The way of the Gentoo

ruby-talk
1

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of Linux,
which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

Gentoo www.gentoo.org is a Linux distro that has a friendly (as in not /.)
community http://forums.gentoo.org/ but more to the point it has an amazing
distribution system called portage:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-user.xml
Someone mentioned he preferred Gentoo mostly because of the nice colours
(and there may be some truth in that, looking at their documentation).

It downloads and synchronizes a list of available packages. It installs
software on demand including all dependencies.
Say you want VI: “emerge VI” and VI gets downloaded, build and installed in
the most recent stable version unless it’s already installed.

“emerge KDE” and you can wait for long time first installing and building X
unless you have it installed. Actually a lot of Gentoo mirrors are
currently bogged down due to the recent KDE 3.1 release.

Gentoo has a number of mirrors and a clear policy for synchronizing existing
mirrors and adding new mirrors. Essentially if you have sufficent diskspace
and a T1 uplink, you can be a mirror if you sync a specific times (to avoid
out of sync mirrors).

The happy user attaches to arbitrary mirrors due to a round robin DNS
feature, but you can also specify a mirror.

When new software enters gentoo for download (or a new version), an ebuild
is written specifying the requirements. I don’t know the details, but
apparently it’s easy to add your own ebuild if necessary. Therefore the
gentoo community is cabable of downloading new packages much earlier than
other distributions that need rpm packages or debian packages.

So what is my point? Of course you have already guessed what I’m hinting at:

Wouldn’t it by out of the ordinary cool if Ruby had it’s package system
working the same way as Gentoo? Possible even blatantly stealing the source
code for the purpose?

Obviously .rb files need no compilation but would still benefit from the
dedependency system. Binary packages do require compilation.

My major concern is that this approach in nature is Linux based. However, I
do not see what should prevent clients from running different operating
systems. The download protocol is http (wget) or ftp, or even local files.

Since Ruby already has decent configuration scripts to build .so modules on
various system (native Windows MSVC, mingw, cygwin, linux etc.) I reckon
this could be integrated into the client build system. Actually I reckon the
client could easily be written in Ruby - I suspect it’s currently written in
Python although I havent investigated.

Gentoo also has various install stages for gentoo including boot strapping
gcc, installing precompiled gcc but compiling all other linux sources,
installing most of the system binary and only updating new version through
builds.
Likewise, Ruby could be distrubuted this way - I reckon it already is on
Gentoo (but I’m not that far into the install yet).

The next step would be integrating this system with FreeRide GUI.

I believe such a system would be an very significant part of moving Ruby to
a wider audience.
It would make it much more reliable to deploy Ruby solutions (even private
ones) becuase you’d only need a small script to emerge all the dependencies
of you app and a network of mirrors would ensure you could always get the
required package. Currently RAA is a link to a number of small unstable
servers and at best links to source forge projects where each dependency
most tediously be downloaded. Furthermore, the core Ruby installation could
be smaller because each user could easily add to the core. Authors of Ruby
applications no longer need to reimplement functionality because it would be
bad to depend on some mysterious package that would annoy potential users.
It would be easier to add mirrors than Gentoo: Gentoo requires about 256MB
of diskspace and T1, but Ruby would require much less space and any ADSL
uplink would be fast enough, provided there is an sufficient number of
mirrors. Thus the average Linux Ruby user could dedicate som diskspace if
they have a home server running.

Anyway, Gentoo proves that it is possible. All else being equal it should be
simpler for Ruby than for an entire bootstrapped OS.

This is just an idea for anyone to pick up. I know nothing of Linux or
Gentoo beside just trying to install it and I doubt I’ll find the time to
work on it myself.

I have noticed the discussion of a Ruby version of CPAN. I don’t know
exactly how CPAN works wrt. dependencies. But being able to easily add
mirrors is apparently a feature of both CPAN and Gentoo.

Speaking of dependency checking like Gentoo’s system: I have been working
with SCons 0.9 alpha - it’s pretty good at only building the necessary stuff
although it has it’s rough edges. I saw a benchmark where builds were much
faster than using make. SCons is written in Python.

