Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Gentoo Linux 2008.0

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #51
    Originally posted by Forge View Post
    Hey you, the guy who knows everything about everyone! Yeah, YOU! Thanks for generalizing. If you're done telling me why I do what I do, I'd like to speak for myself as well.

    Now I don't know everything, as you claim to. I do however know that I do know a lot about a lot of things, and I DON'T think that running Gentoo made me that way.


    I don't run Gentoo because the difficulty makes me leet. It's actually not that hard.

    I run Gentoo because I **enjoy** the difficulty.

    I like a distro that breaks in minor and inconsequential ways on occasion, giving me something to do when I might otherwise be idle. It doesn't break in serious ways. and if I were on stable amd64 instead of testing ~amd64, it probably wouldn't break at all.



    It's the regularly broken down hot rod you're building in the garage. The simple fact that it often needs work is MOST OF THE APPEAL.

    I use a nice current and uninteresting car to get to work. It's reliable, never wants tinkering, and gets me there in totally uneventful fashion.

    On the weekends I'm ripping out those flaky bits and having a GOOD TIME doing it. If I wanted a totally sealed box distro that never let me decide anything or tinker, I'd run Ubuntu. Hell, on my laptop I do. I don't like tinkering on that smaller screen and slightly cramped keyboard. On my big box, I run Gentoo, and I constantly poke at it and tinker with it.

    I DON'T RUN IT TO BE ELITE, I RUN IT BECAUSE I ENJOY WORKING ON IT.
    If it doesn't appeal to you, there are a million other distros, there are all the BSDs, there's HURD, there's OSX, there's Windows. Kindly go run whatever one you choose and stop picking at me and my choices.
    Look, what you think of me or what you do what you do has absolutely nothing to do with the attitude he approached me with. It was quite elitest, and he even said he didn't care if it was. Just because you don't run it to be elite doesn't mean everyone feels the same. Like it or not, he was being an elitest snob. I didn't say he represented Gentoo as a whole, I merely spoke on how he approached me.

    Again, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH GENTOO!! Stop being a damn fanatic - no one insulted your precious distro. This is getting insane. Everytime someone says anything about Linux other than "IT ROCKS!!!" it starts a freaking holy war.

    Comment


    • #52
      Originally posted by Joe Sixpack View Post
      Again, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH GENTOO!! Stop being a damn fanatic - no one insulted your precious distro. This is getting insane. Everytime someone says anything about Linux other than "IT ROCKS!!!" it starts a freaking holy war.
      Most religions undergo schisms as they mature...

      I use Gentoo. Why? Because when things go wrong, I find Gentoo is easier to fix than any other distro I have tried. And lets face it, things go wrong!

      If I just wanted "an install and use distro", I would probably use Debian or Ubuntu. For my personal systems though, I like the option of removing packages I no longer need without serious risk of breaking my package manager. I want the option of being able to update and still change the packages installed without major hassle. In general, I want a package manager that functions well. RPM failed when I tried it, Debian had other problems, and Ubuntu wasn't really on the scene back when I started.

      Comment


      • #53
        Originally posted by Fixxer_Linux View Post
        I never really understood the ccache benefit. But, I have to say that I upgraded my Gentoo only from official release. Meanwhile, I only installed just one or two minor programs, but nothing huge.
        Therefore, ccache was not very usefull for me.

        But, I read in that forum that Gentoo can be (or must be ?) upgraded on a monthly basis. In this case, ccache can be a good option to accelerate the compile time.

        And that leads me to the drawback of Gentoo : the lack of the end-user support. Of course, the forum is really great, but there is not really a documentation to tell the official recommended use of Gentoo for the non-developper (or end-user, call me as you want).
        Or at least, I never found it among the official documentation and the gentoo wiki, but I read perhaps too fast.
        And, for each upgrade I made, I finally ended in 'links2', requesting support in the forums because my xorg didn't want to start again.

        ccache just gives at most 20% of spare time to the normal users... it is very useful for devs that compile a lot some big projects (like devs who work on 5 files in xine-lib, since all the other files has remained the same) and on binaries projects that recompile, but in normal use doesn't do miracles. if you want to read a more detailed description of this go to blog.flameeyes.eu and read a description about ccache from one of gentoo's council members.
        the stuff that really speeds up compilation is another one:
        tmpfs compilation. this impiles to have /var/tmp/portage (or paludis or whichever package manager work directory) point to /tmp.
        i personally have 4gb of ram space with a 8gb swap filesystem mounted as tmpfs on /tmp with /var/tmp/portage pointing to /tmp/portage (created by the local start at startup) so that portage compiles into ram (until it has free ram) and then into swap. the overall performance increase is more than 60% of compilation time and about 75% time in sync time. some packages, usually small ones, sometimes get more than 100% boost in compilation time (less than half time of normal disk compilation). this is the best way to speed up compilation.
        i personally use -j10 on a amd mobile athlon x2 2ghz and i normally have enough ram space and processor speed to also run firefox, openoffice and play videos.

