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Gentoo 2005.0 Released 425

Posted by Zonk from the latest-and-greatest dept.
mintshows writes "According to Gentoo Planet, the first gentoo release of the year, 2005.0, is out. You can download the 2005.0 ISOs from the torrents at http://torrents.gentoo.org/ . Of course, current Gentoo users can just emerge to the latest and greatest as always."
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Gentoo 2005.0 Released More

Gentoo 2005.0 Released

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  • Darn it! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:30AM (#12064204)
    I just finished compiling 2004.999999!

  • compile on! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by qewl ( 671495 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:33AM (#12064218)
    Has anyone had any experiences with the lengthy compilation having a bad impact on their hard drive? I've long been wondering and considering trying Gentoo. And to those who are very experienced in Gentoo, has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end?

    • Re:compile on! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lachlan76 ( 770870 )
      It's not gonna screw with your hard drive, that shouldn't be anything to worry about.

      And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

      But others may disagree.

      • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pyite ( 140350 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:51AM (#12064296)
        And from my experience, yes, the time I spend compiling stuff is worth it for all the learning and flexibility in the end.

        Yea, it starts out that way, like six years ago when I was grabbing the GIMP from CVS on a regular basis just for fun. Then you discover Debian and recover your time, realizing that except for special cases, compiling yourself isn't worth it.
        • It's not like anything I use is particularly time critical though...I can just start compiling before I go to bed and then 99% of the time it's done by the morning.

        • Re:compile on! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ThJ ( 641955 ) <thj@thj.no> on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:42AM (#12064454) Homepage
          I agree very strongly with this. Although I'm a geek, that doesn't mean things *have* to be as complicated as possible.

        • The whole "learning" thing (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bonch ( 38532 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:55AM (#12064485)
          I used to be a Gentoo guy after rolling my own LFS install. A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning? At most, you learn how to partition correctly. Everything else is handled with automated scripts that you just set flags for if you want to customize. When you install packages, you just emerge it, and it does all the compilation for you. So what exactly is being taught here? Just curious.

          For a real good time, Linux From Scratch will actually give you insight into what's going on. No automated scripts there (though there are some available for LFS veterans who don't want to do it all again).

          • Re:The whole "learning" thing (Score:5, Insightful)

            by MyDixieWrecked ( 548719 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @11:39AM (#12066050) Homepage Journal
            it's kinda closer to learning at your own pace.

            Sure, everything's handled by automated scripts, but there's still a lot of learning that's going on. You manually set a lot of information that's not there by default (hostname, dnsdomainname, etc) and manually set your internet settings in config files. I know in some X-based distros, there's GUI wizards for all that stuff.

            Also, installing gentoo gives you a feel for all the things in the kernel. You can see "holy crap, I can compile in support for this Wacom tablet?!" where as if you install RedHat or whatever, you may not be able to even get the thing working. ...not that I've ever even tried to get my wacom tablet working in linux... just that I noticed there's support for it in the kernel...

            also, the thing I like most about Gentoo isn't that everything's compiled for my machine specifically, even though that is nice, but rather the fact that a base Gentoo install is barebones. There's nothing. No ftp command, no hostx. Just the essentials. If I'm putting together a machine that's just going to be an FTP/rsync server, why do I need all that other crap that comes in a standard install?

            I've never used Debian. Just Mandrake, Gentoo, Yellowdog, LinuxPPC, and RedHat, and yeah, I know you can tell it to do a minimal install, but Gentoo's installation handbook is taylored to people installing a minimal base system and just gets them started.

            Gentoo's learning experience is 'learning by immersion.' Much like moving to Japan to learn japanese, you learn simply by being up to yer neck in the whole thing.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It wont hurt your hard drive, but it might try your patience.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Informative)

      by atrader42 ( 687933 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:39AM (#12064246)
      I'd shift those around a bit. The only real liability I've found is the compile time (which can be pretty drastically reduced with the use of some tools. Gentoo has tutorials). I would absolutely move learning and tweaking into the power/cusomizability category (though I haven't found much of a speed improvement over pre-compiled software in most cases, so that probably isn't the best reason to try gentoo). I started out with redhat 9, and although it did what I wanted for the most part, when I had a problem, it was usually pretty hard to fix since I didn't really know what was going on. Now that I've done a couple gentoo installs, though only stage 3, I must admit, I know much better what causes certain problems. In addition, I love being always up-to-date and not having to worry about cruft.

