forums?

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 3:33 am**

jonnevers wrote:
Ateo wrote:To me, time is money and Gentoo can't cut when the minimum installation time is about 6 hours, more for a desktop.
yet you are posting on their forums?

I think you're probably meaning that I am wasting time posting for help there... Hmmm. No.. Not at all bro. My first 2 ubuntu installs are purely development, done on my own time to experiment with other distros.

Either way, yes, I am posting on their forums but 5 posts in the last week isn't bad. But then again, shit.... just.... worked...

@ERM67

I never said I wouldn't compile source again. But I think I would be wise enough to use the same prefix on all my builds (little things gentoo teaches you).. I can even set cflags... yay.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 1:25 pm**

Ateo wrote:I think you're probably meaning that I am wasting time posting for help there... Hmmm. No.. Not at all bro. My first 2 ubuntu installs are purely development, done on my own time to experiment with other distros.

Either way, yes, I am posting on their forums but 5 posts in the last week isn't bad. But then again, shit.... just.... worked...

actually no, that is not what I meant. I'm not surprised you misunderstood either.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 2:08 pm**

Ah the original intent of this thread has morphed.

I've been playing with the latest Ubuntu beta. More bugs come and go in a day than I've seen in 2.5 years of Gentoo.

To all the over-worked, flamed, maligned, cussed ... Gentoo devs: keep up the good work we like it here.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 7:30 pm**

wuzzerd wrote:Ah the original intent of this thread has morphed.

I've been playing with the latest Ubuntu beta. More bugs come and go in a day than I've seen in 2.5 years of Gentoo.

To all the over-worked, flamed, maligned, cussed ... Gentoo devs: keep up the good work we like it here.

I wouldn't compare the beta versions of other distros with Gentoo, not even with Gentoo ~arch.

Even Debian unstable is a pain to be on it.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 9:02 pm**

Not me personally. But a colleague at work put it on a new Gateway laptop. He is very smart but Unix-challenged. The first problem he had was that the taskbar stopped working after he accepted the auto-update offer. I suggested he update Nautilus (using apartment-get,or apt) and then he ended with a blank screen. It appears that the windows manager runs on top of Nautilus, as does Windows on top of explorer - very lame.

After he re-installed, he said that his time would always go back to a wrong offset every time he shut down and restarted. I asked very gingerly if there was a hwclock he could set, there is, but a known bug prevents him from setting the time, says something about losing sync. Well, that's all I need to see. The few bugs I have seen with Gentoo, can be fixed by the time-honored punishment of RTFM, where R=read, T=the, and M=manuals, and I leave the "F" to your guesswork - this is in the grand Unix tradition. I know we need to play around and try new things, but I'll stick with Gentoo !

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 9:02 pm**

No I can't honestly say the quality has got worse at all during my time with Gentoo. Though it does not feel like it has improved very much either. I don't feel I need anything better at this time, and besides, I don't think there is anything better except for very specific needs.

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 9:24 pm**

Don't misinterpret my post , by missing the subject line. I have plenty of nice things to say about Gentoo. My negative comments were directed at Ubuntu - which I find ... amateurish.

As for RTFM, this is as I say, reserved for things we love to hate. I just got my system completely emerge world with GCC 4.1.1. It was painful, but now the result is so pretty...

Posted: **Sun Apr 15, 2007 9:47 pm**

andyandrews35: Who would misinterpret your post? Cheers!

Posted: **Mon Apr 16, 2007 12:14 am**

Well I've been using linux in general on and off since i was about 8ish, and im now 15 and use it full time

ahh... fedora core 2(maybe it was 3?) dual boot with windows 2000..... those where the days.

And I continually jumped from one distro to the other, fedora core, ubuntu (and all its branches), mepis, pclinux, puppy, DSL, feather, vector, debian, and everything far and inbetween.
And what distro have I undoubtly learnt the most from? that's right, Gentoo.

The installation, following the handbook and from the minimal install cd, on my pentim 3 633mhz with 512MB ram and a 20GB HDDtaught me alot. probably more than all the other distros put together. Before Gentoo I wasn't at all fond of the CLI, infact I was semi-scared of it.

