On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 12:27, Declan Ingram wrote: > Has anyone out there had much experience with Gentoo ? I was running > debian and thought i would give it a go.
I switched to using Gentoo about 9 months ago, partly for technical reasons (not the ones you'd think, see below) and partly because I thought that *someone* on the Linux Australia committee should be using something other than Debian [Ok, Leon uses Mandrake :)] There are, it turns out, quite a number of Gentoo people in Australia. I'm working on encouraging the ones I come across to join in with groups like SLUG, LUV, HUMBUG, PLUG, etc and to attend events like LCA. If you want to "try" it, expect a learning curve; the same that you would have switching to any other distro. One tends to do a lot manually on a Gentoo installation (for example, if you want to change timezones, you probably are going to be changing the /etc/localtime symlink yourself). It's not exactly hard - and great fun for anyone who likes doing a lot themselves. It *does* have it's own ways of doing things, notably around rc scripts and building packages. Both are excellent. The technical reason I'm still using Gentoo is not for the performance optimizations that may or may not accrue from compiling things with specific optimization flags, but rather that I find the packaging system (specifically the files used to describe how to build packages) to be deliriously easy to use. I work in a number of environments where I need to rebuild specific packages to my requirements, or quickly package local software to be rolled out across a number of machines in a production environment. I find it really easy to integrate my own work into the machine's existing package management system. That counts for a lot for me. As a side note, I expected Gentoo to be a nightmare to maintain. We've all lived through the occasional nightmare episodes when tracking Debian unstable (like breaking lilo, things like that) and given that Gentoo is a similarly moving target, I expected it to break all the time. Much to my surprise, it doesn't. I *don't* just madly and blindly update my system automatically each night or anything like that, but I do find that when I upgrade specific packages the dependency graph stays on top of things... between that, proper library slotting, and ./configure working it's magic, It <FONT size="-36">mostly</FONT> Just Works (tm). :) One last little tidbit. Using Gentoo, one maintains (in a /etc config file) a list of the various "kinds" of things I'm going with my system. For example, I've told it things like "gnome -kde java -ldap". The build files take account of these settings, and adjusts ./configure settings accordingly. So, when using Gentoo, you're not locked into the decisions about settings and capabilities made by, say, a Debian package maintainer. All adds up to a lot of flexibility and a lot of power under the hood. But of course, that's also the case because it's Linux. All good. I've prepared a presentation called "About Gentoo for people who think its a crazy idea". It's on offer as a SLUG talk if anyone is interested. > If you dont mind having it download and compile for a day or two it is > fast and tastee! Gentoo has a [mostly] working binary package system which integrates tightly with the normal filesystem management done by the packaging system. I recently built a server and for comparison tried downloading Gentoo's CD images (1 x CD-ROM to get you going up to and including X windows, and a second one with a pile of [optional] binaries (Gnome, KDE, etc)). Downloading the ISOs and then updating my build description tree resulted in some wasted downloads in the more fast-moving software, but many things are pretty static over medium time spans and so the binaries made a few weeks/months ago are pretty good. Not having to build gcc, glibc, xfree, etc right off the bat meant I was up and running really quickly, downloading and compiling specific ebuilds as needed as I moved forward. After about a month of running the system, I'd say that I've needed/wanted to upgrade (ie downloaded source + compile + merge into system) about only 30% of the packages. That's a slow and quiet background trickle, really.... and as for system impact? There isn't any. That's what nice(1) is for. AfC P.S. I don't care if the original poster was trolling, as some suspected. It's a worthy enough question. -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 http://www.operationaldynamics.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
