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Gentoo

IEC

IEC

Elite Member
Super Moderator
I have played around with Mandrake before, but did not find it to my liking. However, I recently came across Gentoo Linux, a rather interesting distro with a very active user base and forums, as well as good documentation. I am considering using it as my main O/S, ;however, I would first like some ATOS input on the topic. 🙂

The main thing I like about Gentoo is the idea of PORTAGE... using one all-powerful command like "emerge" to download, compile, and update is tooooooooo good. 😉
 
i like it a lot, and it's what i'm most familiar with. i find that the community is very helpful. it does take longer to get up and running though.
 
I like Debian. Apt-get uses programs that are pre-compiled on other computes. Gentoo is a bit annoying for me. But I am a freak anyways.

Go for it. If you like it it can be very rewarding OS. Better then Mandrake, although Mandrake is more then likely going to be a bit faster. Not that it would noticable either way.
 
Gentoo is, indeed, a very cute idea. Be aware, though, that it can be rather tricky to get a fully functional Gentoo system going. At very least it will take awhile, at most you'll go through rather a lot of munged configurations first. If you succeed, of course, you get a rather nice setup. You might also want to look into Debian. It is a rather diffirent system, philosophically(more emphasis on stability, less on bleeding edge packages and extreme optimization); but its package manager, APT, is really, really nice as well. Ordinarily you work with binary packages, to save time; but you can also use source for packages, if you feel like it.
 
As long as you use it for the right reasons, it's a good distro IMO.
Good reasons would be, among others:
Good documentation
Good user community(helpful and friendly, few asshat elitists)
Very up to date

People using it for the perceived speed boost are the same kind of people who use RAID-0 and think their OS boots twice as fast as a single drive.
 
Originally posted by: Sunner
As long as you use it for the right reasons, it's a good distro IMO.
Good reasons would be, among others:
Good documentation
Good user community(helpful and friendly, few asshat elitists)
Very up to date

People using it for the perceived speed boost are the same kind of people who use RAID-0 and think their OS boots twice as fast as a single drive.
Click to expand...

Number 1 reason I use it for : STABILITY

I don't know about you....but I love knowing that every single package on there has been compiled specificly geared to my hardware. I have yet to see anything fail on there.

The only time it's been shutdown was due to a #^&%@Q# power outage (yes, I know, no ups)
 
Stability is a nonissue, if anything many Gentoo users are likely to get less stable systems than those using Debian, Fedora, etc, since they play around with compiler flags without actually knowing what they do.

If you install Solaris 9 on an older SPARC box you won't have it compiled "for your box" but I'll put it up against any Gentoo box as far as stability goes, and so will many banks, governments, etc.
 
Originally posted by: Sunner
Stability is a nonissue, if anything many Gentoo users are likely to get less stable systems than those using Debian, Fedora, etc, since they play around with compiler flags without actually knowing what they do.

If you install Solaris 9 on an older SPARC box you won't have it compiled "for your box" but I'll put it up against any Gentoo box as far as stability goes, and so will many banks, governments, etc.
Click to expand...

Generally....those who install Gentoo actually know what they are doing 😉

Considering it's a distro where you build from the ground up 🙂

I definitely would not recommend gentoo to someone new to linux.

Every single OS out there is flawed, but several of them are VERY close to 100 percent stable.
 
I disagree, there are lots of people who install Gentoo who have little idea about what they're doing, the very amount of people who do it for the perceived speed boost is evidence in itself, someone who knows what they're doing would probably know enough to look beyond placebo effects.

The documentation and community make it easy enough that pretty much anyone with some basic knowledge about computers and some spare time could install it.

Like I said, I like Gentoo, but not for any speed or stability boost, those are just placebo.
There are real good sides of Gentoo though, it's too bad those are often overlooked.
 
Originally posted by: Sunner
I disagree, there are lots of people who install Gentoo who have little idea about what they're doing, the very amount of people who do it for the perceived speed boost is evidence in itself, someone who knows what they're doing would probably know enough to look beyond placebo effects.

The documentation and community make it easy enough that pretty much anyone with some basic knowledge about computers and some spare time could install it.

Like I said, I like Gentoo, but not for any speed or stability boost, those are just placebo.
There are real good sides of Gentoo though, it's too bad those are often overlooked.
Click to expand...

In my personal experience I've noticed that my gentoo box was more stable then my mandrake or redhat box. However, that doesn't mean I couldn't customize everything in the mandrake or redhat box, but since it was already configured, I got lazy and left things as is. (I could of downloaded the latest kernel and redownload the sources of everything i needed)

For gentoo, I was forced to configure and tweaked things to get things going. So in that way, it was configured in a more stable fashion

What would you consider to be the real good sides of gentoo?
 
