Guest post by “Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below…”
“Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below…”
It’s gone from the top 10 to beyond 20 at Distrowatch: http://distrowatch.com
What could we do about it to recover the buzz it used to have early 2000?
It’s 2011… it would probably take more automation to give Gentoo the “buzz” it used to have, since these days eye candy, ease of use, and automation seem to be synonymous to “buzz”. Of course, then you would have to wonder… with extra automation, would it still be Gentoo? More frequent releases would probably help too, since every time a new version of a distro is released, that distro jumps up several places. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the Top 25 on DistroWatch have frequent releases.
Personally, while Gentoo is interesting to me, it’s one of the very few distros that I just can’t be bothered to get working… it’s a nightmare, even when attempting to follow directions step-by-step. I have a lot of patience with computers and like to play around with OSes, but Gentoo just goes too far for me. I’ve tried installing it so many times, with absolutely no luck.
Gentoo is a rolling release distro, there are no releases, only updates to portage.
What this article is about is a new Live CD which happens every now and then. I used to use Knoppix to install Gentoo back in the day. Now their CD’s provide a good enough environment to install Gentoo.
I run Gentoo on my Laptop, Workstation, Xbox (original (Gentoox)), and my SheevaPlug. Used to run it on my PS3 but we all know what happened there… f###ing Sony made me choose between NetFlix and Linux.
The reason I keep using Gentoo is because all other installers for other distros make it unclear what is about to happen during install as far as partitioning and the MBR are concerned. This is a problem if you are setting up a dual boot environment or want to frequently blow your root partition away and re-install without losing your other OS’s and data partitions. With Gentoo its all manual and explicit… I like that.
I don’t care too much for the actual environment and working with portage is very frustrating at times. I’d love to use Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, or something more mainstream but sadly their installers are lacking.
Edited 2011-03-09 22:20 UTC
I don’t know about other oses but debian asks you where you want to install grub/lilo and if you want to install them, it also lets you choose to reuse an existing partition for /home for example
True, but PCLinuxOS is also a rolling release distro, and they regularly come out with new live/installation CDs with updated packages. To be fair, though, Gentoo seems to be all about installing a base system and then compiling/installing anything else you want, so it would probably be relatively infrequently that enough of the base OS is updated to release new install CDs.
Actually the release team makes new releases on a weekly basis. That is, for the installation media.
The LiveDVD is updated less regularly to put it mildly.
The weekly releases can be found on the mirrors in
/releases/arch/current-iso/ or in /releases/arch/current-stage3/
Wow… damn, no wonder they don’t regularly post release notes and list it on DistroWatch then, I had no idea new installation images were that frequent. Interesting, thanks–I didn’t know that.
You can manually partition with most other distros. Definitely with Centos, Fedora and OpenSUSE. I think you can with Ubuntu too.
Sorry dude that’s crazy talk. Choosing Gentoo over anything else because of the installer??
I have run Gentoo for at least 7 years and finally rid my server of it a couple weeks ago for Centos.
The installers of most distros are fine do nearly anything you like. You are also free to post install manage partitions and change mountpoints, swap, whatever you like.
I like many others realised that the time donated to keep Gentoo going strong was just not worth it. We don’t use 10G hard drives anymore, we don’t use laptops with 128MB RAM anymore and we don’t use dial up Internet anymore (majority anyway). It became less and less relevant. If my root partition kills itself with Kubuntu it would take me a couple hours to be back where I was with a fresh install (disregarding backups). Not possible with Gentoo. For me Gentoo was a great progression from LFS. It was educational, trim, small and fast. I don’t need the education, my HDD is plenty big, don’t care what dependencies install, hardware is fast enough now not to notice software optimising….
There is a place for Gentoo. Would be a sad day if they ever close shop.
The aforementioned OS’s bootloaders work seemlessly with dual-boots or more.
I don’t think the issue was with GRUB’s capabilities, i think it was with the installer overwriting the MBR with a new GRUB image – thus wiping the old image and any boot mappings it had.
Trying to restore an existing Linux install after GRUB has been wiped can often be a complete nightmare.
Though getting it up and running is kind of complicated and time consuming; Gentoo is the Linux distro I’m more comfortable with:
* It has a very BSD-like port system
* Its port system (portage) is far better than the one found in BSDs.