Mikkel

2

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of Linux,
which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

Gentoo www.gentoo.org is a Linux distro that has a friendly (as in not /.)
community http://forums.gentoo.org/ but more to the point it has an amazing
distribution system called portage:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-user.xml

Since Ruby already has decent configuration scripts to build .so modules on
various system (native Windows MSVC, mingw, cygwin, linux etc.) I reckon
this could be integrated into the client build system. Actually I reckon the
client could easily be written in Ruby - I suspect it’s currently written in
Python although I havent investigated.

Yes, much of it is in Python.

Likewise, Ruby could be distrubuted this way - I reckon it already is on
Gentoo (but I’m not that far into the install yet).

I use Ruby on GenToo/sparc, and yes, it is distributed this way.

You get ruby installed by saying

emerge ruby
(which fetches, compiles, and installs the source)
and several ruby applications are available as
dev-ruby/

The next step would be integrating this system with FreeRide GUI.

Nice idea.

I believe such a system would be an very significant part of moving Ruby to
a wider audience.
It would make it much more reliable to deploy Ruby solutions (even private
ones) becuase you’d only need a small script to emerge all the dependencies
of you app and a network of mirrors would ensure you could always get the
required package. Currently RAA is a link to a number of small unstable
servers and at best links to source forge projects where each dependency
most tediously be downloaded. Furthermore, the core Ruby installation could
be smaller because each user could easily add to the core. Authors of Ruby
applications no longer need to reimplement functionality because it would be
bad to depend on some mysterious package that would annoy potential users.
It would be easier to add mirrors than Gentoo: Gentoo requires about 256MB
of diskspace and T1, but Ruby would require much less space and any ADSL
uplink would be fast enough, provided there is an sufficient number of
mirrors. Thus the average Linux Ruby user could dedicate som diskspace if
they have a home server running.

Anyway, Gentoo proves that it is possible. All else being equal it should be
simpler for Ruby than for an entire bootstrapped OS.

This is just an idea for anyone to pick up.

I’m not going to pick it up just now, but I’ll second the thought. GenToo
is a very nice (linux) distrubution, and ruby installs easily and runs quite well
on it. Thanks for getting the idea going.

···

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

Mikkel
–
Ferris McCormick

3
For even more control, next time you might try LFS.
···

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 05:32:51 +0900 “MikkelFJ” mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of
Linux, which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

4

“MikkelFJ” mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com writes:

Wouldn’t it by out of the ordinary cool if Ruby had it’s package system
working the same way as Gentoo? Possible even blatantly stealing the source
code for the purpose?

This has been hashed out numerous times in this list. There are
already ruby package manager that do dependency checking, raa-install and
portupgrades are some of the more famous ones. I am sure there are many others.

The question here is not, is it possible to have a package manager for
ruby. The question is: which package manager will win.

I have been trying to modifying portupgrade (of FreeBSD) so that it
works on non-BSD system. At the same time, I am also modifying apt (of
Debian) so that it works on non-Debian system. Both are excellent and
mature package managers. I am currently torn between the two, although
I am leaning slightly on the direction of apt.

portupgrade is written in ruby, which gives a nice ego
boost. Unfortunately: 1. cannot easily select a specific version to
install. 2. no alternative UI in the class of aptitude, 3. present a
problem of requiring ruby to install ruby. #3 is a problem if
portupgrade is used on a system without ruby, but this is not a big
deal since ruby can also be shipped along with portupgrade. minor
problem.

apt is written in C and binaries for various OSes can be produced so
that it can be used to bootstrap ruby into a system without
ruby. There is also aptitude, a ncurses-based UI to apt, and it is
very useful to browse the package selection. It also have a very
rich package building tools. Unfortunately, many of the package
building tools are written in perl; it takes away some ego. Yet, this
is not a major problem since this affects only the package builder
(which probably is not the package author).

