Download the first release candidate of the new version of Gentoo Linux, 1.4. This version is built with GCC 3.2 and includes cutting edge versions of software. In the meantime, the founder and main architect of Gentoo Linux, Daniel Robbins, requests either financial support, sponsorship or even employment or contracting opportunities in order to continue to be able to work on Gentoo.
Gentoo Linux 1.4-RC1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I really like portage, but the Gentoo install just takes too long. I realize that the system is lightening fast once you are done, but two plus days to install is more than I care to do. Admittedly, I’ve only done the from scratch install and not the level 2 or 3 (or whatever they are called). Perhaps it is much better to start from one of these.
I ran Gentoo for a while, and I really liked it (especially since it reminds me of FreeBSD), but I emerged something that the system didn’t like. I then screwed around with the system until I had it all foobarred (totally my fault) and I just didn’t want to spend all weekend compiling so I installed SuSE or Debian; I forget which.
In spite of all my whining, I am looking forward to trying this latest release of Gentoo.
I have an i686, and the default Stages 2 and 3 are built for i686 I think, so if you too have one of these, you can go ahead and start with Stage 3. The above url also includes stages for 386, 486, 586, 586-mmx, 586-k6 builds.
If you have something else (amd or piii or p4) you might want to use Stage 1, change the right GCC optimization flags and then build the rest of the distro for your CPU architecture. Read here which CPU architectures gcc 3.x supports:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.1/gcc/i386-and-x86-64-Options.h…
Personally, I don’t think that I will bother anymore with Gentoo. I like the power of Portange, but it breaks many things when upgrading and it just takes too long compiling. I am waiting for Red Hat 8.0 to be honest. This will be my next main linux distro (I will still keep Gentoo on my hdd, but it won’t be my main distro anymore)
I’ve had a bit of a different experience with Gentoo, I think, than the others on this board. It has given me far less trouble, in all, than either RedHat or Mandrake. I’ve been running it off and on since 1.0_rc3, and exclusivly since 1.3_beta. I’m typing this on a 1.4_beta machine (though, with Gentoo, I’m an emerge world away from the latest and greatest) and I’m amazed at how easy everything is. Sure it takes a little skill to set up, but in the end, its been far easier for me to add a few lines to a text file here and there than it ever was to wade through the mountains of menus that make up a WinXP config. What I like most about Gentoo is that it tries to stick to the standard Linux-y way of doing things (a lot like Debian) and it doesn’t try to be different and put things in weird places (Redhat is really bad at this). In fact, its far easier to take a random HOWTO on the Internet and follow it on a Gentoo system than on any RedHat system. Portage is really great. If you’ve got the CPU power and RAM (2Ghz/640MB here) its absolutely perfect for installing software. Compile times really don’t bother me because most software that I need right now (like some random utility) compiles in a few minutes, while software that takes a long time to compile (KDE!) can wait for an overnight run. Best of all, the newest software makes it into the repository within days. I used to have to go to all these different sites to download 3rd party stuff like the NVIDIA drivers, but know, I can set up the whole system without ever leaving Portage. Plus, moreso than any other distro, it is dead-easy to customize your system. I installed the Xft2 patches for Qt-3.0.5 the other day, and I was amazed that I could do it within the framework of portage (just copied the ebuild and changed a few lines, then emerged) instead of having to work around it. If I f**ked it up, I could just emerge rsync and remerge Qt to back out the changes. Absolutely awesome. Lastly, the speed is as good as you’ve heard. Since this is the only Linux distro I’ve run on my P4, I’m not entirely sure whether it is the P4 optimizations or the GCC 3.2 compiler that makes it so fast, but the combination works wonders. KDE 3.1-beta is almost as responsive as WinXP on my computer when the system is idle, and blows it away when the system is under load. Best of all, the new 2.4.19-r1 kernel seems to resolve all the problems XFS has been having with the preemption patches. I guess, in summery, Gentoo is not for a newbie. Its best to have cut your teeth on another distro before it. However, if you know a little bit about Linux, you’ll find that Gentoo will give you far fewer headaches than most distros, and will reward you with speed and an awesome software installer to boot.