        Comment


        • #54
          if i were to chose for a distro based on people wants and competences i'd chose:

          - ubuntu for people who want something put on quickly and that has almost everything they need installed without the need to know much of operating systems.
          - opensuse + kde instead of kubuntu, which i really find a very bad distro and a very immature one when compared to its major sister, ubuntu, for about the same target as ubuntu with the diference that opensuse needs external repos for some stuff as codecs and multimedia packages due to licensing issues. this is by far the most windows compatible linux distro around and it would be the perfect windows to linux intermediate step
          - gentoo: by far the most customizable and full distro around. there isn't a single project on the net that hasn't got a gentoo ebuild. this lets users install packages without problems, while some other distros give many problems (one example is aeskulap). once set up the chances for a normal user to have things go broken when running stable branch are nearly 0% and the daily update could be maintained with scripts that can run in background while the user is unaware of them. when running it on tmpfs its update time is very small and the compilation is very fast.
          for advanced users i'd advice the use of alternative package systems like paludis or pkgcore since portage has some dependency resolving issues and doesn't permit the multiple --skip-first on world update.

          Comment


          • #55
            Originally posted by Joe Sixpack View Post
            no one insulted your precious distro. This is getting insane. Everytime someone says anything about Linux other than "IT ROCKS!!!" it starts a freaking holy war.
            Actually, that's just it -- the article posted to Phoronix did just that. It made some quite unreasonable, unwarranted statements about Gentoo, with nothing to support them, so now we have several pages of users agreeing with my original post taking the author to task for some sketchy journalistic practices.

            Mind you, I recognize properly done criticism; not everything about Gentoo is "IT ROCKS!!1oneone," but the article in question is anything but thoughtful criticism. Nor is it even accurately researched (see the corrections I posted). That's what I was trying to point out. No holy war intended.

            Comment


            • #56
              Everytime someone says anything about Linux other than "IT ROCKS!!!" it starts a freaking holy war.
              it's not like i get all angry about bashing gentoo.

              i get annoyed when people repeatedly miss the idea of this distro. releases are just like snapshots in this distribution - they don't actually mean anything. they are only meant for people as a stable starting point in using this distribution. (there are weekly snapshots on funtoo.org since a couple of months, and they do their job as well).
              Last edited by yoshi314; 09 July 2008, 04:18 PM.

              Comment


              • #57
                Originally posted by tulcod View Post
                Finally, it's not like the installer is actually supposed to work. If you need an installer, don't use gentoo. Gentoo is to be installed manually, period. The installer is broken and it should be.
                This is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Typical gentoo mentality though.

                if (Installer!=WORK)
                Installer=BROKEN;

                The whole purpose of an INSTALLATION CD is to INSTALL an OS. If the gentoo installer is indeed broken (again), then gentoo installer team == FAIL.

                Comment


                • #58
                  Originally posted by slikster View Post
                  This is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Typical gentoo mentality though.

                  if (Installer!=WORK)
                  Installer=BROKEN;

                  The whole purpose of an INSTALLATION CD is to INSTALL an OS. If the gentoo installer is indeed broken (again), then gentoo installer team == FAIL.
                  Although I don't agree with the wording in the original quote it is a fact that usage of the Gentoo installer is discouraged for those new to Gentoo. The traditional stage 3 install with the handbook is still the first and foremost way to install Gentoo.

                  Comment


                  • #59
                    Originally posted by aniruddha View Post
                    Although I don't agree with the wording in the original quote it is a fact that usage of the Gentoo installer is discouraged for those new to Gentoo. The traditional stage 3 install with the handbook is still the first and foremost way to install Gentoo.
                    the reason is quite simple: the installer is based on an unstable package for graphical management of packages to install and sometimes, with non stable flags and uses the installer is known to fail. this is complicated more because of the fact that the usually installer runs from a livecd and without a connection to internet and some conflicts might occur.
                    from my experience, i'd advice unexperienced people to use the installer in the following way:

                    start the installer, select the partitioning and type of processor (for example amd64 for newer chips, including new intel ones) and then leave the default options for use flags, profiles and so on. the installer will work well and install the system.
                    after that tune the system (like use flags, cflags, compila), connect it to internet, do a emerge --sync and the emerge -UdNv world. this will reinstall just the needed packages with the wanted optimizations.

                    Comment


                    • #60
                      If the gentoo installer is indeed broken (again), then gentoo installer team == FAIL.
                      syntax error ;P

                      i consider gentoo's installer the most pointless project ever started :]. unless it starts providing decent solutions for unattented install.

                      if you could make a gentoo cd that would partition the disk, install and setup network + ssh access to the box and somehow broadcast it's ip to you (e.g via e-mail) automatically - the installer would be quite useful in that case. but i don't think it's there yet.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X