Although I do still have a Ubuntu occupying a small portion of my HDD (dual boot) for the sake of my little sister (9yrs) to be re-educated and experience the 'nix side of life

(Dad insists she needs to learn windows.....)

So long live Gentoo.
Ducky.

Posted: **Mon Apr 16, 2007 3:10 pm**

jonnevers wrote:
Ateo wrote:I think you're probably meaning that I am wasting time posting for help there... Hmmm. No.. Not at all bro. My first 2 ubuntu installs are purely development, done on my own time to experiment with other distros.

Either way, yes, I am posting on their forums but 5 posts in the last week isn't bad. But then again, shit.... just.... worked...
actually no, that is not what I meant. I'm not surprised you misunderstood either.

I expect that from elitist Gentoo users. They expect everyone to *KNOW* what they are talking about... *sigh*

Posted: **Mon Apr 16, 2007 3:33 pm**

suicideducky wrote:Well I've been using linux in general on and off since i was about 8ish, and im now 15 and use it full time

ahh... fedora core 2(maybe it was 3?) dual boot with windows 2000..... those where the days.

And I continually jumped from one distro to the other, fedora core, ubuntu (and all its branches), mepis, pclinux, puppy, DSL, feather, vector, debian, and everything far and inbetween.
And what distro have I undoubtly learnt the most from? that's right, Gentoo.

The installation, following the handbook and from the minimal install cd, on my pentim 3 633mhz with 512MB ram and a 20GB HDDtaught me alot. probably more than all the other distros put together. Before Gentoo I wasn't at all fond of the CLI, infact I was semi-scared of it.

Although I do still have a Ubuntu occupying a small portion of my HDD (dual boot) for the sake of my little sister (9yrs) to be re-educated and experience the 'nix side of life
(Dad insists she needs to learn windows.....)

So long live Gentoo.
Ducky.

Well it seems that you're the perfect candidate for Gentoo. A 15 year old with a lot of time on his hands. Gentoo is PERFECT for you. But, get a job that eats your time and social life and I'm almost positive you'll have a change of heart unless you're a basement dwelling freak that'll turns out like the 40 year old virgin living with mommy and daddy.

I, a 30 something business owner, cannot wait the time it takes to get a Gentoo install working. When a client tells you they need something yesterday, trust me, Gentoo won't work. You can try, but you risk losing clients. That's just the way it works because they can turn around and find someone else who can do what they need/want.

Don't get me wrong. I can say nothing negative about Gentoo. As with you, Gentoo taught me the most and I appreciate that.

Posted: **Mon Apr 16, 2007 4:48 pm**

Ateo wrote:Don't get me wrong. I can say nothing negative about Gentoo.

nothing negative? "it's fine for a 15 year old". okay... laughable...

Ateo wrote:Well it seems that you're the perfect candidate for Gentoo. A 15 year old with a lot of time on his hands. Gentoo is PERFECT for you. But, get a job that eats your time and social life and I'm almost positive you'll have a change of heart unless you're a basement dwelling freak that'll turns out like the 40 year old virgin living with mommy and daddy.

you're ignorance and stereotyping are dumbfounding. why are you posting such garbage here? if you don't like gentoo. fine. no one cares. ok?
seriously.

one should be smart enough to say "gentoo isn't for me, i'll use X [whatever you want here]" and just go about their day

its like calling up porsche and saying:
"this 911 SUCKS for hauling dirt"
"i outgrow my 911 when my business clients said they needed a ton of dirt moved ASAP..."

Posted: **Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:21 am**

Guys you all have valid points here, I think there is no need to get offended. Ateo didn't say that we all Gentoo users live as if we were 15-years old, he simply said that at that age people usually have lots and lots of free time.

Something that I find funny, is that many peolpe say "Gentoo doesn't work anymore", as if Gentoo changed or lost quality, when usually someone's life changed and can't keep up with Gentoo's higher maintenance profile. But I also believe this is a bit of a myth. I've invested months learning it, but now I invest almost nothing in maintaining Gentoo. Upon a compilation error, I issue a skipfirst, and sure one week later at max the error is fixed. Reaaaaally simple.

