Gentoo Linux is proud to bring you the long awaited Gentoo Linux 2005.0 release.
Gentoo 2005.0 released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Finally!!!
Who “waits” Gentoo release anyway?
KDE 3.4 and GNOME 2.10 are still marked as unstable. Why were people waiting for this release?
I guess most of the people were waiting for 2005.0 to get the graphical installer which could make their job of installing Gentoo a bit easier. Unfortunately it is not in 2005.0. Those of us who already run Gentoo will just update the profile to 2005.0 and then use emerge to update everything.
True,
Once you have gentoo installed, you need not wait for a gentoo release and can update your system using emerge. But for the not so fortunate people 2005.0 is an excellent release. As for kde 3.4 and gnome 2.10, if anyone wants the latest software there is always an unstable branch and installing is equally easy.
If u wont Gentoo installer Beta Check this link http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/gli/
yeah but i read a post on the forums where the poster was worried about having a “nice and easy” installer would flood the forums and IRC channel with “newbie questions”.
Well if you want your distro to grow then you need more users, no? So who cares if they are newbies or not?
Gentoo needs to embrace the newcomers to their distro – be they newbies or oldies (experienced users like me). I, for one, have no issues with installing Gentoo…but hey…that’s me. As they say YMMV.
Newbies tend to flesh out bugs that other, more experienced users, may not. It is, IMO, a Good Thing for this to happen.
They do things differently.
It’s all about QA and you can’t predict what a newbie might click or press or spill Pepsi on.
cheers
peter
I guess most of the people were waiting for 2005.0 to get the graphical installer which could make their job of installing Gentoo a bit easier. Unfortunately it is not in 2005.0.
There’s always Vidalinux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical installer.
To hell with a graphical installer. I like Gentoo because it DOESN’T have one. I want to see inside the process, not cover it up with eyecandy. I don’t think you could easily get the power of choice that Gentoo provides out of a graphical installer. Some transparency is required, and the point of a graphical installer is to provide a comfortable abstraction to the user, i.e. cover up some of the internals. There may be no everyday benefit to Gentoo’s approach for some people, but those who NEED a graphical installer for one reason or another can always use a different Gentoo-like/based distro, like Vida Linux, and those who are looking for the learning experience/flexibility/performance tuning/whathaveyou probably don’t really care about a GUI for it anyways. It might defeat the purpose…
Can’t have your cake and eat it too.
My .02, take it with a grain of salt.
Yeah, I didn’t miss a graphical installer, either.
It’s a question of audience. If someone has gone far enough along in the *nix learning curve to feel cozy with Gentoo, what’s a grapical installer buying?
Also, there is the fact that GUI-anything is a fat mouth to feed.
I, for one, would appreciate emphasis on the internals of portage. I think it’s already fairly well documented at the interface level, but I would be keenly interested in something akin to a design spec for the whole system.
Also, I’m curious if there is a suggested or average donation to the project for someone who emerge syncs && emerge -u world about once a week. Liking the project as much as I do, I want to know what is a reasonable amount to keep it in fighting trim.
Not to bug, but isn’t Gentoo about choice? I don’t mind there being a gui installer, but perhaps just leave the minimal cd minimal, without the gui installer and such? Just one example how things can be done.
graphical installer? wasted time, there is no need to install gentoo more than once (unless you buy a new pc or your hard disk explodes) and doing everything by hand was useful to introduce new users to portage and gentoo’s way of installing software
Silly me, gentoo devs were already thinking about that long ago
“zhen took the floor and stated that if the Gentoo Linux Installer can be released as an ebuild there will be no problem integrating it into a LiveCD. He also stated that the Releng project is flexible to do whatever the Installer project requires, including creation of X and CLI LiveCDs.”
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/meetings/2004/200409…
And you’re welcome to stay with CLI, but I can’t see why a GUI installer being released would affect you in any way, especially if you can easily not use it at all. You can argue the learning experience, but I like to think gentoo documentation good enough anyone can install it and forget how they did it just as easily.