In the end, I think the winner will be the one that provide the higher
total-value benefit which invariable means quality of supporting
applications (easiness to make a package, browsing/searching the
collection) and comprehensiveness of the package collection.

Let’s see which one will win.

YS.

5

In article 3e42c372$0$150$edfadb0f@dtext01.news.tele.dk,

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of Linux,
which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

Gentoo is wonderful - I’m typing this on a Gentoo’ed laptop. However, it
it’s your first foray into the Linxu ‘pool’ you’re jumping in at the deep
end… (but that’s beside the point)

Gentoo www.gentoo.org is a Linux distro that has a friendly (as in not /.)
community http://forums.gentoo.org/ but more to the point it has an amazing
distribution system called portage:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-user.xml
Someone mentioned he preferred Gentoo mostly because of the nice colours
(and there may be some truth in that, looking at their documentation).

It downloads and synchronizes a list of available packages. It installs
software on demand including all dependencies.
Say you want VI: “emerge VI” and VI gets downloaded, build and installed in
the most recent stable version unless it’s already installed.

“emerge KDE” and you can wait for long time first installing and building X
unless you have it installed. Actually a lot of Gentoo mirrors are
currently bogged down due to the recent KDE 3.1 release.

Gotta check that out… but maybe I’ll wait a few weeks.

Gentoo has a number of mirrors and a clear policy for synchronizing existing
mirrors and adding new mirrors. Essentially if you have sufficent diskspace
and a T1 uplink, you can be a mirror if you sync a specific times (to avoid
out of sync mirrors).

The happy user attaches to arbitrary mirrors due to a round robin DNS
feature, but you can also specify a mirror.

When new software enters gentoo for download (or a new version), an ebuild
is written specifying the requirements. I don’t know the details, but
apparently it’s easy to add your own ebuild if necessary. Therefore the
gentoo community is cabable of downloading new packages much earlier than
other distributions that need rpm packages or debian packages.

So what is my point? Of course you have already guessed what I’m hinting at:

Wouldn’t it by out of the ordinary cool if Ruby had it’s package system
working the same way as Gentoo? Possible even blatantly stealing the source
code for the purpose?

Well, I don’t know if we’d want to steal Gentoo’s packaging code (emerge,
etc. ) as it’s written in Python - perhaps it can be translated and
improved :wink:

Obviously .rb files need no compilation but would still benefit from the
dedependency system. Binary packages do require compilation.

My major concern is that this approach in nature is Linux based. However, I
do not see what should prevent clients from running different operating
systems. The download protocol is http (wget) or ftp, or even local files.

Since Ruby already has decent configuration scripts to build .so modules on
various system (native Windows MSVC, mingw, cygwin, linux etc.) I reckon
this could be integrated into the client build system. Actually I reckon the
client could easily be written in Ruby - I suspect it’s currently written in
Python although I havent investigated.

Yup, it’s in Python.

Gentoo also has various install stages for gentoo including boot strapping
gcc, installing precompiled gcc but compiling all other linux sources,
installing most of the system binary and only updating new version through
builds.
Likewise, Ruby could be distrubuted this way - I reckon it already is on
Gentoo (but I’m not that far into the install yet).

Yes, there is a Ruby package for Gentoo - Ruby 1.6.8.

The next step would be integrating this system with FreeRide GUI.

I believe such a system would be an very significant part of moving Ruby to
a wider audience.
It would make it much more reliable to deploy Ruby solutions (even private
ones) becuase you’d only need a small script to emerge all the dependencies
of you app and a network of mirrors would ensure you could always get the
required package. Currently RAA is a link to a number of small unstable
servers and at best links to source forge projects where each dependency
most tediously be downloaded. Furthermore, the core Ruby installation could
be smaller because each user could easily add to the core. Authors of Ruby
applications no longer need to reimplement functionality because it would be
bad to depend on some mysterious package that would annoy potential users.
It would be easier to add mirrors than Gentoo: Gentoo requires about 256MB
of diskspace and T1, but Ruby would require much less space and any ADSL
uplink would be fast enough, provided there is an sufficient number of
mirrors. Thus the average Linux Ruby user could dedicate som diskspace if
they have a home server running.

