Weekly Edition
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Distribution quotes of the week
In what feels like Day 5 in a two-day weekend, the system now boots! I
actually see a new grub (wait, why is that text-mode only again ? Fedora
guys, you spent years to make everything look graphical, because that was
some huge important feature that mostly got in my way when it took longer
than it was supposed to and I had no way to see why except reboot and
remove quiet and rhgb from the options) and now you suddenly let grub2 take
that back from you? Show us some spine, please), and the system shows me
plymouth again. Until it doesn't anymore, and drops me into a terminal
screen.
-- Thomas Vander Stichele
You know, this Fedora 16 better be frigging spectacular after this six day weekend.
Gentoo users are what Arch Linux users imagine themselves to be: real
men. You don't even get in their club unless you pass through the Klingon
pain stick ritual, where if you come out alive at all, you've at
least bludgeoned, bruised and bloody. What doesn't kill you makes you
stronger. And those who survive, are brothers.
-- Mark
Rushing... Gentoo is a warrior, a kung fu master who can juggle the primal elements, and teaches you by forcing you to confront yourself. It doesn't matter if you're male or female. It's the essence that counts. And if that essence isn't strong, persistent and true, you will break. That is the beauty. That is what binds us together. (Log in to post comments)
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 17, 2011 10:37 UTC (Thu) by elvis_ (subscriber, #63935) [Link]
I've been using Gentoo since 2003 and it's really not that hard. The best bit is that I have not needed to do a single whole OS update in that time.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 17, 2011 19:59 UTC (Thu) by blitzkrieg3 (subscriber, #57873) [Link]
Amen brother. I don't understand why more distros don't have a rolling release model. It makes everything much simpler.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 18, 2011 7:28 UTC (Fri) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link]
Yes, well that's one side of it. There have been a couple of pretty painfull moments though, so maybe the rolling release model isn't always that great. (Xorg update - I'm looking at you!)
But what do I know, I've only used Gentoo as my standard desktop since 2004...
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 18, 2011 19:44 UTC (Fri) by knobunc (subscriber, #4678) [Link]
In general gentoo has been great. And there have been a few upgrades that I've feared touching, and was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly they went. Recent portage versions are getting much better at resolving dependency tangles.
However, I had an "exciting" time upgrading a 4-6 year old gentoo box at work. The portage and python would not upgrade because the other was too old. GCC and glibc would not upgrade because the other was too old. Whacked at those (and their dependencies) by pulling packages from the gentoo tinderbox. Then binutils messed me up for a while... ld was creating things that would not execute on my kernel. So I upgraded the kernel... and then glibc needed to be rebuilt because it had not detected features in the old kernel.
That said... it was all much better than I expected, and easier than some other upgrades I've done on other distros.
It would be nice if there was an "old version" overlay that would let you get the old ebuilds that let you work up to a modern system if you let the system get too stale.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 26, 2011 3:29 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]
Not quite an overlay, but you can always get older versions of the tree from CVS or even WebCVS. But tbh I suspect upgrading antique setups using binary packages is much quicker.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 29, 2011 9:33 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
My worst experiences ... :-)
"emerge --depclean" when gcc had been updated. I didn't know this at the time, but it will quite happily delete your active gcc if you've built a newer one ... it also did it to me with python! And it'll pull the same stunt on the kernel, so you can't build anything that depends on kernel headers!
The other really annoying stunt was when it got thoroughly confused over my cross-compiler. So I spent months with mis-matched gcc's on my Phenom X3 and Athlon K7, and couldn't cross-compile. Trust me, rebuilding some things on a K7 is PAINFUL (this system has 768Mb ram and can't take any more...)
Or when a KDE upgrade fails half way through ... trying to complete it is a PIG!
Cheers,
Rolling releases Posted Nov 19, 2011 20:51 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
I really don't understand the fetish people have with upgrading verses a fresh install. I kind of like the way that Red Hat does things with their painless minor updates within a major release version... and no supported upgrade path between major releases. Huh? Yeah, that's right.
