Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Alan McKinnon writes: Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin O'Gorman did opine thusly: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. I know how you feel :-) I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as bat shit crazy, but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it. I tried various distros (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, Libranet, RedHat), but when I started using Gentoo, I was hooked. No fancy shmancy GUIs that hide what's really going on beneath, and that often enough have their own bugs so that it's easier to not use them. Rolling updates, no fear that upgrades mess up everything. Good documentation, that explains what has do be done and why, instead of just telling me what to do and where to click. Yes, Gentoo means a lot of work to do. But for me it's less than before, all in all. And I can fix many things myself. When I had trouble with other distros, I was often unable so find a solution, apart from waiting for the next release. Which introduced new problems. I installed some Ubuntus recently, that's supposed to be very easy to use, but not for me. The default install medium does not know much about LVM, I had to fetch an alternate install medium for this. After all updates were done, I ran into an old bug that killed all initramfs images after installing a new kernel. I found some threads of users who had no clue what to do now, in my case even older kernels were affected. It was simple to fix, but not for inexperienced users who had no clue what to do, apart from waiting for some Linux guy to help them or re-install. NIS and automount stuff sometimes fails, I was not able to find the cause for this, despite many threads mentioning this. Sometimes a simple reboot solves this, sometimes not. I have no clue. It seems to work well on standard desktop systems, though. If the default is fine for you, Ubuntu is not bad I think. easier to set up, easier to maintain. But then I installed it on a notebook with little RAM, and ran into various problems. The installer even crashed once. I use Linux a lot, I administer some Linux servers, but I felt too stupid to install Ubuntu and WLAN via ndiswrapper. And then there's things happening like the packet manager front-end refusing to start because the automatic update notification is still active, and only once instance of a package manager can be running at a time. Okay, this is not a big problem, just close the other application (or kill it, if another user has it open). But hey, with portage I can not only run queries while another portage process is running, I can even do it while emerge is installing things, and nowadays I can even have multiple emerges run in parallel without trouble. I got used to this. BTW, in the past when I used Debian (ten years ago), it happened for two times that apt (the package manager) got corrupted and no longer worked. I didn't even know what I did wrong, in one case I was only following advice others gave me. The mailing list was no help at all, they suggested to simply re-install. Oh my, how I hate to do so and to configure everything again. And wait for the problems to happens again. My Mom's new PC would get Ubuntu, as I do not want to spend too much time installing, and because she doesn't need much special configuring. But I think I will try ArchLinux which I heard good things of, but did not try yet. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Apparently, though unproven, at 14:30 on Tuesday 31 May 2011, Alex Schuster did opine thusly: Alan McKinnon writes: Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin O'Gorman did opine thusly: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. I know how you feel :-) I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as bat shit crazy, but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it. I tried various distros (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, Libranet, RedHat), but when I started using Gentoo, I was hooked. No fancy shmancy GUIs that hide what's really going on beneath, and that often enough have their own bugs so that it's easier to not use them. Rolling updates, no fear that upgrades mess up everything. Good documentation, that explains what has do be done and why, instead of just telling me what to do and where to click. That's what keep me on Gentoo for my own machines (bar one) and I have never needed to re-install it anywhere. But at work, things are different. Gentoo is banned from the -prod machines (the risk of some n00b admin running emerge uND world and walking away is too great, plus even just (deep) upgrading a single package is often more than a reasonable amount of work for someone who doesn't know portage. It's encouraged on -dev, mostly because I can change versions of almost anything with no hassle at all. A developer wants python-3.2 on a box that already has 2.4 and 2.7? No problem! I do run Ubuntu on the netbook, but I treat that like it was an Android device or a big web browser i.e. I don't try and get fancy and mostly stick with what the installer and apt want to do. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On 31 May 2011 14:38, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Apparently, though unproven, at 14:30 on Tuesday 31 May 2011, Alex Schuster did opine thusly: Alan McKinnon writes: Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin O'Gorman did opine thusly: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. I know how you feel :-) I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as bat shit crazy, but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it. I tried various distros (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, Libranet, RedHat), but when I started using Gentoo, I was hooked. No fancy shmancy GUIs that hide what's really going on beneath, and that often enough have their own bugs so that it's easier to not use them. Rolling updates, no fear that upgrades mess up everything. Good documentation, that explains what has do be done and why, instead of just telling me what to do and where to click. That's what keep me on Gentoo for my own machines (bar one) and I have never needed to re-install it anywhere. But at work, things are different. Gentoo is banned from the -prod machines (the risk of some n00b admin running emerge uND world and walking away is too great, plus even just (deep) upgrading a single package is often more than a reasonable amount of work for someone who doesn't know portage. It's encouraged on -dev, mostly because I can change versions of almost anything with no hassle at all. A developer wants python-3.2 on a box that already has 2.4 and 2.7? No problem! I do run Ubuntu on the netbook, but I treat that like it was an Android device or a big web browser i.e. I don't try and get fancy and mostly stick with what the installer and apt want to do. These days I install OpenSUSE, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu on *other* people's machines. I found out really early in the process of becoming familiar with Linux that Gentoo is the only self-healing OS for me. ;-) I had to reinstall Fedora twice, OpenSUSE 3 times and Ubuntu twice, because they kept corrupting themselves. Perhaps things have improved since (well I know that Ubuntu has improved significantly over the years) but nothing gives me the flexibility and breadth of choice that Gentoo does. On the other hand if one's needs are simple or conveniently met by the vanilla Ubuntu or other binary distro, then perhaps that's all they need to bother with. Updates are done in a matter of seconds and complete version upgrades completed in a matter of minutes. I was actually quite impressed last time that Ubuntu upgraded itself without breaking into a sweat. Given past experience I was expecting it to corrupt itself and not boot again without a bare bones reinstall - but was proven wrong! -- Regards, Mick
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.comwrote: Apparently, though unproven, at 18:38 on Saturday 28 May 2011, Daniel da Veiga did opine thusly: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 20:28, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). Good luck. A friend just dropped Ubuntu cause they simply decided to use Unity, and the dashboard is just (his words) weird. He was used to the Gnome look, and they simply changed everthing with an upgrade. I stick with Gentoo, at least I know my next upgrade won't change my whole interface... Ubuntu are simply doing what KDE already did - take a risk, go with something new, try to stay ahead of the curve. Unity works fine on my netbook with 600 vertical pixels. I'm not sure it would work well on my 1920x1200 notebook though. That's the risk one takes with disruptive technologies, you might annoy some of your users My hardware is not capable enough to run unity, so it logs into Gnome 2, the familiar interface. I'm eventually going to upgrade the mobo and video, and I'll get to visit with Unity on my own schedule. I generally stick to the LTS versions, which remain supported for 3 years. I don't see the point of more frequent upgrades because as an old-timer, I am perfectly happy with the tools I'm used to and find myself increasingly exhausted on the learning curves. I can do it, but I want there to be a really good view at the top. :o) -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin O'Gorman did opine thusly: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. I know how you feel :-) I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as bat shit crazy, but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it. Kevin, you were around here for ages and you certainly pulled your fair share of the load. FLOSS thrives on people just like that. But if Gentoo doesn't suit your needs anymore, then so be it. Doesn't mean you won't be missed though. Best of luck for the future. [Like Dale, I think you'll be back. See para 2 :-) ] -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 15:06, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin O'Gorman did opine thusly: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. I know how you feel :-) I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as bat shit crazy, but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it. Shhh... don't let the Narc Task Force hear that!! That said, I agree... control-freaks like me feel... lost... when using binary-based distros. Rgds, -- Pandu E Poluan ~ IT Optimizer ~ Visit my Blog: http://pepoluan.posterous.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 20:28, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). Good luck. A friend just dropped Ubuntu cause they simply decided to use Unity, and the dashboard is just (his words) weird. He was used to the Gnome look, and they simply changed everthing with an upgrade. I stick with Gentoo, at least I know my next upgrade won't change my whole interface... -- Daniel da Veiga
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Apparently, though unproven, at 18:38 on Saturday 28 May 2011, Daniel da Veiga did opine thusly: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 20:28, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). Good luck. A friend just dropped Ubuntu cause they simply decided to use Unity, and the dashboard is just (his words) weird. He was used to the Gnome look, and they simply changed everthing with an upgrade. I stick with Gentoo, at least I know my next upgrade won't change my whole interface... Ubuntu are simply doing what KDE already did - take a risk, go with something new, try to stay ahead of the curve. Unity works fine on my netbook with 600 vertical pixels. I'm not sure it would work well on my 1920x1200 notebook though. That's the risk one takes with disruptive technologies, you might annoy some of your users -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On 27/5/2011, at 12:28am, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: ... * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. I *think* at that age those may be single-core hyperthreading chips, which would nevertheless show in (for instance) `top` as 4 cores. I won't swear to this, though. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