      I'm a computer science student, and love learning all I can about computers, so maybe some of those are not advantages for you. However, if you're into experimentation and the latest and greatest, gentoo is a great way to play with it all.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Funny)

      by BigBuckHunter ( 722855 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:40AM (#12064249)
      Why would "compilation" impact a hard drive? It has no more impact than watching lengthy porn videos (normally done during the compilation).

      BBH

    • Re:compile on! (Score:3, Informative)

      by John Hurliman ( 152784 )
      I don't know, I use binary packages for just about everything unless I want the latest bleeding edge stuff or it's just a small trivial package. Gentoo doesn't MAKE you compile everything, it's just the default option.

      But to answer your question, I've had a fully compiled system started from stage one, and didn't have any hard drive problems. Also didn't notice any visible performance difference, but the customizability has kept me with Gentoo for a long time now.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mstromb ( 869949 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:44AM (#12064270)
      Let me say that I'm not a very experienced gentoo user. Not a very experienced linux user either. Oh, I've tried dabbling for the longest time, my interested started long, long ago when I found some RH5 CDs someplace.

      Forward to now. Now, I'm building a media center-ish pc. Also acting as a fileserver. Uses wireless, with WPA encryption and all that cool stuff.

      Now, I could have gone with some other distro and saved myself quite a bit of time (I'm reinstalling it for the 3rd time as I write this), but honestly, gentoo is just plain fun to set up and I've learned way too much for me to just put it down now.

      There are tons of ways to get it started. I've always opted to use a minimal livecd, but bootstrapping from knoppix or another livecd works well too.

      Portage is just awesome, the most package-specific setup you'll ever really need to do is edit a new config file. There's even a tool to let you easily merge old config files when new revisions come out. And while I don't know how much speed I'm getting out of compiling everything from source, I do know what's on my computer, as I compulsively check use flags just to see what I can do with my system. With portage, I've found incredibly useful software I never knew existed, and don't know how I lived without. It's all about choices, choices, choices. And the only penalty for changing your mind is a bit of your time.

      My only bad experiences stem from me using insane compiler flags that mess up your system completely. I had no idea it was possible to screw up rm, but I managed to do it. My hardware is also not the best, I went for cheap and older components I had lying around. However, gentoo hasn't told me "no" yet, I've just needed to be clever about doing things, which has taught me a huge amount about how linux, and computers in general, work. I've always been the "computer guy" around here, but I just feel... closer ;)

      So long story short, I think gentoo is really, really worth it if you've got some spare time and some curiosity.

      And being able to use bleeding-edge everything is just cool.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TexVex ( 669445 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:48AM (#12064286)
      Are you just being silly? Think about a TiVo, which records video real-time continuously while powered on. DirecTiVo systems can and do record two video streams at times, while playing back a third. All using regular old IDE hard drives.

      Compiling some software for a few hours is a drop in the bucket.
    • Frequent read/write of a hard drive does not damage it, infact the platters would be better off the more you use it. MTBF take into account the circuitry, servos, etc. In other words-nothing to worry about.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jafar00 ( 673457 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:56AM (#12064324) Homepage
      If you compile Gentoo on a slower system (PII, PIII etc) you will notice a huge increase in performance over a pre-packaged system. I have a PII-366 laptop that could not play movies until I installed Gentoo on it. Sure, it took 4 days to get everything installed, but in the end the old laptop is now quite usable with a cutting edge, new OS rather than just opting for the recommended win98 ;)

      • Re:compile on! (Score:2, Informative)

        by bonch ( 38532 )
        Unfortunately, benchmarks show that there is no marked performance boost compiling everything. Mostly, the things that affect performance most from compilation are the kernel and libc.

    • fragmented fs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cryptoluddite ( 658517 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:22AM (#12064393)
      The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation caused by all the compiling and updating files. I think it isn't so much that the files are fragmented as spread out thin across the disk... that's because you're always compiling something and creating system files with different amounts of space in use.

      I've tried different filesystems such as jfs, reiser4 (using -mm kernel), and ext3 of course and none of them really solved the problem. Reiser4 is the best overall, but suffers from several-second long pauses when doing file-io as in rebalances the tree, which can be really irritating when :wq from vi hangs for a while. The best solution I have found is to create a fairly large partition and mount tmpfs onto /tmp then bind to /usr/tmp and optionally to /usr/portage/distfiles or portage cache dir. Creating a loopback device file and putting portage on it helps but the real problem IMO is all the files from compiling. Over time this has a large impact.

