Is Gentoo a nightmare to the experienced users?
Gentoo September 19th, 2006
This post has stirred in the slashdot about whether Gentoo installation is so painful even for a savvy Linux user. Ok, let’s replay the his Gentoo journey:
Mini LiveCD vs LiveCD
The author complains that the miniLiveCD is not adequate for the installation, so he had to download/burn the liveCD again. But later, he grabbed the snapshot of portage, and compile almost everything from the scratch, — the troublemaker, zlib is in system metaclass, — so why bother to go for the LiveCD? Eventually, the liveCD is used in the 2nd run.
GUI vs CLI
I strongly suggest the CLI interface for either savvy user or newbies. You have more control of the packages, configurations.
Auto configuration
I have never used Debian or Ubuntu, just curious how Debian users update/rebuild the kernels. Does Debian is powered by smart tools to probe the devices automatically? If so, why Gentoo could not adapt it as well?
RTFM
I know quite a few Linux users hate this word. But it really works. Gentoo enjoys the reputation to have the high quality documentation, wiki and forum. You can easily find a solution in Gentoo’s community than Google.
I do think Gentoo has somewhat dropped the ball with their new installers. My friend (an old Debian head) certainly had a lot more trouble with it then he needed to due to choosing to use the CLI installer.
Granted he did this to himself, I told him to do it the ole fashioned way.
“just curious how Debian users update/rebuild the kernels”
I used ubuntu for my girlfriend computers (3 in a row, each with a different release of ubuntu), so I’ll comment on that.
Update?
They don’t. Once a release is made, kernel version is mostly set in stone. Any update consists only of critical security fixes.
“Does Debian is powered by smart tools to probe the devices automatically?”
Yes, the linux kernel, initrd, and hotplug/coldplug, same as gentoo, same as any linux out there. The kernel is built with every module imaginable (plus a handful of patches to support even more hardware), making it bootable on virtually everything. An update consists of a set of packages containing prebuilt kernel and its matching modules (version check activated). And sadly they don’t even thought of patching in suspend2. Not even as an optional package, so third party is mandatory.
For example Dapper Drake is 2.6.15, and suffers a critical bug which implies some systems (pentium-m apparently) go 100% cpu for no apparent reason. A workaround imposes having “echo 1 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate” at boot, thus basically killing any effort from the cpu to economize battery. This bug is still running as of now. Solution? build your own kernel manually, or install one fixed or without SMP support from a third party repository, which is in both cases quite some pain and has daunting consequences on module installation (like fglrx or nvidia drivers) and synaptic repository.
Someone thought gentoo was a pain? Try ubuntu on some half supported hardware, you’ll feel your pain. In the end you will have to just do what you would have done under gentoo, just 100% by hand, where gentoo has both tools and infrastructure for that.
Sorry to happy ubuntu users if I felt bitter in my comment, but 2 years of maintaining her computers was a nail in the toe, to say the least. Guess the better, I endend up lurking gentoo forums and wiki for assistance in bugs of ubuntu, their own being relatively unhelpful. Seeing that, my girlfriend has happily installed gentoo herself, and maintains it herself too. She feels relieved that I don’t touch her computer to do god-knows-what, and I am relieved not being taken for a weirdo anymore when I say “kernel”, “modules”, “partition”, “X11″ or “window manager”.
I have been considering this for several days/months since installing Gentoo.
Gentoo is really cool when it works out.
- Emerging a new piece of software and boom it is there installed, ready to use. Man how easy would that have been back in 1996 on my Slackware installation?
Gentoo is less cool when it doesn’t work out.
- Emerging a new piece of software, but no you have to update the kernel, the compiler, rebuild a number of things and then several extra steps later you could have your software update.
Given enough Linux experience and some polished linux administration skills, then yes Gentoo is great, highly configurable, easy to update.
However, many a soul out there just want to be productive and not spend time on the OS; a valid point of view and possibly those people get to watch more TV, read more books, stay in better shape because of it.
As for me I like Gentoo and I am sticking with it. Although I do have a VMWare image of ubuntu, just because I am curious what the stir is all about.
Paul Cooley
http://linuxlore.blogspot.com
IMHO, no linux distribution else could handle it more gracefully than Gentoo when migrating from gcc 3 to gcc 4 or glibc upgrade. The user have to backup his work and re-install a new release. While at the least, the Gentoo users could make the migration more smooth by calling
Touche, very true.