From: Mark Shields laebsh...@gmail.com To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Sent: Thu, May 26, 2011 9:57:26 PM Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put together these pieces: * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. * 2GB of DDR ECC memory * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. 2) Postfix 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by the cron daemon. 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) 5) NTP client and server 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up. Probably needs to switch to the open source radeon driver instead of the ATI binary driver if he hasn't already too. My 2004 laptop had that issue a couple years back. I initially installed the ATI driver (which I haven't seemed to be able get rid of now), and then they (ATI) dropped support for the R250 line-up. I switched over the open source radeon driver and all works just fine and dandy. Ben
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Friday 27 May 2011 05:31:15 Dale wrote: Kevin O'Gorman wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields laebsh...@gmail.com mailto:laebsh...@gmail.com wrote: You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up. Of course it's doable. It's just the last straw. This left my web site down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar with. But you will be back. ;-) Ha, ha, ha! :-)) Ubuntu has come in leaps and bounds over the years and its maintenance is now easy-peasy. The problems start when you depart from the vanilla Ubuntu distro and end up with a modified system - I have been looking after a laptop with Ubuntu for a couple of years now and as long as you keep to the distro way of doing things it pretty much runs without problems and upgrades are almost seamless. That said for someone who's been using Gentoo for some time now it should not be a big deal to look after a machine like Kevin's, even if the monitor won't play initially. I'm still running Gentoo on a 13 year old Pentium III 1GHz laptop which is refusing to die and compiling anything serious on it is at least an overnight affair. The monitor problem is probably a KMS configuration issue. Add nomodeset at the boot line and you should probably get your monitor again. Before you throw in the towel on Gentoo completely, may I recommend SystemRescueCD. It is updated more often, has the latest drivers and pretty much works better that the Gentoo LiveCD (most of the time). The only thing it does not have is star, which is a package I prefer to do fs backups, but that's irrelevant anyway. Of course Kevin only knows what is best for Kevin. Enjoy your retirement! -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Am Thu, 26 May 2011 16:28:46 -0700 schrieb Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. [...] (I realise your decision is made, but if this is the bug I think it is, this has nothing to do with Gentoo in particular.) I wonder which kernel version you use, because in 2.6.36/37 I was hit by a nasty EDID parsing bug. Actually, IIRC the code for parsing EDIDs was updated to understand more features or something, and that triggered errors that didn't come up before because those parts of the response from the monitor were simply ignored until then (or something like that). This lead to my own monitor not responding for over a minute at a time (sometimes going blank in between) and other people complained that it left theirs permanently blank. I think this is the original bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31943 which contains a workaround (with patch): The drm EDID checker is pretty strict about what EDIDs it will accept. Try this patch and add drm.edid_strict=0 to your kernel command line. For me, upgrading to 2.6.38 helped, I don't see the problem anymore (though other people report otherwise). *If* this is the bug, it makes me wonder why you don't see it under Ubuntu. Good luck with Ubuntu! -- Marc Joliet -- People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't - Bjarne Stroustrup signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Friday 27 May 2011 11:55:48 Mick wrote: ... may I recommend SystemRescueCD. It is updated more often, has the latest drivers and pretty much works better that the Gentoo LiveCD (most of the time). Another point in its favour is that it starts RAID and LVM itself, which saves a fair bit of messing about if you use either of those. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:00 PM, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.ukwrote: On 27/5/2011, at 12:28am, Kevin O'Gorman wrote: ... * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. I *think* at that age those may be single-core hyperthreading chips, which would nevertheless show in (for instance) `top` as 4 cores. I won't swear to this, though. Stroller. Actually, you're right. I got two chips so I could work with real threads and thread control. The hyperthreading was a surprise, and might have done quite as well by themselves. Anyway, it still works fine and the only thing likely to make me upgrade is that the card slots are all PCI-X low voltage (extra cutout in the connector). As time goes on I'm going to want to add things, and I may wind up with a new mobo fairly soon. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 5:56 AM, Marc Joliet mar...@gmx.de wrote: Am Thu, 26 May 2011 16:28:46 -0700 schrieb Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. [...] (I realise your decision is made, but if this is the bug I think it is, this has nothing to do with Gentoo in particular.) I wonder which kernel version you use, because in 2.6.36/37 I was hit by a nasty EDID parsing bug. Actually, IIRC the code for parsing EDIDs was updated to understand more features or something, and that triggered errors that didn't come up before because those parts of the response from the monitor were simply ignored until then (or something like that). This lead to my own monitor not responding for over a minute at a time (sometimes going blank in between) and other people complained that it left theirs permanently blank. I think this is the original bug: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31943 which contains a workaround (with patch): The drm EDID checker is pretty strict about what EDIDs it will accept. Try this patch and add drm.edid_strict=0 to your kernel command line. For me, upgrading to 2.6.38 helped, I don't see the problem anymore (though other people report otherwise). *If* this is the bug, it makes me wonder why you don't see it under Ubuntu. Good luck with Ubuntu! Thanks. It's up, its 2.5.38 which may explain a little. I ported my usual selections (think world) from my laptops, downloaded and installed around 1400 packages in a bit over 5 hours. This included both libreoffice (the default) and openoffice (from the selections), apache, gimp, on and on, and would surely have taken a week or so under Gentoo. Today, I port over my apache configuration and my embarrassing downtime is ended. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
[gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put together these pieces: * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. * 2GB of DDR ECC memory * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. 2) Postfix 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by the cron daemon. 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) 5) NTP client and server 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put together these pieces: * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. * 2GB of DDR ECC memory * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. 2) Postfix 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by the cron daemon. 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) 5) NTP client and server 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up.
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields laebsh...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.comwrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up, and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year, and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put together these pieces: * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores. They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all. * 2GB of DDR ECC memory * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site). The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy. * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer. So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just fine). The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. 2) Postfix 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by the cron daemon. 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) 5) NTP client and server 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up. Of course it's doable. It's just the last straw. This left my web site down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar with. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Kevin O'Gorman wrote: On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields laebsh...@gmail.com mailto:laebsh...@gmail.com wrote: You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system scare you away? Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's an option for that)? It's doable man, don't give up. Of course it's doable. It's just the last straw. This left my web site down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar with. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD But you will be back. ;-) Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman kogor...@gmail.com wrote: It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away. A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go. Sorry to see you go! The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port. 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site. 2) Postfix 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by the cron daemon. 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account) 5) NTP client and server 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years. Maybe you can run them from your previous gentoo installation inside a chroot until you can reproduce them in Ubuntu proper. My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so. I have a laptop from 2004 and am increasingly irritated by the slow build times. Keeping Gentoo up-to-date with it takes a very long time, especially since I use it so infrequently. Having several days worth of compiling just to bring it up to date is tiring, when it causes the fan to blow at full speed (and full decibels) and heat which approaches that of the Sun. If I ever get around to it, I'm going to give Sabayon a try. Hopefully then I'll have the familiar Gentoo setup but without the building from source. So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though. After using Gentoo for so many years, I find the maintenance in Ubuntu to be rather anti-climactic. 256 packages to update? Oh no! Oh, look, it's done already. :) Good luck and congratulations on your retirement. Paul
