There have been many articles as of late about the so called “source” distributions of Linux. Articles about “rpm hell” and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.
I was told some time ago of a new distribution. One unlike RedHat with its redhat package management (rpm) system. One unlike Debian with apt-get. One that takes some time to
build, but is worth it. Well, as the old adage goes, hard work pays off in the end, so I decided to take Gentoo Linux for a spin and see what it was like. I will describe the install, breifly, which can take quite some time, the performance of the running
system, and then contrast that slightly with ports of Gentoo.
I note first off that this distribution is not for the faint of heart, but does have some advantages (which in some cases are disadvantages) right from the get-go. The install image
is small. The release I downloaded (1.0) was a scant 16MB. Now that is a small image. Those of you tired of grabbing RedHats 2 CDs or SuSes 7 might be glad to hear that, but wait. The install CD is just that, like an install floppy, it has enough to “get you going”. Then the installer will download the packages it needs for your system to build itself, then after that (and a reboot) if you want any other packages you can download them also. Of course, I am leaving some things out for now, but that is the basic concept. Now onto the things I left out…
The command line Portage system and one of its GUI front ends (there are 3 GUI efforts), KPortageMaster.
So how does it perform? In a nutshell, I was running RedHat 7.1 on the aforementioned Dell machine. I had also installed Debian op the same box. After gentoo was installed and X was compiled and configured (for the comparison with the other distributions) it was noted that everything was quicker. Booting to a working bash promp for instance, was faster than the previous OSs. Granted, we are not talking huge amounts of time, but enough to make a noticible difference. Previously on RedHat I ran siege against the rpm install of apache. Running the same apache version on gentoo and running siege against it I noted an decrease in response time and the number of simultaneous connections the server could handle increased slightly. Unfortunately, I did not investigate into what led to this increase in speed at the time. It could have been the kernel, the fact that the entire OS was compiled
Gentoo (until recently) does not install packages as one would expect (ala RedHat, Suse, etc). The install process actually grabs the latest source from the Gentoo server and builds them right on your machine. This serves many purposes, some of which are: small install disk, packages are built for the machines CPU type, the process itself takes care of dependancies, you get the latest snapshot of the tree. These few I have listed are pretty big pluses. The CPU optimization alone is a good thing. With most other distributions one has a choice of perhaps x86 compatibility or an i686 build. As noted
in the preamble, this also solves the “package-dependancy-hell” problem.
The Gentoo install, for the first part, is quite envolved from the user perspective. First off the user should be familliar with installing linux and doing good old command line operations. I can see that someone following the instructions to the tee (with small amounts of intuition) should be able to install Gentoo, but if they run intro trouble, or are not familliar with say, linux networking, it could be sligltly frustrating. A running machine on the side with internet access to search or read FAQs would be a big plus
for those not so familiar.
Booting the CD brings you into a running kernel, just as most other Linux installs do, but the similarity ends there. The user is dropped to a stripped shell prompt and must begin preparing the system by hand. Then they must load any kernel modules needed, startup networking, partition the drive(s), set up the partitions, format them, mount them, mount the CD, unpack the stage they want to use and whamo, they are in a small Gentoo environment!
Backing up a moment, the small install CD is sort of a “you get nothing, please build everything” distribution. It is called stage1. There are now Gentoo CDs with stage2 and stage3 tarballs. The stage2 tarball is one that has bootstrapped for you already.
This takes quite some time on older machines (it took an hour and a half on a Dell Precision 330 1.4Ghz machine with 512MB ram and SCSI-U160, it takes hours and hours on say a AMD K6-200, the other x86 based machine I installed gentoo on). The stage3 tarball is one
that has bootstrapped and has the snapshot of the latest portage tree. To summarize, stage1 takes the longest as the install builds everything after it grabs it, stage 2 cuts that about in half (roughly) and stage3 is basically a running system that needs to get up to date and perform a kernel compile. It is the “fastest” install type.
I will not get into the gory details of an install. The install notes for x86 based machines are pretty good, and if the person performing the isntall is slightly familiar with linux, all should go smoothly. A few personal comments about the install: Its slow, even on a “fast” machine (the 1.4Ghz machine mentioned above was a work machine, my personal machines are in the 200Mhz range, and installing gentoo on them is a war of
attrition to say the least). You need a decent connection to the net, or at least to the gentoo server, if performing a install from stage1 or 2. Granted, the install is not huge like some other distros are, but the build will take a long time, and waiting 10mins to
grab a big package will just add to the wait.
Keep in mind that after gentoo is installed a lot of “familiar” packages are not there. Users will have to grab what they want, somewhat like a Debian install, after completion. There are cons to this setup, but I think even the casual serious user can see the benefits of this. Nothing is there that one does not want. The user will know what is installed on the machine. It also makes it quite simple to seetup a stripped down customized server. Lightweight, and optimized for the machine, gentoo has the makings of a serious server optimized distribution.
machine specific on that machine, or that apche was compiled machine specific on that machine. It was most probably a combination of all of them.