Anyway, Gentoo proves that it is possible. All else being equal it should be
simpler for Ruby than for an entire bootstrapped OS.

This is just an idea for anyone to pick up. I know nothing of Linux or
Gentoo beside just trying to install it and I doubt I’ll find the time to
work on it myself.

I have noticed the discussion of a Ruby version of CPAN. I don’t know
exactly how CPAN works wrt. dependencies. But being able to easily add
mirrors is apparently a feature of both CPAN and Gentoo.

See http://www.freepan.org

There are a few packaging projects in the works, perhaps the closest one
to Gentoo’s is Rubynet, which is modeled on the BSD ports system (which
Gentoo borrowed from heavily, AFAIK). There is also raa-install which
covers the packaging only not things like mirrors and dependencies (I
believe RBuilder is the name of the project that does dependencies).

At any rate, you can use raa-install now to install packages. It’s still
an evolving project, but installation works now.

Phil

···

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

“Or perhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?”
Amy Weiss (accusing theregister.co.uk of engaging in ‘tabloid journalism’)
Senior VP, Communications
Recording Industry Association of America

6

Well, we’ve got rubynet, ruby gems, raainstall and rapt/rpkg.
We’re referring to the *BSD port system, the gentoo port system, the
apt-get/deb system, the apt-rpm/conectiva system, and even the "perl
-MCPAN -e shell " system.

We already have running projects, for a while it seemed to me that
rpkg was the best performer, but Massimiliano let it for a while after
raainstall came out. It seems he’s working on it again (I hope he is
:slight_smile:

I’d like to add to the bunch of ideas 2 other distribution systems:

mandrake’s urpmi is wonderful .
I like the option to add non official sources and the non-need to
write correct names.
writing:
urpmi kde
or
urpmi kde-base
would work anyway.

(It seemed to me that pkg_add -r on freebsd didn’t worked this way)
You even have a grafic font end , gurpmi.

urpm* is perl.

The other system I suggest is the cygwin/miktex setup system:
you get a tiny executable (well, in this case is just a .exe but we
can have multi-platform stuff) and that handles all the packages.
You can upgrade/install new packages from various mirror when you
want. It is just win graphics, but having it ncurses based or text
base should not be hard.

The real problem is: having all the packages in one place (yes, again
talking about c(R|P)an :confused: ) .

AND having all the developers in one place.
This is a field in wich I don’t need neither want choice.
Remove options, put ONE working system in the standard distro, and
we’ll get used to it and we’ll start to bother other lists/ng talking
about “that awful ruby distribution/installation system”

···

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 21:24:43 +0100, “MikkelFJ” mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

I recently tried (as in not yet succeeded) to step into the world of Linux,
which let me to the way of the Gentoo.

Gentoo www.gentoo.org is a Linux distro that has a friendly (as in not /.)
community http://forums.gentoo.org/ but more to the point it has an amazing
distribution system called portage:

7

presto! ;0)

rpkg:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=rpkg

raainstall:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=raainstall

what you looking for?

···

On Thursday 06 February 2003 01:54 pm, fmccor@inforead.com wrote:

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

This is just an idea for anyone to pick up.

I’m not going to pick it up just now, but I’ll second the thought. GenToo
is a very nice (linux) distrubution, and ruby installs easily and runs
quite well on it. Thanks for getting the idea going.

–
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

8

“Phil Tomson” ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com wrote in message
news:b1ui160qc7@enews2.newsguy.com…

In article 3e42c372$0$150$edfadb0f@dtext01.news.tele.dk,

Gentoo is wonderful - I’m typing this on a Gentoo’ed laptop. However, it
it’s your first foray into the Linxu ‘pool’ you’re jumping in at the deep
end… (but that’s beside the point)

True, it’s beside the point because isolated from the other Linux stuff, the
installer works well.
Anyway, going OT in line of many great Ruby threads ;-):
Lets not turn this into a major Linux discussion - but given the grief I’ve
had it would be nice to get it out of the system (the frustations out of my
neural system, that is :wink: - If you feel an urge to tell may how stupid I am
Linux wise, please take it to e-mail - remove “-anti-spam” from email
address.