* I install just what I need; and I am full aware of what is installed in my box.
* The Gentoo devs do not tweak the mainstream desktop environments to look cooler or to do strange things (I think Kubuntu or OpenSuse are very ‘tweaked’).
portage is what makes gentoo beat the shit out of LFS
The good things about gentoo are too many for me to mention, but it low level of nonsense in regard to KDE and Gnome are among the best parts. Not to mention that the gentoo devs are quite important in regard to keeping beagle alive (I really dislike tracker).
If they would just keep kernel-versions alive for longer time periods…
Indeed! Portage is just plain and simple awesome and I’ve missed it ever since I moved on to binary distros. Sure, compiling stuff takes time and can be frustrating on slower machines, but the power that Portage gives you is quite unparalled and could perhaps make it all worth it. Like for example I recently needed libx264 and libvp8 support in FFMpeg only to find out that Ubuntu’s one hasn’t been compiled with either. To fix that I would have had to install all the compiler tools and dependencies manually and then compile and install it, whereas with Portage I would simply have specified “+x264 +vp8” flags and issued one single command to install it all.
Good thing I am getting a quad-core CPU next week, it’ll make compiling times a lot less of an issue and I could start using Gentoo again
oooor you could have just added the medibuntu repository.
For Debian, there’s debian-multimedia.
Yeah.
At this point nearly any common issue like this has been experienced by someone else first, and a fairly simple solution exists.
Less simple than Gentoo, you just have to add an USE flag. It’s telling your system:
“From now on, be able to do this too, period”
Not only do you get the flexibility, but its properly package managed so you can update the packages easily. If you start manually installing software by hand it soon becomes an update nightmare.
Also with gentoo, you can optimize the code specifically for the hardware your using… This can have quite significant benefits for things like media encoding.
I used Gentoo from 2002 till 2008 as main OS. Except the last half year everything was good, but then after almost every emerge something broke. It was no longer possible to use it as my main OS, to much tinkering to keep things running, so I switched to Fedora.
Never looked back since.
Idem, Jun-2002, sometime in 2008. Except I went to Ubuntu
create at least an easy/automatic way to install it? Instead to follow all those cp/mount/chroot/mk2fs/links/wget
always likek gentoo couldnt get my kernels to build properly tho.settled for arch thats where im at today.The effort the guys/gals at gentoo put in is to be appreciated if only to keep the distro scene from becoming a debian monocultureby proxy(not in a bad way but with ubuntu – which is basically debbian wiith all its spawned remixes some fresh air is welcome)
Just a correction: The “11.0” is the version of the LiveDVD, not the version of the Gentoo release.
Starting 2009, Gentoo is built every few days, you can pick the “current” version; install it in your box (with a lot of effort), install the latest Portage tree available and updating your whole system from time in time with:
emerge -uD world
…you forgot vN :p
Or is just me who keeps messing with my use flags every other month?
and we mustn’t forget eix-sync and glsa-check -tv all
I used to love Gentoo back in the day, I used it as my main os for 3-4 years… It seemed to kind of fall apart around 2006 so I moved away from it. I do miss it though and as far as the default text install, believe it or not, after I did it a couple times it was quite simple and could easily do it from memory.
I actually downloaded this iso the other day. But I forgot, and was reminded of this article. I’m going to give it a spin, but I am far too used to Ubuntu ways, to change to another distro, I think. (apt-get/sudo). What the real differences are I don’t know either. Boot scipts seem to be little discussed, when discussing distro vs distro, and compilation options are generally the same? And the open-source components are generally the same. I noticed that ubuntu maverick and natty, gave me higher latencies with solid audio streams, with the same kernel, as I used on karmic and lucid. So I’m going to do a quick check of latencies here, as it seems that userland matters when it comes to latency aswell.
-Well, first of all I had to kill knotify as it was hogging the audio driver. Second, it is a voluntary preemption kernel, which is rather uninteresting. While I was typing this Konqueror also locked up on me. I also generally prefer Gnome, or maybe e17 when that matures.
The background keeps changing and giving various statements. Maybe amusing for internal humour of the developers, but not what one would except of a distro that “should just work”.
All in all, not my kind of distro.