Before I go into an install comparison of different architectures, I wish to note that gentoo help, in the form of online manuals and IRC channels is good, for the most part. The online install is fairly comprehensive, until you get to the install manual for ppc (RS/6000 not Apple) and Sparc. The ppc install manual is completely Apple oriented (which is to be expected) and the Sparc manual basically tells you to consult the x86 manual. This
is not too much of a bad thing, however, the Sparcs do requrie some “other” operations to get them going and the RS/6000, well, that is just a lot of work (and you thought the x86 install was a lot of work). The gentoo IRC channel has a lot of people in it, mostly
not talking. I asked a question in #gentoo about installing on a machine with EISA since on “other” distros I can type in a kernel parameter at the boot prompt (which I could not do with gentoo). It took all of twenty seconds before someone responded with a command line option at boot to add options to the boot kernel. Not bad. The #gentoo-sparc channel on the other hand is where we find people with responses like “why would you want to install Linux on a Sun box?” (that is an actual quote, I have the logs). As far as I can tell, no one in that channel (for the week that I was there) has installed #gentoo-sparc. I think the
maintainer has, but he was not active. All the gentoo IRC channels are on openprojects.net and the list of gentoo specific channels is at the gentoo.org homepage. Note that all manuals are not on the homepage and that gentoo-sparc is at mirrors.
Lastly we compare the install process of gentoo linux on x86 based hardware and “other” hardware, most specifically, Sun sparc hardware. I have a little spot in my heart for Sun Microsystems gear. I own a Sparc 10 a Sparc 20 and an Ultra 1. I have owned
a Sparc 2, 4, 5, Ultra 2, Ultra 5, Ultra 30 and worked on the Blade 1000 and E250. My personal preference is the Ultra 2 or the Ultra 30. They are cheap (respectively speaking), fast running linux and rock solid. Expansion cards (of the SBUS variety) can be had used for cheap and the older units such as the Sparc 10/20/Ultra 1 do not use much power and are small. I have had many a Solaris admin ask me why I would ever want to
run Linux on Sun hardware, but after I show them how fast an Ultra 1, 2, 5, or 30 loads linux and runs, they stop asking questions. At any rate, installing something such as RedHat 6.2 sparc or Debian potato sparc on a Sun box is fairly straigtforward.
If you have a CDrom dirve (sun compatible) it is as easy as booting from it and installing. There are a few small pitfalls installing linux on the Sun, particularly the “whole disk” parition and where to put the swap space, but this is well documented.
Installing Gentoo on the Sun Ultra 1 appears at first to take a similar course. The CD boots fine and you are presented with the normal shell prompt for install with a minimal survival paragraph above for installing gentoo on sparc. Getting the stage1 and 2 on the machine is almost the same as for the x86 installs, but that is about it. After this you must download a kernel and compile it (32 or 64 bit specific). This is where the problems start. Keep in mind my Ultra 1 is a 200E, meaning it has a 200Mhz Ultra Sparc CPU and a few other things like 10/100 networking and USCSI interface, so it is a little quicker than a regular Ultra 1, and it still took gentoo 5 hours to get to a stage 2. At this point in time you do not want this install to fail. It fails. After the kernel compile to stage 3 the system will not reboot into gentoo. The kernel panics with various erros such as not being able to find a loader for modules. I had downloaded the linux-2.4.18.tar.bz2 from kernel.org as mentioned in the install instructions. I found out (much) later that the stock kernel has some Sparc “issues” and that some poeple have had success with the “vanilla” kernels. I found this to be true for only a few moments as the power died after install and my drive
was a goner. The joys and sad times of older hardware.
To summarize, Gentoo is a fast lightweight linux distribution. If you are in a hurry to get linux up and working this is problably not the distribution for you, however, it is well worth the wait. As previously noted, on a stock Dell machine gentoo installed
without a hitch and after an emerge and installing X et al gentoo did not have any hardware problems that I could see. It even played nice with the IDE cdrom burner (which I should mention RedHat has finally gotten to work without user intervention after install).
Gentoo linux is coming along quickly from what I can tell, support is readily available from IRC or the gentoo website and there seem to be an endless number of people willing to help solve problems. As with most other distros there are people in the help
channel who ignore questions which are covered in the install manual, but I digress and state again that this should not be the first Linux someone installs. A little *NIX experience will go a long way in making the gentoo install and maintenance smooth.
As for installing gentoo on hardware other than the x86 based or the Apple, it can be tricky at times, and some things are still undocumented. This is not to say that it can not be done, it just may take a little more effort than a “no problems” x86 install.
I think that the pros still outweigh the cons for Gentoo, and I know of many who are using it (some on laptops with USB 2.0 working) in many applications, from servers (which I think it is most suited for) to desktop systems. Having used RedHat linux since RedHat 1.0, the biggest pro for me for gentoo is not having to go fetch and install ten other rpm packages when I want to install something, or having to remove five rpm packages
when I want to remove something.
About the Author:
Robert Minvielle holds a M.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His interests are Linux security, old hardware, esoteric hardware, and woodworking. You can reach him at [email protected].
