Gentoo Linux Releases LiveDVD Iron Penguin Edition | Hacker News Reader

Gentoo Linux Releases LiveDVD Iron Penguin Edition

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61 pointsmariuz48 comments

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... (now a spam site) and laugh about all the pain and time to get that 0.02% increase in overall system performance.

My experience was largely similar, although I suffered along with using lynx to read the documentation in e second virtual console as I was learning about partitions and compiler flags.

And after spending hours watching/waiting for gcc, bash and some of the other core utilities (and of course Linux) to compile my then limited experience also witnessed a panic on first boot :( so I switched to Lunar and had that on my laptop until I replaced it.

I too became lazy, but went for Arch instead of Ubuntu (which I did use before attempting Gentoo).

Might fire-up a VM and give this a whirl...

That ricer link was hilarious, thanks. Somehow I've missed it all these years.

I keep using Gentoo mostly out of inertia; I understand it, and don't have to mess with it much. My systems remain current, and I don't break them... um, very often.

A very long time ago, when I was running Mandrake on a tiny Pentium-II system (kids, ask your grandfathers) I spent a week installing Gentoo. Holy cow, that was a laborious process - but there was a surprising and obvious performance benefit at the end. That conditional compilation business, where I could excise stuff like spellcheck, qt, nautilus, support for scripting languages I didn't care about - really made a noticeable difference on my limited systems.

Since then I've spent some money and gotten some decent hardware, and I don't notice the bloat in my systems so much. My useflags have become much less restrictive. Gentoo keeps everything current, and if something new tickles my fancy I can simply emerge it and a few minutes later it's there - with it and its dependencies tailored to whatever useflags I still keep.

So Gentoo works for me. (But my brothers run Ubuntu on my recommendation - they're cupholder-next-next-next-finish kind of guys.)

I still fondly remember doing a Stage 1 install on Pentium 3 era 800Mhz Celeron with 512MB of RAM.

Days! Days of compilation.

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.

Nooooooooo! funroll-loops.org got spamparked? _Russian_ spamparked?

Oh well, at least it's still Asian, I suppose.

But talk about losing part of your .... well, in my case, second childhood (I'm presently on my fourth or fifth).

Thanks for the the funroll-loops reminder, some of those bug reports from the early days were class

"HOLY COW I'M TOTALLY GOING SO FAST OH F*"

USE="GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE"

(Source: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072)

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.

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.

The same could be said for Arch, or any other rolling distro.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Portage supports installing binary packages from a binhost, as well. Most large packages (Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, etc.) have precompiled versions that follow the naming convention of $SOURCEPKGNAME-bin.

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

Interesting. I'm running a mix of i3wm and some Gnome apps on a relatively old Intel P8700 powered laptop and the only compile pain points are browsers and libreoffice (I ended up using the -bin package).

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.

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

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?

I would say so. Gentoo's package manager is a bit different from some others (dpkg, rpm, etc) in that it will build from source instead of installing binary packages, but all in all I would say it is worth it. It will be more difficult than just running the graphical Ubuntu installer, but hey, that's how we get better, right?

The big thing is to make surr you have reasonably modern hardware. Installing on older systems could take a week or more for all the builds.

AMD FX-8350 and 8gb shall be enough, I suppose.

The issue is that I used a lot of Fedora, but it works surprisingly slow on my machine, but the support for developers' tools was awesome (never had problem with old versions). After that I tried ElementaryOS, which is beautiful and fast, but Ubuntu-based so every compiler I need to build from scratch (I'm testing new languages recently) so started thinking about something still nice and fast, but with recent stuff. Now i have a two days of continuous spare time and maybe will try Arch or Gentoo, which I know what's about, but not tried ever.

I personally have not used Gentoo on the desktop, but I have friends & coworkers who have, and they have been generally happy.

Arch is awesome, I am not currently using it but have used it before.

Another possibility you could look into is Debian Testing. Debian has the reputation of including "old" packages for the purpose of stability, but the "testing" version of the OS is much more up-to-date, and if you need something even newer, and are feeling adventurous, you can install specific packages from debian-experimental.

I'm a heavy Gentoo user and a weekend should be enough. Especially if you've compiled a kernel before (do this btw, don't use genkernel). As for speed, I doubt you'll really doubt you'll notice much. Memory usage and installation size is way more noticable. If you need a speed boost I suggest not using a Desktop Environment, but using a simple lightweight window environment (I use Awesome, some friends of mine use i3) in combination with xfce4 utilities, since they don't have a gigantic amount of dependencies and are very nice to use.

My dotfiles repository also contains my gentoo config files: https://github.com/JelteF/dotfiles/tree/master/etc/portage Don't copy paste all of it, but it might be nice to see what a config aquired over a couple of years looks like. And some stuff is just nice to have for a desktop/laptop that you regularly use.

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 :)

I'd like to know how you deal with qt version bumps. It drives me crazy to see that every time kde is upgraded the qt dependencies are bumped with previous versions removed.

I don't remember last time I did an emerge world because of this. It's insane.

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 [2] http://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr [3] http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Genkernel [4] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ [5] 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)

I managed a stage 2 install in a long afternoon 10 years ago knowing basically nothing about Linux, so yeah, you'll be fine.

Use genkernel instead of configuring the kernel by hand. That will save you hours of time. ;)

Oh, and this guide: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml

Genkernel has never worked for me and configuring a kernel is a really good learning experience. Which is probably what you want if you install Gentoo.

That's your experience. genkernel has always worked for me and I use Gentoo because I think the rest of distros are worse. (Last one to fall was Arch Linux after systemd)

A weekend is definitely enough time to learn how to install a Gentoo system, and it's a good experience.

Whether you'll really want to keep with it in the long run is another question. The level of control is awesome, but it is high maintenance. Expect it to break in interesting and surprising ways during updates.

You can just follow handbook and get a workable system within a few hours. The real question is: what do you want it for? If it's just for the kicks, you probably want to spend some more time exploring what you can break. You'll probably find out that, other than outright breakage, nothing you do has as much impact as you expected to.

I'd say that there are only two valid non-educational reasons to use Gentoo: getting a stripped down (for security or embedded) system or to alpha-test a lot of the free software ecosystem at the same time (e.g. build all your system out of repositories HEADs, a friend was doing that for a long time).

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.

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?

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.

> 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

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

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).

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.

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 :-)

I use gentoo to stay away from systemd.

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