But heres the very abbreviated history:
Let my put it this way - I installed mandrake on one laptop using a USB
CD-ROM,
for hardware reasons I moved the harddisk to another laptop and the USB
drive worked. But I didn’t like the idea of running an installation from
different hardware although it mostly worked so I installed Mandrake
properly on the new laptop. But subsequently I couldn’t connect to the
USB-drive - go figure… ? Meanwhile Mandrake files for bankruptcy
protection …
RedHat 8.0 stalled during package installation (apparently I should upgrade
the RPM system, but given it’s burned into the ISO CD image I opted out on
that). Then I tried the new FreeBSD 5.0 release, which actually is very cool
and worked well (except I had to kick it hard to make it understand what a
40GB disk is) - beside the disk problem and the not entirely intuitive
installation, FreeBSD is fast and in retrospect easy to install - and well
documented! PCMCIA Wlan and sshd is running immediately but keyboard, sound
and X is a mess - got X configured to laptop after much work. Basically I
could SSH log in from my Win2K laptop using Putty on wlan to FreeBSD laptop
after a 10minute FreeBSD install, once you now the drill. I decided to try
Gentoo based on a FreeBSD users recommendation, since FreeBSD is not the
easiest for stuff other than servers (notably sound support requires kernel
rebuild). I forgot I had a Pentium II and had lots of trouble installing
Gentoo Pentium III (I ordered a used PIII laptop but got a PII version due
to lack of stock). Once realizing this mistake, Gentoo actually was quite
easy to install following the instructions (more typing, but it works). Only
grief is rebooting and loosing wireless - the entire stage2 install ran fine
over wlan. The post-boot orinoco wlan problem is a very common Gentoo
problem - and this problem I haven’t fully resolved. However, I’d rather
work harder as long as each step is documented, rather than an easy install
and then it doesn’t work - I didn’t get wlan running at all on Mandrake,
trying equally hard. My only worry is that Gentoo might be too much a moving
target to be a stable server - so I kind of want to go back to FreeBSD but
then I’ll also not learn Linux.

At any rate, you can use raa-install now to install packages. It’s still
an evolving project, but installation works now.

I’ve heard about some of these projects, but haven’t followed Ruby closely
for two months or so - things are moving fast here - or did I miss earlier
major events?

Mikkel

···

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

9

“Yohanes Santoso” ysantoso@jenny-gnome.dyndns.org wrote in message
news:87isvx85f2.fsf@jenny-gnome.dyndns.org…

rich package building tools. Unfortunately, many of the package
building tools are written in perl; it takes away some ego. Yet, this
is not a major problem since this affects only the package builder
(which probably is not the package author).

Actually I can only see to languages for a Ruby installer: Ruby and C. On
Windows it is not a given that you have perl so you have to install it
first. I’m not going to install Perl to install Ruby.
The same goes to Python. If I have to install something, that something has
to be a prebuild Ruby core.
C is omnipresent, although most Windows users won’t have it. However, that
path from C to binary is short.

Serverside for the distribution mirrors I am completely indifferent towards
what language is running. The ego side of using Python or Perl I could live
with - first if Python helps Ruby grow that would only be poetic justice -
second why rewrite good code?

Of course you could have Perl or Python package managers, but then it would
be a convenient add-on to Ruby, not something you could use in a deploy
applications or even modules in general.

Other than that, thanks for summarizing the situation. I’m a bit concerned
about the quality of dependency checking in the various systems, but
obviously you have been studying this a lot.

Mikkel

10

No, it’s just as awful as their other perls :frowning:

Ontopic: I’m packaging Sympa for local purposes now and am
wondering if efficient s/Perl/Ruby/g exists in the area of
mailing lists management software…

···

On Fri, Feb 07, 2003 at 11:37:00PM +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:

mandrake’s urpmi is wonderful .

