Gentoo Users Assemble!

Cat1yst

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 1, 2007
Messages
1,616
I started up Gentoo last weekend to give it a spin, (and i wanted to see how challenging would assembling it together into a smooth, quick, responsive OS on my old laptop would handle)
And i must admit, its a pretty slick OS, people say that its hard to assemble and install..but the install process is so well documented that even I a linux n00b can do it knowing that once im done its gonna be a quick, light, secure, OS.

Not to mention all the things i learned about linux while working on it

Anyone else here use Gentoo?
 
I loaded the live dvd and started the installer which formated my drive and then errored out. Does that count?
 
I'm a user. Have a server, an IBM T23 laptop, and a VM on my desktop. Love it mostly. Learned linux because of it.

Hopefully the foundation will get its issues settled soon.
 
Been using Gentoo off and on for about 3 years now. I think there is a Gentoo developer on these forums also.
 
back into my noobie hole i go...

emerge, got it


why did everyone leave? it seems like an awesome OS, not to mention a great project to emerge onto a system with lacking horsepower but yet we still want to make some use out of it

I have found that LiveDVD's or CD's perform poorly and aren't very good unless you need to pull data off your hdd or perform a recovery
 
:eek:
why did everyone leave? it seems like an awesome OS, not to mention a great project to emerge onto a system with lacking horsepower but yet we still want to make some use out of it

Why did who leave what? What are you talking about? Seems like you are very excited about Gentoo. Alittle too excited...:eek:
 
Been using Gentoo for years, and it is my main OS.

I think the only thing I would leave it for is FreeBSD (when nvidia releases 64bit drivers).
 
:eek:

Why did who leave what? What are you talking about? Seems like you are very excited about Gentoo. Alittle too excited...:eek:

people are just saying that they left gentoo after a little time on it

Its not my main OS, im still a windows first type of guy, but it makes a great alternative OS, definately my favorite linux distro so far.
 
I tried it for a bit until I tried to get 3945ABG going. IWL and IPW wouldn't work right. It would see networks and crap but it wouldn't connect or anything. After a week of trying to figure it out, i just gave up.
 
I use it as a file/http server. All the PCs I use regularly run Windows.
 
\o
been getting my hands dirty with Gentoo for over 5years now
fantastic distro for keeping things the way you want
 
For any project where I have a real choice, I prefer Gentoo. I've yet to discover any other Linux distribution with the flexibility that Gentoo has. It's the only distribution I've found to seamlessly move from Server, to workstation, back to server, to hardened server, to workstation, etc :) Things I have used Gentoo for:

*Workstation (my main workstation is gentoo)
*File server (standalone and highly available)
*Load balancer (clustered)
*Router
*Web server (clustered) using memcached both Tomcat and Apache
*MySQL/PGSQL Server
*Internet facing, unfirewalled, root over ssh enabled with password as "root" and-never-got-owned server
*Multimedia system

Right now in my house I've got at least 6 systems running Gentoo, and I should probably install it on both my laptops as kubuntu is driving me insane. Puffy and Llama in my sig are both gentoo.
 
i used gentoo a little while back to learn about linux initially but transitioned over to FreeBSD in the end. One of the biggest reasons why I moved over to BSD was that I just couldn't "get" Gentoo's Use flags. I tried and tried but they just never really meshed well with me :(
 
It was a strict SELinux policy with the standard hardened profile (Grsec/ssp/other goodies). root was nothing more than another user, and I have good faith that you would not have been able to attain the sysadm role (the "real" root). That system also functioned as a squid proxy and a portage rsync server which all of our gentoo systems synced to. It also had Apache for a while, but I took it down because nobody actually made real attempts. To answer your question, the lab the system resided in has been taken offline and isn't available anymore :(
 
Im sitting here waiting for it to finish emerging my USE flags....and its took oh 4 hours so far, did i do something wrong?
I ran
# emerge --update --deep --newuse world
after i defined USE flags in /etc/make.conf
was i just supposed to save the settings in nano then go ahead with the kernal install?
 
Im sitting here waiting for it to finish emerging my USE flags....and its took oh 4 hours so far, did i do something wrong?
I ran after i defined USE flags in /etc/make.conf
was i just supposed to save the settings in nano then go ahead with the kernal install?

You forgot -a to see what it was going to do first. A capital N in the output means it will re-emerge based on new use flags, and the appropriate flag will be a different color.

If you are using ccache, you could cancel and start again without losing compile time. And 4 hours does not sound out of the ordinary, if you created a considerable number of flags. My slow laptop took a day I think to emerge gnome. :(

For those that are a little uncomfortable with USE flags, emerge profuse (ncurses or gtk2 based). Great for explaining the uses without having to go to the web to look them up.

Another tip - if you have multiple Gentoo systems, you can use distcc to share the compilation load. Just make sure the gcc versions are the same on all hosts. This is specifically the only reason I use my VM, so my laptop doesn't have to struggle so much.
 
Almost..there!
Thanks for the reply, i was getting worried that i did something wrong...i think i should be able to skate by without -a or -N right?
Though i wish the list of USE flags was better organized...like Critical, Useful, Content Creation, Media Playback, GUI, etc.
 
i just looove Gentoo. ;)

what can i say, i´m still waiting for Hurd :D


official Gentoo motto "if it moves, compile it" ;)
 
Something that I know I haven't played with (ever), but is supposedly there somewhere in portage - is the binary support. I'm a bit interested in how it functions, as compiling from source is great but nothing beats binary releases for clustered systems. It would be pretty neat if you could send a binary request to the build server, it builds it to the given specifications (or just builds it blindly - and its up to you to keep lab machines in software sync) and then caches/returns the binary. So you build it once for all your systems, then just deploy the binary with the built in portage binary flag. Obviously this would have to keep track of use flags/architectures, but it seems like that would be a great feature to push Gentoo towards the enterprise level.
 
