

Gentoo Linux Releases LiveDVD Iron Penguin Edition - mariuz
http://www.gentoo.org/news/20140826-livedvd.xml

======
zedr
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-
lo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050217094757/http://funroll-loops.org)
(now a spam site) and laugh about all the pain and time to get that 0.02%
increase in overall system performance.

~~~
rostigerpudel
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.

------
TheRealDunkirk
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.

------
jwr
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.

~~~
bhaak
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.

------
sramsay
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.

------
dochtman
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
_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.

~~~
valarauca1
KDE takes about 30 hours to compile on my core i7-4790k even threading it out
to all 8 threads.

~~~
andmarios
That is too long. On my i7-3630QM laptop it takes about six hours or less. I
haven't seen KDE (with almost all use flags enabled) take 30 hours since 2006
on my Pentium 4 and I have emerged every major and minor update since then.
Even on Pentium 4 I think the usual emerge duration was around 18 hours most
of the time.

~~~
valarauca1
I think I maybe counting KDE's dependencies into that figure. Not just KDE
alone.

------
kornakiewicz
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?

~~~
travisby
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 :)

~~~
taway0987
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)

------
wyc
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.

------
zokier
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
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
> 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)

~~~
Nanzikambe
Indeed, it'd be intersting to know how many people use stable.

------
organsnyder
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).

------
billylindeman
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.

------
song
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 :-)

------
tarminian
I use gentoo to stay away from systemd.

