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I've been putting off using Gentoo for quite some time now, due to hearing about the long compile times, and lots of manual configuration. I finally gave it a go a few days ago, by doing a stage 3 install from the liveCD. Right off the bat my network device failed to load, my kernel didn't have support for my soundcard built in, which required a recompile, and I was having difficulty getting the NVIDIA driver installed due to the rivafb module being loaded. After lots of headaches and lots of searching and posting on the Gentoo forums (which are fantastic by the way), I've finally got everything up and running. Hopefully, the next "emerge --update world" doesn't break my system! Seriously though, Portage is amazing, the speed is very noticable after compiling most of the system from source. I can definitely see Gentoo being too much for most users, but I think if you want to really get to know the ins and outs of your system, Gentoo is the only way to go.

'ey Gentoo helped me get comfortable with the commandline, so big kudos to Gentoo for that.

Well you have a strategy, get a gentoo live cd documents which will spit the hardware configuration and see which drivers do you need.

Basically after installing distros on my installation you could know the drivers already.

I don't know if I'll ever leave Gentoo. The forums and documentation are excellent, and portage is tough to beat. I made the switch from Red Hat 9 to gentoo, which was a pretty good leap for me, and I had to learn quite a few things through the course of the install and those first few updates. Once you grow accustomed to the customizing possibilities with USE flags, and get used to the /etc/portage/package.keywords, package.mask, & package.use files, you have great control over your system.

Like the lawyer that was interviewed about patents, I use Gentoo because it offers great control, and for the past year it has been rock solid for me. Even when I'm using testing packages I rarely have troubles.

One thing I would warn you about is not blindly doing the "emerge -uDav world" command too often. Something I had to learn about was how to properly take care of the toolchain. I'd probably be terrible at explaining it, but here's a link to the forum where I first read about it:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-282474.html

Now that's a lengthy read, and robmoss goes over his "update world" technique as well in this forum post:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-16 ... bmoss.html

Using revdep-rebuild is usually very helpful, and I highly recommend learning dispatch-conf for managing your configuration files. I say not to use etc-update, since it can easily hose your fstab or other files to where you have to boot from a rescue CD. I learned that lesson pretty early on, and haven't made that mistake again. I think you have to "emerge rcs" to get dispatch-conf and take full advantage of it. Once again robmoss talks a little about it later on in that post, and how dispatch-conf will keep a copy of your previous config files in "config-archive" so that you can always go back and see what was changed, given that you make the directory and peruse the relatively simple config file for dispatch-conf. Go ahead and "emerge gentoolkit" so you get glsa-check as well for security checks.

Man, looking over those posts makes me actually think I learned something about linux along the way, when I just though I was following some good howtos. There's a lot of text to take in if you read all that, but I find some interesting reading in there, and it's made managing my gentoo system a lot easier and more robust.

Happy gentooing!

Like you guys have pointed out, Gentoo's documentation, and users forums are second to none. They have like what, 100,000+ members? Any time I have a problem, there's always someone who can help me out. I still like Debian very much, but the user community is somewhat lacking.

Also, it's such a relief not having to fiddle around with 3rd party, unofficial repositories for a RedHat, or Debian based distro. Everything in Gentoo is an Emerge away. Libdvdcss, Mplayer, Flash, Java, you name it. It's all available for download out of the box.

I dont think the so called (3rd parties, untested repositories) is more than something comming from the mouth of microsoft. Open source is about 3rd parties, untested code, the testing is done by you if you havent find out.

So I really don think there is anything wrong with the so called untested repositories. I am perfectly fine with them, actually I am glad that they exsist.

Vogateer wrote:One thing I would warn you about is not blindly doing the "emerge -uDav world" command too often. Something I had to learn about was how to properly take care of the toolchain. I'd probably be terrible at explaining it, but here's a link to the forum where I first read about it:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-282474.html

heh I update my world usually once a day (if not more) I find as long as you notice what gets updated if something breaks it is pretty easy to find the problem.

Although the install is tough I did learn some very useful things like learning about chroot and fdisk which could be useful for sys admin stuff. I'll admit compiling can be somewhat tedious at times but Portage is the best thing since sliced bread. Gentoo gives me the control I need and I have learned far more than when I was on Debian. With gentoo you can mask put keywords on and change use flags and more with your packages (there are even other repositories although they are called overlays and require you to update them seperately with something like layman).

I agree with Vogateer, use dispatch-conf, it is much better (I don't know why etc-update hasn't become depreciated).

Another thing about Gentoo is they are very bleeding edge (of course they are either hard masked or by keyword). Right now I am running Xorg 7.1, Kopete 0.12beta2, amaroK (todays SVN snapshot), XGL, and a bunch of other bleeding edge stuff all from Portage.

It also has pretty good AMD64 support so you can get the Firefox binaries or try a hack to get them to work with the AMD64 compiled one and they have 32bit emulation layers for everything from java to glib for any 32bit binaries and you can even create a 32bit chroot as well.

I am glad some see the reason Gentoo is not all bad and I have run it for over half a year now and will probly continue for a long time.

I've rarely, rarely had breakage updating world, as long as I've run revdep-rebuild afterwards. I compile with conservative flags, and for a while there I was updating every other day, and the occasional problem I did have was easily solved on the forum. That was when I was first getting the hang of things and wanted the experience. The only time I've ever really broke stuff is when I used gentoo hardened, and my lack of understanding in the area of SELinux really made a mess of things. I didn't update properly, and had trouble with spamassassin, and finally just gave up. I certainly don't blame gentoo for that, though.