Eugenia, have you tried out SuSE8? I’d like to hear your take on it.
No, I haven’t tried it, and after being at the SuSE booth at LinuxWorld, I don’t think I will try it… 😉
I heard that the latest version had problems with USB mice… (doesn’t affect me though, I still use PS/2 for compatibility with obscure OSes)
… for the past couple of weeks now. I don’t think this article is very clear about how Gentoo works. Since it might leave people confused, I thought I’d clear it up.
The Release Candidate mentioned in the article is NOT the distribution itself. In fact, Gentoo isn’t exactly a distribution at all. It’s referred to as a “meta-distribution” since it basically serves only as a framework and a means to put together your own distribution. The “standard” Gentoo install, no matter which Stage you start with, is a barebones system that isn’t even capable of booting your machine without some work on your part (it doesn’t even have a kernel).
The latest stable Gentoo is 1.2, yet there is NO difference, in terms of available packages, between Gentoo 1.2 and Gentoo 1.4 … the difference is in the version of GCC with which your system will be compiled, among other things (below). To install Gentoo, you download an ISO (or tarball, if you already have a running Linux system and don’t care about having a boot CD around). This ISO will boot a minimal Linux system with all the tools you need to start building your system — and that’s it. The rest is up to you. On the CD, you’ll find 3 tarballs, Stages 1, 2, and 3. Stage one requires you to build every single package on your own machine (not literally! — you simply type “emerge system” and your system will be built according to whatever specs you’ve defined, optimized to your heart’s content). Stage 2 requires a bit less compiling, and Stage 3 will give you a base system (not necessarily optimized as heavily as you’d like) almost ready for its first real boot.
Another key differnce between 1.2 and 1.4 will be the contents of the initial system you boot into to install Gentoo (ie, what tools are available to you — the 1.2 install environment doesn’t support NFS mounts, for instance, while, IIRC, 1.4 does/will). As I said, I’ve been running 1.4 for a couple of weeks (the 1.4 base system is ready and available in a hidden directory on the mirrors, it’s simply the initial environment and ISOs that aren’t finished). I installed 1.4 from the 1.2 boot CD, simply replacing the 1.2 base system tarball with the 1.4 tarball (from my hard drive, of course).
The key point is, it’s misleading to imply that 1.4 offers more cutting edge software than does 1.2 — the portage tree for both, aside from the compiler, is the same. And if you’re feeling lucky, you can even switch your 1.2 box to the new GCC (3.2) and re-compile everything in place … I wasn’t that brave, of course. =)
Also, for those who will be trying Gentoo for the first time: it’s NOT hard, but it is involved and must be done pretty much *exactly* according to the excellent Gentoo docs. You’ll probably hear, “Install from Stage 1, it’ll take longer initially but be faster in the end …” Don’t listen to them. Installing from Stage 1 takes ages and it’s the EASY part. Like I said above, you just type “emerge system” then leave for several hours and come back. You can shave those hours off if you go with a Stage 3 install — and then later, when the real work begins, if you screw up, those hours aren’t wasted. You will still be compiling the rest of the system, such as X, KDE, GNOME, and other various apps, with whatever optimizations you choose. Even unoptimized, Gentoo IS optimized — it’s the only distro I know of that’s shipping i686 binaries by default (contrast this to SuSE and Red Hat with i386 and Mandrake with i586).
So, why go to all that bother? You’ll end up with a system you put together yourself. You’ll know and have the chance to approve installation of every package on your machine. I learned more in a few weeks with Gentoo than I had in all my time with other distros. For the first time, I started to feel as if I truly understood how the various pieces of a Linux system fit together. It’s a great experience, if you understand the intent of the developers and approach it properly. I wouldn’t recommend it to true newbies, but anyone who thinks they know their way around a Linux box should definitely give it a try. But with the excellent docs, intelligent defaults for package installation, and the VERY popular Gentoo Forums, even an MCSE, if he worked really hard, might be able to get it installed without too much fuss …
What? Surely no one thought I’d post without making SOME kind of snide remark about Microsoft? =)
You may want to consider paragraphs.
