8 ms·

Gentoo Linux Releases LiveDVD Iron Penguin Edition

61 points by mariuz 12y ago

kornakiewicz 12y ago
I know something about Linux (can build a package, set variables, do some configs and simple stuff in terminal/vi/emacs), is weekend enough to install Gentoo?
- deleted 12y ago
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  - untothebreach 12y ago
    Though the person you responded to should definitely do that, just putting the acronym in a comment comes off as rude. Is it really that hard to instead say, "Gentoo has great documentation and an install guide here: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml "?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Comments like this do more harm to linux adoption than 3 advocates helping people to install linux on their machines. What a pity.
    - cm-t 12y ago
      You must be right. I thought I was funny, but since I'am advocating for freesoftware in my way, a few scale, I should not had respond that (even if when you are going to use gentoo you should be ready to read the manual)... mea culpa NB: "what a pity" is also hard to take in the face :'(
  - kornakiewicz 12y ago
    I know where to find handbook and in case I decide to play with Gentoo definitely will use it hardly, but that was just question if it's worthy my time instead of testing erlang and drinking beers :)
- untothebreach 12y ago
  I would say so. Gentoo's package manager is a bit different from some others (dpkg, rpm, etc) in that it will build from source instead of installing binary packages, but all in all I would say it is worth it. It will be more difficult than just running the graphical Ubuntu installer, but hey, that's how we get better, right?
  - emeraldd 12y ago
    The big thing is to make surr you have reasonably modern hardware. Installing on older systems could take a week or more for all the builds.
    - kornakiewicz 12y ago
      AMD FX-8350 and 8gb shall be enough, I suppose.
  - kornakiewicz 12y ago
    The issue is that I used a lot of Fedora, but it works surprisingly slow on my machine, but the support for developers' tools was awesome (never had problem with old versions). After that I tried ElementaryOS, which is beautiful and fast, but Ubuntu-based so every compiler I need to build from scratch (I'm testing new languages recently) so started thinking about something still nice and fast, but with recent stuff. Now i have a two days of continuous spare time and maybe will try Arch or Gentoo, which I know what's about, but not tried ever.
    - untothebreach 12y ago
      I personally have not used Gentoo on the desktop, but I have friends & coworkers who have, and they have been generally happy. Arch is awesome, I am not currently using it but have used it before. Another possibility you could look into is Debian Testing. Debian has the reputation of including "old" packages for the purpose of stability, but the "testing" version of the OS is much more up-to-date, and if you need something even newer, and are feeling adventurous, you can install specific packages from debian-experimental.
- travisby 12y ago
  Putting cm-t's words nicely, the Gentoo Handbook is fantastic! I first built a Gentoo install maybe around 2007, and had no problems up until the Grub install (however, I had done kernel compilations before). With Gentoo, the two hardest problems you arrive at _during installation_ are kernel configuration, and grub configuration. The former has now been solved with having great prebuilt kernels, or even just a way to use their configs. The latter may still be an issue, but once you wrap your head around it you'll be fine. I haven't done a new install in a couple years - it just keeps running as-is, so I don't know about the state of affairs, but I would hardly doubt they got worse! I'm sure it's even easier than before. A weekend is certainly enough time to build a base Gentoo system, and get enough packages installed to be able to use it for daily work. If you have any problems I would be happy to help someone with a *ntoo setup! My email is in my profile if you run into any issues :)
  - crististm 12y ago
    I'd like to know how you deal with qt version bumps. It drives me crazy to see that every time kde is upgraded the qt dependencies are bumped with previous versions removed. I don't remember last time I did an emerge world because of this. It's insane.
  - taway0987 12y ago
    Regarding grub, 2.x is torture. All hdd's with even traces of its code should be collected and shot to the sun to make sure noone would ever recreate something as painful to use as grub2. Even more, samples of their configs should be posted on the walls of every CS class, together with charges of crimes against humanity against all developers responsible for that abomination - as a warning to anyone thinking of going their road. Most systems these days have EFI bioses, just create a 512M EFI partition[1] and put your kernel(s)(with a set kernel-command line) to EFI/Boot(bootx64.efi is usually the default being loaded). You don't need a bootloader at all(+you'll get a few s off of your boot time too). Many bioses let you choose a kernel at boot time, so you don't even have to play with efibootmgr[2] if running multiple kernels/OS's. It gets