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Re: [PLUG] Review: Gentoo 1.2 (long)
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Hey Jason,
Thanks for the review. I've been wanting to play with Gentoo for a while. I
even downloaded ISO's but haven't yet had a chance to try it. Now I know
what I'm going to do with the WalMart Lindows box I just bought.
thanks!
> 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.
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Philadelphia Linux Users Group - http://www.phillylinux.org
> Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
> General Discussion - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug
______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group - http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug
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