–
---- WBR, Michael Shigorin mike@altlinux.ru
------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/

11

In article did74v02a9f4ni3hpstjhd5q62dgdr3v4d@4ax.com,

···

gabriele renzi surrender_it@remove.yahoo.it wrote:

(It seemed to me that pkg_add -r on freebsd didn’t worked this way)

Yes and no. Yes it can work that way but the logic in names is fixed (by a
link in the FTP site). You can “pkg_add -r -v ruby” and it will get
ruby.tgz which will probably be a link to the real package but you have to
know the name in advance.

portupgrade on the other hand has more fuzzy logic and can propose you with
a list of possible packages.

Ollivier ROBERT -=- Eurocontrol EEC/ITM -=- roberto@eurocontrol.fr
Usenet Canal Historique FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!

12

Tom pointed out I replied only to him, so here goes:

could you foward to ruby-talk? some people might like to know this.

thanks,

···

rpkg:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=rpkg

It just proves my point: raa links to allruby.com which has been stolen by
domain pirates, so you can’t download it.

That said, rpkg and ruby-install may be on the way - but it’s a package
deal (so to speak). Mirrors must be running, core Ruby should use it and
not least there should be a clear official policy for creating ebuilds or
whatever they should be called. If most of the software is already there,
it’s mostly an organizational issue.

–
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

13

In article 3e42dada$0$158$edfadb0f@dtext01.news.tele.dk,

···

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

Gentoo based on a FreeBSD users recommendation, since FreeBSD is not the
easiest for stuff other than servers (notably sound support requires kernel
rebuild).

Nope, no kernel rebuild for sound under FreeBSD. Just load the snd_pcm
kernel module (kldload snd_pcm) and you’re set!

Ollivier (aka roberto@freebsd.org)

Ollivier ROBERT -=- Eurocontrol EEC/ITM -=- roberto@eurocontrol.fr
Usenet Canal Historique FreeBSD: The Power to Serve!

14

speaking of Gentoo. i am a long time Debian user, but i am tired of being so
far behind the front lines --i have of course added a few unofficial apt
sources to get newer stuff, but my system has suffered for it. as of last
night i tried to upgrade to kde3.1 and it failed. now i can no longer use
konqueror in kde. there are also a number of other issues, and honestly i
tired of it messing with it. my last ditch effort i guess will be to try
dist-upgrading to Sarge (testing).

but, ironically, inspired by raainstall, i am thinking of jumping ship and
moving to a source distribution. looks like there are three good ones to
choose from: Gentoo, Lunar and SourceMage.

so i 'd like to know more about your expeirence with Gentoo. is it going well?

···

–
tom sawyer, aka transami
transami@transami.net

15

“MikkelFJ” mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com writes:

rpkg:

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=rpkg

It just proves my point: raa links to allruby.com which has been stolen by
domain pirates, so you can’t download it.

I’m setting up a project at Sourceforge. It is taking a little
because a former project existed, it was abandoned, but the name was
not deregistered.

rpkg supports the features you mentioned (I can go over the initial
message in detail if you wish). It was meant to clone apt, then
diverged somewhat when people talked to me about Gentoo.

I’ll post a link in a few days when the Sourceforge site is up.

Massimiliano

16

My personal experience with Gentoo has been great. I want to try Lunar out as
well though. A fellow on irc (xoritor i think?) is a driving force behind
that distribution and the package management is apparently handled by a Ruby
application.

Signed,
Holden Glova

···

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:41, Tom Sawyer wrote:

speaking of Gentoo. i am a long time Debian user, but i am tired of being
so far behind the front lines --i have of course added a few unofficial apt
sources to get newer stuff, but my system has suffered for it. as of last
night i tried to upgrade to kde3.1 and it failed. now i can no longer use
konqueror in kde. there are also a number of other issues, and honestly i
tired of it messing with it. my last ditch effort i guess will be to try
dist-upgrading to Sarge (testing).

but, ironically, inspired by raainstall, i am thinking of jumping ship and
moving to a source distribution. looks like there are three good ones to
choose from: Gentoo, Lunar and SourceMage.

so i 'd like to know more about your expeirence with Gentoo. is it going
well?