      Other that that gentoo is awesome. I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts. The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update. Once you figure out the interactive merge and what files to actually care about (/etc/conf.d and /etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.

      • Re:fragmented fs (Score:4, Informative)

        by bonch ( 38532 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @04:15AM (#12064568)
        I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts.


        And people wonder why Gentoo users are stereotyped? All three of those statements aren't always true.

        1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

        2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

        3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

        I'm not bashing people who use Gentoo. I'm just saying, it's not some perfect distro that does everything great. And compilation is so overrated and provides no benefits. I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu, so that's just me.

        • Re:fragmented fs (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Lussarn ( 105276 )
          I wiped my three year old Gentoo install once I discovered Ubuntu

          And thats the bigest strengths of gentoo. While other distros "can" function three years from initiall install without distribution upgrades Gentoo has this one nailed down. A three year old install function very close to a newly installed machine. For desktop use thats just wonders.

        • Re:fragmented fs (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Mornelithe ( 83633 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @06:08AM (#12064806)
          1.) So, where's your Gnome 2.10 then? Before anybody mentions ~x86, that's no different from unstable on Debian or just installing the package yourself on any other distro.

          I doubt that it's easier to track down packages outside of a repository---in addition to any dependencies they may have---than it is to unmask the ~x86 Gnome builds in Gentoo and have dependencies resolved for you.

          I don't know anything about Debian, so I can't comment on it. Is it possible to install only Gnome 2.10 from unstable, and have everything else from stabe/testing (I assume it is, but I thought I'd ask)?

          2.) There are sometimes configuration issues with Gentoo; they are mentioned elsewhere in this discussion.

          There are sometimes configuration issues with Mac OS X, and every other large software system on earth.

          For instance, etc-update absolutely sucks and the Gentoo devs refuse to replace it with better solutions that have already been offered.

          Portage has come with dispatch-conf for a while now, although it requires some setting up, so it's probably less used/advertised than etc-update.

          3.) Gentoo's packaging system sometimes creates versioning conflicts. I've personally had to fix a broken system twice. Check the Gentoo forums for all the other issues users sometimes have.

          Yes, sometimes there are version conflicts in Portage, just as there in every operating system. Perhaps the grandparent was saying that in his experience, there are fewer version conflicts than with other systems he's used. Or that he hasn't encountered any, even though some obviously exist at times, since anything else is nearly impossible. Sometimes people use hyperbole in everyday situations, and not everything they say is meant to be taken exactly literally.

          compilation is so overrated

          This is true.

          and provides no benefits.

          This is untrue. I quite enjoy my ability to install mplayer without installing directfb, gtk 1.2, esound, JACK, and other things I'll never use, while other people have an easy way to install mplayer so that it can make use of all those things.

          Ubuntu is nice, and maybe when I buy my next computer, I'll use it (or, Kubuntu, rather) instead of Gentoo. However, Gentoo does have advantages over Ubuntu (and vice versa) depending on who you are.

      • Re:fragmented fs (Score:3, Informative)

        by szap ( 201293 )
        The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation

        You might want to look into XFS, particularly xfs_fsr ("filesystem reorganizer for XFS" from the xfsdump package in most distros). Works on mounted filesystems.

        Higher CPU and mem usage than other fs, though. YMMV.

      • Re:fragmented fs (Score:4, Interesting)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Monday March 28, 2005 @08:18AM (#12065071)
        Seeing how Portage's temp location where it extracts it's archives and does all its compiling is /var/tmp, I would think that would be the key area to optimize, not /tmp. Portage doesn't use /tmp for anything important.

      • Re:fragmented fs (Score:4, Informative)

        by tweakt ( 325224 ) * on Monday March 28, 2005 @10:11AM (#12065470) Homepage
        "The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update."

        Then you'll be pleased to discover 'dispatch-conf' It keeps all your CONFIG_PROTECT files in RCS revision control and automatically merges in changes which do not result in conflicts (not by default, auto-merge must be enabled, but it works flawlessly). You'll only be prompted when there are changes to config files in updates that directly conflict with changes that you've made yourself.