Jesus, I just can’t here this whining about how gentoo doesn’t need a better installer anymore.
Not once, realy not once have I heard one sane argument why having a graphical installer on top of the old install method is a bad thing. That’s probably because there is no such argument.
All I hear amounts to people feeling leet because they are able to copy and paste commands from the manual, that’s all. Believe me, after installing gentoo several times it really, really, gets boring and you yearn to have something that makes these stupid, boring repetetive steps faster.
So yay for a new installer.
It’s not question of “I’m l33t because I made everything by hand”, the problem is that I installed gentoo in 2003 and I never had again the need of reinstall. So we’ve got 9 developers that waste their time with something that ideally a user will use once, while there are dozens of open bugs, fully working packages in ~arch since 2004 and working ebuilds for new software and upgrades that wait patiently in bugzilla for a developer who can add them to portage or bump them. I know that this is very boring and that writing an installer is amusing, but I’d prefer they use their time in a better way.
BTW, I read too many mandrake/fedora/suse users that mess up their system because they don’t know urpmi or yum, I never read a gentoo user asking “how can I install this program I just downloaded from a site?”. so a CLI installation that doesn’t hide anything to the user is working very good… better than those shiny graphical installers.
The link to the installer (http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/gli/) that was pointed out is my site, and yes, those are my cats. I’ve written most of the dialog and GTK frontends, along with all of the partitioning code. So, before you continue spouting off about the installer, read this.
The purpose of the installer is not to make installing Gentoo easier. The purpose it to make it faster for people that are already experienced with installing Gentoo by hand. The original intent of the install project was to make automated mass deployments easier. Because of the way we designed it, end user installs were easy to do. While we have strayed away from the automated deployment aspect of it, it will still happen.
While I am on this project, the installer will never hold the user’s hand through an install. In my opinion, a user should still have to read the install guide before using the graphical installer.
For those of you going to my site expecting to have something to test, you’ll be disappointed. There are current CVS snapshots, but the installer needs a specialized LiveCD (with xorg, gtk, pygtk, parted, etc.) to run. While such a LiveCD does exist, I’m currently only giving it out to testers who will actually report bugs and even submit patches. There will be an “official” experimental X LiveCD released soon that will contain an alpha version of the installer. Don’t expect miracles.
A graphical installer is bad because people need to learn to follow the easy instructions and become accustomed to basic CLI if they want to use Gentoo. Gentoo is not meant to be an OS for grandma, and if it is… then someone else would install/update it for her anyway, even if there was a graphical install.
If people never learn and understand these basics, the forums would fill with 10x more idiotic questions about what file to edit to change grub bootup, etc.
THAT is the arguement against a graphical-point-and-click automagic install.
I hope gentoo will follow it’s niche and forget the graphical installer. For those who enjoy graphical installers there are many options, like fedora, mandrake and suse. The current way to install gentoo works as a test to see if the user is worthy of running gentoo, and it keeps the n00bs away.
I personally would like to see a Gentoo installer made with ncurses.
It wouldn’t exactly be graphical, but you could have maybe four panes- one on the top left for the table of contents of the installation guide, another one filling up the rest of the top of the screen with the install guide, and then maybe a dividing line in the middle with the name of the program currently running in the terminal on the bottom (oh, it’s emerging 3 of 134, I have time for a nap)
Like that installer above, it wouldn’t do things for you, it would just make the install process a little more user-friendly. Lots of typing, but things would be right there in front of you.
“A graphical installer is bad because people need to learn to follow the easy instructions and become accustomed to basic CLI if they want to use Gentoo.”
Ah, so the installer is an educational tool. Sorry for living with the misconception that it’s purpose was to install the OS.
“Gentoo is not meant to be an OS for grandma, and if it is… then someone else would install/update it for her anyway, even if there was a graphical install.”