17

“Ollivier Robert” roberto@REMOVETHIS.eu.org wrote in message
news:b28o3d$nub$1@saphir.eurocontrol.fr…

In article 3e42dada$0$158$edfadb0f@dtext01.news.tele.dk,

Gentoo based on a FreeBSD users recommendation, since FreeBSD is not the
easiest for stuff other than servers (notably sound support requires
kernel
rebuild).

Nope, no kernel rebuild for sound under FreeBSD. Just load the snd_pcm
kernel module (kldload snd_pcm) and you’re set!

Nice, I must try that.
I have decided that life is too short for kernel builds - I temporarily gave
that up while testing Gentoo, but I have grown to regret that decision (I
like the Gentoo spirit but it needs a couple of years…). (after dumping
Gentoo I eventually managed to install Redhat, but without wlan <=> status
quo with Gentoo) - Oh and suddenly you can’t logout from Redhat desktop -
fortunately my user account allowed me to reboot (safe huh?) so I didn’t
risk trashing the filesystem powering off - and it trashes disk more than
Windows. FreeBSD is by far the easiest free OS I’ve tried because - while
not trivial - your efforts are usually rewarded within reasonable time. mmmm
I need a server running so I can get back to writing software.

BTW: I just discovered the original smiley proposal - it was retrieved on a
FreeBSD 4.1 from a 20 year old tape backup… :slight_smile:

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

The author about the smiley:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

Mikkel

···

MikkelFJ mikkelfj-anti-spam@bigfoot.com wrote:

18

our group is looking at moving from redhat to gentoo. my sysop swears by it.
the new redhat install (8.x) is MASSIVE and very window’esc - which is
prompting the switch methinks… also, rpms seem to suck.

-a

···

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Tom Sawyer wrote:

so i 'd like to know more about your expeirence with Gentoo. is it going well?

–

====================================

Ara Howard
NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory
Information and Technology Services
Data Systems Group
R/FST 325 Broadway
Boulder, CO 80305-3328
Email: ahoward@fsl.noaa.gov
Phone: 303-497-7238
Fax: 303-497-7259
====================================

19

“Tom Sawyer” transami@transami.net wrote in message
news:200302101157.19469.transami@transami.net…

so i 'd like to know more about your expeirence with Gentoo. is it going
well?

Well - our mails crossed but to give you a resume:

I required wireless network to run otherwise I might well have been happy. I
failed after many attempts although it work for others (and even mine until
reboot).
My first kernel booted fine except the wlan issue. Later kernels failed
after a reinstallation but that is hardly gentoos fault - it’s generic Linux
and my lack of expertice.

On Gentoo you can do a basic install in a couple of hours, but you should
choose a stage2 install because stage3 will upgrade lot’s of stuff anyway.
It takes a long time to compile, that’s how source works especially on older
hardware. My intial attempt at stage2 was before KDE 3.1 went out. Now the
network is too slow for a couple of weeks I guess (5-14KB/s where I should
have 100KB/s).
I would not discourage you from choosing Gentoo - I’s a great community
(also visit IRC and forums to get an idea of the potential problems people
deal with). However, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and you spend a lot
of time trying combinations where each combination takes of lot of time.
Some people have tried weeks worth of kernel builds while others are happy
users. Generally the spirit of Gentoo is better than elsewhere in Linux (An
IRC’er wrote: “why is Gentoo the nicest freenode channel?” This reminds me
of comp.lang.ruby and you should always choose a tool based on the quality
of its users). You might actually catch a dead Gentoo-ist with a FreeBSD
system as well - an anomaly in the usually heated OS wars - this could be
down to the heritage from the FreeBSD port system or that the community
generally has an open mind (again like Ruby). The documentation is fairly
good and you learn a lot about Linux (making it good even for newbies like
me). The portage system lets you upgrade and downgrade as you choose and I
have easily grabbed a few tools that way. However, I suspect some flaws in
the portage system prevented my wlan working after having done something
wrong early in the install hence I tried to reinstall but misconfigured the
kernel during the operation and decided enough is enough - no more kernel
builds.