*headdesk*
50% of this says “I’m lazy”, 50% says “ORSIETRHSTYRUORSKMOVLROFYUHV”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuBNifd1iIk
Edited 2011-03-10 03:53 UTC
Lol, you’re probably one of those people who think that when Henry Rollins says “I’m a liar”, he’s cool. You don’t get the message, and apparently you didn’t get the message of my post either. Maybe you like to geek out, and have lots of immature messages on your screen, and nudity, because you are immature yourself. Unfortunately that is a problem in the computer world, that some people truly geek-out and fail to see the ultimate, because of programming paradigms, or personal convictions. Or simply bad taste. And the result is bloated code, and obfuscated lesser-performing solutions. And a whole number of geeky slogans, apparently.
O_o
Actually, that song is about how being a liar is a _bad_ thing. Not his best work, either. His speaking gigs are much better than any of his music.
The rest of your post is simply more madness and nonsense. It’s not insulting, because it’s… madness.
Gee.. you understood that. So how come you are the same sociopath yourself.
o_o… Wat?
Go be this cocky in a gay-bar. It’s like a call of love, in there. You might get the attention you want.
O_O
Uh…
“Such small, fat, bald-headed technologist be insane”.
If you remove the hate-speech and crap-English factors this basically says “Why don’t you go get laid! I’m sure you could!”
…yowza.
Even with the fear of sounding apologetic, I still feel sorry for posting this here. This post has got nothing to do with this topic or this thread.
I could not reply to your comment in an earlier article because the system on this site locks out any new comments after 5 days.
Anyways, you had asked what my first language is. It is Hindustani. And I went all the way to post this in a different article because linguistics interests me too.
Gentoo is a tweakable system from bottom up. Most other systems make you feel like you are “hacking” the intended patterns when you make certain changes. Gentoo is designed to be tweaked at all levels. I wouldn’t call Gentoo a “distribution” of Linux. Gentoo is a system for continuously creating your own distribution.
I’ve been using Sabayon, a Gentoo based distribution for nearly two years now. Sabayon is like the best of all worlds. It’s based on Gentoo, however, it comes as a live-DVD (in any flavor – Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Server, base, etc.) that utilizes a tweaked Anaconda installer that quickly and easily installs the system to hard disk. Once installed, the user finds that Sabayon has its own vast repository of up-to-date binary packages that can be installed from either a Syanptic-like GUI (Sulfur,) or easily from the command line a la apt-get (equo.) the ‘Limbo’ repository (similar to Debian’s Testing) transforms Sabayon into a “rolling” release. Interestingly, Gentoo’s native portage is also available and fully functional so if one wishes, they can quickly and easily install Sabayon and then manage the system using emerge like any Gentoo system (mixing the two package managers is not recommended.) Gentoo remains a powerful Linux system, however, in this day and age of easy to use *buntus, something like Sabayon fills the bill nicely. I highly recommend it.
It’s a little funny to me that with more cpu power, compiling to optimize is faster, but at the same time, unnecessary. Gentoo won’t be back in the top 10 because it is irrelevant now. That’s not to say it’s not still fun and interesting. There are still a few distros that give the user total control. The one I’m using now, I’ve had complete control over what’s been installed. Even Debian, you can change a few things and reclaim control over that install, too. I’ve also never had a problem with ANY installer. I’ve had the same control over the bootloader and any other OS with every installer I’ve used. Some of them are even annoying with all the double checks!
Anyway, I hope Gentoo doesn’t drop out of sight completely. It does have it’s place and the people who have put their time and effort into it are much appreciated.
Please stop comparing Gentoo with Ubuntu or Fedora. If you replaced Gentoo with Ubuntu or Ubuntu with Gentoo you were doing something wrong.
I use Gentoo for development. Gentoo offers some unique features. I could recompile my system with the debug flag in 2 commands. Pretty cool.
I ALSO use Mandriva. With Mandriva, when I want to quickly try a new soft, I urpmi it and it’s there in seconds. It’s not Gentoo vs distro X, it’s Gentoo + distro X. Gentoo is nothing like distro X.
I run Gentoo in a chroot. You need a host distro to install Gentoo anyway (can be the liveDVD).
Edited 2011-03-10 07:13 UTC
…Wow, that’s… an intense viewpoint.