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Informative)

      by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:50AM (#12064473) Homepage Journal

      has all the learning/tweaking/compiling been worth the extra power/costumizability in the end

      I'm an avid Gentoo user, and I've got to say, if you're only considering Gentoo for the speed/power, you might as well put some stickers on your case, because you'll probably notice a bigger speed improvement like that. Gentoo is really useful for the following reason:

      • Relatively bare-bones linux (like Linux from Scratch) but with excellent documentation. - Fantastic for learing about linux
      • Customizability - if your distro maintainers chose one route with a package that doesn't meet your needs, your stuck installing from source, and maintaining version upgrades yourself. (Being sure to keep track of config options every time) - with Gentoo, you set the appropiate config option (called USE-flags) and you're good from then on.
      • Support community - no matter who you are, sometimes you will have problems. Pretty much every problem I've ever had on Linux took a simple search on the Gentoo forums to find the solution in less than five minutes. (Even when my problems aren't on Gentoo Linux, I always search the Gentoo forums first, as they're usually more likely to contain a useful answer)
      • Available packages - Everything under the sun (and I mean, just about everything you could want) is already packaged for Gentoo. Meaning, unlike with some other distros, you won't have to go searching for someone else's packages to install what you want. It's already there, with just one line to search and install.
      • Support community - oh wait, did I mention this already? It deserves a second mention because it really is fantastic. I've never been more impressed with the amount of community help available.
      • THANK YOU.

        This isn't said enough. The Gentoo "ricers" are covering up the real benefits of the distro, as you've mentioned - lots of docs, a broad community, and a great repository of available packages.

        I'd probably never use Gentoo myself for anything other than poking at it out of curiosity, but I can see why some people like it. They can have my Fedora CDs when they pry them from my cold, dead hands, but I have to say the package availability on Gentoo (and Debian, for that matter) makes me jealous

      • Re:compile on! (Score:4, Informative)

        by amcguinn ( 549297 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @08:13AM (#12065058) Journal
        To my mind, the big advantage is that the dependencies are more fuzzy. I can run a stable distribution, with stable, tested, software, but if I need, say, the latest Abiword, or mplayer, I don't need to upgrade my whole system to get it. That is what I always wanted with Debian, but couldn't have.

        The end result is just slightly less stable than debian "stable", but considerably more than "testing" or "unstable". It is only possible because my packages are built against the libraries I've got, not the ones the package maintainer has got. Waiting for compiles is a pain, but it's what makes it all work.

    • I have extensive experience with gentoo, it will not harm your HD in any way.

      And as far as tweaking, to me it is noticably faster then pre-compiled distros. Its also a hell of a lot of fun to mess with. If you don't care about speed, don't have to have the latest pacakges, and don't really wanna mess around -- then use mandrake or whatever people like nowadays and dont bother.

      If youre like me and you wanna control exactly what gets onto your system, you cant stand knowing your programs could be going

    • Re:compile on! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iamacat ( 583406 )
      In my experience, there is much more learning/tweaking on redhat side than for gentoo. For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde". With a pre-packaged Linux distribution you would have to worry about installing countless packages missing or out of date on your system. Later you get to fix everything that broke because you upgraded its dependency to an incompatible version

      With that said, the install process has several steps with no apparent purpose except for being 1337. They didn't really hav

      • Re:compile on! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by BenjyD ( 316700 )

        For example, to install kde 3.2, just type "emerge kde"

        I'm not sure what you're saying: how is that different from:

        • apt-get install kde
        • pacman -S kde
        • yum install kde

    • Re:compile on! (Score:5, Funny)

      by hdparm ( 575302 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @04:12AM (#12064558) Homepage
      No issues with HD. And don't worry, here is the quick howto [bash.org], it's pretty straight forward.

  • That's what I like about Gentoo... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:33AM (#12064219)
    ...rather than have 'releases', there's just a whole lot of software which can be used in any combination from the get-go.

  • Bye bye Gentoo users! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Have fun compiling! See you when 2006.0 comes out!

    • Re:Bye bye Gentoo users! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mu-sly ( 632550 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @07:45AM (#12065000) Homepage Journal

      Bye bye Gentoo users? Sheesh, we don't even need stop using things while they upgrade. Just emerge and forget about it while carrying on as normal.

