Victor Padra from Venezuela ported Red Hat’s Anaconda GUI installer on top of Gentoo 2004.0.
Gentoo 2004.0 Graphical Installer Based on Anaconda Available
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Eugenia Loli
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That’s the only part about Gentoo that I really didn’t care for. Installing it takes too much time (even if you do the binary install)… Three cheers for Victor!
This is quite impressive as I am sure everyone knows that gentoo is normally a total command line installation. I will probably dl & try this installer tonight. On seeing this news post, I remembered the Gentoo Linux Install Script at http://glis.sourceforge.net/ . I downloaded the latest tbz2 & found that the GLIS has not been updated in a while but I think I might be able to hack it & smack it as it is shell scripted in bash. GLIS is also impressive as it is not one big script or main() but has been broken into separate scripts that contain managable functions.
Kudos for someone pushing aside the NIH & doing what was once believed as “not wanted”.
I think that you may have missed the point of gentoo. This distrobution is for the speed freaks. using a gui installer and binary packages deffeates the whole purpose of gentoo in my opinion. I learnt so much from bootstraping and going through the works. The gentoo documentation is very good and the forms are excelant. With that said congradulations to victor I wonder what his motive in doing this is?
Is this available in the 2004.0 release or do you need to download the ISO from his website?
No, this distro isn’t JUST for speed freaks. I use it because I love PORTAGE. No other distro is so easy to update and maintain. I also love the Gentoo forums. There is a ton fo useful information there.
You can download iso’s from the webpage, it’s quite slow at the moment no doubt from all the osnews traffic
In addition to a system built from the ground up just for you and your hardware, Gentoo also offers an alternative package manager with up-to-the-minute builds, as well. Gentoo also has great documentation and a nice community. So, there are other reasons to run Gentoo besides compiling from scratch. Adding a GUI installer might not be for everyone but, if it fills the needs of some, then it is good.
darren
Disclaimer: I haven’t used Gentoo in a couple of years because I got tired of crossing my fingers to use the package manager. Maybe that has changed now.
<sarcasm>I wounder why they didnt port Suse’s installer?</sarcasm>
I hate to see this article end up on /.
“I use it because I love PORTAGE. No other distro is so easy to update and maintain.”
I just finished setting up an installation of Arch Linux. Hard to imagine an easier way to update and maintain than this. If you want a package managment/dependency checking distro. You should try this one.
Still keeping Slack as my primary though 🙂
If he had ported the Mandrake installer. Not that I will ever use Mandrake again (too many bugs, even in the latest edition), but Mandrake has got the install down pat.
I hope this stays maintained. I have installed Gentoo on my fair share of machines, and although I don’t mind the current method, it does get tedious
I would like to see the installer exist as a seperate project from the Gentoo guys, because I think that the command line install should be the main focus for the devs to keep bug free.
We need an installer, even if it was something from the command line for install eg: install -g anything. Geeks can still be geeks, newbies can use a good OS. Elitest attitudes must go away in order for Linux to take off.
I have been trying for 20 minutes now to start the download of the P4 iso, but this torrent is not seeded!
Have to agree, Arch Linux’s package management is darn good. Much faster than Gentoo’s; quicker to update the package database, easier to remove packages (and dependencies), and only basic shell scripting is required to write new packages.
We need an installer, even if it was something from the command line for install eg: install -g anything. Geeks can still be geeks, newbies can use a good OS. Elitest attitudes must go away in order for Linux to take off.
Elitist attitudes and installation routines have been long gone for such distributions as Mandrake and Redhat. In fact you won’t find much in the way of elitist attitudes on the Gentoo forums except for the occasional noob who is a little too proud of his successful install.
There are different distributions for a reason. I don’t think a distribution that tries to be everything to everyone will ever succeed. There is too much pressure to support too many different things, and the quality will suffer. With that said I don’t mind someone coming up with a graphical installer as long as it’s not taking away from gentoo developer resources. It’s not difficult to install it manually as long as you know how to read. The gentoo docs are quite good and many noobs who have never even used Linux before have installed it. I’ve used Anaconda before and to be honest I don’t know how it would work with Gentoo without limiting the flexibility that the manual Gentoo install provides.
Have to agree, Arch Linux’s package management is darn good. Much faster than Gentoo’s; quicker to update the package database
It’s faster because Gentoo has a lot more packages than Arch.
easier to remove packages (and dependencies)
It’s not difficult to remove packages in Gentoo. The only problem is removing all their dependencies. This is currently being worked on but I don’t think it will be usable for a while.
only basic shell scripting is required to write new packages.
Ebuilds are written in bash.
For the most part i agree that the elitest attitude is non-critical to linux adoption, but there are numerous distributions for linux out there. Why should all the major(?) distro’s be easy and target the home user and not the elitest user/developer? I think catering to both the elitest and desktop users would be beneficial. This is a good project, as long as there always remains the choice to keep the cli-only option open and it does not become a major task to access it. In fact it is my opinion that gentoo stick with the cli-only approach and make a gui installer secondary. After all, gentoo is a self-proclaimed developers distro, i do not recall ever hearing it is officially targeting the nominal userspace.
I agree that a graphical installer should be maintained, so that people who aren’t comfortable doing all the mini-steps themselves…or maybe just dont have the time…. can take advantage of all the benefits of Gentoo Linux.
It would be nice if the LiveCDs had a graphical binary installer as *AN OPTION*… but also maintained the ability to manually install from scratch…. thereby pleasing both crowds.
