Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 Gentoo is rediculous. I was able to get text-mode Gentoo 2004.0 installed and running Kernel 2.6.4-rc1. So far everything has worked properly. But give me a break, it's still installing/compiling/emerging KDE. How many days will it take to get a system installed with KDE, GNOME, Xfce4, Fluxbox and other items installed? That's retorical, btw. If I go downstairs and it's not finished yet, it was still running as of a few hours ago after running all night long, then I'm toasting it and reinstalling Knoppix. So what if it runs a little faster. It would have to be like greased lightning to make up for all this installation time and overall pain. I'm not impressed at all... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CaKeY Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 System specs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BxBoy Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 It can take as long as a week, no joke. But it's dependent on your system and your network connection. on a decent system, it should take no more than a FULL day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orestes Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 First of all, Gentoo is probably one of the greatest distros made. Second of all...KDE has nothing to do with 'Gentoo' itself. KDE is strictly a windowmanager which gives Gentoo or any other distro a nice Windows looking GUI. Linux is all about compiling, the bigger the application and slower your machine/net connect the longer it will take to compile. Gnome for example took 5 hrs for me from start to finish. KDE is a hell of alot bigger because it comes with a pluthera of useless bloated crap like WindowsXP. If you want something that will compile quicker use Fluxbox/openbox/blackbox they take less than 10-15 minutes. But i warn you...if you already have no patience, which it seems to be the case, you need the ease of KDE/Gnome because you won't last with Fluxbox (building it and learning it). You can always go back to some other ****ty noobie distro like Redhat/Mandrake or hell even Lindows. :blink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kemical Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 only good thing with gentoo is portage... as far as speed i see no difference from my slackware to gentoo :\ besides i dont want to have to wait a day or two to get a DE running :\ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 on a decent system, it should take no more than a FULL day. Yes, but you need to be on-call for the installation. I can't be checking the box every couple of minutes to see if its done the last step. There's no percent complete. Maybe you guys live and eat in front of your computer but it's supposed to be a tool not an end onto itself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 But i warn you...if you already have no patience, which it seems to be the case, you need the ease of KDE/Gnome because you won't last with Fluxbox (building it and learning it). You can always go back to some other ****ty noobie distro like Redhat/Mandrake or hell even Lindows. :blink: I have been running Fluxbox as my WM of choice under Knoppix. It's clean and small. I like to use some of the xfce components on top of Fluxbox. Until the Linux community can make its collective mind and choose one interface, I need to have them all installed. I plan to keep each one current. If the inference is that I am too much of a noob to run Gentoo then sorry, I'm not buying it. I got it far enough that it's running Kernel 2.6.4-rc1 in text mode and emerging KDE. A true noob wouldn't have gotten that far. Perhaps, I have too much of a life to run Gentoo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 that's 'unto' itself... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 that's 'unto' itself... There you see. I've already spend so much time install Gentoo that I've lost touch with the real world. :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 that's 'unto' itself... wow i feel like being an a$$hole today :whistle: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 There you see. I've already spend so much time install Gentoo that I've lost touch with the real world. :D the gentoo speedup isn't large unless you are going to be doing some really intensive processes or you use the machine all the time. for casual usage, i don't think it's going to be worth the hassle to you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjordan2001 Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 Well, you could download the iso in the corresponding folder to your processor type, in it you will find prebuilt stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kemical Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 opinions opinions opinions... good job on getting gentoo up.. but if you have to much of a life like you say, then go back to a distro that uses a binary packaging system and be done with it.. gentoo isn't for everyone you know.. its going to take time to install applications on gentoo just because it compiles everything, i myself like you don't have time to sit around and wait for a package to compile and install and i only compile items on my slackbox that i absolutely have to but during that time i make packages for the ones i need just in case someone else may need it... but back to the point at hand if people are going for gentoo for speed differences then ask yourself this... does maybe a slight increase in speed on a machine running gentoo make up for the time you sit waiting for a package to install on a gentoo system.. i think it pretty much evens itself out and there is really no point for me or someone else who may have better things to do then sit and watch their pc go through thousand of lines of code to use gentoo as a main workstation ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 Well, you could download the iso in the corresponding folder to your processor type, in it you will find prebuilt stuff. I didn't see any reference to that in the official installation instructions. Still I have a minor issue of upgrading to KDE 3.2 in Knoppix. The apt-get produces and error and it ends up killing XFree86. Perhaps I need to run apt-get from the command line rather than use a GUI front-end. I'm much more inclined to go fix the problem in Knoppix rather than spending any more time with Gentoo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kemical Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 you really only need three packages to get kde upgraded to 3.2 try just installing, arts, kdebase, kdelibs in that order and you should have a complete working kde 3.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