If she isn’t ubergeek grandma you are right, but what does that have to do with the installer? Again, this is not about making the installation easier, it’s about making it faster and more convenient. If you want to spend your time doing stupid things that could be done faster, fine with me, but I don’t.
“If people never learn and understand these basics, the forums would fill with 10x more idiotic questions about what file to edit to change grub bootup, etc.”
So and what would have really changed from the state the forums are in now? 99% of all posts are just bs.
And again, I wasn’t aware it was the purpose of the installer to keep people who might ask stupid questions away from some online forum, I really thought it was there to get the OS installed. Silly me.
“THAT is the arguement against a graphical-point-and-click automagic install.”
Blah, first of all, it’s no argument but a load of bs and further, nobody, no one, not one person, especially not the dev who posted here is talking about a “graphical-point-and-click automagic install”.
This is the new graphical gentoo installer: http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/gli
It SHOULD have been included in 2005.0 but WILL be included and the default in 2005.1.
“The current way to install gentoo works as a test to see if the user is worthy of running gentoo, and it keeps the n00bs away.”
Please get a live and something else to build your self esteem on apart from running gentoo. And if you are afraid of noobs, don’t run gentoo, because one look at the forum should convince you that gentoo is full of noobs.
Btw., I really like gentoo and I really appreciate the great work the devs are doing, so people like you that give gentoo a bad name because of their arrogant, childish, ricer attitude are really making me sick.
The ricer attitude is lame. If you don’t want a graphical installer then fine, but acting like you’re elite because you don’t use one is childish and idiotic. Give people choice.
I love Gentoo just the way it is. I don’t say that i would mind a graphical installer, that would be nice, but i think there are more important issues to do than a installer.
I would love for gentoo to have a graphical installer, I’m sorry that I’m not unix or linux informed and had trouble with gentoo installs before but an installer would be much easier for me personally to use. Why don’t they just add the option to use a graphical install, it would make everyone happy. And to those who said you never need to install gentoo more than once, thats prolly true, but it seems like your installing something every single day to update gentoo, the continual updating may be for some people but it really isnt for me. It just seemed like i was installing all the time.
“I personally would like to see a Gentoo installer made with ncurses.
It wouldn’t exactly be graphical, but you could have maybe four panes- one on the top left for the table of contents of the installation guide, another one filling up the rest of the top of the screen with the install guide, and then maybe a dividing line in the middle with the name of the program currently running in the terminal on the bottom (oh, it’s emerging 3 of 134, I have time for a nap)”
Currently, there is a dialog frontend to the installer (scroll farther down on the screenshots page). My original intention was to do it in curses (for a more custom interface), but I was lazy and didn’t feel like learning curses and pycurses (especially as I was just learning python at the time). There may be a rewrite of the dialog-based installer in the future, though.
Also, to those of you concerned about the old install process going away, don’t be. The use of the graphical installer is completely optional. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing your install by hand like you are used to. Personally, I’ll never use the installer because I like doing it by hand.
dinolunch, i agree with you that it would be a nice addition, but the EXTREMELY well documented handbook makes install very easy … all you have to do is follow the instructions supplied there. The first time i’ve installed gentoo i did not even knew how to login as root (after some Mandrake graphical installs
).
All i’m saying is that after a Gentoo install i had a minimal set of linux info that get me started in Linux.
So i decide to see what all the hype is about i am currently downloading gentoo for HPPA to find out that there isn’t a 2005.4 release for it so i grap the eirlier version and its downloading at 9k a second….
Not once, realy not once have I heard one sane argument why having a graphical installer on top of the old install method is a bad thing
Because developing and maintaining a graphical installer is a bitch. It eats up man hours that could be better used elsewhere given the limited developer resources and the volunteer community nature of Gentoo.
That said I wouldn’t mind ncurses interface that would allow you to set all install options and then let it set and do it’s thing.
an OS should facilitate the use of productivity tools, if it doesn’t then it will die.
what part of “if you use gentoo you should see installation once in the life of your pc” don’t you understand? is there anything more counterproductive than reinstall the whole system regularly?