Hm, I don’t have any problems with SuSE8 and my USB mice.
I been using SuSE 8 Personal Edition ever since it came out. I think, mostly because of Yast 2, it is the friendliest of the “big” distros, edging out Mandrake because package selection is easier. It is surprising, in a way, because they are really server oriented. LOL, from Eugenia’s LinuxWorld report, it doesn’t sound like they’re friendly themselves <g>.
I heard that the greek courts ruled that no game law unjust and got rid of it
… that big, unrelieved block of text just makes my eyes blur out of focus.
As for SuSE8 with USB mice, I used it for a bit on my laptop and it had no problem driving my touchpad AND USB optical mouse at the same time. Ditto for my desktop machine (minus the touchpad).
Everybuddy forgotten Slackware?
I use 8.0/8.1 and i do not believe Suse, Gentoo, RedHat, Debian or
any other/outer space flavour will outpreform my Slackware…
Slackware is Gentoo’s bitch. =)
Sorry, I’ve always wanted to say something like that for, um, pretty much no reason. I’ve never actually used Slackware. I guess that means I’m not a real Linux zealot.
You should Rob,
Its easy to install, easy to configure, easy to maintaine,easy to upgrade and easy to fall in love with it…
From all the distros I’ve looked at so far, gentoo is definitely the one to throw at people who want to learn linux, and learn the nuts and bolts of it. I definitely learned a lot installing this thing, even learned how to set up hardware I never really was able to get working well with redhat or mandrake ever.
Gentoo can definitely be a pain, esp if the “guys” break some of the ebuilds, but then that’s the price of being able to stay up on the cutting edge. I’d never build a production system using gentoo, though…
I made similar good experiences, but after a while… I don’t know… Nothing is really perfect anymore. Nowadays even my X server tends to crash! And I don’t even want to think of recompiling everything for gcc 3.2. To be fair, I did really crazy things with my system so it wasn’t a surprise that I had problems. But the fact that it becomes unstable worries me. There are also some other issues that I don’t really feel like spending time for. My Mozilla is antialiased now (including Galeon2) but those fonts look like crap and Galeon2 crashes constantly. That’s no surprise of course but it somehow tells me that all this experimenting isn’t really worth it. I also don’t feel like fixing the fonts as this isn’t trivial.
So if Red Hat 8 doesn’t suck, I will probably buy it, hoping that it will just run and that it’s interesting enough that I can live without the newest software. Otherwise I will stay with Gentoo, because it’s still the best Linux experience I had so far (after a few years of SuSE, Mandrake and mostly Debian). I also learned a lot, especially about compilation errors.
I love SlackWare and I’m starting to love Gentoo too…but those distros are for totally different puposes (IMHO). SlackWare is very stable, quite secure distribution with very nice package management (now I mean really easy package creation) and absolutely great rc scripts. Everything is where I’m looking for it…and I never had any problem with it (I run few production machines on SlackWare).
Gentoo is cutting edge…and it says almost all…sometimes, something may break, sometimes you have some unexpected problem…but if you know, what are you doing, you can build great system with it…I use it at home as a workstation…it’s soooooo fast when optimized for my processor…and witk WOLK kernel – enabled preempt, latency, supermount, xfs and few other patches, it si the best system, I’ve ever worked on.
Also, somebody mentioned that Gentoo is good to learn Linux…I think, SlackWare is better for this purpose…it’s totally logical…and it’s simple – important thing when you’re learning something…it doesn’t force you to use some obscure scripts like Gentoo’s rc-update (still haven’t read it, so it’s black magic to me ;-))
Seems that Eugenia and Spark (and me) are interested to make the leap for Red Hat when 8.0 comes out. But a few points you guys got wrong
– It is Technical Workstation that have upgrades every 2 years. They would have the other Red Hat packages made from Null.
