Gentoo 2006.1 released

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Thu Aug 31, 2006 1:41 am

A new version of everyones favorite Linux distribution has been released. Pat, you should give the AMD64 version a try. Give that machine a real workout!

Live CD for i686: ftp://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/ge ... 2006.1.iso

Jza · Post by **Jza** » Fri Sep 01, 2006 10:13 pm

I just download it today, I will install it tomorrow. I havent have a gentoo box in a while (2004) and I think there are tonz of new enhacments. A question I have is which is the right download for me. I want to build a dedicated LAMP server.

I download the LiveCD but I am thinking I should have got just a base install instead. What do you think?

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 2:45 am

The GUI installer on the Live CD is still pretty much broken from my experience. You can definitely give it a try though. Just for laughs I tried the live/mininal CD for PPC, and absolutely nothing worked - no ethernet, no sound, and no explanation on how to go about installing it. Gentoo is cool, I guess I've just had my share of bad luck with it.

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Sat Sep 02, 2006 8:34 am

Jza wrote:I just download it today, I will install it tomorrow. I havent have a gentoo box in a while (2004) and I think there are tonz of new enhacments. A question I have is which is the right download for me. I want to build a dedicated LAMP server.

I download the LiveCD but I am thinking I should have got just a base install instead. What do you think?

If you will have internet access during the install I would recommend the minimal install cd. You will be able to download the most up to date stage tarball and portage snapshot. I can also confirm that the gui installer is not very reliable yet.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 11:36 am

I have a server running Fedora Core 4 that needs a rebuild. It's got a 400 Mhz CPU and 384 megs of RAM. I need a distro that is fairly stable, but I also need recent versions of Python, Apache, etcetera.

How difficult would it be on this box to get a basic server install that would do sendmail, apache and a CVS server? There will be no GUI of any kind on this system. Does an install include a mailer out of the box? I don't have a problem with configuring apache from scratch, but I can't lose my mail server for more than a few days.

My other top choice is to go to Fedora Core 5, but I'd like something more minimal that I don't need to upgrade every 6 months.

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:08 pm

Gomer_X wrote:I have a server running Fedora Core 4 that needs a rebuild. It's got a 400 Mhz CPU and 384 megs of RAM. I need a distro that is fairly stable, but I also need recent versions of Python, Apache, etcetera.

How difficult would it be on this box to get a basic server install that would do sendmail, apache and a CVS server? There will be no GUI of any kind on this system. Does an install include a mailer out of the box? I don't have a problem with configuring apache from scratch, but I can't lose my mail server for more than a few days.

My other top choice is to go to Fedora Core 5, but I'd like something more minimal that I don't need to upgrade every 6 months.

Current version of sendmail is 8.13.7.
Apache 2.0.58.

You probably can't get much leaner than a gentoo baselayout and only emerge what you need. Base install doesn't include a mailer by default so you would have to emerge anything that you need. There are some very detailed howto's on setting up various mail configurations. Wouldn't you be able to just migrate your sendmail config over?

The biggest thing would be how long it would take to compile sendmail and apache. I would guess even on a 400 Mhz machine it would only be a matter of hours.

I've recently installed gentoo on a few machines lately so if you go that route I could probably answer questions about the install.

Linc · Post by **Linc** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 12:21 pm

Gomer_X wrote:I have a server running Fedora Core 4 that needs a rebuild. It's got a 400 Mhz CPU and 384 megs of RAM. I need a distro that is fairly stable, but I also need recent versions of Python, Apache, etcetera.

How difficult would it be on this box to get a basic server install that would do sendmail, apache and a CVS server? There will be no GUI of any kind on this system. Does an install include a mailer out of the box? I don't have a problem with configuring apache from scratch, but I can't lose my mail server for more than a few days.

My other top choice is to go to Fedora Core 5, but I'd like something more minimal that I don't need to upgrade every 6 months.

I would consider sticking arch or debian on it.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 1:46 pm

hellonorman wrote:The biggest thing would be how long it would take to compile sendmail and apache. I would guess even on a 400 Mhz machine it would only be a matter of hours.

I've recently installed gentoo on a few machines lately so if you go that route I could probably answer questions about the install.

I'm not too worried about compile time. I am worried that there is no longer an i586 stage 3 tarball available. I'm not willing to do a stage 1 or stage 2 install as they're no longer supported and a lot more work.

What would be the result of using the 2006.0 stage 3 tarball for i586?

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 1:48 pm

Linc wrote: I would consider sticking arch or debian on it.

I didn't like Arch much.

I may consider Debian, though. It's got a pretty good pedigree on the server. I think they're still on Python 2.3.4, but that would work.

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 2:02 pm

Gomer_X wrote:
hellonorman wrote:The biggest thing would be how long it would take to compile sendmail and apache. I would guess even on a 400 Mhz machine it would only be a matter of hours.

I've recently installed gentoo on a few machines lately so if you go that route I could probably answer questions about the install.
I'm not too worried about compile time. I am worried that there is no longer an i586 stage 3 tarball available. I'm not willing to do a stage 1 or stage 2 install as they're no longer supported and a lot more work.

What would be the result of using the 2006.0 stage 3 tarball for i586?

Nothing wrong with using the 2006.0 tarball. You would just need to emerge world afterwards to be completely up to date.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 2:17 pm

Debian on the server is pretty rock solid in my experiences.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 5:18 pm

I would consider running CentOS on there. No long compile times, it's supported for many years, and it has all the stability of RHEL. Either that or Debian, but you seem like more of a RedHat guy.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:21 am

Patrick wrote:Debian on the server is pretty rock solid in my experiences.

My website runs on a virtual host that's running Debian and I haven't had problems. However jokosher.org runs on a debian VM and it falls over all the time. It's a fairly new setup, though, and we're running a lot of stuff on it.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:24 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:I would consider running CentOS on there. No long compile times, it's supported for many years, and it has all the stability of RHEL. Either that or Debian, but you seem like more of a RedHat guy.

I'm really leaning towards CentOS at this point. The thing that really puts me off Debian is they're still using apache 1.3. Version 2.0 is there, but not well supported, and I'll probably need mod_python and mod_perl.

Time is also a factor and the learning curve would be a little easier to deal with on a Red Hat based distro. I'm just too busy right now to learn a whole new system.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:45 am

I'd go for CentOS if I were you, Gomer. It's very nice, and there are good 3rd party repos for it. It's also a rebuild of your favorite distro's mother. I have to "maintain" rhel servers at work, and the redhat "support" has been so useless that most of our subs have expired. We're seriously considering migrating everything to centos at this point. I can't stress enough how incredibly useless redhat has been - I'm sure there is an application for their support, but we've never found it. "Not Supported" was and is their motto every time we've called with a question, be it about hardware recommendations, about milter issues, or about kernel patches. I get as much "support" from community mailing lists, and generally more.

Sorry for the rant...