Oh yeah, one other recommendation I have is changing your make.conf file to log the portage messages. That way if one of the packages needs you to run a command, or something breaks, you can go back and see what happened.

Now I have things pretty well set up the way I want them, and don't mess with it too much. I mainly watch for security updates and maybe the latest kde release. If I had two computers, I'd be using one of them to test all the latest xorg stuff, and I'd probably be breaking things left and right just for the fun of it. I use my current computer too much right now to deal with breakages, particularly while my wife is in school and using it.

Therein lies the beauty of gentoo, though. You want stability? My gentoo box has been rock solid for over a year despite my playing around with things like initng and composite transparency. (Initng is almost there, I just can't get it to automount stuff correctly.) You want bleeding edge? Unmask some packages and you're there. Packages? Portage probably has everything you want and more, and I've even made some ridiculously simple ebuilds for my own machine for one or two that were too new to be in the tree, yet. I say gentoo is what you want it to be.

Well, after about 4 days of compiling, tweaking, and optimizing, I now have a super fast, super customized OS. I've got MMX, SSE, SSE2, ACPI, and alot more special compilation settings enabled in my make.conf file. Try doing THAT on a binary distro! As long as my system doesn't explode in a horrible fiery death in the near future, I plan using Gentoo exclusively from now on. The speed, and configurability is light years beyond anything else I've used.

Wally Balljacker wrote:Well, after about 4 days of compiling, tweaking, and optimizing, I now have a super fast, super customized OS. I've got MMX, SSE, SSE2, ACPI, and alot more special compilation settings enabled in my config file. Try doing THAT on a binary distro! As long as my system doesn't explode in a horrible fiery death in the near future, I plan using Gentoo exclusively from now on. The speed, and configurability is light years beyond anything else I've used.

Good luck!!

Patrick wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:Well, after about 4 days of compiling, tweaking, and optimizing, I now have a super fast, super customized OS. I've got MMX, SSE, SSE2, ACPI, and alot more special compilation settings enabled in my config file. Try doing THAT on a binary distro! As long as my system doesn't explode in a horrible fiery death in the near future, I plan using Gentoo exclusively from now on. The speed, and configurability is light years beyond anything else I've used.

Good luck!!

lol, come on Pat, once you get your system compiled and configured the way you like it, it's not that time consuming. Do a stage 3 install from the LiveCD, and give it a try. Initially it takes awhile, but they have precompiled binaries for alot of large applications like OpenOffice.

Wally Balljacker wrote: lol, come on Pat, once you get your system compiled and configured the way you like it, it's not that time consuming. Do a stage 3 install from the LiveCD, and give it a try. Initially it takes awhile, but they have precompiled binaries for alot of large applications like OpenOffice.

I was being serious when I said good luck. I'm glad you got it tweaked out the way you like. 2 Gentoo installs in my life time is enough for me.
No thanks.

I'm sure gentoo isn't for everyone, but it seems like a lot of people, like myself, enjoy using it and never have problems with portage.

Patrick, have you gone over your gripes with gentoo before? I'd rather not have you rehash stuff you've already said, but it is interesting to know why knowledgeable users don't care for it. Was it just the compile times, or was it other stuff?

Vogateer wrote:I'm sure gentoo isn't for everyone, but it seems like a lot of people, like myself, enjoy using it and never have problems with portage.

Kidding aside, as long as you like it then that's all that matters.

Vogateer wrote: Patrick, have you gone over your gripes with gentoo before? I'd rather not have you rehash stuff you've already said, but it is interesting to know why knowledgeable users don't care for it. Was it just the compile times, or was it other stuff?

The compiles are pretty brutal especially if that's your only machine. I guess you could do an update before going to bed and wake up golden. The last time I installed it I didn't keep it around for too long. The first time was back in the day when it was a fairly new distro. The system got borked after an upgrade. I'm sure it's better than what it used to be.

Yeah, when I read some of the posts in the forum from about 3 or 4 years ago, there seemed to be a far greater occurance of breakage with gentoo. It's a reasonable conclusion that the maturity of a good distro will eventually encourage stability.

I'm thinking about using gentoo on an ancient G3 mac I have at work. I may have to take that one home with me to get anywhere with it, since I don't have time to do much with it while I'm at work. There aren't many distros for PPC that I'm familiar with. Ubuntu, Yellow Dog, and gentoo are the only three I'm familiar with. I was able to get Ubuntu Live working on this old machine, and was impressed with how well it worked, though my love for gentoo will probably win my heart over.

It's interesting to note how many distros there are that inspire devotion among their users. Slackware, gentoo, Suse, Debian, and a few others seem to have a hardcore fanbase. I keep thinking I should try others, but then I always think to myself, "What could this distro give me that gentoo can't?" There's never a good answer to that one, because if you know how to use gentoo, and don't mind compiling packages at night or at a decent nice level, then there's very few things any other distro can offer you. I'm assuming there's a similar situation with other distros as well. I just get the feeling that I would try several others, and that eventually I would just think to myself, "This is some pretty slick stuff, but if only I had gentoo on this machine, then I could do this and that and the other..."

It's also interesting to see how many guests on the show use gentoo. It's probably just me fooling myself, but I swear I can sense a gentoo user by listening to them. Just like the lawyer talking about patents. Just get that feeling...