The problem is that we have hundreds if not thousands of packages installed on our systems. They are in a constant state of flux and often there isn't much coordination between the various parts. With each upgrade there is always residue. Minor version upgrades usually are no problem... but the vast changes caused by a major update can lead to turmoil. Often significant components are abandoned and replaced... or major software version changes need work with their configuration differences. Heck, even in the area of desktop environments and applications, there are often config differences that are ignored by the developers and left to the users to resolve.
From a support point of view, having a system in a somewhat known state makes it much easier and reasonable to support. That leads not only to a good experience for the support suppliers but the support receivers as well. That is one reason, I'm told, that you don't see much third-party stuff made available for Gentoo... because there aren't any two Gentoo systems that are alike... at least across organizations.
Now having said all of that I will acknowledge that if we had slow changing software and more frequent major refreshes (rather than every 18 - 36 months as with RHEL), upgrades might be more doable yet still supportable... only if Red Hat took an additional year or two to work on the upgrade details.
In Debian's case they appear to put the vast majority of the burden on the package maintainers who have to put a lot more work into pre/post upgrade scripts... but even Debian abandons (for various good reasons) a few hundred packages each release. The extra work, as well as the number of arches they support and the large number of packages they offer... means Debian releases are less frequent. I'm really surprised at all of the work they have been able to do and still get out their last two releases in only 24 months each.
Red Hat is a bit different... they take so long not necessarily to maintain the packages, but because they do a significant amount of development work all over the place... so much of what they package they actually originated.
Gentoo seems to put the burden of upgrading more on the end user and an upgrade can go well or poorly given the skills and experience... and strategies used.
Expecting the users to take care of application data and configurations is more reasonable. Doing a fresh install for major releases and migrating the data and configs seems so much cleaner. Of course that doesn't mean they are always trouble free... but in big organizations where they have server provisioning and deployment fairly automated... the utility of a rolling release seems less valuable.
I'm actually glad we have multiple approaches... rolling releases... and non... as there isn't any single approach best for everyone. Just don't give me guff when I prefer to do a fresh install.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 19, 2011 4:04 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
For what it's worth, I've had a single Debian install since 2001. That includes a migration from 32 to 64bit.
So Gentoo might be great but it's certainly not a property specific to Gentoo.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 19, 2011 14:15 UTC (Sat) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
Same Ubuntu 6.06 since about April 2006 upgraded all the way to 11.10 on my server, moved from hardware to hardware (thanks dd).
This said I am jealous of your 32- to 64-bit upgrade! On my to-do list but Debian might make it easier than Ubuntu due to some packages missing on the latter AIUI.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 20, 2011 7:16 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
To be fair, I had to do some manual chroot and symlink tricks during the transition -- but I retained the same set of packages and same system/package configuration files.
And all my custom crap in home and opt, of course.
I will admit some binary-only stuff i had back in 2001 doesn't work anymore in 2011. I could probably get gcc 2.8's C++ stack working in /usr/local, but I cant bring myself to care.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 19, 2011 20:22 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
The reason Gentoo is so hard for you is because you have been using it for so long... so you forget the learning curve you had at the beginning all the while every day that passes re-enforces what you know and cements it even more.
Everyone thinks Windows is so easy to use because of the same process.
Trust me, from a new users perspective, unless they came from BSD or something, Gentoo is terribly hard. And if it isn't hard, it's very time consuming.
If you disagree with me, that's fine. I don't feel like arguing. :)
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Nov 19, 2011 14:28 UTC (Sat) by tedd (subscriber, #74183) [Link]
As a sane and mature computer user with a fulfilling life outside computers, I don't understand this chest-beating about Linux distributions and claimed knowledge of Star Trek lore.
Sykrim? Windows? Posted Nov 21, 2011 10:23 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
But why the hell would Mark Rushing use WINDOWS just to play Skyrim? It works nicely with wine. http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicat...
Sykrim? Windows? Posted Nov 29, 2011 16:10 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
You mean "slow as hell and with artifacts"?
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