If you are into Linux and don’t mind kernel rebuilds I would recommend to
give it a shot - decide how much time you’ll spend and perhaps it works out
great. You will probably spend some time maintaining the system as new
software may fail and require downgrading again where Debian is more
conservative (I haven’t tried Debian).

More generally on my Linux experience for anyone who cares - no flame
intended I’m trying to be as objective as possible while truthful to my own
subjective impressions. I entered Linux with an open mind (this happens with
3 year intervals). Also I’m a bit annoyed with Windows features - notably
the support of Posix, SSH and much fewer freely available apps.: Verdict: I
think Linux is hyped - its no more stable than Windows, it’s just that
(quoting a BSD user) everything on Linux is a “hardware error” - I smiled
when reading it, but later realized that he was right. There are incredibly
many “hardware errors” discussed in the Linux forums. In reality it’s a lot
of slightly different drivers that should have been merged to a single
driver which in turn should have more intelligent sensing and be properly
debugged - Linux is a lot duplicated incomplete work from drivers through
distributions. This is why people compiles kernels over and over - or in the
case of RedHat you either happen to have it working or not (granted, a lot
works). And in case of FreeBSD this is why my network went online
immediately - they have their drivers integrated. I do believe the Linux
kernel is evolving faster than FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very late with thread
support and FreeBSD should enter the XFS filesystem. You could also argue
that Linux is very late with proper VM btw… khttpd kernel level http server
is fairly kewl in Linux - I’m not aware of equivalents in *BSD. However, in
the end of the day it’s much easier to get a relatively safe FreeBSD server
running and kick it around until it also goes multimedia than the other way
around. Major downside with FreeBSD is that it is poorly supported
commercially (how ironic). Arkeia has Linux but no BSD server. Ditto Oracle.
Professionally I develop on Windows but feel I should also get acquainted
with Linux. However, as things are, I can’t be bothered. I’ll pick something
that works for my server so I have a server, Windows 2K or some variant of
*nix where I can test posix stuff and get SSH - which currently leads me to
FreeBSD. One last thing for FreeBSD: I’ve got an older laptop for the
purpose so fulltime X-desktop is not the primary purpose - with an 1.8
Athlon and lots of RAM I might choose different. I need the sound because
I’m supposed to use the 40GB disk for something so hopefully I manage that.
Oh - and Microsoft policy aside - Windows really is much better than it’s
reputation. Given how much banging I’ve given my dev. machines, it’s a very
long time since I’ve got the systems down (but you need a few service packs
to get there) and the remote desktop on XP seriously rocks. I might also add
that a lot of complaints about Windows is due to writing non-portable *nix
code rather than lack of functionality in Windows (Ruby works mostly great
on both platforms) - that said it’s too bad Windows does not support Posix.
Windows network browsing is crappy btw. Can’t browse network from home - I
can only use known servers - very old crappy protocol indeed - oth - not
sure you have an equivalent feature on Linux at all (save LDAP).

Mikkel

20

“Massimiliano Mirra” bard@prism.localnet wrote in message
news:87fzr1otb1.fsf@prism.localnet…

rpkg supports the features you mentioned (I can go over the initial
message in detail if you wish).

If you write some informative documentation on your new sourceforge page, I
will be looking forward to reading that.

It was meant to clone apt, then
diverged somewhat when people talked to me about Gentoo.

This is interesting - I have only known Gentoo about a week and I was afraid
the rpkg project wasn’t really taking off.
Seeing these things emerge together is the best I could hope for.

I’ll post a link in a few days when the Sourceforge site is up.

Great!

Mikkel