Re: [tlug] Gentoo

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 11:15:55AM +0900, Mauro Sauco wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> Yesterday I installed Gentoo/Linux for the first time. mmmm ! I think the 
> project its interesting and could be very good experience for those who just 
> started with linux and would like to know how a Linux distribution is built 
> and structured since you have to build the  system by your own step-by-step, 
> compiling absolutely everything for your needs and configuring every conf 
> file without any script help. which result of course in a very fast 
> small-efficient, customized  build... I liked it so much, although I have to 
> say that it took me around 6 hours to get the system + X running ( 
> compilation time it's boring :-) ) . I think it's cool and it's worth to give 
> a try.

A few things about Gentoo for those who have perhaps had a mild
interest but haven't really looked into it.

Ever since it's been ./'d---err /.'d, it's become quite popular--the
general mailing list probably has about two hundred posts a day.
However, they're trying to divide the lists up into things like
installation, newbies, etc, though it's not working.

However, there is now a searchable archive of the lists--there is also
a forums page (searchable) covering a variety of things--they have a
documentation section as well, though at present it's quite small (I
have a piece up there about configuring mutt in Gentoo for the single
user who doesn't want to run sendmail or postfix). 

As it's still new, there's still a good many bugs--I think a few people
are runing it on production servers, but they're the brave ones.  

On a slow machine, it can, if you put in X and KDE, literally take over
a day to build. They had, for a release candidate, a binary ISO but
it's been removed.  They do have, however, a stage 1, 2 and 3
install--the stage 2 skips the bootstrap (about an hour on a 1 Gig
Athlon, 256 megs RAM) and the emerge system (about 2-3 hours on the same
machine.

To me, the best thing about it is its portage system.  I remember
playing with Linux from Scratch, and having to track down dependency x
and dependency y, which was a nuisance.  Portage seems to do a better
job than RH's up2date (haven't used Debian in a year or so, so can't
really compare it to that). While there will be problems, it's close to
BSD ports in effectiveness and also has a nice --pretend feature, where
you can see if you're going to wind up having to download a bunch of
other things that you weren't expecting to need. 

The other nice thing, as you say, is that it's small--the base install
doesn't throw in a bunch of things that often turn out to be
unecessary--for instance, in RH, IIRC, 7.1 took about 1400 megs, 7.2
more like 1900-2000 and the 7.3 beta (as most of you know, the official
release is out today, btw) over 2000--while some of that is due to
Japanese fonts (haven't played with getting Gentoo to work with
Japanese yet), Gentoo, with X, including KDE (as I use konqueror,
though I use fluxbox for my desktop) is 729 megs.

The downside is, as you said, the length of time of an install (though
if one has an Athlon or other i686 system, you can use the stage 3,
which is not very long). I wouldn't even try it without a broadband
connection. They're planning, according to their web site, to
eventually have binaries though, so this will probably become less of
an issue. 

It seems as if it might wind up becoming one of the bigger
distros--it's really not that hard for the newcomer to install, the
documenation is clear--and since it's been /.'d he's made it clearer.
When it first came out, most of the people trying it were experienced
and realized that if the instructions showed an /etc/fstab of
/dev/BOOT
/dev/SWAP
/dev/ROOT
that one had to edit those things.  After it became popular, however,
there were a bunch of posts from people who thought that's what they
were supposed to have there, so they've edited the install instructions
to point out that one replaces BOOT, etc with the proper device. 

Sorry, I've probably gone on too long with this.  Anyway, it's a nice
distro and I thank Jack for turning me on to it.

Scott Robbins