more tricky if you want LVM root fe(which I'd recommend) - in that case genkernel[3] may make your life a lot easier, but even here you don't require a boot loader. If you do want a nice(er) boot menu, just copy refind[4] to your EFI partition, configuration takes seconds and you can tune it very - VERY - easily Also, folks @ #gentoo are very helpful, feel free to give them a visit if you are stuck. And the last thing I want to add - you don't have to compile your binaries on your nb/slow hw, just setup a binhost[5] and compile your tailored packages on your beefy PC/server@work - you can then share them with your devices via http for example Ok, last one - if you like elementary os, you can get the same look&feel running on gentoo, although it may take some hacks at this stage [1] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel [2] http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr [3] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genkernel http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genkernel [4] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ [5] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide ..a buildroot micro-system running other distributions as overlays is also a nice time-waster and only a step away from gentoo(+ with lxc/docker there is a lot of long-hanging fruit to collect)
- Avshalom 12y ago
  I managed a stage 2 install in a long afternoon 10 years ago knowing basically nothing about Linux, so yeah, you'll be fine.
- mahouse 12y ago
  Use genkernel instead of configuring the kernel by hand. That will save you hours of time. ;) Oh, and this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml
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  - JelteF 12y ago
    Genkernel has never worked for me and configuring a kernel is a really good learning experience. Which is probably what you want if you install Gentoo.
    - mahouse 12y ago
      That's your experience. genkernel has always worked for me and I use Gentoo because I think the rest of distros are worse. (Last one to fall was Arch Linux after systemd)
- loudmax 12y ago
  A weekend is definitely enough time to learn how to install a Gentoo system, and it's a good experience. Whether you'll really want to keep with it in the long run is another question. The level of control is awesome, but it is high maintenance. Expect it to break in interesting and surprising ways during updates.
- lrem 12y ago
  You can just follow handbook and get a workable system within a few hours. The real question is: what do you want it for? If it's just for the kicks, you probably want to spend some more time exploring what you can break. You'll probably find out that, other than outright breakage, nothing you do has as much impact as you expected to. I'd say that there are only two valid non-educational reasons to use Gentoo: getting a stripped down (for security or embedded) system or to alpha-test a lot of the free software ecosystem at the same time (e.g. build all your system out of repositories HEADs, a friend was doing that for a long time).
dochtman 12y ago
Gentoo is awesome. I'm a big fan of the amount of control it affords me over what it installs (i.e. it allows really focused, minimal base installs), and I generally find the package manager really nice to work with (definitely nicer than yum, or even brew). To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome. Note also that e.g. CoreOS and ChromeOS (or are those the same these days?) are built on Gentoo technology IIUC. Thanks to all the developers who helped put this release together!
- loudmax 12y ago
  To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome. I feel the same about Gentoo, but my approach to desktops and servers is the opposite. If my laptop or desktop breaks during a Gentoo upgrade, it's an interesting learning experience (after much gnashing of teeth and shaking of fist). If a server breaks during an upgrade that's a business impacting outage. So I prefer to run Red Hat or CentOS on servers despite distinct lack of awesome latest packages. I never bothered with a Gnome or KDE desktop. Compiling XFCE, Firefox and Chromium takes long enough.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Portage supports installing binary packages from a binhost, as well. Most large packages (Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, etc.) have precompiled versions that follow the naming convention of $SOURCEPKGNAME-bin.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    KDE takes about 30 hours to compile on my core i7-4790k even threading it out to all 8 threads.
    - OGC 12y ago
      Heh, it took me about 2-3 days on a PIII 450 mhz once.
    - jinzo 12y ago
zedr 12y ago