Something that I know I haven't played with (ever), but is supposedly there somewhere in portage - is the binary support. I'm a bit interested in how it functions, as compiling from source is great but nothing beats binary releases for clustered systems. It would be pretty neat if you could send a binary request to the build server, it builds it to the given specifications (or just builds it blindly - and its up to you to keep lab machines in software sync) and then caches/returns the binary. So you build it once for all your systems, then just deploy the binary with the built in portage binary flag. Obviously this would have to keep track of use flags/architectures, but it seems like that would be a great feature to push Gentoo towards the enterprise level.

Basically you can do exactly this. Have a server (or a cluster of machines [again using distcc]) emerge -B (build only). Have your client machines use it as a 'binary host'. Then use emerge --getbinpkg --usepkg PROGRAMNAME to do a quick install, with no compilation necessary.

Read here for juicy portage info.
 
Basically you can do exactly this. Have a server (or a cluster of machines [again using distcc]) emerge -B (build only). Have your client machines use it as a 'binary host'. Then use emerge --getbinpkg --usepkg PROGRAMNAME to do a quick install, with no compilation necessary.

Read here for juicy portage info.

Neato, thanks for that. I should probably try doing it with my el-cheapo Gentoo cluster when I get a chance.
 
Been running Gentoo for years. Love it. Grew up in a BSD world, so it's like a BSD linux. Vmware, games, mythtv all with ports! Weeeee!

Although ubuntu's nice in the fact its powerful but takes far less time to configure it.
 
i just looove Gentoo. ;)

what can i say, i´m still waiting for Hurd :D


official Gentoo motto "if it moves, compile it" ;)

Or in other words - if it aint broke, compile it again anyway :)

I've been a Gentoo user since 1.4 and never had any major problems that couldn't be fixed with a couple of emerges
 
EXACTLY!!!

every now and again a libary will change its ABI (the most recent is expat) and that will force you to rebuild of a few packages BUT gentoo provides you with all the tools needed to do this

if you just want the system to look after itself then ubuntu/fedora is for you, but if you want your own system and how you want then gentoo is just great
 
last time I tried it GRUB was broken and wouldn't accept commands (the version of grub in portage had a broken command interpreter).
 
you got the bash-completion USE flag

All portage is is a recept to "cook" an upstream tarball. IF upstream do not provide such features then Gentoo won't magically provide them (unless a gentoo-side patch is provided)
 
you got the bash-completion USE flag

All portage is is a recept to "cook" an upstream tarball. IF upstream do not provide such features then Gentoo won't magically provide them (unless a gentoo-side patch is provided)

it was gentoo customized and totally broken. This was years ago.
 
Ubuntu is great for pop it in and install it...especially for fresh from windows type of people like me

But Gentoo really lets me understand my OS...half the fun of computing is the learning, all i can say is when im done, it better boot, and it better run fast, cuz i aint sifting through that USE flag list again....
 
I started up Gentoo last weekend to give it a spin, (and i wanted to see how challenging would assembling it together into a smooth, quick, responsive OS on my old laptop would handle)
And i must admit, its a pretty slick OS, people say that its hard to assemble and install..but the install process is so well documented that even I a linux n00b can do it knowing that once im done its gonna be a quick, light, secure, OS.

Not to mention all the things i learned about linux while working on it

Anyone else here use Gentoo?

I tried using Gentoo once, around 2 years ago. Suffice to say I was getting angry at how long it took to compile openoffice and just did rm -R /* in the middle of the compile. That took care of openoffice, the compile finished a second later with an error for some reason. :cool:

I have vowed to not install or attempt an install of gentoo untill I get a quad core cpu.

edit: In my defense I was using a 1.4Ghz tbird.
 
*shudder* there is a reason Gentoo provides binary install for Openoffice you know

The codebase is sooo flaky that the ebuild actually strips ALL make options and essencially you end up build as upstream does (ie no point compiling yrself)


Openoffice and firefox are the only open-source (binary) packages I have installed on my gentoo. Openoffice since there is no point compiling, and firefox-bin since I have a 64bit setup but need a 32bit browser to use flash



saying that I did compile OpenOffice on my present system to see how much better it was
Old setup: 2.4Ghz P4 with 1Gig RAM took 9h to compile
New setup: 2.4GHz Core2 E6600 with 2Gig RAM took 3h to compile

ie P4 crap CPU
 
How long does it take for you guys to install gentoo...i know if you have a Daemon its well about 3 mins....what about manually?
 
How long does it take for you guys to install gentoo...i know if you have a Daemon its well about 3 mins....what about manually?

I'll be honest, a very long time. After doing it about 8 times in row, I finally made a list of everything I do, and now it doesn't take so long. I can get it to boot in about an hour, from there about a day to turn it into a server, about 3 more to turn it into a desktop. Lots of compiling, I don't usually use binhosts. I do however spread the compiling duties. Helps some. If compile time was an issue, I'd setup a local binhost and it'd be just as fast as any other distro. But I don't have the disk space to spare at the moment either...

Mind you this is on slow hardware, 1.13GHz P3 laptop and a 2.4GHz P4 desktop. My VM took a bout a day and a half to get into Gnome.
 
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