      All this hot air about learning stuff from Gentoo is partly true, but the main reason I use it is because it's stupidly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Compiling certain things takes a while, and I don't bother to compile OpenOffice because it's not worth it. Still, it's not like I even have to stop using the computer while it's going on - I just fire, forget, and get on with my work.

  • Gentoo users need to do more (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BigBuckHunter ( 722855 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:36AM (#12064231)
    Don't current Gentoo users have to change the symlink of their /etc/make.profile to point to the 2005.0 profile under /usr/portage/profiles? Then emerge sync, then emerge -uD world? Then fix_libtool_dependancies.sh... Then revdep-rebuild... Then Emerge --prune some of the old slotted apps that they don't need anymore?


    Sincerely Yours
    An "Actual" Gentoo user.

  • New but better? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jefedesign ( 869140 )
    I have given Gentoo several attempts and have floundered each time because of hardware issues. It would be nice to have a distro that recognized all my hardware with minimal configuration. Gentoo is still a little scary for my Mepis oriented thinking.

    • Re:New but better? (Score:3, Informative)

      by grishnav ( 522003 )
      Ubuntu is really great like that. It's what I use when I don't have the time/motivation to do a Gentoo install (and then normally just wish I'd done the gentoo install when I can't have Gaim+OTR, mplayer+codecs, etc. without grabbing the tgz's, hunting down the deps, and putting it all together myself instead of just 'emerge gaim-otr', 'emerge mplayer'... oh well).

      Anyway, Ubuntu has up to date packages, uses a nice interface to apt, and has really excellent hardware detection. It's as brainless to install
    • Yeah - Windows is great for that - you should try it sometime :-)

      - JD

      P.S. Begin the countdown to being marked a troll :-D
  • I'm reinstalling Gentoo after some time away from it. Is KDE 3.4 in the default tree yet ?

    • Re:KDE 3.4 (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jafar00 ( 673457 )
      3.4 is there but masked. The current stable version according to portage is 3.3.2. I'm sure in a few weeks, I will wake up to a new KDE and a smoking CPU after all that compiling. Funny thing is, I use Xfce these days. ;)
      • I've always wanted to try Xfce, but it seems like underkill on a modern machine. What are your impressions of it ?

        • Re:KDE 3.4 (Score:2, Informative)

          by aconbere ( 802137 )
          honestly XFCE 4.2 is one the nicest, cleanest and most stable Window Manager/ Desktop Environments I've found and I've tried them all. It's crisp clean and simple, doesn't come with a whole slew of deps (ie no ancient mozilla dependancies that I'm never going to use).

          then to top it off, it has taken a clue from the *box's and the like and made using workspaces more than just an eye-candy toy, making it easy to scroll through workspaces, or to set keys to do so. It doesn't steal key configs as gnome doe
    • Last time I checked, it's there but masked.

    • add this to /etc/portage/package.keywords (Score:5, Informative)

      by rkcallaghan ( 858110 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:24AM (#12064399)
      paste this block in to your /etc/portage/package.keywords to get KDE 3.4.0
      # unmasking kde 3.4.0
      =kde-base/kde-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdeartwork-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdebase-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/arts-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdebase-pam-4 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdelibs-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdegames-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdepim-3.4.0-r1 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdewebdev-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdegraphics-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdenetwork-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdetoys-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdeadmin-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.4.0 ~x86
      >=media-libs/xine-lib-1.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdeaddons-3.4.0 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdeedu-3.4.0 ~x86
      >=dev-libs/boost-1.32 ~x86
      =kde-base/kdeutils-3.4.0 ~x86

  • For those of you who want ease of install (Score:4, Informative)

    by vectorian798 ( 792613 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:43AM (#12064267)
    Try this out:
    Vidalinux [vidalinux.com]

    Apparently it's Gentoo, with a nice graphical installer that is no longer cruel and unusual punishment...although the install of Gentoo teaches you quite a bit.

    Yes, you get the benefits of portage.

    Just wait a little for a new version based on 2005

  • Oh, and I just (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:47AM (#12064279)
    No, really, I didn't just finish compiling whatever. Anyway, as a lot of people still don't seem to understand, release don't mean anything if you've got gentoo allready installed, as you can keep it up to date with emerge sync and emerge -u world, that's all there is to it.

    Releases only mean something for people wanting to install gentoo, although it is no proplem to install from an older medium, you'll still get an uptodate system in the end.