Gentoo really is a great distro. I first used it around 1.0-RC3, and it’s gotten much better since then. First, the installation was tons simpler than that of any other Linux distro I’ve used. True, it was all command line, and you had to get in with nano and start editing files in /etc, but the straight-forwaredness of it was a welcome change from the complexity of other installs. The distro itself is a pleasure to use. It has nice little touches like optimizing your HD by default, renicing X to -10 by default, enabling the Freetype bytecode interpreter by default, and downloading and setting up the MS WebFont pack by default. The ebuild system is great. While there are occasional problems with compiles failing (which bite when you do something like KDE which needs to run overnight) I can chalk that up to using the 1.3b (beta) version. Hacking your own ebuilds is very easy, to the extent where it is rather simple to take standard source packages (ie. ones that use ./configure && make && make install) and write your own ebuilds for them. I’ve been messing around with getting Gentoo to work with the prelink tools (currently, all KDE apps segfault if you use prelink) and the ability to mess with core system ebuilds (like glibc and qt) and still get a consistant package database has been very helpful.
How does the portage system compare to FreeBSD’s ports collection? From what I can tell, they seem quite similar from a user’s perspective, if not functionally.
Gentoo is garbage.. from the get go they’ve never been able to make it work properly.. not only is it a humongous waste of time and effort to the linux community.. but when there are products like FreeBSD.. why use yet another linux distro.. ? Not only is linux slow and convoluted.. it’s a mess.. everyone wining about how their version is the better one. Well, skip the garbage distros and go with FreeBSD.. it’s real.. it works.. and it’s well supported. Not only that.. but updating is ten times easier than gentoo. I will never support Gentoo.. especially considering they can’t be bothered even updateing their website when a new release is available..
Hell with Linux… it’s crap.. FreeBSD is the way to be.
I can say the same for HP-UX, IRIX and Solaris, being able to scale much more and being better overall than FreeBSD. Your point?
I’ll probably take it for a test drive when Portage2 has matured, but not right now. It’s a damn good idea though.
Umm…he calls his 1.4GHz Dell (p4 class) machine new and fast? Woah. That machine sits squarely in the major POS category.
You defeinitely need a good software development calibre machine to feed the gentoo beast. I installed it at work on a dual p3 600 machine and it took like 9 hours to upgrade kde 3.0 to 3.0.1. Painful. At home on my dual athlon 1.43 it’s pretty stinking fast. I do an “emerge rsync” a few times a day and there’s definitely changes going ALL the time (although I submitted some ebuilds 3 weeks ago that still aren’t in).
I’m glad to see that gentoo is *somewhat* cross platform. I wonder how well it works with PowerPC.
<flame>
Mike (above) is a BSD militant. Wierd how much the BSD folks are like the MAC folks, they can only degenerate into simple minded name calling and general (gonad) envy of other OS’s.
Puleeze dude, get a life. Regardless of what you think of Linux, BSD would not be even remotely close to what it is today without Linux. Hmmm..I guess without Linux there would be fewer BSD whiners…..
</flame>
i believe that gentoo and freebsd can coexist just fine. i have always found linux to be great for personal use, there are more “play time” apps being written for linux currently.
if i am going to install a unix SERVER, it’s going to be bsd, openbsd is what i like.
my workstation is gentoo and i find it to be a great distribution.
I guess I’m not supposed to care about your silly “mac & bsd folk”-remark but what the hell.
I run FreeBSD. It serves me fine. I don’t have a need to push it down your throat, so please, don’t push whatever system you prefer down mine.
a little note here:
Linux seems to run fast only on UltraSPARC (64-bit) workstations. The older 32-bit Linux variant is slow because they just couldn’t get the MMU right. I installed SuSE on a friends Ultra 1 Creator and it was fast, but when I installed linux on my SPARCstation 2, it was sllooow… After I installed NetBSD 1.5, it got faster. So if you plan to install something on a sparc 32-bit, install NetBSD 1.5 or Solaris 1.4 (where wouild you find that?)…
Right, Gentoo is probably not the best choice for servers anyway (way too much bleeding edge atm), so there is no reason for BSD users to whine. Not that this would stop them.
Someone once called FreeBSD the “Linux for grown ups”. I begin to question that statement…
It’s seems that now that Linux isn’t “leet” anymore but mainstream, those dumbheads make FreeBSD their pet OS. Poor FreeBSD.
Hopefully they will be mainstream one day too so they can loose those “leet kids” to the next poor underdog OS (but it has to be easy to use so they can understand it but still feel leet).
</rant>
Of course I’m aware that probably 95% of all FreeBSD users aren’t like that, it’s just the minority that shouts out the loudest.
>if i am going to install a unix SERVER, it’s going to be >bsd, openbsd is what i like.
Why GNU/linux is not a good choice for a unix SERVER ?
Many people think that *BSD is better than GNU/linux for server.
Anyway, one thing is missing in Gentoo and FreeBSD. It’s a easy way to mass install.
I’m not a big fan of Redhat, but it take me only 10min with a kickstart disk to get up a workable server… some tuning is nescessary but the most part is done.
And binary package it’s important (for me) when you have 20 server to update.
“Not only that.. but updating [FreeBSD] is ten times easier than gentoo.”
Not that I have tried updating my Gentoo install yet (since there hasn’t been a new version since 1.2), but I understand that all it takes is an:
emerge –update world
What could possibly be simpler?
My apologies for getting a bit harsh up above. I used to work with a software developer who was a MAC militant to the level of the absurd. And reading my statement, I didn’t see me “shoving” any OS down anyone’s throat.
