Gentoo 2006.1 released

Post by **Patrick** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 9:09 am

CentOS has to annoy the people at RH. It's basically RH minus tech support for free! I'm going to see if can have those guys on the show. I'm sure it would be a good interview.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Sep 06, 2006 9:53 am

Patrick wrote:CentOS has to annoy the people at RH. It's basically RH minus tech support for free!

Why would that be the case, Red Hat has been a part of the community for over a decade, so they know "the rules of the game", plus even if CentOS didn't exist, if people really wanted to run RHEL, but not pay for support, they could just get all the stuff they'd need right here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/e ... e/4/en/os/
And the SRPMs for updates is available right here: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/u ... n/os/SRPMS

It's very very easy to build an SRPM, you just put it into the /usr/src/packages/SRPMS, and run:

Code: Select all

rpmbuild --rebuild --target=i386 package.rpm

And if you think about it, the GNU/Linux distro, RHEL, doesn't cost anything, because Fedora is pretty dang good, and through the Fedora Legacy project, you get updates for a long long time, so in theory, the thing that Red Hat makes money on is support (Which includes packaged security fixes), training etc.

Patrick wrote:I'm going to see if can have those guys on the show. I'm sure it would be a good interview.

How about trying to get Michael Tiemann on, he ran Cygnus before they got bought by Red Hat.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 9:48 am

Well folks, after much deliberation I've decided to put Gentoo on my server. There are some problems with the 2006.1 installer on pre-i686 architectures, so I'm using 2006.0. I'm still installing, but it's OK so far (with minor glitches).

I wrote up a post on how I made my decision on my blog if anyonne is interested. I tried to consider any reasonable option, and give details on what distros I turned down (and why).

I'll try to write up a report on how the install went when I'm done.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 3:38 am

Gomer_X wrote:Well folks, after much deliberation I've decided to put Gentoo on my server. There are some problems with the 2006.1 installer on pre-i686 architectures, so I'm using 2006.0. I'm still installing, but it's OK so far (with minor glitches).

I wrote up a post on how I made my decision on my blog if anyonne is interested. I tried to consider any reasonable option, and give details on what distros I turned down (and why).

I'll try to write up a report on how the install went when I'm done.

It's been about 7 days since the last update. Still compiling, I take it?

Should be done by new years.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 10:18 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:
Gomer_X wrote:I'll try to write up a report on how the install went when I'm done.
It's been about 7 days since the last update. Still compiling, I take it? Should be done by new years.

I was planning on doing a write-up for my blog, but haven't gotten to it yet. The install went fairly smoothly. I had to use the 2006.0 install CD (2006.1 is broken on i586 arches) and stage 3 tarballs (there is no 2006.1 stage 3 for i586).

As reported elsewhere it took about 25 minutes to compile a kernel, but I had a running system fairly quickly. I found that there was a portage update available and emerged that, which recompiled 18 packages. That took a few hours.

Once I had some basic stuff installed and everything was working OK, I did a 'emerge --update --deep --newuse world', which will upgrade all packages and their dependencies and recompile against the new USE flags. Basically this is an update and rebuild of the ENTIRE system.

This took a little over 10 hours. Bear in mind that I recompiled 51 packages, and went from GCC 3.4.x to 4.1.x, which is a big deal - on a 400 MHz CPU.

Afterward my system was completely broken, although it would boot. Once I edited all the config files, everything is fine once again. Gentoo will not overwrite config files, so I did it manually. It was pretty simple, really, with quite a few files just being copied over the old ones without any changes.

Seems pretty cool so far, but I still need to get an MTA, apache, MySQL, CVS and some other stuff running. It boots in under 40 seconds and comes up with 364 of my 384 megs of RAM free!

mowestusa · Post by **mowestusa** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 1:19 pm

Gomer_X wrote:I wrote up a post on how I made my decision on my blog if anyonne is interested. I tried to consider any reasonable option, and give details on what distros I turned down (and why). I'll try to write up a report on how the install went when I'm done.

Just wanted to thank you for the interesting read on your blog and for posting an update on this thread. I really enjoyed your blog post. You had some great thoughts which I kind of expected since you have always spoken about the solid reasons you have had for not distro hopping in other threads in this forum. You really laid out some solid reasons for giving Gentoo a try, and pointed out resonable reasons for passing by other choices. A great read for those setting up a home server.

I've been involved in a similar experiment for the last three weeks as I attempt to learn NetBSD. I have a long road ahead, it is the steepest learning curve that I have encountered in a free Unix system, but I believe it will be worth the trouble in the end. I have already learned more about vim, bash, and the shell than I have learned in using different Linux distros for two years.

mowestusa

hellonorman · Post by **hellonorman** » Fri Sep 15, 2006 2:56 pm

Gomer you may want to look into the buildpkg and usepkg options for emerge. It allows you to store a copy of the compiled binary. This can be helpfull if you upgrade a package and something doesn't work right. You can just emerge the older binary package instead of having to recompile it.