..meant to be in this release.take a look at this. http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131174&cid=10951707
Yeah, that women took what wolf31o2 said completely out of context and wrote whatever she felt like. We’ve been getting so much crap because of it.
I’ll probably welcome a tool that speeds up installs when I find a reason to try it. I will, however, not welcome a tool that makes it “easier” to install Gentoo.
For people that know how to RTFM Gentoo installation couldn’t be easier and if that makes people who can’t RTFM pick a diffrent distro that is a Good Thing(TM).
The problem isn’t so much with flooding the forums, that could be a problem with wasting effort. But OSS will always have bad cases of Not-Made-Here development so were kind of used to it.
What I think people fear (it is fear you know) is that the community will change. Gentoo is all about it’s community, we depend on eachother to create the Gentoo life. On the forums theare are tons of development and research going on to make life with a Linux system easier. This creates an environments that fosters developers and generally improves the community.
The new kind of users that a handholding system would introduce could damage this echosystem. If we started to foster a breed of “feedme”-users Gentoo as we know it would simply implode, nobody likes to do that kind of work.
Gentoo doesn’t need users, we need developers.
To address what people has previously said about this:
1. I belive n00b is the wrong word for this threat, n00bs are just people who havent gained the experience yet. Anyone who has the ability learn and the will to do it is a welcomed addition to the Gentoo community. These are even the best people, they are the ones who document what they learn so that others can learn.
2. I have no ide what this GUI installer actually is so I do not have any opinion on that particular pice of software.
it seems to me if there is going to be a gui installer, then there should be a mature/stable gui front end to portage. something that will control make.conf, /etc/portage/*, and the actual package tree. with an installer and a portage front end, gentoo could almost be ready for pure desktop use.
as it is now, just having the installer is not going to end up as bad as some think. once you’re done installing, what do you do next? well, you need to learn the system you installed. sure there will be people who use the installer and then have no clue, but they probably wont stick with gentoo anyway.
hopefully with a larger user base comes a larger developer group. packages need better maintenance.
… but the EXTREMELY well documented handbook makes install very easy …
Well, yes. And no. As someone once said, the docs seem very complete, but are not suited for “anything less then a sunny day scenario”. Let me give you a brief example from my own experience – actually my first experience with Gentoo, as I installed it on this machine (and, of course, never had to reinstall it) about one year ago.
Back then, the stage2-tarballs contained some hardlinks between /usr and /etc – some terminal compatibility profiles, stuff you would like not to care about in the 21st century. However, I had /usr on a separate partition, and, as we all know, hardlinks between different partitions are impossible by the very nature of the filesystem (reiser).
Add to this tar’s whim (some actually call it a bug) not to utter a useful message in such cases, but something like “error in archive” instead, and you have a guy (me) staring at his screen, wondering what just went wrong with that md5-checked tarball – while the seemingly omnipotent handbook just tells him to extract the tarball and move on.
Well, after having successfully fought the first cold sweat (like “omg, am I actually to dumb to get this thingie installed after 3 years of Linux?”), I cleaned up, repeated with -v, grep’ed through the output, found the problem, symlinked by hand and hoped everything would just work. It did.
This was a rather very minor issue, easy to figure out and to fix. So what’s my point?
The handbook is great. Period. It is a very helpful step-by-step instruction. Thanks to those who wrote (and write) it. Having said that, however, if for some reason you fall off the road, it’s not about choices anymore, it’s about surviving – lone surviving in most cases.
HOWEVER, a graphical installer can’t fix such stuff – luckily it’s not supposed to, anyway
the best thing about gentoo is that it is didactic… it forces you to understand your linux more then other distributions. it’s sink or swim.. no social promotion. if you don’t like it then don’t use gentoo, and don’t expect the benefits of running gentoo.
a command line interface for system maintenance is more powerful and flexible then any gui will ever be. it’s a good thing that gentoo users are forced to deal with command line, even if only for a few minutes during install. it builds self-reliance, empowered, blah blah etc.
that said, an optional gui installer would be ok as long as it does not drive the evolution of gentoo. the gui authors should keep up with the command line tools, raather than the cli tools being retarded to co-exist with a gui.