Not sure why your use-case should be the definition of what a certain piece of software is or is not, but you are free to state… things.
I think gentoo will become more relevant as hardware increases in speed particularly storage. Once compile times for a stage one install to working desktop drop down to under 30 mins the benefits of optimising the code and the flexibility to add features immediately as you need them will start to outweigh the compile time downside.
o_o
What does that have to do with anything I said?
Gentoo is Gentoo. My point is that it is not meant to be Ubuntu of Fedora. If all you need is a distro that browses the web and run openOffice, you will get things done quick and easy with Ubuntu of Fedora.
Gentoo is for people who need the extra features that come at the price of compiling the software. If you run Gentoo but don’t use/need Gentoo’s feature like use flags or make.conf, you are doing something wrong. On the other hand, if you are spending hours recompiling software to enable features you want in Fedora, you are also doing something wrong and you should use Gentoo instead.
Edited 2011-03-10 08:56 UTC
How does any of this relate to “it’s not or, it’s and”?
Gentoo is something completely different. It can not be compared with a binary based distro and come out as a winner or looser. The binary distros have their use cases and the source based distro have other use cases.
Gentoo can be compared to Sourcemage for instance. That would make sense. Comparing Gentoo with Ubuntu does not.
Well, that’s a valid argument.
The original “and” argument is just… confusing.
I have a colleague that runs Gentoo on his workstation for daily use, and he’s been quite happy with it, except for few minor problems. But Gentoo is the type of OS that gives you very good visibility on what exactly is happening – if you spend some time with it, later it starts to pay back. Very nice distro for softwre tinkerers.
I used to be dedicated Slackware fan for many years just because you need to configure and mostly compile everything yourself and it is very educational. I was proud of myself that I can maintain my own computer the way I want and servers use the OS of my choice. My point of view however have changed in recent years.
After you are beyond the linux learning curve and you don’t need the education any more, there is no point running hands-on linux on the machine anymore. The purpose of the computer is not to run OS or the purpose of my time is not to maintain an OS. The purpose is to get something useful done – making sure servers provide neccecary services, that on desktop I can carry out neccessary functions (like sending email, chatting, playing games, downloading torrents, watching movies etc).
The platform underneath is totally irrelevant. If your purpose of life is to maintain a linux setup, then gentoo probably is your choice (or slackware or any ther hands-on distro).
I however have gone to the point where Windows licese cost is irrelevant to me and I run Windows as OS of choice. Just because I dont have to think about irrelevant things (like compatibility os depencdencies or anything other small detail). The computer is there to serve me the way I want.
So I can define myself as a regular computer user even if I have good knowledge about how computer works and what CAN be done with it.
Long live Gentoo, because there are always people who need and fancy hands-on linux. But it is mostly temporary situation until time becomes too valuable.
Edited 2011-03-10 10:49 UTC
…meh.
Gentoo is less hands on than Slackware, but does still provide most of the flexibility… That’s the beauty of Gentoo, it still has a package manager so you don’t need to make a lot of effort to build things while still retaining the flexibility to configure the build process.
Wigry has hit on the point again well.
There are a few here saying Gentoo cant be compared to X distro, sure maybe. But it gets used the same way, I have myself. Like many others it seems, that ran Gentoo from ~02 – 2008 (very interesting), we found it fun and educational. Eventually we used it like any other distro (!) and it became a management problem/nightmare. Unlike others here I’m not going to tell anyone what Gentoo is for or who should use it. Read the comments from people that ACTUALLY USED GENTOO for long enough. It’s a great distro. If your time poor then feel free to “dabble” more than “commit”.
I remember a while back GoboLinux was making some noise. They had a very good idea with software management.
What happened to them?
Its main claim to fame was the elimination of the /usr and /etc directories. The last major release was in March of 2008. There was an Alpha release toward the end of 2009. The forums are pretty quiet.
I’m using Gentoo for about seven years now and I got so used to the Gentoo way it is really difficult to switch to something else. I’ve tried other distros and was often back to Gentoo in no time. There have been times when things were really broken and I was sometimes running out of patience and tempted to switch to something else. Tried PClinux OS recently and installed it on my wifes netbook. After a few weeks and an update something went wrong. I packed my Gentoo install on a usb stick and copied it to her netbook with the result that it’s much snappier than before.