My itent was to point out what should be clear, that MAC and BSD have never really *taken off* as compared to like windows and linux. Some people are bitter about their pet OS, and will fabricate comparisons to make it look way more appealing than it really is.
I frequent this site primarily because I *don’t* think that any OS that’s currently out there really does *it* very well, and I’m curious about what’s cool and innovative out there that might have the technical merit to actually be the next *cool thing*.
I’ve run FreeBSD for quite some time now. I’m not quite sure why people feel the need to fly off the handle so randomly. Personal Opinion: I like FreeBSD, because, for myself, i’ve managed to figure out how to make it do all of the things I wanted an OS to do. Does that mean no other OS can do them? No.. just means I happened to find FreeBSD easier. Perhaps he should take some pills?!
“that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices.”
Choice is, indeed, a great thing but…immersing yourself the installation of umpteen different flavours of Linux to try to ascertain which ‘Linux’ is ‘best’ or most ‘suitable’ is a ball-ache.
Ok! maybe I havn’t stuck with Linux as ‘devoutly’ as I should have but I HAVE tried several different flavours and found that……well Linux is pretty much….Linux. IMV, it’s still difficult to configure and keep updated and that goes for every flavour I have tried.
Now, I have absolutely no axes to grind with Linus or the Linux community in general but there has to be a line drawn somewhere…..at some time.
There seems to be a new revision of (insert your favourite distro here) every quarter or so…so evaluating and choosing just the right distro is no easy thing……unless of course, you eat, sleep and breathe Linux.
Just stirring my spoon in the pot :o)
Gentoo is very easy for rollouts, compile a solid running system, roll your custom stage3.tbz2, and you are good to go for multiple systems. Upgrading is easy to as long is all hardware is standardized.
Gentoo looks nice but I have always wondered how long an update takes. How often do people update and how long does it take?
My last –update world took me about 16 hours. You can either update the system every so often in the background, while you are working, so it won’t ‘feel’ that it takes too much time, or you can do it every few weeks. I do it about once a month… I leave the PC overnight to compile.. However, the speed of the update has a lot to do with your computer. The faster the CPU, hard drive and amount of memory you have, the faster the update will happen. I still use Gentoo on my old dual Celeron 533 Mhz PC, with 256 MB of RAM and an old Fujitsu IDE 10 GB hard drive.
I just got a new laptop, and I’m torn between Gentoo and Debian … I have a slow modem connection at home, so installing Gentoo has been a headache. I have the latest Woody snapshot ready and waiting on CD, and it’s growing more and more tempting, as I don’t look forward to compiling Mozilla just so I can use galeon. On the other hand, Debian is rather conservative with package/release rollouts, and I prefer the cutting edge software; if nothing else, my laptop requires the latest driver.
Both have the strength of minimizing dependency hell, but with different approaches. I guess I can’t decide if I’m willing to spend a lot of time (half a day, in some cases) twiddling my thumbs to obtain the latest greatest software.
Is there a compromise out there?
Yes, download the Stage 3 Tarball, burn it on a CD (or buy the CD) and then the gentoo installation will be faster. You will still need to download X+KDE/Gnome though via modem if you want X with a window environment. And that is about 200+ MB worth of downloads…
Eugenia,
I have completed the stage 3 install; the plan has been to to do an “emerge -p <stuff>” at home, run it through a script (available at gentoo.org forums) to give me URLs for _all_ the required files, and download them at work. The two headaches thus far:
* the custom kernel created was crap, even though the only experimental feature I used was the ACPI for my laptop. My machine ran godawful slow with this kernel. I left a new one compiling as I left for work. With either the kernel off the CD or a custom, my hard disk can’t use DMA (I’m experimenting now; perhaps it’s unfair to blame this on Gentoo).
* The process to get the URLs for the various required source files didn’t work correctly; that, or the portage tree on the stage 3 CD is woefully outdated — have to figure that out tonight. In any case, I’ll try with the latest portage snapshot and see if I get anywhere.
If, optimistically, I can get all this corrected in short order, I am still wondering if I want so much time spent on compilation with each major software upgrade. Perhaps the best thing to do is try it out; if I get overly annoyed, i can just nuke my installation and start over with Debian.
> I used was the ACPI
I had problems with ACPI on Gentoo on my dual Celeron. The kernel was not booting because of this. I searched on the net, and only SuSE had similar problems in some cases. I had to disable ACPI in order to manage and boot on Gentoo.
> that, or the portage tree on the stage 3 CD is woefully outdated
You always, ALWAYS, make a:
emerge rsync
before you emerge any new software. This will update the portage tree, which changes pretty much, daily.
I’ll try turning off ACPI — thanks for the tip!
We’ll see how it goes …
I have wanted to try out gentoo for some time, but the install iso’s are really no more than boot discs, stage 1, 2 or 3 don’t help you much on a crappy modem line:( The real apps you need to download/install witch would take forever.
What is needed are stable snapshot on cds/isos, like 1 CD with install ,basic libs and some generic apps. Then one containing Gnome/GTK stuff and one for KDE/Qt, so the die-hard Gnome/KDEers dont have to download all 3 isos. Included on each iso you have the corresponding part of the portge tree. The more exotic/unstable apps, there is no need. They can be downlodaed/installd thru portage the standard way.