I’m with you 100%.
I’ve been using Gentoo for a couple of years now…and there is just *no* comparing it w/ other distros. Use SuSE or Fedora if you want a graphical installer, graphical tools, and a sluggish, canned system to which you’ll learn nothing while installing and not nearly as much using it.
I don’t look forward to the day when (or if) the gentoo devs decide to start pandering to the less technically savvy crowd simply to please everyone.
Gentoo use is growing but it’s growing amongst those craving to earn some real linux chops…not those who want a 15-min. install w/ a bunch of crap they don’t want or need pre-installed.
Viva la Gentoo!!
I don’t look forward to the day when (or if) the gentoo devs decide to start pandering to the less technically savvy crowd simply to please everyone.
I don’t understand why people think you can’t please everyone. From what I see, it should be possible to make an interface that both newbies and veterans can find useful. Why do people say that there is a trade-off between catering to newbies and catering to Linux gurus? Look at Mac OS X. It’s one of the most colourful, newbie-friendly operating systems around. Yet the same distribution makes nerds salivate. All the power is there, you can customise as much as you want, or if you’re not confident, the defaults work great as well.
And regarding the Handbook – yes, it’s excellent (and I have my own Gentoo install under my belt). But a principle of user interfaces is, if there’s only one way to do something (which there is in a lot of the Handbook), have the computer do it automatically. Thence an installer.
I remember watching in stunned amazement upon first installing Gentoo the scrolling lines of compiling code go by, and by, and by….almost 24 hours for openoffice, and maybe 6 hours for xorg-x11! It was simply amazing to think about all the work that went into these programs that I was taking for granted. Gentoo may not have the prettiest installer but it does work and it does deepen the user’s appreciation (if not his understanding) of the complexity of the modern linux desktop.
Andrew Gaffney, one of our main developers, is doing an incredible job to get the new gentoo installer ready to be included in the 2005.1 release: http://dev.gentoo.org/~agaffney/gli
The installer will be the default in 2005.1 but of course you will still be able to install everything by hand. A modern distro simply needs to offer a graphical installer and this is a crucial step to ensure the survival of this great distro. We are confident this will increase our user base dramatically.
IMHO Gentoo’s install guide is great if your installation progresses as expected. If it doesn’t, you have problems, especially if you’re not sure what all those commands actually DO.
The number one problem with Gentoo I’ve experienced isn’t insufficient Q&A before marking stable, but the infrequent but time consuming problem of packages that require certain configuration file settings that either you’re not told about or that are buried in the scrolling text.
I had that problem trying to install Gaim on a computer after having upgraded practically everything… when I re-installed gcc, there was something hidden at the end of the output about a setup program I needed to run to change all these configuration files. I’d missed it the first time because it was just one of 100 packages the system had updated (with very little fuss)
a gui installer will cause a shift in the public discourse about gentoo. gentoo will start being compared in reviews where “ease of installation” and installer screenshots are compared.. is this a good thing?
maybe there could be at least a difference in name.. so that gentoo-x is with gui and gentoo-y is without.. so that it’s clear that the installer is a piece of the gentoo meta-structure.. and not representative of gentoo as a whole.
along the same lines, it works to gentoo’s advantage that the disparate gentoo sites, logos, and graphics are NOT in sync. there is no single, trivial understanding of gentoo, no single mental image, no single identity. gentoo is special because it is so malleable, fluid, and hybrid.
