Gentoo Linux 1.4 released [LWN.net]

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 6, 2003 14:27 UTC (Wed) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link]

Can I just take this opportunity to remind everyone that Gentoo is
seriously cool ;-)

It's more than just a fast and furious source-based distribution. It's
way ahead of curve in numerous other ways. Despite its bleeding-edge
nature, this is a very well-engineered and impeccably-tested system. I
have been running my next-generation Gentoo Linux system for 5 months
now, and out of the 500+ packages "emerged" so far, only one failed [the
OpenOffice source build; no problems, I used the binary build instead
]. The robustness, and ability to continually upgrade ad infinitum,
is something that many people will appreciate.

What's less well-known is the elegant ways in which Gentoo handles such
perennial problems as runlevels and services, environment variables,
modules and the like. Though it's non-standard, some serious thought
has gone into improving the way these things work, and Gentoo takes us
a few steps closer to the self-maintaining Linux system. This platform
significantly alleviates a lot of time-consuming maintenance chores.

Yes, the installation is a bit of a sweat, but the documentation is
excellent, you learn a lot, and you'll only have to do it once - ever.
It's hard to install, but very _easy_ to maintain. And yes, you need a
fast connection and powerful hardware, but if you have those things -
and many people do these days - you really ought to give Gentoo a try.
You'll never be able to go back to a clunky RPM-based distro again!

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 6, 2003 17:40 UTC (Wed) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101) [Link]

Like a lot of people, my loyalty to Red Hat is wavering these days, and
I'm looking around at other distributions. The problem is, whatever I use
needs to be deployed and maintained on about 150 computers.

Gentoo sounds great for a single computer, but I wonder if anyone
has deployed it department- (or enterprise-) wide. Anybody have
any stories?

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 7, 2003 5:08 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Hi,

I switched from Red Hat to Gentoo a couple months ago. I really do love it, but there are still a couple quirks I haven't solved yet.

It *is* possible to set up your own internal server to hold your Gentoo portage repository. You can also generate binary packages from the ebuilds one time and distribute them to all your clients (assuming the architecture is the same, of course). I don't know enough about it to give you specifics; you might want to ask in the excellent Gentoo forums. All I can tell you is that yes, it's possible. :)

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 16, 2003 9:02 UTC (Sat) by Klavs (subscriber, #10563) [Link]

Gentoo will work just fine for a server environment, as long as you know what you are doing.

You can find the slides for a presentation of Gentoo I held at my local LUG (SSLUG) - here http://vsen.dk

The short tips, would be to make a buildhost - the WORST thing you can do, is to compile packages on every machine, cause then each server will be different and that's a BAD idea. Also remember that portage supports pre-compiled packages - so have a buildhost - and lock down the servers, so they CAN'T Compile packages - only install pre-compiled packages from your buildhost.

Unfortunately (AFAIK) Gentoo doesn't support fetching those packages automatically from some mirror (yet atleast - definetely a needed feature), but I'm sure you can get the packages out to the machine yourself - and then it's no problem.

Another clever thing you should do, is to run your own portage tree on your buildhost - and then let the servers "emerge sync" from that. That way you can ensure which package versions the servers see (cause they will always try for the latest) - and this way you can simply update your servers, by mounting your buildhost package dir (usr/portage/packages) and running emerge -u world.

Takes a little work to get running - but once it's running you will be set for life ;)

Also, you can many more great tips and help at forums.gentoo.org - it's really an active forum community, with help for everyone and everything.

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 7, 2003 14:32 UTC (Thu) by vinci (guest, #13772) [Link]

Sorry, but a distribution where you have to compile everything you download is just too much time consuming for me. I like to add and delete packages quick to test them out. Therefore my choice is Debian.

Thilo

Gentoo - so cool that versions don't matter!

Posted Aug 16, 2003 9:05 UTC (Sat) by Klavs (subscriber, #10563) [Link]

Agreed - you have to compile the package, before you can test it out. But everybody who knows what they are doing on Gentoo, has their own package-directory, so once the package is compiled and installed (only takes a short time - unless for a few big packages, like X, KDE etc :) it has the old one saved, to install in seconds - so you can easily roll back if it goes sour - saved me many a times :)

Also, there's a thread in the forums.gentoo.org (see link in http://vsen.dk gentoo presentation), where many (especially Debian) people state why they have switched to Gentoo. So that would seem to imply that for many people incl. Debian users, Gentoo has something to offer that Debian doesn't.