I have very fond memories of Gentoo Linux. My first Linux distribution was Mandrake 7. After a few months, unsatisfied with the experience, I found out about Gentoo and Portage. The idea of having running a system that was fine-tuned to my hardware intrigued me, so I decided to try it. That was 10 years ago. I downloaded the Stage 1 Live CD and ran it off my main box. I loved its colorful framebuffered background, and the way it simply dropped you in a terminal. We didn't have desktop virtualization back then, so I had to read the docs on my brothers PC and go back and forth between his computer and mine. With my very little experience with Linux, I hardly understood the commands I was typing in. Somehow I made some progress. I managed to partition the hard disk (burning the bridges - as the say), chroot into the boostrap environment, and use portage to update my system. I remember setting my CFLAGS with the most unstable options possible ( -O3 for everything, obviously), compiling GCC three times, and then beginning to slowly compile all the essential packages. Finally, I reached the crowning moment of the installation: configuring my first kernel. Unfortunately, I made a mistake somewhere between "make menuconfig" (I went through each option!) and installing LILO, and was rewarded with my first Kernel Panic, and a bricked system. After several failed attempts, I managed to get a working system and log in. I remember the great sense of achievement. It still was less challenging than whipping up an LFS system, but - what a ride! I later abandoned Windows, became a Linux system administrator, converted an entire webfarm (80+ servers) to Gentoo, started a career as a web developer, and became lazy. Today, I am happy with Xubuntu on my desktop, and CentOS on my servers. On #gentoo, denigrators would often link to https://web.archive.org/web/20050217094757/http://funroll-loops.org https://web.archive.org/web/20050217094757/http://funroll-lo... (now a spam site) and laugh about all the pain and time to get that 0.02% increase in overall system performance.
- albinoloverats 12y ago
  My experience was largely similar, although I suffered along with using lynx to read the documentation in e second virtual console as I was learning about partitions and compiler flags. And after spending hours watching/waiting for gcc, bash and some of the other core utilities (and of course Linux) to compile my then limited experience also witnessed a panic on first boot :( so I switched to Lunar and had that on my laptop until I replaced it. I too became lazy, but went for Arch instead of Ubuntu (which I did use before attempting Gentoo). Might fire-up a VM and give this a whirl...
TheRealDunkirk 12y ago
I ran Gentoo for about 5 years. Most people miss the point of it. It was created to create other "distributions." Where I worked, we actually needed that capability, but never found the time to create our own profile, and prune our own portage tree. Missed opportunity! If you need that sort of thing, great, but don't run it on a desktop thinking that it will give you any more "performance" than another distro. That's been debunked handily.
sramsay 12y ago
I've been running Gentoo pretty much exclusively since about 2002 (on servers, desktops, and laptops). I absolutely love it. A while ago, there was a post on HN (mainly harshing on systemd) that complained about the way Linux was starting to converge into something that gave the user little choice about what to install. The OP was using Ubuntu, and all I could think was that if this is a problem for you, you should certainly give Gentoo a spin. It would be hard to imagine having more control over a Linux configuration (short of building a system without a distro). I'll also say that if you're new to Linux and are interested in how it all fits together, Gentoo is a really nice way to learn. The Gentoo Handbook (the main install doc) is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of technical documentation I've ever read.
jwr 12y ago
Gentoo is often ridiculed for trying to squeeze more performance by using platform-specific compiler settings, but this misses the point. It is the only distribution that can deal with the rapidly-changing nature of open-source software. Most open-source libraries are not designed with long-term viability in mind, and are not ready for binary distribution. Distribution makers put a lot of effort into actually making things work in the long term. Gentoo takes a different approach: just assume that you will be recompiling pretty much everything, regularly. The result is a surprisingly maintainable system. As long as you update it regularly, it won't tell you to perform this monstrous cliffhanger upgrade, or reinstall using a newer version. Sure, there is always breakage, but Gentoo has a different tradeoff: minor breakage happening more often vs major breakage happening when major releases are done.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  The same could be said for Arch, or any other rolling distro.
- bhaak 12y ago
  Last weekend I had to do exactly that, taming the monstrous cliffhanger upgrade of my MythTv system that still was running a kernel 2.6.15 and hasn't really seen much change since 2009. I don't think any other distro would have allowed me to upgrade the system without a reinstall. Even though I screwed up because I didn't RTFM and didn't install everything necessary for booting the system with OpenRC, I still could salvage the system by booting with a rescue stick (based on Gentoo of course) and chrooting into my system and fix it this way. Now it's running a current kernel and it is ready for the installation of the new digital receiver card.
song 12y ago
