Re: [PLUG] Linux distributions without version upgrades

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 7:29 PM, K.S. Bhaskar <bhaskar@bhaskars.com> wrote:
> My first experiment - Sabayon Linux 7 AMD64 - was a bomb.  The live
> DVD booted to give me my boot options, but failed to boot the KDE
> desktop on a Dell m6600 laptop.  Asking it for the messages while
> booting showed that it was in a permanent loop trying to run (or kill)
> alsactl.

Odd.  Yeah, boot music seems a bit odd to me.  Do they include the
Mass Effect Elevator Soundtrack as an option?

I tried it out on a VM and it worked great on the first try -
pretty-much with the defaults.  Seems decent to me.  Of course, the
first thing I wanted to do is try to figure out what USE settings they
have by default and tweak them.  :)

I suspect that it lets you do it somewhere, but I imagine that doing
so would quickly put you off the binary package track and you'll be
building everything from source.  They obviously can't have every
permutation sitting in a repository.

Oh, and I noticed one other pet-peeve with the package manager - it
didn't do parallel fetch/install.  It wanted to download EVERYTHING
before installing anything.  I guess that is probably safer - less
risk that you'll update some dependency and then break everything that
depends on it.  The default on Gentoo is to fetch and then start
installing as things are downloaded (and when you have to compile from
source, the sooner you can start building the better).  Gentoo also
allows parallel installs, although that really only applies to the
build phase since access to the root filesystem holds locks, and on a
binary distro that is 99% of the time spent anyway (I doubt you get
much benefit from parallel unpacking).

One thing that I appreciate is that it looks like they gpg-sign
everything.  Gentoo really needs to get their act together there.
Aspects of package-signing are implemented, but not mandatory, and
there is no central key so you have to trust individual devs.  On the
other hand, it is really easy to have gpg signatures all over the
place that don't really add much security, as it just takes one key on
a compromised server to break the whole chain of trust.  Without some
kind of centralized QA responsibility for signing every package it is
hard to keep that from happening.

Sorry it didn't work out on your hardware.  Not sure why it is
breaking - looking at the forums at least one person is running Gentoo
on an m6600, though maybe the sabayon install CD is running an older
kernel.  A loop on alsactl of all things suggests a bug in the init
scripts.

Good luck with your quest!

Rich
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