    However, what is great about new releases is that they mean new and uptodate binary packages, so if you just want to install gentoo quickly and still have an uptodate system, here is your chance.

    Btw., wasn't this release supposed to feature at least a preview of the upcoming installer? Any word on that?

  • just about through with gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:08AM (#12064356)

    Pardon a little rant, but gentoo is about to get wiped off all my remaining linux boxen. I've already taken the hard drive out of the gateway and popped in m0n0wall, a CD-based firewall that is the bee's knees and works much more smoothly. Thank god I don't have to deal with the monstrosity that is the webmin "user interface"(aka 5 billion gif images for no particular reason). Oh if only it supported config-on-usb-key!

    Last night I updated apache and a bunch of other things (I use the unstable branch because "stable" lags, big time, on many packages I need; yes, I can manually unmask those certain packages, but that wouldn't have solved the particular problem I'm about to describe).

    I run etc-update, which absolutely blows chunks and has for years; for example, ALL of /etc is protected. So maybe webmin comes along and touches 70 config files. You're then treated to trying to approve those 70 files along with other files that were also changed by other emerge updates. Attempts to provide better alternatives have been staunchly blocked; cfg-update has been trying to get into portage, but the gentoo team have been sitting on their asses for over two years [gentoo.org]. Piss-poor configuration management is one sure fire way to get me off your distro, because it's the biggest potential problem maker. PS- not everyone installs X on their servers, guys.

    All is well, or so I think. Overnight, the power fails. I go to show someone photos on the server, connection refused. Huh?

    Apache's not running. Hmm. 'apache2 start'.

    That spits out a big tirade about how my commonapache2.conf file "is present in the old location" and I need to update the current configuration files and remove the commmonapache2.conf file. Then tells me to see this page [gentoo.org] which tells me about all the internal details, none of which I give a fuck about; I want a simple 1-2-3 migration, and they're yacking about recompiling everything, but they don't actually tell you what versions of everything you need to have at a minimum for that package to "understand" their changes. The page claims mod_php isn't ready for these changes yet (which is not true anymore, I later discover), so I panic and try going back to older versions of everything. More carnage and wasted time compiling.

    It then takes me 2 hours to sort out the mess because they've got HARD LINKS to some directories, soft links to others, there's a full configuration file tree in /usr/lib/apache2, there's no clear delineation between the "common" and (???) apache conf files, their migration page claims the server root changed to /usr/lib/apache2 but it really didn't, it's all still in /etc/apache2/...Oh, mod_user_dir for no particular good reason now has to be TURNED ON with a -D option. I spend another 30 minutes fixing all the crap that was in my old apache configuration files, because apache2's error messages consist of "an access directive prohibited you from loading that". WHAT access directive? Or, my personal favorite, an "internal server error". Whee.

    It's a unholy mess (at least part of it is apache's fault, for having one of the worst configuration schemes and error handling I've ever dealt with) and I was completely caught off guard- why? Because as portage merges things, if there are extremely important notes printed to the console, but so is EVERY detail about a compile along with all the files that are being merged/unmerged/whatevered...so chances are, it scrolls right out of the terminal buffer. At the end of a multiple-package emerge, there's no one block of text that says "IMPORTANT STUFF CHANGED".

    I used to think the compile-from-source stuff was a godsend, but lately, it's nothing but a curse. I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps. Fantasti

    • Calm down (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:23AM (#12064395)
      First off, I agree with some of the things you say, while I personally don't find etc-update to be that hard (It just gives you a list of the config files that can be updated and you can then simply choose the ones you don't want to be updated, that is most of the times the ones you edited yourself and then update the rest automatically), it sure isn't the ideal way of doing things.

      Also the important messages scrolling by has been a problem for ages and still hasn't been addressed, which is a shame.

      And I also agree that gentoo's handling of web things like apache, php, wordpress, etc. is far from ideal. (webapp-config, how I hate you).

      But there is one thing that really makes a lot of your critizism mute, you are running an unstable system and complain about breakage and constant updates. Come on, that's just silly.

      And contrary to what you seem to think, there is no situation that requires you to run an unstable system, especially if this system is a server. If you think you need some unstable apps, fine, gentoo gives you the tools to just install those unstable apps and leave everything else stable, if you refuse to use these tools, don't complain, it is entirely your fault.