I use funtoo for my personal server... It's partly because I've used gentoo for so long that I understand it well and I find it very easy to mainting. I also love the fact that it's just easy to install newer versions of any software I need which is great for development and testing (which tends to be more of a problem with ubuntu and debian in my experience where I often end up having to compile from source). That said while I use funtoo on my server, I use ubuntu LTS on the servers of my clients. It's just much easier if there are other people working together. I used to use gentoo for my laptop and desktop until I switched to Mac and while I do like Mac OS X, I kind of miss the freedom I had with running gentoo. I enjoyed spending hours to scripting fvwm just the way I liked it :-)
billylindeman 12y ago
I also have fond memories of gentoo. I got my start in linux using GentooX on a chipped Xbox :). I had a dedicated TSOP flashed Xbox running Cromwell bios as my main server throughout my middleschool / highschool years. I did stage1 installs on all my machines and it was a blast and great learning experience.
tarminian 12y ago
I use gentoo to stay away from systemd.
zokier 12y ago
I have a passing interest in Gentoo, but two thing have put me off; 1) the community seems bit splintered with Gentoo, Funtoo, Exherbo, and probably others I'm not aware of. It is not really clear which one I want. 2) The "stable" repository(?) seemed to be in somewhat bad health. Any gentooists willing to give their opinion of my (possibly quite faulty) impressions?
- Nanzikambe 12y ago
  Gentoo user since late 2002 here. I agree that the state of stable is quite poor of late. I surmised there're a variety of reasons behind this: I'd say the explosive growth of Arch Linux is part of this, personally I've seen much of the community move there. If you look at the state of Arch Linux's community and documentation, you'll see strong parallels with Gentoo a couple years back. Another is Docker leading many people to want a homogenous environemnt using Docker and Debian, Centos or Ubuntu. That said, I've no plan to move away from Gentoo and found that sentiment mirrored amongst a substantial core of Gentoo "power users" for the lack of a better description. Why? Ebuilds, when you want something "just so", you roll 'em "just so" Use flags, ties into the above OpenRC.ymmv, but systemd is an anathema, there's been much discussion on the topic so I'll leave that out hardened-sources Given privacy and concerns I will never trust a binary only system any more than I trust the organistion behind it. With gentoo I need never trust a binary blob should I choose not to It's worth pointing out that this current state of affairs is relative to the pinacle a few years ago, and that even in its current state the Gentoo community is way more responsive than many comparable communities. I had Firefox 32 (~amd64) within minutes of release, no such luck on my Macbook. I'd still never recommend Gentoo to new Linux users that lack the curiosity to find out precisely how all facets of their system fit together. If you want a system that "just works", Gentoo isn't it. If customisation uber alles is your battle cry, then you'll find no parrallel.
  - zokier 12y ago
    > I had Firefox 32 (~amd64) within minutes of release, no such luck on my Macbook. On the other hand, stable apparently still is on Firefox 24 even though the next ESR (which I suppose stable would be tracking), 31, was released in July. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox
wyc 12y ago
As a Gentoo user, what I enjoy (freedom of choice): [ebuild R ] media-video/ffmpeg-1.2.6-r1 USE="X alsa bzip2 encode fontconfig hardcoded-tables iconv jpeg2k libass libcaca mmx mp3 network openal opus sdl ssse3 theora threads truetype v4l vorbis x264 zlib -3dnow -3dnowext -aac -aacplus (-altivec) -amr -avx -bindist -bluray -cdio (-celt) -cpudetection -debug -doc -examples -faac -fdk -flite -frei0r -gnutls -gsm -iec61883 -ieee1394 -jack -libsoxr -libv4l -mmxext -modplug (-neon) -openssl -oss -pic -pulseaudio -rtmp -schroedinger -speex -static-libs {-test} -twolame -vaapi -vdpau (-vis) -vpx -xvid" ABI_X86="(64) (-32) (-x32)" FFTOOLS="aviocat cws2fws ffescape ffeval fourcc2pixfmt graph2dot ismindex pktdumper qt-faststart trasher" 0 kB what I suffer through: Currently merging 1 out of 7 * www-client/chromium-38.0.2125.44 current merge time: 31 minutes and 45 seconds. ETA: 1 hour, 37 minutes and 10 seconds.
organsnyder 12y ago
Gentoo was the first distro that I used full-time on the desktop. It was my distro of choice through most of college, running on my trusty (albeit excruciatingly slow) Fujitsu P-2046 laptop. This laptop (really one of the first netbooks) had an 800 Mhz Transmeta Crusoe processor and 256 MB of RAM (later upgraded to the maximum of 384). Needless to say, software installation and upgrades were extremely painful. A larger package (X11, OpenOffice, Firefox) would take over a day to compile, during which time the computer was only somewhat usable. Those were the days. I've been mostly a Kubuntu user since then, and have enjoyed having my software installations be constrained by network and disk speed. I've also enjoyed not having things break on a regular basis (though Canonical has really tried to emulate that functionality at times).