– Technical Workstation isn’t made for use, but rather those working in office jobs.
Gentoo 1.2 runs wonderfully over here. I’m really looking forward to upgrading to 1.4 after it is released. For those having problems with Gentoo, are you using the etc-update tool (part of the app-admin/gentoolkit package) to maintain your config files? The docs only mention this app in passing, but it is important.
“My Mozilla is antialiased now (including Galeon2) but those fonts look like crap”
Are you using good scalable fonts? I’ve got Mozilla and Galeon running with the MS TrueType fonts, and everything looks great.
“Galeon2 crashes constantly”
Galeon2 is only alpha-quality now. Crashes are to be expected. It may work well for some people, but that doesn’t mean its complete. Galeon 1.2.5 (with Mozilla 1.0) is rock solid for me.
– Technical Workstation isn’t made for use, but rather those working in office jobs.
Put “geek” between “for” and “use”.
I know I read somewhere (can’t recall where) on Mandrake’s site that, in order to make it easier for 3rd parties to support the distro, they intend to move to a 12-18 month cycle, with incremental updates throughout, instead of the present 6-month cycle. I may be remembering wrong, but I think it mentioned something similar for Red Hat (like rajan said, the standard distro, not Technical Workstation).
That would go a long way toward making it easier for ISVs and OEMs to support Linux … with a new release (often binary incompatible with the previous one) every six months, Linux is a moving target when it comes to things like that.
> I know I read somewhere (can’t recall where) on
> Mandrake’s site that, in order to make it easier for
> 3rd parties to support the distro, they intend to move
> to a 12-18 month cycle
Warly mentioned such a possibility in the Cooker mailing list, see here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mandrake-cooker&m=102995987012206&w…
Cheers,
Andreas
I’m considering a move to gentoo in a month or three when I buy a new box and, equally importantly, migrate from 56K.
(No new Mac Cubes on the horizon, so still it’s x86!)
I read a lot about how Pentium 4 performance varies greatly with software; Gentoo might improve things.
However price/performance is a factor. Hence AMD…
I figure any modern CPU will ‘fly’ with custom compiled software, but is ‘fly’ a relative term?
As per bang for buck I’ll probably buy a ‘Barton’ Athlon when they’re released. I’m sceptical that x86-64 will be spectacular in it’s first iteration.
Is there any source of benchmarks for gentoo running on P4/Athlon/Opteron?
Weird, you and me are so alike. I wanted to get Gentoo when I get DSL. Now that I have DSL, I wanted to wait for 1.4. But since I heard a lot of negative things about stablity, moving from Mandrake to it isn’t that fantastic. Now I’m stuck with Debian 3.0.
Plus, i also planned to buy an Barton. But at the way things are going, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy a computer this year. Next year ClawHammer would already be here, and who knows? It might be spectacular. Besides, being the first kid in the neighbourhood to get a 64-bit processor, hehehe, imagine the bragging rights.
“are you using the etc-update tool (part of the app-admin/gentoolkit package) to maintain your config files?”
Sure, since I heard about it. Before I updated the config files manually. That’s not the kind of problems I have.
“Are you using good scalable fonts? I’ve got Mozilla and Galeon running with the MS TrueType fonts, and everything looks great.”
Ehm sure, I’m using MS Arial. But look at this terrible ugly font rendering:
http://server204.serverflex.de/download/uglyfonts.png
I included the preferences panel so you can see that I made damn sure that Arial is used. Other fonts are even worse.
“Galeon2 is only alpha-quality now. Crashes are to be expected.
Sure, that’s what I said. I just realised because of this that I don’t really want to be on the bleeding edge anymore.
BTW, Mozilla 1.1 crashes just as hard now. I guess that’s because of Gtk2 and Xft, because it was rock solid for me before. Don’t feel like recompiling this now (Mozilla takes ages). But even worse are the X crashes, sometimes right while I’m working on something… Not very often though luckily. But still…
I’ve been using Gentoo almost exclusively since around 1.something. (Maybe a little before, but I don’t really remember
and I’ve had no problems with stability.