      • Proposal for etc-update solution (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Many Gentoo users have probably run etc-update only to find out that 85 files need updating, 7 have been automatically merged, now you have to merge the rest yourself. After working steadily through them, you soon discover that 95% of them are files you have not even heard of, or at least you have never changed them. After a while you decide to just run your eyes over the list quickly, and keep the ones you have edited, then use -5 on the rest. Except you miss one and now your system doesn't work and you ha

    • Re:just about through with gentoo (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Gentoo has no "unstable" branch in the sense you present it here. You can choose to install software marked as unstable (in the opinion of the individual ebuild maintainers). You claim to say you understand this concept, but you mix up the ideas of unstable and unmasked packages.

      dispatch-conf is the sensible alternative to etc-update - check it out (it's been around for a long time now).

      Gentoo is, and always has been, billed as a distro for advanced users with time to maintain it.

      You are using the wrong
      • Gentoo has no "unstable" branch in the sense you present it here. You can choose to install software marked as unstable (in the opinion of the individual ebuild maintainers). You claim to say you understand this concept, but you mix up the ideas of unstable and unmasked packages.

        I've had ACCEPT_KEWORDS="~arch" in my make.conf since it was introduced so am essentially running an unstable branch of Gentoo. I guess that is the unstable to which the grandparent referring. Why he is surprised by breakage when
      • You are using the wrong tool for the job - SuSE or Debian, or even *BSD seems more appropiate for what you require.

        I hate it when I see people say this. If he's using Gentoo, I'm sure he's very aware of the easier-to-use distros. You're basically telling him to stop playing chess and go back to fucking Chutes and Ladders. What an insult.
    • Its common practice to not use the ~arch flags in /etc/make.conf for ACCEPTED_KEYWORDS. This is basically the flag for an unstable branch. Especially if you are running a server you should stick with stable. I use unstable tho and never really had any problems. Then again I've been using Gentoo since 2002. If there were packages you needed that were not in stable you should have used package.unmask.

      Also just doing etc-update then signing off on every file to be overwritten isn't a good idea. I normally do
    • I run a sync and then emerge -up world, and I get a list 3 pages long of mostly minor little version bumps.

      Surely, if you want to run an `unstable' system, you are going to have to expect things to constantly change.

      On the apache front, for real systems (as opposed to random desktops I happen to want a web server on to run SWAT or something), I build apache myself. That way FreeBSD and RedHat servers have everything working the same way. Apache is so easy to build, and so portable, that the ports/packag

    • Re:just about through with gentoo (Score:4, Interesting)

      by joaobranco ( 55662 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @06:02AM (#12064798)
      So, you want your cake and eat it too?

      Sorry, can't be done.

      I run gentoo in one machine I have. I however don't run it with ~arch make flags on (you call it unstable).

      But I also run a handful of servers. They don't run gentoo, but run FreeBSD (close enough). Again, on the servers I need to have running smoothly I use FreeBSD STABLE, not CURRENT.
      In fact, I only run CURRENT on my personal notebook, which I can afford to tinker with when I like it (and that on dual boot, so I can always access my data when I need it)

      If you want stability, and ease of configuration, don't use an unstable version of any system thats being changed every day. Even if tools can be found to help management in this situation, you are trying to build a castle in the sand... It will come down, rest assured.
    • It is really annoying that you have to be compiling constantly when you use gentoo, but it's not annoying that it actually works and I can just make my own installer CD with a miniroot that has busybox and some filesystem utilities in it, and unpack a tarball into place. Bingo, I'm installed. I chroot into it, build whatever I need to get the system going, install grub to the boot partition, and bingo. I'm in like Flynn. On the other hand, I continually have problems getting other Linux distributions to ins

  • Broken system? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:42AM (#12064453) Journal
    I did an emerge --sync and an emerge -u world just a few hours ago.

    I wonder if this new release is why autoconf became broken and why I can't compile anything,

  • GUI installer - not this time around (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:56AM (#12064488)
    I'm a big fan of Gentoo, I run it on my laptop and my file server, its a shame that the GUI installer didnt make it into this build...

    Although the console install process certainly teaches new users of linux new tricks it might help gain some traction into the linux market to help raise awareness of the project.

    Hopefully the next build will make it :)

    Good work guys!