61 points by mariuz 12y ago

I know something about Linux (can build a package, set variables, do some configs and simple stuff in terminal/vi/emacs), is weekend enough to install Gentoo?

deleted 12y ago
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- untothebreach 12y ago
  Though the person you responded to should definitely do that, just putting the acronym in a comment comes off as rude. Is it really that hard to instead say, "Gentoo has great documentation and an install guide here: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml "?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Comments like this do more harm to linux adoption than 3 advocates helping people to install linux on their machines. What a pity.
  - cm-t 12y ago
    You must be right. I thought I was funny, but since I'am advocating for freesoftware in my way, a few scale, I should not had respond that (even if when you are going to use gentoo you should be ready to read the manual)... mea culpa NB: "what a pity" is also hard to take in the face :'(
- kornakiewicz 12y ago
  I know where to find handbook and in case I decide to play with Gentoo definitely will use it hardly, but that was just question if it's worthy my time instead of testing erlang and drinking beers :)
untothebreach 12y ago
I would say so. Gentoo's package manager is a bit different from some others (dpkg, rpm, etc) in that it will build from source instead of installing binary packages, but all in all I would say it is worth it. It will be more difficult than just running the graphical Ubuntu installer, but hey, that's how we get better, right?
- emeraldd 12y ago
  The big thing is to make surr you have reasonably modern hardware. Installing on older systems could take a week or more for all the builds.
  - kornakiewicz 12y ago
    AMD FX-8350 and 8gb shall be enough, I suppose.
- kornakiewicz 12y ago
  The issue is that I used a lot of Fedora, but it works surprisingly slow on my machine, but the support for developers' tools was awesome (never had problem with old versions). After that I tried ElementaryOS, which is beautiful and fast, but Ubuntu-based so every compiler I need to build from scratch (I'm testing new languages recently) so started thinking about something still nice and fast, but with recent stuff. Now i have a two days of continuous spare time and maybe will try Arch or Gentoo, which I know what's about, but not tried ever.
  - untothebreach 12y ago
    I personally have not used Gentoo on the desktop, but I have friends & coworkers who have, and they have been generally happy. Arch is awesome, I am not currently using it but have used it before. Another possibility you could look into is Debian Testing. Debian has the reputation of including "old" packages for the purpose of stability, but the "testing" version of the OS is much more up-to-date, and if you need something even newer, and are feeling adventurous, you can install specific packages from debian-experimental.
travisby 12y ago
Putting cm-t's words nicely, the Gentoo Handbook is fantastic! I first built a Gentoo install maybe around 2007, and had no problems up until the Grub install (however, I had done kernel compilations before). With Gentoo, the two hardest problems you arrive at _during installation_ are kernel configuration, and grub configuration. The former has now been solved with having great prebuilt kernels, or even just a way to use their configs. The latter may still be an issue, but once you wrap your head around it you'll be fine. I haven't done a new install in a couple years - it just keeps running as-is, so I don't know about the state of affairs, but I would hardly doubt they got worse! I'm sure it's even easier than before. A weekend is certainly enough time to build a base Gentoo system, and get enough packages installed to be able to use it for daily work. If you have any problems I would be happy to help someone with a *ntoo setup! My email is in my profile if you run into any issues :)
- crististm 12y ago
  I'd like to know how you deal with qt version bumps. It drives me crazy to see that every time kde is upgraded the qt dependencies are bumped with previous versions removed. I don't remember last time I did an emerge world because of this. It's insane.
- taway0987 12y ago
  Regarding grub, 2.x is torture. All hdd's with even traces of its code should be collected and shot to the sun to make sure noone would ever recreate something as painful to use as grub2. Even more, samples of their configs should be posted on the walls of every CS class, together with charges of crimes against humanity against all developers responsible for that abomination - as a warning to anyone thinking of going their road. Most systems these days have EFI bioses, just create a 512M EFI partition[1] and put your kernel(s)(with a set kernel-command line) to EFI/Boot(bootx64.efi is usually the default being loaded). You don't need a bootloader at all(+you'll get a few s off of your boot time too). Many bioses let you choose a kernel at boot time, so you don't even have to play with efibootmgr[2] if running multiple kernels/OS's. It gets more tricky if you want LVM root fe(which I'd recommend) - in that case genkernel[3] may make your life a lot easier, but even here you don't require a boot loader. If you do want a nice(er) boot menu, just copy refind[4] to your EFI partition, configuration takes seconds and you can tune it very - VERY - easily Also, folks @ #gentoo are very helpful, feel free to give them a visit if you are stuck. And the last thing I want to add - you don't have to compile your binaries on your nb/slow hw, just setup a binhost[5] and compile your tailored packages on your beefy PC/server@work - you can then share them with your devices via http for example Ok, last one - if you like elementary os, you can get the same look&feel running on gentoo, although it may take some hacks at this stage [1] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/EFI_stub_kernel [2] http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr [3] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genkernel http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genkernel [4] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ [5] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide ..a buildroot micro-system running other distributions as overlays is also a nice time-waster and only a step away from gentoo(+ with lxc/docker there is a lot of long-hanging fruit to collect)
Avshalom 12y ago
I managed a stage 2 install in a long afternoon 10 years ago knowing basically nothing about Linux, so yeah, you'll be fine.
mahouse 12y ago
Use genkernel instead of configuring the kernel by hand. That will save you hours of time. ;) Oh, and this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml
- deleted 12y ago
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- JelteF 12y ago
  Genkernel has never worked for me and configuring a kernel is a really good learning experience. Which is probably what you want if you install Gentoo.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    That's your experience. genkernel has always worked for me and I use Gentoo because I think the rest of distros are worse. (Last one to fall was Arch Linux after systemd)
loudmax 12y ago
A weekend is definitely enough time to learn how to install a Gentoo system, and it's a good experience. Whether you'll really want to keep with it in the long run is another question. The level of control is awesome, but it is high maintenance. Expect it to break in interesting and surprising ways during updates.
lrem 12y ago
You can just follow handbook and get a workable system within a few hours. The real question is: what do you want it for? If it's just for the kicks, you probably want to spend some more time exploring what you can break. You'll probably find out that, other than outright breakage, nothing you do has as much impact as you expected to. I'd say that there are only two valid non-educational reasons to use Gentoo: getting a stripped down (for security or embedded) system or to alpha-test a lot of the free software ecosystem at the same time (e.g. build all your system out of repositories HEADs, a friend was doing that for a long time).