Whenever something broke it was because I used a masked ebuild (not deemed stable) or was too creative with my use of make flags
Well, when I say I’ve no problems I also need to say that I’ve used gcc 2.95.3 all the time. I tried emerging gcc 3.1 when it came out. It didn’t really seem unstable, but I had trouble with different things like Java, so I dumped it again. I’ve heard lots of stories about instability with gcc3.x, so maybe you should try sticking with the 1.2 iso.
It is most definately the fastest linux I’ve tried. I picked up several seconds on execution and load times on many applications when comparing to mandrake, for example. And the system in general is more responsive.
And portage… I love portage ;D
I can warmly recommend Gentoo. It’s easy, speedy and fun
– Anti
I’ve tried most of the Linux Distros out there. Once they are loaded gentoo really is fast. But I don’t like waiting for the compile times either. Right now SUSE 8.0 is probably my favorite, but ask again tomorrow. What I like about SUSE is that is updates all of your Window Managers application menus when you install a new application.
Yast2 is great. Installing packages from the web, configuring your box is all easy. I also like Mandrake. I have only run 9.0RC1 of it though. Haven’t tried the RC.
Just my 2 cents.
>Technical Workstation isn’t made for use, but rather those working in office jobs.
Meaning rest of the world but hackers.
Well, as soon as my PayPal-account is activated I’m gonna give
them 20 bucks. If it’s possible I’m gonna do it each month.
It may be a tiny ammount, but hey… “may little is much”
which file system did your gentoo setup use? Reiserfs is noted as unstable, if you run that one that might just be the reason you are having problems.
If you run ext3 or xfs, I don’t know.., all the 3 gentoo boxes I’m using have had no problem whatsoever..
I have an HP ZT 1150 Notebook. With SuSE 8 it kept changing the USB port it worked with. In fact the first time it happened I stupidly went out and bought a new optical mouse. I now have two. Each time you boot there was an excellent chance you would have to switch ports. They also had numerous other problems including the DVD/CD-RW drive mounting. The touchpad also never worked in conjunction with the mouse.
SuSE is very unfriendly. I reported the problem (using my 1 free support incident) to SuSE. I got a very sarcastic response back telling me it was a known issue and to search the database, with a link to the entry. I promptly uninstalled SuSE.
Ext3. My system was also rock solid for most of the time. I compiled X once with a patch for antialiased fonts (looked quite good but blurry). This was stable. Now because the Mozilla fonts looked so ugly I recompiled X without this patch (the default ebuild) and since then I’m having the occasional crashs. And it was completely unrelated to the Mozilla font issue, they still suck.
This just showed me that all this trying isn’t worth it… Whenever I do that I end up with a mess and more time spent working on my desktop than anything else.
I’m just waiting for someone providing a really really well working desktop that lasts for a long time without breakage. Maybe Red Hat will deliver this time. Or Ximian on Red Hat.
I’ve installed and worked with just about every distro out there. I’ve purchased several that were complete disasters and those that just worked. At the top of my list is Slackware. It’s a workhorse. As for Gentoo, I never had the patience. SuSE8 is ok if you like carying around almost 10 CDs in order to install that missing package. The internet package service is the worst I’ve seen. NetBSD is sloppy and requires too many CDs. FreeBSD is having mgmt problems and it shows in their releases. OpenBSD is getting better, but the hardware docs don’t do much for me. RedHat and Caldera are too busy fighting with M$. RedHat, Caldera and SuSE all offer an email server version a web server version and so on, and an enduser version. How useless is that? And finally, for the most useless version award, the RedHat Technical User version.
-R
You can still install all of the regular developent tools on the new Redhat corporate distro. I have tested out null, and it comes will gcc, python, perl, and the rest of the usualu stuff.
“How useless is that?”