  • How Ironic (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ctrl+Alt+De1337 ( 837964 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @03:59AM (#12064506) Homepage
    It's always ironic to me wherever Gentoo is discussed on Slashdot because Gentoo has struck me as the ultimate RTFM distribution. Think about that for a second. RTFM required + Slashdot = ...
  • can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

    I tried this an 8gb drive once before but it never worked because it was a few years ago, the docs were flawed with bad directions and the pc was a PI/133, after about a week of compiling it just crapped out and I gave up and installed Damn Small Linux..

    • Re:question, (Score:4, Informative)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Monday March 28, 2005 @07:40AM (#12064989) Homepage
      A small gentoo desktop install typically takes between 1 and 2GB. That includes the coreutils, linuxutils, X, mozilla, editors, compilers, etc...

      As for the ram, ideally you want 256 as a minimum or you're going to be swapping a lot to disk. 512MB is plenty. I know on my laptop at least going from 256 to 768 [two slots, it came with a 256MB board] MB of ram was a nice boost for building stuff.

      On my laptop I sit at 3.2GB used and I have tons of other tools installed [Gnome, tetex, debugging tools, gaim, openoffice, etc...].

      But even a full desktop build with Gnome or KDE wouldn't top 4GB of space and in that you're getting a lot of free tools.

      Tom

    • Re:question, (Score:4, Informative)

      by MeerCat ( 5914 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @07:47AM (#12065005) Homepage
      can it be installed on a PIII with 256mb ram and an 8gb hdd?

      I'm running gentoo on an old 233 pentium MMX laptop with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gg hard disk (of which 1.5 gb is stil an old windows partition) - it's my home server including my main mail server (built in UPS, only draws about 10 watts, small and quite quiet etc.) and it's running fine.

      I rarely run up X on it, I admit, but I've got X installed (so if need be I can run up apps to display on my main machine) and it's happily running qmail (qpsmtpd,spamassassin, clamav,pyzor, razor,dcc etc.), ssh and other "home server" apps, and it doesn't need much room:


      Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/hda6 2.9G 1.8G 1019M 64% /
      /dev/hda5 17M 8.7M 7.5M 54% /boot
      /dev/hda7 1.1G 560M 529M 52% /usr/portage

      I could probably trim this further, but it's fine for me. I have a weekly cron job to "emerge --sync" and "emerge -Dupv world", and I'm thinking of adding "emerge -Du --fetch-only world".
      Updates compile a little slowly at times, but then I don't have much installed to update, and I could always add a cron job to do the updates too.

  • I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blonde rser ( 253047 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @04:20AM (#12064583) Homepage
    Does anybody else think that the combination of torrent and emerge (or torrent and apt-get for that matter) would be a great match? I mean transfers are pretty quick already but this way the bandwidth loads from updates can be passed around with out a serious security risk. Bah I'm probably just being an idiot.

  • Boring article (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bcmm ( 768152 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @05:40AM (#12064753)
    Gentoo doesn't have core versions, just versions of each package. This is a new version of the installer, one of the least frequently used bits of Gentoo. Apart from the few prebuilt packages in the version for people without internet, this will produce the same system as any other Gentoo installer.

    Please stop reporting new installer versions! This is uninteresting to those who don't use Gentoo becasue it doesn't effect them, and uninteresting to users because they have installed it already.

  • Warning to AMD64 Users - Don't download yet! (Score:4, Informative)

    by isolationism ( 782170 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @11:18AM (#12065910) Homepage
    Users wishing to take the plunge and install Gentoo on an AMD64 should wait a day or three before attempting to download an image from the mirror. As described in the thread on the Gentoo Forums [gentoo.org], the wrong image has been propagated by accident.

    Gentoo's master mirror was staged with the wrong amd64 livecds which don't boot due to a missing bootsector!

    We're currently shipping the correct images to all the mirrors.

    Not that this will probably impact any /. readers, but I read the AMD64 forums religiously as I have two AMD64 Gentoo installations at my house. I don't go reading the forums before installing though, so hopefully this saves at least one person some time/frustration before installing.

  • Never ceases to amaze me... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MerlinTheWizard ( 824941 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @01:33PM (#12067095)
    how Gentoo generates heat and passion. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. Why waste outrageous amount of times explaining to the world that it's stupid and that its users are insane? In the time it took you guys who posted that kind of comments, you could have emerge'd and updated a Gentoo box. ;-)

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