This will make gentoo avalible for us poor modem users, all you need is a frien with a DSL line and a CD burner. (And realy no problem downloading a cople of isos at work:)
Well, you can make your _own_ binary distro (emerge ostensibly can handle binary packages); the Gentoo maintainers don’t distribute any yet. I’m not sure what they could distribute binary-wise and still be compatible with the good aspects of Gentoo …
The portage tree is only 5MB as of right now, so you can get the whole thing in one shot pretty easily. I agree that it’d be great if they were to make distfile ISO snapshots on corresponding to the portage snapshots, sorted by order of popularity like the Debian ISOs. Saves the trouble of picking them out yourself.
I use Linux and FreeBSD. They both have merit. Why are you arguing over them? We are all using UNIX type operating systems here. I have no interest in reading this crap flame war stuff.
I really enjoy Gentoo. It’s a nice distro and it has replaced Debian on my laptop. The custom Gentoo kernel simply kicks ass :-D. It has everything you need wrapped up into it minus The International Kernel Patch (for obvious reasons I suppose) but thats not to hard to roll into it ( http://www.kerneli.org ). The Preemptive and Low Latency kernel patches are already wrapped into the kernel and really improve GUI response times (something I’ve always found lacking under Linux). Enough so that KDE response time is not effected by a full blown emerge in the background (I keep a VT reserved for that).
Portage is very nice as well and I’m glad someone has FINALLY brought an equivelent of the BSD port system over to Linux (some people say its even more stable then the BSD equivelents). Nothing quite like optimizing KDE for your system (which is probably another reason why its response time is so nice).
I only have one complaint and that is that it took so long to compile everything for my system (1 day and 1 night on a 1 GHZ system with a T1 from stage 1).
Other then that I really love it and suggest that people AT LEAST look at the Gentoo custom kernel if nothing else 🙂 (yeah I’m putting the kernel on my other Linux systems as well).
Tip for new Gentoo users:
Learn how to use the USE flag http://www.gentoo.org/doc/use-howto.html BEFORE you start compiling your new system 🙂
>Well, you can make your _own_ binary distro (emerge >ostensibly can handle binary packages); the Gentoo >maintainers don’t distribute any yet. I’m not sure what >they could distribute binary-wise and still be compatible >with the good aspects of Gentoo …
Mmm, the flexibility of gentoo:) But I was thinking of ISOs with the source. Like cut up the source tree at gento and put it on CDs, and a sane way to install it frome those CDs(probably a preatty easy change/paramter to portage)
>Mmm, the flexibility of gentoo:) But I was thinking of >ISOs with the source. Like cut up the source tree at >gento and put it on CDs, and a sane way to install it >frome those CDs(probably a preatty easy change/paramter >to portage)
Problem is once they manufactured the cd’s and distibuted them, most of the sources would be out of date.
I love gentoo. It’s the first Linux distro I’ve really been comfortable with. It sure helps a bunch having broadband access to the internet. As it is a distro, presently, aimed at developers and network pros; most of these individuals will certainly have a fast connection.
I think you should put more articles about *BSD especially FreeBSD on OSNews so that their zealot can post their comments. If you look at statistic, very few articles on FreeBSD posted here compared to Linux distribution. Maybe this is why FreeBSD zealot getting piss off and start flaming in most of the articles related to Linux.
Here what I got from OSNews statistic starting Jun 2002 until now:
FreeBSD 4.6.1 and CURRENT DP2 Scheduled for Release in July (2 comments)
FreeBSD 4.6 (Officially) Released (36 comments)
FreeBSD 4.6 (Unofficially) Released (50 comments)
New FreeBSD IPFW Beta Code Available (3 comments)
PS: Maybe we can fake the comment so that it look like many responded to the FreeBSD articles. DO YOU GET MY SACASTIC MESSAGE? —Just want to know weather FreeBSD user will flae me because of this.
Mistype ‘weather’
Well, I’ve never tried Gentoo but I have this to say… Jordan Hubbard, all around god of FreeBSD repute who wrote many of the tools ports uses, looked at portage and was impressed.
Check the OpenDarwin mailing lists for more info
Have you ever tried to set up a SERVER(!) with gentoo?
Say you don’t want an X server (who wants that on a server??) but you need vim and nethack (for sysadmin sanity
The very moment you want to install one of these, emerge says you need X for it and starts downloading XFree86 4.2.0.
After sending a mail to the gentoo-users mailing list asking if it is possible to tell emerge NOT to install X, I got several answers which were based on one of three groups:
– It is possible to do it “this way” or “that way” (comment: neither did actually work)
– It might be possible, but I don’t know how
– It is not possible
Please note that ALL answers came from Gentoo-Developers.
Maybey you should 5 minutes out of your life to actually read some documentation before forming your opinions. You see there are these things in Gentoo called USE settings which define options on a system-wide basis to configure applications during compilation. A simple export USE=”-X” would solve this problem you have, but I suppose that might take some actual effort on your part to find that out.
When will Linux zealots learn that “RTFM” is the most arrogant, pointless, and snotty thing to tell someone? Either help someone by giving the answer or STFU.