Crusader:
This is a common concern. There are 2 things you can do. As soon as you have completed your stage install, edit your /etc/make.conf and add
PORT_LOGDIR=/var/log/portage
Then you want to mkdir /var/log/portage
From then on everything you emerge will create a complete log in this directory. To make sense of the log data, ie parse out useful messages like einfo, warning, etc. Use the tool portlog-info
portlog-info is a small bash script that can parse content of your /var/log/portage (or whatever else is defined as PORT_LOGDIR in /etc/make.conf) to retrieve different kind of messages (einfo, emerge errors, etc.) in per-package emerge logs.
http://tdegreni.free.fr/gentoo/portlog-info
A better solution will come with the next version of portage currently being developed.
A better solution currently is enotice
enotice Tackles the most popular portage feature request ever: per-package message logging.
The patches are outdated, so use the second method. It only takes a minute to setup, its painless and its just what you need.
http://dev.gentoo.org/~eldad/
For people that know how to RTFM Gentoo installation couldn’t be easier and if that makes people who can’t RTFM pick a diffrent distro that is a Good Thing(TM).
So gentoo is the prefered Distro of Linux snobs world wide? Or is it that you just want to feel special becasue you use a version of Linux that is more difficult to install then others. Do you own a Mac? becasue i seem to have heard this drivel before from those of your ilk. If Gentto is truly a better fast Distro then why not make it easier to install so that more people can benefit from it? isn’t that the FOSS way?
those who are waiting for Gentoo Linux Graphical installation release,why don’t you install Vida Linux and use it?check it out.it worths!how many of the most popular linux has graphical installation?Ubuntu?Debian?Slackware?well if you really want graphical installation I suggest then Fedora Linux or Mandrake Linux whats more lots packages RPM,HUH!
I don’t understand why people think you can’t please everyone. From what I see, it should be possible to make an interface that both newbies and veterans can find useful. Why do people say that there is a trade-off between catering to newbies and catering to Linux gurus? Look at Mac OS X. It’s one of the most colourful, newbie-friendly operating systems around. Yet the same distribution makes nerds salivate.
I guess I’m not a nerd. I don’t salivate. I ask myself why the hell this annoying GUI is getting in my way, why many of its design decisions are the way they are, why multiple desktops aren’t immediately available to me and thus forces me to use expose when I don’t want to, etc. Then I open up my laptop and use XFCE or GNOME, which, though one is less functional and the other clunky, will both stay out of my way and let me do what I want.
Don’t get me wrong: I think OS X, and its GUI, are fantastic. When students in the labs I work in ask me what to buy, I usually point to the iMacs. But the computer desktop world is NOT one size fits all.
As for the argument that I could spend lots of time learning the Mac GUI and customize it however I want — I don’t want to sit around and customize my desktop. I want to open some terminals, a web browser, an IDE, and my email client, preferrably all on different desktops, and then get to work. Ideally I’d like to do it in an environment that doesn’t hurt my eyes. OS X scores one point with me there.
(sorry Moderators for the second post!)
I use Gentoo Linux and I am very happy to the installation method.why because it is meant fo the advanced users and as well for the beginers who wants to learn how the Linux works.I am sure Gentoo Developers can build a very beautiful graphical installation gui and they can make that the installation takes only 15 min.then what is the use?Gentoo installation is not difficult!if someone says yes it is then please tell me what is difficult?Gentoo Linux has a great documents and great community/forum and irc chanels.did you even try to install Gentoo Linux?you have tree options stage1,stage2,and stage3.stage3 is perfect for the beginers.I think you can mount the installation cd nd you can use text editors like nano,pico!I don’t say vi because it is difficult.Gentoo Linux 2005 instaalation has a perfect handbook and installation instractions.just trust yourself and try to install it!I recomend that you print the necessary installation instractions.
LONG LIVE GENTOO LINUX!
Don’t get me wrong: I think OS X, and its GUI, are fantastic. When students in the labs I work in ask me what to buy, I usually point to the iMacs. But the computer desktop world is NOT one size fits all.
I claim that Mac OS X is closer to one-size-fits-all than any other OS. Furthermore, I claim that it can become even closer to that, with more work. People say that it can’t be done, I say that it can, and is.