Not at all. Those are all still the same system, just specialised on one task. The “technical workstation” of Red Hat won’t really be different for the user than any other distribution. You can do the same things, it’s the same software, etc. Just that this time you will get a real finished and reliable desktop system. In Theory. Everything sounds great so far. Like the integrated and complete desktop configuration tools, the nice font support, the excellent design, the integrated authentication (will ask for your password whenever it needs root authentication and then shows a symbol in your system tray while you are authenticated), the clean applications menu, the software installation software, etc, etc.
That’s what I want for a modern desktop system, not just the ability to install all available Unix software.
I thought that it wouldn’t be that hard to get the same things working manually, but then I had to realise that it’s not quite that trivial to do the work that dozens of employees do fulltime for Red Hat.
If you are a Slackware user, guess what? Red Hat didn’t build that version for you, nor any other Linux geeks you is willing to spend days managing their software without any package manager.
It is made for the corporate desktop. Not on a corporate desktop? Move away, you aren’t a its target market. It is like installing Lineo on a IBM mainframe and complaining how useless it is.
Besides, have you even used the beta? I feel in love with it. I swore to buy the full boxed set as soon it is available in Malaysia.
I installed it on a notebook, which was an interesting process. I’ve had good and bad experiences installed many of the pre-packaged distributions on this particular notebook, so was curious how Gentoo would cut it.
The installation went very smoothly, depite having to muck about with PCMCIA drivers for my wireless card. Once it was up and built, it ran very quickly and smoothly.. in fact, much better than other recent distro’s I’ve tried on it.
People have made comments about its stability, and I’m not sure why they have had problems. I think, as with any system, once its running you can leave it alone and it will be fine. I would be perfectly happy running this as a production OS, but I wouldn’t be doing updates every 2 days to see what happened. In fact, I think this would make a good server OS, since you have so much more control over package compilation and configuration than using straight RPMs. One interesting note that I haven’t seen mentioned, is that they offer a GRsecurity patched kernel out of the box, which is great. I wouldn’t run a linux server without that, and they make it very easy to get up and running with a high level of security.
Speed wise, it may be faster, but its not a doubling in speed or anything similar, atleast on this machine. But, its quick and easy, and I would recommend it for people.
Ok now, since I changed the font setting from “Agfa Monotype Arial” to “MS Arial” (stupid me), the Mozilla and Galeon crashes are gone! Also the fonts (at least the small ones) look great now in Mozilla but still bad in Galeon2, although the font settings are _exactly_ the same. But it’s ok now.
I am on a Gentoo laptop that I built myself and, while it is a great system and I am having alot of fun with it, I am probably going to go with RH 8 when it comes out.
The main reason is that I am dreading the upgrade to gcc 3.2 and also I can’t see myself ever going through that long install again. Yes, I know that there are precompiled CDs, but I hate what comes before, and you still have a whole lot of compiling to do once you get your system up and running. fdisk is antiquated and the gui install beta did not work for me.
All bitching aside, Gentoo does rock, and I will probably pull over all my machines once there is a good GUI or textmode installer that takes less than a few hours (so that I can build packages that I want, or rebuild current packages once the system is up and running).
It crashes right after sending my last comment. In a series. Whatever.
Did somebody try it? I enjoy it.Very good distro.
Gentoo 1.4 RC – hw-detect
I run as described on login screen – hw-detect – and get – command not found.
Does anybody had this ?
Hi,
Yes “hw-detect” isn’t there yet. We are going to be adding it in the next rev of the CD; also, you can find the stage1 tarball in /nocompress, which isn’t in our 1.2-era install docs yet. The “official” 1.4_rc1 release (with updated docs, new rev of the CD) will likely happen tonight.
There is something weird with my Gentoo install. For some reason, when emerging something, X gets really slow. The mouse pointer keeps “jumping” around the screen (much like windows, when it’s heavy loaded). But, with Slack, I can load up all consoles compiling something (with all optimizing stuff) and run X without a glitch. Pretty weird, huh?
Thanks Daniel !!! I didn’t expect you to reply here ))))
Thanks for the great job !!!
Julio Biason: Try compiling the “Preemptible Kernel” part into the kernel. That should take care of mouse jitters and stops during compiles. Does for me, anyway.