The whole fresh-off-the-programming-room-floor system seems like a good idea, until you “emerge” a new package (say Apache), you have no choice of where to install the package (I like to keep my after-install software in /usr/local) and I was actually told by a GENTOO developer (when I asked if I could do a –prefix thing with the packages) that I was wrong for wanting my program there and that I should be happy with the default, and that there was very little call for that feature so it probably wouldn’t be added anytime in the near future. But also, you can’t choose to install any version of the software but the very latest (including beta’s which aren’t ready for production use) so lets say I want to run PHP 4.1.2 and not 4.2.1 (the latest) with Apache 1.3.26, not 2 (the latest), I can’t do it, (even though this combination of Apache/PHP is best for stability at this point). I absolutely hate these two things (no version control and no prefixing or custom flags), other then that I thought it was a good distribution.
I’ve played a bit with Gentoo and I must say it doesn’t deserve the 1.x version. First, there is no simple way to install it; you have to do it by hand (make sure you have a printed version of INSTALL, or you’ll have problems later). Second, as pointed by blindcoder, it has some really weird dependencies. Third, try to update some software on portage by hand; you’ll see a lot of code, which seems a waste of resources.
I’m not a RPM fan, so what are the other options? http://www.sourcemage.org SourceMage is the perfect (IMHO) source distro. It has a nice install program, the dependencies are sane (if you “cast” [the term they use to download/install a program] vim and don’t have X installed, it will not build gvim – but you can cast it again after the X installation and have a nice full featured graphical editor
) and the “spells” (think it as an eBuild) are simple text files with shell variables. Also, the spell manager allows you to choose what kind of optimizations all spells will have.
Gentoo looks like a 0.1 version near SourceMage…
to update my system is type in sorcery update, and presto! i haven’t tried gentoo, but i use source mage. i like source based distros. rpms = evil.
Um, the poster you criticised did offer help by suggesting that the person with the problem use export USE=”-X” to avoid downloading all of Xfree86 when trying to get Vim or whatever.
And Slow – Gentoo isn’t supposed to be easy to install. I think Mandrake or Lycoris might be more what you are after. Sourcemage sounds interesting – shame I can’t download it! (the links are dead)
Eugenia – is there a filter for posts? What I mean is, could I specify that I can ignore all posts that contain the word “zealot” for example? I really am tired of reading all this pointless reactionary insulting, and anything that uses zealot is rarely worth reading.
ps – thanks for a great site!
It is possible to install ViM without X, but it requires a couple of extra USE flags. You need to specify without X and without gtk, if you leave any of them there it will still download X and compile it.
it’s the same with nethack.
Given some of the earlier comments from other BSD users, I suppose it’s not that surprising that some of you might label the lot of us as “sore losers” or somesuch. If I were to use the same metric, I would take the inflammatory statements favoring linux and arrive at a similar conclusion. As was pointed out, there just aren’t that many BSD articles being posted here, so most of us BSD users tend not to post and the responses you will get are more likely to come from the advocacy crowd.
On that note, I think OSNews does a fair job of covering FreeBSD news (the other BSD’s I follow less closely and cannot comment on). The FreeBSD community mostly exists in the mailing lists hosted at freebsd.org; the use of web sites (whether focused solely on FreeBSD or covering a number of systems), newsgroups, etc. is not as pervasive as it is with the linux community. Covering FreeBSD in any greater level of detail would require following the mailing lists (as Jeremy Andrews of kerneltrap has sometimes done) and being able to cull the wheat from the chaff. The volume alone makes it time consuming, and the latter requirement makes it, shall we say, non-trivial.
ObGentoo: my thoughts on the number of linux distributions have vacillated between “choice is good” and “can’t someone do it right?”. For me, doing it right means installing and upgrading from source whenever possible. So, when I installed Gentoo a month or two ago, I was pleasantly surprised that: 1.it was done right, and 2.it didn’t muck with my FreeBSD partitions (as RedHat has done more than once). I’ve used the FreeBSD ports system for some time now and portage provided the same functionality I needed. I don’t remember if the source for other things like ls, tail, etc. was included but I assume it’s in there somewhere.
The biggest complaint I had about Gentoo was that it only provided one editor during the install process and that if you were not careful the editor would wrap your lines and you’d end up with botched config files. In a source only distribution, you should expect to get people who have been using unix for some time. Give them a little more credit and provide a set of editors, or at the very an editor most of them are already familiar with.
Oh, and it is because of Gentoo that I was introduced to GRUB, which makes a much better boot manager than almost anything else I’ve ever used.
First, let me state that I really like FreeBSD and am looking forward to trying out 5.0. That said, I’d like to point out that Gentoo is a desktop distribution an on the desktop, Linux kicks FreeBSD’s ass. First, the preemptible kernel makes for a much more responsive system. Second, it has much better sound support via ALSA. Third, it has XFS. While FreeBSD’s softupdates-enabled UFS is nice, XFS is ultimately faster and has a bunch of useful tools and features (node monitoring, recovery/backup tools, file attributes, ACLs) that FreeBSD doesn’t. With Linux 2.6, Linux will still probably maintain that lead. I’ve been using the devel kernels now and then, and the latest versions kick ass. They are nowhere near as rock-solid as they should be. I’ve wiped out my filesystem after trying to burn a bad CDR. WinXP and Linux 2.4 both merely froze when I tried to burn the same CDR. But using it, you can see signs of genius here and there.