havyn Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 I'm much more inclined to go fix the problem in Knoppix rather than spending any more time with Gentoo. you just made your choice. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RoboStac Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 The speedups *not* the reason to use gentoo. It's not large, and often not actually noticeable. The reasons to use gentoo are * Ability to build applications to suit your needs - eg debian has to have a lot of .debs for the same package, with different build options, and even then they aren't always what you want. In gentoo, you set USE flags, and get the support you need compiled in to your packages. * Faster updates. The stable branch gets updated a lot more than debian stable, and the unstable branch (or ~x86) gets packages within a day of release. Debian packages can take much longer, and stable is usually years out of date. * Portage. Portage handles dependencies far better than apt / dpkg I've found. Especially when using the -D flag for deep dependencies, you can get the entire list of dependencies of a packe. * Support. The gentoo forums are very helpful, other distro's forums aren't as popular. * Startup scripts. They've made running things on startup a lot easier. * Config protection. Updating packages won't break your config files. New config files can either be ignored, or interactivly merged with the old ones. I'm sure theres many more reasons, but thats the main reasons I use gentoo. I run it on both my pc's, replacing the debian installs that used to be on there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 you really only need three packages to get kde upgraded to 3.2try just installing, arts, kdebase, kdelibs in that order and you should have a complete working kde 3.2 It says there is a conflict with openoffice-en-de or something like that. Something about the desktop.calc being in use. I plan to ensure that openoffice is removed before I go to KDE 3.2 next time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RoboStac Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 Also, the precompiled packages are the GRP - also referred to in the install documentation as a Stage 3 install. You seem to be doing a Stage 1 or 2 install, where you compile all/most of it yourself Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 you just made your choice. ;) Oh, the choice was made by the time I woke up this morning and saw that KDE hadn't completed. Mind you I started the install pretty late at night and I only had a few hours sleep. (Maybe that's why I'm testy) But still... I just don't understand why people would be so gung-ho on Gentoo. I've even seen it recommended to noobs. I'm sure portage is wonderful. I've had the odd incident with apt-get including my current KDE 3.2 dilema. This thread is more of a rant. Sorry... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 Also, the precompiled packages are the GRP - also referred to in the install documentation as a Stage 3 install. You seem to be doing a Stage 1 or 2 install, where you compile all/most of it yourself No, I untarred the Stage 3 file. It made a lot of the normal folders that I'm used to. /usr, /etc, etc... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RoboStac Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 Gentoo's strong point isn't its installation. However, once you've got the system installed, you can run it for ages, keeping it uptodate, with a lot less work than any other distro. If you set portage niceness in make.conf, it'll run at a lower priority when emerging, and just use your free cpu cycles to update your pc. In a debian/knoppix system, you have to carefully help it through the dependency issues, and unless you use unstable are out of date very quickly. If you do use unstable, theres often huge parts of the apt repository that won't work with each other. In redhat/fedora, it only seems to do security updates, until the next big release, when you have to download the new iso's and do an upgrade installation. My server runs gentoo, does an emerge sync and emerge world every morning, I have to do etc-update about once a week to check it's all uptodate there, and all my software is up to date. When it ran debian, the few times I tried to automate the upgrades like this on a 'testing' install, I'd quite often wake up to no internet, as something was broken. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RoboStac Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 Stage 1 would make most of those folders too. Stage 1 - Compile everything, including a new gcc and glibc before starting on stage2 Stage 2 - Compile everything using the default gcc and glibc Stage 3 - Base system already compiled, use GRP's to add in extra packages if available, then compile updates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
clonek Posted March 3, 2004 Share Posted March 3, 2004 Solution to slow Gentoo compiling....distcc Download a copy of the Knoppix live cd and start distccd on all computers that you have available to you and you will have a small cluster just for compiling. It will take a fraction of the time using a cluster. I managed to get KDE fully compiled in about 3-4 hours. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted March 3, 2004 Author Veteran Share Posted March 3, 2004 Gentoo's strong point isn't its installation. However, once you've got the system installed, you can run it for ages, keeping it uptodate, with a lot less work than any other distro. If you set portage niceness in make.conf, it'll run at a lower priority when emerging, and just use your free cpu cycles to update your pc.In a debian/knoppix system, you have to carefully help it through the dependency issues, and unless you use unstable are out of date very quickly. If you do use unstable, theres often huge parts of the apt repository that won't work with each other. In redhat/fedora, it only seems to do security updates, until the next big release, when you have to download the new iso's and do an upgrade installation. My server runs gentoo, does an emerge sync and emerge world every morning, I have to do etc-update about once a week to check it's all uptodate there, and all my software is up to date. When it ran debian, the few times I tried to automate the upgrades like this on a 'testing' install, I'd quite often wake up to no internet, as something was broken. This is a good post and I agree with it. I'm not at all interested in a RPM disto (RH, Mandrake, Fedora) that releases an update version every year or so. As far as I'm concerned, by the time you install a RPM disto it's already out of date. I like the idea that you can take Knoppix/Debian and even Gentoo and keep it current on its own. I like the idea of being current. Since my goal is information then I prize new information not dated information. I am a little frustrated that even Debian's experimental stuff lags a few weeks behind the times. Once recently has KDE 3.2.0 become listed. As far as I'm concerned, however, is that it's current enough. Yes I do have apt-get issues but I think it's an excellent overall system. It probably would work much better if I didn't have it set to use the experimental releases. So while portage has its advantages, I'm just not convinced that it's worth it. Especially considering that I want access to EVERYTHING and that will take time to install. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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