– Anti
This is strange, but when I’m turning on antyaliasing in Gnome, most of the fonts disapear.
Is this normal?
Yes!
It all depends on your fonts, lots of fonts do not
render in antialiasing mode so you will not be ebale to use
them…
What are you problems with gentoo lately?
I use to avoid rsync during weekends since most people star committing ebuilds the friday and end sunday…
rsync on a low trafic day and you’ll be fine =)
Ginks, your the type of person that gives linux a bad name. Spreadig FUD against anyone who doesn’t use “your” l33t distro, because obvisouly the rest suck and are for lamers. Guess what, your the lamer. The only wrong with any of those distros was the moron that was installing them.
it’s just the least of the evil.
Portage system is good but could be better.
I run gentoo as my main linux system and and ’emerge’ almost every night. So it’s kind of up-to-date. Should it be in crontab ?
Problems that I see :
– compiling is taking damn too long. And most of the time it’s not gcc but configure script running. Why not create a config.cache once and then substitute it – it would speed up things.
– shell scripts. I did a simple script that run diff on ._cfg files and prompt you for update. And I was really surprised to see that etc-update package is doing the same but worse – it does it in the loop and you cannot pipe it to a paginator. And while I thought of my little script as a kind of crochets for real thing, ‘etc-update’ is praised as the greatest tool.
I put pdksh as a login shell and Gentoo choked.
I looked in the /etc/profile – omigosh! if [ `whoami` == “root” ] ? have your ever seen systems where superuser is not ‘root’ ? So typical for linuxoids – very little knowledge on how real Unix works. In this example, /etc/profile has only system wide settings, $HOME/.profile has user specific settings. That horrible “if” doesn’t have to be there at all. And it’s not a bug – it’s the style, can’t fix it – it’s everywhere.
Then why do I use it – it’s nice small Linux where I have very few packages installed (I stay out of X almost all the time), I have the least amount of pain with it of all Linux distributions I ever used. I boot it for couple hours to do my job, test some code and I’m off.
It’s kind of sad story for Daniel. It’s tough market but I’m pretty sure he get some decent job easily. Good luck.
i used redhat, and slacks (and many more), found slacks is damn right and fast too bad it’s not running j2sdk-forte or websphere…. i talked to patrick of slacks and he doesn’t have any idea how to turn the business into corporate level.
geezzz remember the old days when SLS was the only one, and everybody copying slacks (including redhat).
patrick wake up!
I really wanted to test it, being one of the few left (just kidding, of course) using more FreeBSD than Linux-whatever, but I come across a couple of major troubles:
(I used the ‘big’ i686 boot CD, and headed straight for stage3 install)
1 – I already have 3 OS’s living on my main HD, and with LILO there’s no way, as far as I know, to politely add a 4th OS, just laying above the goddammed cylinder 1024. GRUB!!!
2 – I have an ADSL link via PPPoE: guess it, as soon as I installed Gentoo (yes, I did replace my main HD for this attempt), I found myself stuck w/o any chanche of connecting to the net for emerging the PPPoE-related ports, or whatever the name under Gentoo. Catch-22?
As a result, I simply scratched anew the temp main HD, and put back in place my happy 3 OS’s, w/o Gentoo…
I think there’s is a moral in my little story: why the heck Gentoo is not distributed with a nice extra CD full-chocked of applications??? This way, one could decide whether it’s the case to e-teleport whatever (s)he needs, or simply to (download and) slide in a second CD and being able to run Gentoo at once, maybe even w/o net access. btw, this latter is often the case if you want to install on a corporate server.
I spotted the name of Daniel Robbins above, so I hope these little suggestions can be evaluated.
Daniel, please keep in mind that FreeBSD, the father of the port system, does publish at least 4 CD’s for each release.
I understand you’re proud of the portage system, and you really deserve credit for it, but for godsake please allow the less technically minded to quickly start w/o too many complications. I’m sure Gentoo will spread much more and faster, this way.
Corrado