Unfortunately, this is right, at least partially. VIM can depend on X. So, USE=”-X”. It can also depend on gtk+, which will install XFree. So, USE=”-X -gtk”. VIM does depend on portage. Portage depends on python. Python can depend on tcltk, wihch will install XFree. So, to install VIM without XFree:
USE=”-X -gtk -tcltk” emerge vim
Nethack can depend on gnome or qt, so
USE=”-X -qt -gnome” emerge nethack
Hopefully portage2 will have the capability to have dependant USE flags. Something like USE=”noX” that will set all X and X toolkit flags to -.
Right, but as a workstation system, I don’t see this as a critical problem. I think that people complaining about Gentoo not beeing the perfect server OS completely miss the point.
Adam Scheinberg & Slow
Um, the poster you criticised did offer help by suggesting that the person with the problem use export USE=”-X” to avoid downloading all of Xfree86 when trying to get Vim or whatever.
I know, but if you read many sites frequented by Linux users (osnews, slashdot, linuxtoday, kerneltrap), you’ll see the trend. The help was prefixed with “Well, you should have read the manual.” In this case, it was actually worse, “Maybey you should 5 minutes out of your life to actually read some documentation before forming your opinions…. I suppose that might take some actual effort on your part to find that out.“
One thing that I’ve found very helpful about gentoo is to use/abuse the forums engine.
I’ve found answers to 90+% of my questions there, and learned a LOT about doing non gentoo related stuff on linux that I’d always been meaning to learn but had never gotten around to (incl grub).
Just wanted to compliment you on ignoring the flame posts and helping out the questions. You don’t see that enough in the Linux community.
I enjoyed my testing with Gentoo. Still looking for the perfect BeOS replacement that will not cost me an arm and a leg though.
>I know, but if you read many sites frequented by Linux users (osnews, slashdot, linuxtoday, kerneltrap), you’ll see the trend. The help was prefixed with “Well, you should have read the manual.” In this case, it was actually worse
Mayby your sick of attitude but I’m sick of lazyness and stupidity. The user came out blasting Gentoo, Gentoo Developers, and Gentoo Mailing Lists. All of this could have easily been solved by simply reading the excellent documentation on gentoo.org. The USE flags are introduced in the install guide; furthermore, a 7 page “Gentoo Guide to USE Flags” is right below the install guide.
“That said, I’d like to point out that Gentoo is a desktop distribution an on the desktop, Linux kicks FreeBSD’s ass.”
Let’s see, they both serve as a platform for… X, which is… inherently slow due to the use of sockets for IPC.
You’d be amazed how incredibly slow sockets are. Try benchmarking them sometime.
“First, the preemptible kernel makes for a much more responsive system.”
So are you patching a mainline kernel or using a 2.5 kernel? In either case I have this to say, the FreeBSD task scheduler is much more responsive. FreeBSD has true LWPs and HWPs, as opposed to Linux’s quasi-LWPs created with clone(). Multithreaded applications will simply operate better under FreeBSD, and this includes most of the GUI apps that a “desktop user” would consider running.
“Second, it has much better sound support via ALSA.”
Well, can’t really argue there… I can only say that NICs which work fine in FreeBSD (such as various incarnations of the 3c905C and Intel EtherExpress pro) tend to horribly fail in Linux. Both operating systems have spotty hardware support.
“Third, it has XFS.”
I love XFS and use it for all my fileservers!
“While FreeBSD’s softupdates-enabled UFS is nice”
Very nice for small volumes. Since you don’t really have to worry about fsck times on small volumes used in desktops, you can do things like cache metadata operations! It’s really quite nice.
“XFS is ultimately faster”
Try doing something like rm -r on a large directory in XFS and UFS and see which one takes longer.
“and has a bunch of useful tools and features (node monitoring, recovery/backup tools, file attributes, ACLs) that FreeBSD doesn’t.”
To a desktop user? I would think that the desktop user wouldn’t want all the bells and whistles, and would rather have performance.
XFS is really nice, but unfortunately since it is b-tree based filesystem operations aren’t always linear time as it has to traverse the tree and perform rather complicated insertion and removal operations.
XFS also had a rather nasty issue where it would journal a metadata operation without flushing the buffer cache. If a crash occured during this time, you’d find the file whose metadata had been journaled but not flushed to disk filled with zeroes. I’ve been told this has been corrected, but nevertheless it’s a very nagging issue.
When it comes down to it, Linux is just very new code in comparison. The BSDs have the advantage of being tuned over a period of decades, and have proven themselves to have rock solid stability and superior performance.
Contrast this with Linux, where the entire VMM was replaced in the stable kernel line. Something’s not right there.
I agree that you should never answer with “RTFM” to someone asking for help, but the guy wasn’t asking for help, he was complaining! So I think telling him that he wrong and a friendly RTFM was more than appropriate.
I’m sure that he would have got a friendly answer if he would have really just asked. Because I did!
I like the idea of Gentoo, and I think their documentation is very nice.
The two negative things about Gentoo is that it is still in flux and it takes too long to install.
Once they release a stable build (like Debian’s potato) that isn’t going to change much, Gentoo will be much more desirable to me.
