Tagged and Bagged: Gentoo
I sure hope so!
I’ve just noticed that on the Gentoo home page, which has been pretty much stagnant, as far as news or activity is concerned, seems to have had a burst of activity. Since January 12, there have been 9 posts on the home page. This is more than in the previous 5 months. The news is encouraging. I’m happy with what I see. Awesome!
I think the recent media activity has prompted them to do something about it
Why? What’s up with Gentoo?
I really hope that they’ll get things back on track. I used to install Gentoo on my machines and it was a pleasure to go through an install (except for the compile times). However, after the political crap started, it began to affect the maintenance of the distro itself. The 2007.0 release was an abysmal failure and even the minimal installer was broken. The only hope of installing a system that may or may not work was to start with the smallest base and recompile with the latest compiler. Then, you’d want to add your preferred apps.
I tried again in December to get Gentoo installed and it was beginning to be too much work, so I gave up on that. I was constantly coming up against dependancy issues as many parts of the portage tree were not updated or corrupted and nobody had any direction to fix the problems.
I hope that this has changed, as now, with tools like the –parallel-fetch flag, you can have your source fetched while the current package is being compiled, saving a lot of time. And, with ccache enabled, compiling from source becomes trivial, even on an old machine like mine.
I don’t follow Linux news all that much these days. But Gentoo was a good distribution, so it would be a pity if they let the project deteriorate.
I learned a lot about how to install Linux by installing Gentoo. Without the excellent Gentoo Handbook, I would have likely struggled with using CHROOT, which has been an excellent and useful tool for other distributions. I’ve actually fixed a few unreachable cinfig files and gathered a few config variables from an otherwise unreachanbe partition, due to a real system bork. Without knowing how to CHROOT into a filesystem, I would have never been able to access the filesystem and I would have had to reinstall, losing any files or configurations that I had.
Well, from what I heard, Gentoo was in a downward spiral. The original founder I believe is stepping back in place to head Gentoo in a direction it originally was in when it first started.
The rumors I heard was, he was sort of ousted cause he was going to start making money from Gentoo, in which the contributers and developers did not like, which in my opinion is just plain stupid. The guy has to make a living, if you want to dedicate all your energy behind something, you can’t work a full time job and run a full time Linux distribution, it’s just not going to happen.
It wouldn’t make any difference to me though, I still use Slackware and I think it’s nice to know Patrick makes a living off his distribution so he can dedicate all his time and energy into it.
And if you really want to learn a lot about Linux, install LFS, you’ll learn more with it than Gentoo even has to offer.
I totally agree with you, Drew. I am so glad that Patrick can make a living on his passion (although its not a particularly huge living).
I’ve thought about LFS, but I don’t know if I want to compile all that stuff just for the sake of doing it. I really like the lazy tools like emerge and etc-update. Of course, once the thing’s installed, I’d just have to install security updates, which is pretty basic. Perhaps I’ll read the book and have it at that.
I hope so too! After all it is my distribution and you are right Corey about the pitfalls one faces when installing that system! I pulled out the remaining hair I had trying to do it but it was still worth it! Gentoo Gave me one of the best systems I ever had and my Nintendo 64 emulators along with my ripping fast KDE applications prove that point alone. I’m pulling for Gentoo because the community needs an source based distro and LFS may be great as a learning tool but in terms of practicality you can’t expect one individual to apply patches, compiler optimizations for each application that they compile. I’m rooting for Gentoo because it is the way to go!
By the way, where are the emoticon selection tool. The only thing I remember how to do is the simple smile face. But I’m sad without those tools. Will this show up?
I dropped the smiley tool for now, as it was showing some weird icons that it wasn’t supposed to. I’ll either reinstall it or get another soon.