Another plus would be to have a graphical installer that asked a bunch of questions that users might know about their PC (and some questions about the desired install interface—Shell? KDE? GNOME? etc.). Then, this installer automagically customizes the optimizations/config files to correspond to the user responses. Following this, it would run a completely automated compilation process in the background, but show the user a %’age in progress (and maybe estimated time to completion).
…the end result… a completely optimized, compiled from scratch Gentoo system…ready for full use… but required little to no interaction by the user outside of answering a few simple questions.
*Here’s to choice!*
I always hated diggingf around trying to find the refresh rates for my monitor or getting my mouse to work. The first time I installed Gentoo I learned a lot. The second time I installed Gentoo it was just a hassle. It was a great learning experience but I doubt I’ll ever do it again. Now if Gentoo officially supported this new installer I might give it another go.
Why does every gentoo article get ruined by arch linux zealots. Guess what, we tried your distro and we don’t like it. Stop trying to “convert” us.
It would have been nice to know about this ahead of time…I just spent 12 hours yesterday installing a stage1 tarball…and I’m typing this from lynx as xfree compiles 🙂
Although a single gentoo installation is rather simple, I have to admit that performing multiple installations is rather obnoxious. I think having a graphical installer which installs a simple base system (as I believe this does) is a great improvement on this. I think it’s a great benifit to have a basic working installation which you can then use portage to update and customize. I’d love to have a system up and running in a sumwhat useable state in a few minutes and then use portage to update it while still being able to work on it as it downloads, builds, and installs the latest and greatest.
You are absolutlely correct, i would like to see a kickstart port or kickstart-like application for automated gentoo installations for the sake of mass installation via whatever prefered medium.
“Why does every gentoo article get ruined by arch linux zealots. Guess what, we tried your distro and we don’t like it. Stop trying to “convert” us.”
A wee bit rich coming from a Gentoo fan, isn’t it? I’m sick of hearing about how wonderful goddamn portage is.
Is there an iso coming with this? From what I’ve read on the ‘weeeb’ Gentoo seems pretty impressive, but it doesn’t seem like something that I would try — Yet! I want to learn how to use Gentoo — not learn how to install it!
Sorry for being such a newb, but I think others would feel the same way too!
I love seeing elements from one distro in another… it’s just taking the whole component sharing thing one step beyond! In many areas of my life, I’m a purist, but not in picking software! This looks totally cool and I just now got hooked up on the torrent for the AthlonXP ISO. JOIN ME and we can try this thing out for ourselves.
i am glad this got ported….i hope is is mantained
No. Gentoo is not elitist. It’s about perfomance and choice. It just happens to be that elitists are more “patient” in acquiring those two things. The reason why portage was created was to avoid the lack of choices and “dictation” in other distro’s. It has _nothing_ to do with being an elitist, power user, or developer. Only a noob would think otherwise.
But in the end, every user wants performance and choice, but the way to go about it usually requires more work than the average. It’d be an even bigger testament to portage’s excellence if an even easier “choice” was made possible, without compromising “performance”. Want to be a true elitist? Then write something that makes that possible.
Make portage even better.
Just because you can type “emerge”, it doesn’t make you “elite”. That’s no different than a script kiddie who thinks he’s a hacker.
“That’s no different than a script kiddie who thinks he’s a hacker.”
Just for the record, where does one draw the line between script kiddies and crackers?
been trying all night to get into the p3 and p4 torrent hives all night without success. any mirrors yet?
Ophidian
as for the arch vs gentoo debate, either or is fine, however arch didnt ship with the kernel source as a package on the install cd. i had to have the source to get my network card working properly on this box (luckily arch just uses straight kernel.org sources so this was easy to remedy). past that i think both are well done distros, albeit targetted at different people.
No luck here either with the torrent links …
hacker != cracker
i would say that most script kiddies do qualify for that cracker label as well.
The author of the story could do with actually doing some research. Victor Prada did this hack almost two years ago already. This new thing is just another hack on top of it. Please note that this isn’t an official thing, we’re working on an installer project. To find out more, hop onto irc.freenode.net and join #gentoo-installer. There’s lively discussion on the mailing lists and the irc channels with the progress of the official NON-RPM based installer.
Gentoo is all about choice!
This is the kind of efforts that drive the OSS world forward!
If people need GUIs, then let them develop it, and then…
share and enjoy!
I agree that the main installation method is very educational,
though, and should be kept as is, though.
But there is room for both! Don’t be so narrowminded!
Take this from a geek who thinks the command line is the most powerful tool in the Linux world, and has no need
myself of GUI-installers himself.
Horay for a nice effort! Keep up the good work!
Does anyone know a mirror? I like Gentoo, but these guys need to be more on the ball about not reporting new stuff until it is out. When 2004:0 was released I couldn’t find it for 2 days on the mirrors…now this. Heavy traffic should make torrents go faster, but there are no seeds.
Once/if this becomes more robust it could be very nice. I’d love to see hooks into portage instead of using rpm (like Debian is doing with dpkg).
And, in theory, there could be a graphical installation for Stage 1 or 2, even. If it was developed well, you could have all of the power with none of the hassle.
Then all we’d need is synaptic for portage… and Gentoo could be easy to use even for a beginner.
Think the idea of install Gentoo in 30 minutes only.
How about this for an idea: a graphical installer gets a base system up and going, and then kicks off an “emerge world” which recompiles everything in the background ‘niced’ (which automatically picks up again when you restart your machine)?
Phillip.
Has anybody managed to download more than 1.5 MB?
These torrents are not seeded!
Why give people false hopes?
This is pathetic. I’m online with over 60 peers showing and no seeds. Whoever set this up is an idiot.