In my opinion, the biggest "maintenance" required by Gentoo, as opposed to other distros, is keeping up with which new programs are available that replace old ones. On distros like Ubuntu, these are installed by default so you are directly exposed to them.

Ateo, if you have a business now and you must invest in the equation "time is money", then get a Mac. There is nothing wrong about adapting your life and moving on to another distro. It is actually very reasonable and we wish you luck wherever you go.

Posted: **Fri Apr 27, 2007 10:46 pm**

Hi,

Please, have a look on my post here :
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-40 ... ml#4029365

I hope it can help.

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 5:47 am**

I've been using Gentoo on 3 machines (2 at home and my work desktop) for over 5 years now and I'm getting very close to dumping it. The reason is crap like this:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-552528.html

I am sick to fucking death of having to come and search on the forums nearly every time I upgrade the system or install something new to try and find out why things are broken or no longer working, why packages are blocking etc etc. It's fine if you do it regularly, but if you leave it a few months, problems are inevitable.

I think a lot of people see USE flags as Gentoo's big calling card. That may have been the case in the beginning, but the sheer number of flags now has turned that into something more akin to an obsessive compulsive disorder. If I were installing a system now and realized I would have to go through this list for every package I installed just to make sure they have the functionality I require, I'd go install another distro.

Gentoo: Linux for obsessive compulsives who have time to kill

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 11:50 am**

I agree about the USE flags to a degree. It can be pretty annoying when you emerge a package expecting to get some functionality, only to find you didn't set the right flag (e.g. I recently installed Eye Of Gnome (eog) to look at pictures, and for some reason jpeg is a flag...why would an image viewer NOT read jpeg by default? so I set it and reinstalled, which is why I have ccache enabled). I have really learned to do -av or -pv, and check out all the flags for every program, and go and set them. Yes, this is a hassle if you are emerging kde-meta. That only really happens a few times, and I can live with it. Most of the time, it is only a single program (and it's dependencies) that you need to check the USE flags for. Like I said, this is something of a hassle. HOWEVER...for whatever reason(s), after using it for close to 4 years, Gentoo has been far kinder to me than any other distro I have tried (Kubuntu a couple of times, recently arch); every foray out of gentoo inevitably lead to a problem that I could not solve, and I would reinstall gentoo. I have it installed on my laptop, and on my desktop at work (I work in a research lab at a university). The desktop has been installed for close to 2 years, and has had an uptime of close to 6 months, which would have been longer if I hadn't had to unplug it and move to a new office down the hall. It is rock-solid stable, probably due to the fact that I have never done an emerge -uD world; I might do emerge -uDp world, and see what needs updated, but IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT! Like I said, I have tried Kubuntu twice now (fool me once...) and for some reason I always get random freezes. The computer just stops. No mouse, keyboard, nothing. I would have to do a hard power-off to reboot, and this happens every 2 or so hours. On arch, I need semi-old nvidia drivers for my xinerama dual display to work properly; the version I use do not work with the 2.6.20 kernel, which is the default arch version. I found (in my experience) that it is pretty difficult to get to an older kernel version using pacman, and even harder to use your own kernel with patches. So, after trying these, I would boot up the gentoo install disk, copy and install my stage4 backup made just prior to removing gentoo, and I was back in business after 30 min or so.

So, what did I learn? I can deal with taking a minute or so to check my USE flags to make sure everything I need is installed, and to not feel compelled to run emerge -uD world once a week (although, to be honest, the longer you wait to update things, the more pain there will likely be in the future when you're forced to do it..at least its not kubuntu, where there is a flashing warning sign in the tray every time it finds an upgrade).
jawilson

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 12:35 pm**

Recommendation for those missing USE flag changes: Set EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS in /etc/make.conf to " -va" - that way every time you perform an update, you'll see any USE flag changes (new and changed USE flags get marked in different colors and with an extra symbol). Out of personal preference I also set "-t" here so I can see why new packages are being installed (what depends on them)

Posted: **Wed May 02, 2007 5:14 pm**

jawilson wrote:... It is rock-solid stable, probably due to the fact that I have never done an emerge -uD world; I might do emerge -uDp world, and see what needs updated, but IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT! ...