I know that the system is fast once it is installed, but I am constantly changing what’s on my two main systems because my job changes all the time. I need a distro that I can install quickly. Two days for a base system is a little too slow for me.
Who cares what os you use. If you like it use it. Stop telling other people to use it, let them make a choice. I see no problem in pointing out a couple cool features in your favorite os, but there is no need over starting a flame war over opinions. The great thing about all this open source stuff is we get our choice. There’s something out there that suits all our needs. In some people’s case its freebsd, in my case its gentoo.
Yeah. (From a [Mandrake 8.2, Win98, XP Pro, 2000 Pro, Gentoo] user)
Just to address a couple of points in this message thread:
1. To the FreeBSD advocate — Gentoo updated their web page the day 1.2 was “released”. No, they don’t update for every little beta release. Check the forums for that.
2. KPortage is a KDE interface to the portage package management system. It makes life 100x easier, and is very well done.
3. You can run most versions of most packages. You are not restricted to “only the latest” as one person complained. Currently there are build files for Apache 1.3.24 and 1.3.26 but with a little effort you can create files for almost any version. Copy, rename, double-check compile options in file. Drop souce code into folder. Drop MD5 sum file into folder and edit (to add a version string before the actual hash). Emerge.
4. Downside — be careful which packages you remove. Dependencies only work one way — installing. Portage will let you remove ANY package without a complaint. This includes glibc, bash, or anything else. Once you reboot… you’re history.
while i agree that freebsd is nice, i prefer to use linux on my desktop. maybe when freebsd gets nvidia support i will switch – but not now 😉
While I haven’t benchmarked UNIX domain sockets, I seem to recalled the BlueOS people claiming that Linux kernel functions are faster than the equivilent BeOS ones, so I’m sure UNIX domain sockets are fast enough. And if you benchmark X, you’ll notice that for a lot of stuff (like blitting bitmaps and whatnot) X is faster than even DirectX on Windows! The real bottleneck for X (modern versions of XFree I mean) are the toolkits and the underlying process model. On my machine, X is reniced to -11 and KDE is reniced to -10. My Konsole runs at 0, so all console apps (ie big compiles) get run at lower priority. It makes my system incredibly responsive, even under heavy loads. Its a pain to do manual jiggering like this, especially when WinNT and BeOS do it automatically, but once the setup is in place, its transparent.
As for LWPs vs Linux threads, I happen to dislike the LWP/HWP concept. While I can see that it has a purpose for certain server tasks where thousands of threads are needed, but on a regular desktop system there is little advantage to the model over the much more elegant and simple Linux model. Linux, btw, has a really cool process model where there is no distinction between threads and processes. Multiple “threads” are simply processes that share a memory, file, signal handler contexts. All of these can be independently shared by clone().
Two points about XFS. Version 1.1 fixes the delete performance on large trees. Its still probably slower than other systems, but its not really something noticible like it used to be. On most desktops, there are far more file grow operations than deletes, since a file grows many times in its lifetime. Thus, the tradeoff XFS makes (optimize file-grow performance at the expense of delete performance) is IMHO worth it.
See, it is the fractializm, if this is a word, that get us no where fast. Mayhaps, because I am a novice, but if it is not Windows, is it not better? Why get into a pissing contest about small, minute, and normally unimportant things. I use both Linux, Suse 8.0, I think works well for me and Mac Os X. As long as it is not Windows, I am happy. If this pissing contest leads to go things, and a little competition can, then fine, but if not do away with it.
Thank you,
Ramblings of a freed Windows user,
Cashaww
Although considering the nasty tone of remarks back and forth I hate to make yet another BSD vs. Gentoo post, I’ll do it anyway. 😉 FreeBSD, along with the technical advantages and the easier to administrate BSD init system (which it shares, from what I understand, with Slackware) has a port system that works well over a dial-up modem. Gentoo does not work easily out of the box with trying to emerge a system over a dial-up link, and in fact the docs reccomend that you set up a second system with automatic redialing and an ethernet connection to your Gentoo box to get it to install reliably.
FreeBSD doesn’t have that weakness, and it’s easy to keep the entire system up to date with cvsup once or twice a week even over a modem connection (more than that if you’re an up-to-date maniac, less if all you do is update for security purposes – and it allows it to easily be set up just for that for those that need extra stability; or to be set up to track either the -stable or -current (development) branches if you like the bleeding edge). Ports are of course a snap, just like Gentoo; or rather Portage is “just like” BSD. 🙂
It is noteworthy that the two distros viewed as most hacker friendly, Slackware (BSD inits) and Gentoo (port system clone) both immitate parts of BSD that distinguish it from Linux. Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery; but if you have hardware that works OK with FreeBSD, and most people do, why settle for an immitation? 🙂
BTW, I saw some misinformation about nvidia and BSD. Nvidia’s 3D acceleration is not supported, true, but via either the familiar “nv” driver or a more experimental non-3D but 2D accelerated driver, nvidia cards are supported just fine in X; I’m using one now; with no hardware-related problems from it; though I imagine Quake 3 would run real slow on it. 🙁 Luckily, however, a lot of other games, and more serious software among the over 7,000 ports in the FreeBSD ports tree (a greater packaging of software than most Linux distributions), work just fine.