dochtman 12y ago

Gentoo is awesome. I'm a big fan of the amount of control it affords me over what it installs (i.e. it allows really focused, minimal base installs), and I generally find the package manager really nice to work with (definitely nicer than yum, or even brew). To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome. Note also that e.g. CoreOS and ChromeOS (or are those the same these days?) are built on Gentoo technology IIUC. Thanks to all the developers who helped put this release together!

loudmax 12y ago
To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome. I feel the same about Gentoo, but my approach to desktops and servers is the opposite. If my laptop or desktop breaks during a Gentoo upgrade, it's an interesting learning experience (after much gnashing of teeth and shaking of fist). If a server breaks during an upgrade that's a business impacting outage. So I prefer to run Red Hat or CentOS on servers despite distinct lack of awesome latest packages. I never bothered with a Gnome or KDE desktop. Compiling XFCE, Firefox and Chromium takes long enough.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Portage supports installing binary packages from a binhost, as well. Most large packages (Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, etc.) have precompiled versions that follow the naming convention of $SOURCEPKGNAME-bin.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  KDE takes about 30 hours to compile on my core i7-4790k even threading it out to all 8 threads.
  - OGC 12y ago
    Heh, it took me about 2-3 days on a PIII 450 mhz once.
  - jinzo 12y ago

