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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 G

by 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...
dandrews 12y ago
That ricer link was hilarious, thanks. Somehow I've missed it all these years. I keep using Gentoo mostly out of inertia; I understand it, and don't have to mess with it much. My systems remain current, and I don't break them... um, very often. A very long time ago, when I was running Mandrake on a tiny Pentium-II system (kids, ask your grandfathers) I spent a week installing Gentoo. Holy cow, that was a laborious process - but there was a surprising and obvious performance benefit at the end. That conditional compilation business, where I could excise stuff like spellcheck, qt, nautilus, support for scripting languages I didn't care about - really made a noticeable difference on my limited systems. Since then I've spent some money and gotten some decent hardware, and I don't notice the bloat in my systems so much. My useflags have become much less restrictive. Gentoo keeps everything current, and if something new tickles my fancy I can simply emerge it and a few minutes later it's there - with it and its dependencies tailored to whatever useflags I still keep. So Gentoo works for me. (But my brothers run Ubuntu on my recommendation - they're cupholder-next-next-next-finish kind of guys.)
meddlepal 12y ago
I still fondly remember doing a Stage 1 install on Pentium 3 era 800Mhz Celeron with 512MB of RAM. Days! Days of compilation.
rostigerpudel 12y ago
Ah, old times. This weekend I will retire my last desktop machine running Gentoo (still have some servers running it). It's been serving my mother for almost ten years with only minor hitches along the way. The machine is an AMD Sempron at 1.8 GHz so updating Gentoo is such a pain that in the last few years I would only update when she was away for a few days. So she would leave it on and I would update the computer remotely which creates its own set of possible problems. Why didn't I switch to some other distro? Well, I tried, but this is the only machine I have ever used where there is a significant effect of all the Gentoo toiling involved. Ubuntu would take minutes to just display the login screen and starting firefox meant a whole different dimension of time for grabbing a coffee (lunch, rather). After a brief attempt, back to Gentoo it was. So the trade-off up to now is usable everyday speed vs. excruciatingly slow updates. The new machine will run Ubuntu, though, because my mother wants to be able to update her computer herself these days (parents grow up too fast, sigh). Still, I owe to Gentoo much of what I know about Linux and computers, in particular to only shoot myself in the foot very carefully when the docs warn me that whatever I am doing is a bad idea. Chasing bizarre build failures taught me that not all hard- and software is created equal, no matter what some "standard" says. Sometimes hardware implementation of some feature is plain broken and sometimes I tried to install that singular combination of software that just won't work. Or I forgot to include drivers for, say, mass storage... It's good to see Gentoo is alive and kicking.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Nooooooooo! funroll-loops.org got spamparked? _Russian_ spamparked? Oh well, at least it's still Asian, I suppose. But talk about losing part of your .... well, in my case, second childhood (I'm presently on my fourth or fifth).
Nanzikambe 12y ago
Thanks for the the funroll-loops reminder, some of those bug reports from the early days were class "HOLY COW I'M TOTALLY GOING SO FAST OH F*" USE="GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE" (Source: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072 https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072)

by zedr 12y ago

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...

dandrews 12y ago

That ricer link was hilarious, thanks. Somehow I've missed it all these years. I keep using Gentoo mostly out of inertia; I understand it, and don't have to mess with it much. My systems remain current, and I don't break them... um, very often. A very long time ago, when I was running Mandrake on a tiny Pentium-II system (kids, ask your grandfathers) I spent a week installing Gentoo. Holy cow, that was a laborious process - but there was a surprising and obvious performance benefit at the end. That conditional compilation business, where I could excise stuff like spellcheck, qt, nautilus, support for scripting languages I didn't care about - really made a noticeable difference on my limited systems. Since then I've spent some money and gotten some decent hardware, and I don't notice the bloat in my systems so much. My useflags have become much less restrictive. Gentoo keeps everything current, and if something new tickles my fancy I can simply emerge it and a few minutes later it's there - with it and its dependencies tailored to whatever useflags I still keep. So Gentoo works for me. (But my brothers run Ubuntu on my recommendation - they're cupholder-next-next-next-finish kind of guys.)

meddlepal 12y ago

I still fondly remember doing a Stage 1 install on Pentium 3 era 800Mhz Celeron with 512MB of RAM. Days! Days of compilation.

rostigerpudel 12y ago

Ah, old times. This weekend I will retire my last desktop machine running Gentoo (still have some servers running it). It's been serving my mother for almost ten years with only minor hitches along the way. The machine is an AMD Sempron at 1.8 GHz so updating Gentoo is such a pain that in the last few years I would only update when she was away for a few days. So she would leave it on and I would update the computer remotely which creates its own set of possible problems. Why didn't I switch to some other distro? Well, I tried, but this is the only machine I have ever used where there is a significant effect of all the Gentoo toiling involved. Ubuntu would take minutes to just display the login screen and starting firefox meant a whole different dimension of time for grabbing a coffee (lunch, rather). After a brief attempt, back to Gentoo it was. So the trade-off up to now is usable everyday speed vs. excruciatingly slow updates. The new machine will run Ubuntu, though, because my mother wants to be able to update her computer herself these days (parents grow up too fast, sigh). Still, I owe to Gentoo much of what I know about Linux and computers, in particular to only shoot myself in the foot very carefully when the docs warn me that whatever I am doing is a bad idea. Chasing bizarre build failures taught me that not all hard- and software is created equal, no matter what some "standard" says. Sometimes hardware implementation of some feature is plain broken and sometimes I tried to install that singular combination of software that just won't work. Or I forgot to include drivers for, say, mass storage... It's good to see Gentoo is alive and kicking.

dredmorbius 12y ago

Nooooooooo! funroll-loops.org got spamparked? _Russian_ spamparked? Oh well, at least it's still Asian, I suppose. But talk about losing part of your .... well, in my case, second childhood (I'm presently on my fourth or fifth).

Nanzikambe 12y ago

Thanks for the the funroll-loops reminder, some of those bug reports from the early days were class "HOLY COW I'M TOTALLY GOING SO FAST OH F*" USE="GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE" (Source: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072 https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072)