Well, the above mentioned docs and community are certainly big plus points, the fact that people with little Linux experience can install Gentoo says something.
Also, I really like the Portage tools.
And some random "little" things, for example installing the nvnet driver is a breeze, of course provided that you have a functional other NIC in your box 😛

And of course, if you're into the bleeding edge, Gentoo is really good, the Portage tree is by far the most rapidly updated tree I've ever used.

Overall, I find it a very "friendly" distro, lacking a better word.
 
IMO Gentoo is a huge waste of time. There is no reason to build every package from source and watching gcc output scroll after you type 'emerge blah' doesn't teach you anything. That and portage is terrible, it's missing key functions that a package manager should have, it's written in python and it's much slower than apt.

http://greenfly.org/mes.html
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
IMO Gentoo is a huge waste of time. There is no reason to build every package from source and watching gcc output scroll after you type 'emerge blah' doesn't teach you anything. That and portage is terrible, it's missing key functions that a package manager should have, it's written in python and it's much slower than apt.

http://greenfly.org/mes.html
Click to expand...

That guy pretty much nailed the reasons why Gentoo isn't great, but like many others missed what is great.

Something as simple as finding help, where do you go for Debian help?
The natural first step would be debian.org, which turns up the Debian mailing lists, many people don't like those, and for many purposes, they aren't as good as a forum IMO.

Second resort might be to simply Google for "debian forums" or some such, which yields a bunch of forums, none of which look very active.

Third resort...ask here?

With Gentoo, there's an official, very active, and very friendly forum right there on Gentoo.org

My ideal distro would pretty much be Debian with the "social infrastructure" of Gentoo.
 
Something as simple as finding help, where do you go for Debian help?
Click to expand...

I usually find the included docs are good enough. And for a specific package there usually isn't anything Debian-specific, so google works fine. And I hang out in #linux on irc.arstechnica.com all the time and most of the people in there run Debian or Ubuntu.

I'm also subscribed to a few of the Debian mailing lists, but most of the questions asked on them are simple so I usually just lurk to stay abreast of what's currently broken.
 
Originally posted by: Sunner
I disagree, there are lots of people who install Gentoo who have little idea about what they're doing, the very amount of people who do it for the perceived speed boost is evidence in itself, someone who knows what they're doing would probably know enough to look beyond placebo effects.

The documentation and community make it easy enough that pretty much anyone with some basic knowledge about computers and some spare time could install it.

Like I said, I like Gentoo, but not for any speed or stability boost, those are just placebo.
There are real good sides of Gentoo though, it's too bad those are often overlooked.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. It's very true if you read their forums a lot. I've run gentoo for a while now (typing on it right now too) and I've seen the two "camps" in the gentoo user base. There's the "ricers" who make posts in the forums about extreme CFLAGS and saying they notice firefox is waaaaayyyy faster than before. Then there are the people who are happy with a simple -march=whatever -02 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer knowing that nothing will break with those flags.

I like the convenience of portage, USE flags, and the community. Every single problem I've ever had has been solved already on the forums (and I've helped solve a few myself too). What can make gentoo fast is the devs' guides on using prelink and nptl, not -03 -ffast-math etc etc.

Gentoo is misunderstood. The ones who go bragging about it making noise are the ones who don't know why it really is good.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
IMO Gentoo is a huge waste of time. There is no reason to build every package from source and watching gcc output scroll after you type 'emerge blah' doesn't teach you anything. That and portage is terrible, it's missing key functions that a package manager should have, it's written in python and it's much slower than apt.

http://greenfly.org/mes.html
Click to expand...


I agreee completely. I think the main attraction of Gentoo is for people of want to learn about a Linux system and how it's built and configured. But it's a waste of time if you already know that stuff. Also their scripts, utilitles and configurations are proprietary and don't usually follow more widely used conventions, which is unfortunate. I also agree that a typical Gentoo system is not as stable as a pre-compiled system, and it hardlyhas any speed advantage.
 
Originally posted by: user1234
Originally posted by: Nothinman
IMO Gentoo is a huge waste of time. There is no reason to build every package from source and watching gcc output scroll after you type 'emerge blah' doesn't teach you anything. That and portage is terrible, it's missing key functions that a package manager should have, it's written in python and it's much slower than apt.

http://greenfly.org/mes.html
Click to expand...


I agreee completely. I think the main attraction of Gentoo is for people of want to learn about a Linux system and how it's built and configured. But it's a waste of time if you already know that stuff. Also their scripts, utilitles and configurations are proprietary and don't usually follow more widely used conventions, which is unfortunate. I also agree that a typical Gentoo system is not as stable as a pre-compiled system, and it hardlyhas any speed advantage.
Click to expand...

n/m: forum weirdness lost the text of my post and I'm too lazy to re-write it all 😛
 
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