zedr 12y ago

I have very fond memories of Gentoo Linux. My first Linux distribution was Mandrake 7. After a few months, unsatisfied with the experience, I found out about Gentoo and Portage. The idea of having running a system that was fine-tuned to my hardware intrigued me, so I decided to try it. That was 10 years ago. I downloaded the Stage 1 Live CD and ran it off my main box. I loved its colorful framebuffered background, and the way it simply dropped you in a terminal. We didn't have desktop virtualization back then, so I had to read the docs on my brothers PC and go back and forth between his computer and mine. With my very little experience with Linux, I hardly understood the commands I was typing in. Somehow I made some progress. I managed to partition the hard disk (burning the bridges - as the say), chroot into the boostrap environment, and use portage to update my system. I remember setting my CFLAGS with the most unstable options possible ( -O3 for everything, obviously), compiling GCC three times, and then beginning to slowly compile all the essential packages. Finally, I reached the crowning moment of the installation: configuring my first kernel. Unfortunately, I made a mistake somewhere between "make menuconfig" (I went through each option!) and installing LILO, and was rewarded with my first Kernel Panic, and a bricked system. After several failed attempts, I managed to get a working system and log in. I remember the great sense of achievement. It still was less challenging than whipping up an LFS system, but - what a ride! I later abandoned Windows, became a Linux system administrator, converted an entire webfarm (80+ servers) to Gentoo, started a career as a web developer, and became lazy. Today, I am happy with Xubuntu on my desktop, and CentOS on my servers. On #gentoo, denigrators would often link to https://web.archive.org/web/20050217094757/http://funroll-loops.org https://web.archive.org/web/20050217094757/http://funroll-lo... (now a spam site) and laugh about all the pain and time to get that 0.02% increase in overall system performance.

albinoloverats 12y ago
My experience was largely similar, although I suffered along with using lynx to read the documentation in e second virtual console as I was learning about partitions and compiler flags. And after spending hours watching/waiting for gcc, bash and some of the other core utilities (and of course Linux) to compile my then limited experience also witnessed a panic on first boot :( so I switched to Lunar and had that on my laptop until I replaced it. I too became lazy, but went for Arch instead of Ubuntu (which I did use before attempting Gentoo). Might fire-up a VM and give this a whirl...

TheRealDunkirk 12y ago

I ran Gentoo for about 5 years. Most people miss the point of it. It was created to create other "distributions." Where I worked, we actually needed that capability, but never found the time to create our own profile, and prune our own portage tree. Missed opportunity! If you need that sort of thing, great, but don't run it on a desktop thinking that it will give you any more "performance" than another distro. That's been debunked handily.

sramsay 12y ago

I've been running Gentoo pretty much exclusively since about 2002 (on servers, desktops, and laptops). I absolutely love it. A while ago, there was a post on HN (mainly harshing on systemd) that complained about the way Linux was starting to converge into something that gave the user little choice about what to install. The OP was using Ubuntu, and all I could think was that if this is a problem for you, you should certainly give Gentoo a spin. It would be hard to imagine having more control over a Linux configuration (short of building a system without a distro). I'll also say that if you're new to Linux and are interested in how it all fits together, Gentoo is a really nice way to learn. The Gentoo Handbook (the main install doc) is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of technical documentation I've ever read.

jwr 12y ago

Gentoo is often ridiculed for trying to squeeze more performance by using platform-specific compiler settings, but this misses the point. It is the only distribution that can deal with the rapidly-changing nature of open-source software. Most open-source libraries are not designed with long-term viability in mind, and are not ready for binary distribution. Distribution makers put a lot of effort into actually making things work in the long term. Gentoo takes a different approach: just assume that you will be recompiling pretty much everything, regularly. The result is a surprisingly maintainable system. As long as you update it regularly, it won't tell you to perform this monstrous cliffhanger upgrade, or reinstall using a newer version. Sure, there is always breakage, but Gentoo has a different tradeoff: minor breakage happening more often vs major breakage happening when major releases are done.

jiggy2011 12y ago
The same could be said for Arch, or any other rolling distro.
bhaak 12y ago
Last weekend I had to do exactly that, taming the monstrous cliffhanger upgrade of my MythTv system that still was running a kernel 2.6.15 and hasn't really seen much change since 2009. I don't think any other distro would have allowed me to upgrade the system without a reinstall. Even though I screwed up because I didn't RTFM and didn't install everything necessary for booting the system with OpenRC, I still could salvage the system by booting with a rescue stick (based on Gentoo of course) and chrooting into my system and fix it this way. Now it's running a current kernel and it is ready for the installation of the new digital receiver card.

song 12y ago

I use funtoo for my personal server... It's partly because I've used gentoo for so long that I understand it well and I find it very easy to mainting. I also love the fact that it's just easy to install newer versions of any software I need which is great for development and testing (which tends to be more of a problem with ubuntu and debian in my experience where I often end up having to compile from source). That said while I use funtoo on my server, I use ubuntu LTS on the servers of my clients. It's just much easier if there are other people working together. I used to use gentoo for my laptop and desktop until I switched to Mac and while I do like Mac OS X, I kind of miss the freedom I had with running gentoo. I enjoyed spending hours to scripting fvwm just the way I liked it :-)

billylindeman 12y ago

I also have fond memories of gentoo. I got my start in linux using GentooX on a chipped Xbox :). I had a dedicated TSOP flashed Xbox running Cromwell bios as my main server throughout my middleschool / highschool years. I did stage1 installs on all my machines and it was a blast and great learning experience.