Oh, try syncing and then run a

Code: Select all

glsa-check --list

and I think you will find that system to be more broken than you think

But I agree with you, except for the first install, it is quite quick and easy to check whether you want a use flag set or not. Use flags are neat.

Posted: **Sun May 06, 2007 1:26 pm**

I agree with you nirax. I switched linux distribution too, my PCs (a laptop, a desktop and a router) now run Debian (as they used to) and OpenBSD. Gentoo is a good distro, but is not for everyone. New software means less stability.

nirax wrote:
I read your post and I think the main point is that you
have no time at all for this hassle.
do you have time for this hassle ? do you really have time for problems you are not up to ?
If you spend your time on computer, do you want to code what you like to, or do you want to fix/tweak/search for solution/ on problems that should not be occuring ?

I completely agree with that. I'm looking for something that _works_. A computer is just a tool and a OS is what is needed to make it useful. I have friends (experienced linux/BSD users and developers) that switched from linux to OsX for this reason.

An O.S. should be fast, powerful and rational. In an ideal world, you should never have to RTFM, because what you need to do would be obvious.

That reminds me of a usual pattern among linux users:
Fresh users choose the distro's precompiled (or autocompiled) kernels, because they don't know any better.
When they feel they are becoming l33t, they always use the most up to date kernels, compiled from source.
When they forget about being l33t, they use precompiled kernels, because your distro adds in them all you may ever need, maintains them for you and they just work.

nirax wrote:
So it looks like you are not interested at all in gentoo
Thats very true. Im not interested in gentoo. Im not interested in Ubuntu, nor Windows nor Access Linux Platform for embedded Systems, nor Palm OS nor any other operating system in general.
Im interested beeing able to find my requirements optimal covered through the usage of a specific operating system.

Me neither. I will 'give back' in code/documentation/money/hardware/whatever if I find it useful, but I'm no way a fanboi defending a linux distro to death. Everything has its strong and weak points. Choose what suits you better.

Posted: **Sun May 06, 2007 1:28 pm**

I don't find it any harder or more time consuming than on Debian servers I maintain

Disagree. Samba is a nightmare, devs changing kerberos dependncies, cifs issues wih date stamps, changing smb.conf to take care of new ways of listing groups.

That's the thing I hate. Why do we have to use Debian to work?

Debian is a great distro easy to use and update. I spend too much time compiling code and resolving issues than using the software. Donn't get me wrong, i've learned so much about linux using gentoo and i dont want to move from gentoo, but it is not suitable for servers. That much I do know now.

I'm staying with gentoo on my home pc, I run debian on my server and freebsd on a test system. I also run vmware on my gentoo box and can serve out win2003 server and xp clients.

Gentoo will prevail, but I can understand some users wanting away from it. Micro$oft, say "Do more with Less" I want all the freedoms that GNU/Linux gives me, I want to learn what goes on on my system, but I also want to be productive when I am using my system.

Posted: **Sun May 06, 2007 4:21 pm**

Just finished my switchover to Debian (4 gentoo boxes). I'm amazed at how many things "just work" on Debian that didn't on Gentoo. Learned a bunch from 4 years of Gentoo, but the maintenance became too great.

Posted: **Sun May 06, 2007 8:24 pm**

I run Gentoo on production servers hosting a number of fairly busy websites using Apache and Tomcat, also running sslexplorer, openvpn, qmail, courier-imap and pop3 over ssl etc. etc.

I use the stable x86 branch and I've never run into any serious problems. Until I had to reboot to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel, I had an uptime of over 300 days.

I find Gentoo systems to be lower maintenance than other distros. I don't have "lots time to kill", just perhaps competent administrative skills and a sensible approach to maintaining servers in production.

So there's another anecdote for this pointless thread..

Gentoo Forums

I'm leaving gentoo (sick of it)

I found Ubuntu buggy

Nothing nice to say?

Just to comment about gentoo as a distro

Re: Just to comment about gentoo as a distro

No problems.