[PLUG] Review: Gentoo 1.2 (long)

[Jason Costomiris <jcostom@jasons.org>]

No distribution flames, please.  We all have our opinions.

To preface this review, let me tell you where I've come from, Linux-wise.
My first kernel was 0.99pl15.  My first installation was the SLS 
distribution.  Boy, were we sure happy when Slackware came around.  In 
those days, Pat Volkerding was doing a great job of maintaining the 
distribution.  Unfortunately, those days didn't last forever.  These 
days, Pat's getting paid to do the job, so it's better.

Then a couple wacky college students decided they wanted to mimic the SysV 
features of an actual package management system, and thus was born RedHat.
I think I still have my Mother's Day +0.1 CD in a box in my parents' 
basement.  Then it was off to Debian.  While nice, stable, and great tools,
Debian got real old, real fast.  I remember when Debian was the first
distribution to go to libc5, and they were first to have a 2.0 kernel.
Sadly, those days are also long gone.  The Debian people seem more 
interested in testing their frozen distribution for a year than releasing
an up-to-date release - truly a shame.  Sure, there's testing, but that's
not "stable", now is it?  I've had (extremely) brief encounters with 
Caldera and Mandrake too.  Caldera, well, let's just say "Hated it."
Mandrake was the "cooler, newer RedHat," but that came with a price, 
instability.

I've heard of Linux from Scratch (LFS), but never had the desire to "build
my own".  Then I tried Gentoo.  I admit it, they're winning me over.  You
start by downloading an ISO image.  You choose between the small one,
at 16MB, which is enough to boot the system and install the bootstrap
stuff, or the bigger one (over 100MB), which includes half-built (stage2)
and fully built (stage3) i686 systems.  Longing for some adventure, I 
did the smaller ISO, which only has stage1 on it.  Gentoo has some great
directions on their site for installing - very worthwhile.  The other cool
part of it is that because you do most of your work by chroot'ing yourself
into the stageN tree and building stuff, you can do this from the comforts
of your current box without having to trash everything before starting.

Starting with stage1, I decided to build binaries that were exclusive to
the P6 arch, which meant my compiler flags would be "-march=i686 -O3 -pipe".
I proceeded on to build stage2, which is really building your glibc, 
compiler, binutils and the assorted other tools you'll need to build the 
rest of the system.  The stage2 build took just about an hour on my 
P-4/1.8Ghz/1.5G RAM[1].  YMMV.  On to stage 3, which I let run overnight.
The next morning I built a kernel, finished the install and booted into 
my shiny new Gentoo installation.  They have this nifty tool called 
"emerge" (written in Python if you care to know) which uses rsync to grab
build information for packages (aka the "portage" system), then uses
wget to fetch source, and uses a script file to build the packages you
specify.

I had meetings most of the day yesterday, so I told it to:

emerge vim gnome mozilla nautilus-gtkhtml xmms bitchx openssh

While I was gone, it installed each packages, along with their dependencies.
I came home to having built (to name a few):

XFree86 4.2.0
Xmms 1.2.5
Vim 6.1
Mozilla 1.0
Gnome 2.0.0
BitchX 1.0c19 (the non-trojaned version, of course)
openssh 3.4p1
and many others.

A little xf86config magic, and some rc-update commands, and I was up and
running.  I must say, the system is very fast, compiles at lightning speed,
and looks mighty fine.  If these guys keep this up, I just might blow off
RedHat for good...  If you've got a "do it yourself" mentality, and like 
to tinker, go for it.  I've got my SB Audigy, USB mouse & keyboard, Firewire
CD-RW drive and all working, with minimal trouble.


[1] Why so much RAM?  I use VMware for lab work, and regularly have 3 or
    4 VMs open at a time.

-- 
Jason Costomiris <><           |  Technologist, geek, human.
jcostom {at} jasons {dot} org  |  http://www.jasons.org/ 
          Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
                    My account, My opinions.

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