tarminian 12y ago

I use gentoo to stay away from systemd.

zokier 12y ago

I have a passing interest in Gentoo, but two thing have put me off; 1) the community seems bit splintered with Gentoo, Funtoo, Exherbo, and probably others I'm not aware of. It is not really clear which one I want. 2) The "stable" repository(?) seemed to be in somewhat bad health. Any gentooists willing to give their opinion of my (possibly quite faulty) impressions?

Nanzikambe 12y ago
Gentoo user since late 2002 here. I agree that the state of stable is quite poor of late. I surmised there're a variety of reasons behind this: I'd say the explosive growth of Arch Linux is part of this, personally I've seen much of the community move there. If you look at the state of Arch Linux's community and documentation, you'll see strong parallels with Gentoo a couple years back. Another is Docker leading many people to want a homogenous environemnt using Docker and Debian, Centos or Ubuntu. That said, I've no plan to move away from Gentoo and found that sentiment mirrored amongst a substantial core of Gentoo "power users" for the lack of a better description. Why? Ebuilds, when you want something "just so", you roll 'em "just so" Use flags, ties into the above OpenRC.ymmv, but systemd is an anathema, there's been much discussion on the topic so I'll leave that out hardened-sources Given privacy and concerns I will never trust a binary only system any more than I trust the organistion behind it. With gentoo I need never trust a binary blob should I choose not to It's worth pointing out that this current state of affairs is relative to the pinacle a few years ago, and that even in its current state the Gentoo community is way more responsive than many comparable communities. I had Firefox 32 (~amd64) within minutes of release, no such luck on my Macbook. I'd still never recommend Gentoo to new Linux users that lack the curiosity to find out precisely how all facets of their system fit together. If you want a system that "just works", Gentoo isn't it. If customisation uber alles is your battle cry, then you'll find no parrallel.
- zokier 12y ago
  > I had Firefox 32 (~amd64) within minutes of release, no such luck on my Macbook. On the other hand, stable apparently still is on Firefox 24 even though the next ESR (which I suppose stable would be tracking), 31, was released in July. http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox

wyc 12y ago

As a Gentoo user, what I enjoy (freedom of choice): [ebuild R ] media-video/ffmpeg-1.2.6-r1 USE="X alsa bzip2 encode fontconfig hardcoded-tables iconv jpeg2k libass libcaca mmx mp3 network openal opus sdl ssse3 theora threads truetype v4l vorbis x264 zlib -3dnow -3dnowext -aac -aacplus (-altivec) -amr -avx -bindist -bluray -cdio (-celt) -cpudetection -debug -doc -examples -faac -fdk -flite -frei0r -gnutls -gsm -iec61883 -ieee1394 -jack -libsoxr -libv4l -mmxext -modplug (-neon) -openssl -oss -pic -pulseaudio -rtmp -schroedinger -speex -static-libs {-test} -twolame -vaapi -vdpau (-vis) -vpx -xvid" ABI_X86="(64) (-32) (-x32)" FFTOOLS="aviocat cws2fws ffescape ffeval fourcc2pixfmt graph2dot ismindex pktdumper qt-faststart trasher" 0 kB what I suffer through: Currently merging 1 out of 7 * www-client/chromium-38.0.2125.44 current merge time: 31 minutes and 45 seconds. ETA: 1 hour, 37 minutes and 10 seconds.

organsnyder 12y ago

Gentoo was the first distro that I used full-time on the desktop. It was my distro of choice through most of college, running on my trusty (albeit excruciatingly slow) Fujitsu P-2046 laptop. This laptop (really one of the first netbooks) had an 800 Mhz Transmeta Crusoe processor and 256 MB of RAM (later upgraded to the maximum of 384). Needless to say, software installation and upgrades were extremely painful. A larger package (X11, OpenOffice, Firefox) would take over a day to compile, during which time the computer was only somewhat usable. Those were the days. I've been mostly a Kubuntu user since then, and have enjoyed having my software installations be constrained by network and disk speed. I've also enjoyed not having things break on a regular basis (though Canonical has really tried to emulate that functionality at times).