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Review: Gentoo 2004.2
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CommentsAs a server, Gentoo Linux is a bit different; if you're only running some services from the command line, Gentoo becomes much simpler to install and maintain. The key to keeping Gentoo stable is to minimize the amount of software that you install on it, so the less there is to update, the less opportunity there is for broken circular dependencies and other Portage-killing debacles. These are problems that can happen on other operating systems as well, but are somewhat more easily found and fixed on Gentoo than on most others.
Portage can create binary packages of programs installed from source code. In other words, you can create a backup of all of your installed software in binary form, compiled to your specifications and for your system. If you ever have to reinstall, you can restore all of your programs through Portage by installing your custom premade binaries. You could also use this capability to deploy the same software over a number of identical systems.
Gentoo will probably never replace Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, or FreeBSD in the Web hosting market, but it adds a kind of variety that is necessary to the survival of the Web. It's also quite often specifically requested by hosting customers who prefer to work with Gentoo over other operating systems -- the OS itself has enough fans to merit a place for it in the server market. In addition to hosting companies, there are also about a half dozen custom hardware companies worldwide that offer Gentoo Linux preinstalled on new computer systems, both for desktop and server use.
Versions
Gentoo Linux is available in two CD images: a 78MB "Minimal" ISO, which has only what is necessary to boot the LiveCD -- no packages and no resources for installing Gentoo locally; and the 605MB "Universal" ISO, which includes everything you need to install Gentoo without an Internet connection. There is also a "packages" ISO that contains many binary packages for some commonly installed programs like KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org. Obviously it's much quicker to install a binary package than it is to compile a package from source, but you tend not to get the same optimizations in a precompiled package that you would from Portage.
Gentoo offers three "stages" tarballs for installation, which can be downloaded individually from a Gentoo mirror or unpacked directly from the Universal CD. You can essentially make your own LiveCD if you like, then download a stage tarball and unpack it to an empty drive. Some people even use Knoppix as a LiveCD to install from, in which case they have a working, graphical, Internet-connected system to use while Gentoo is compiling and installing.
Stage1 bootstraps your system, so you unpack mostly source code and a directory skeleton to your root directory and then build GCC, GlibC, and other necessities. After that you're basically where stage2 starts off; you build Portage and use it to download your Portage tree, which is then the basis for emerging the rest of the system. At that point you're where you'd be if you started from stage3, and all that's left to do is download the kernel source and compile it, then install and configure your boot loader.
On the fastest desktop systems on the market, the entire process will take between three and four hours if you're vigilant and can wait nearby to watch its progress; stage2 and stage3 installations are incrementally quicker to install but offer less optimization. On slower systems, the sky is the limit for installation times. No matter which stage you choose, you still have to start the process by partitioning and formatting your hard drive using the command line, then setting the root password and the date, and setting up and configuring your network if you have one.
Conclusions
Gentoo Linux development seems to be moving very slowly, which is odd for an operating system that people generally choose for its speed and its arsenal of newer-than-usual programs. The lack of an installation utility greatly hampers a user's or administrator's ability to quickly deploy a Gentoo system in any kind of environment. Even doing a stage 3 install takes a little too long -- the process could be mostly automated by using the simplest of Bash scripts. In the future it would be nice to see such a script or even a graphical installation program employed to ease the amount of keyboard time required for deployment. Admins have better things to do than babysit an installation for an hour or (much) more.
The 2.4 kernel is a horrible choice for Gentoo because the installation and configuration of sound and video driver modules is not automatic as it is with commercial distros. If you want sound, you have to wrestle with ALSA by installing it through Portage. Having been through that nightmare in the past, this single point alone makes a solid case for dumping 2.4 in favor of the 2.6 kernel for desktop users. For server use, the 2.6 kernel offers better performance for SMP machines and has expanded hardware support, especially for AMD64-based computers and modern x86 servers that use SATA RAID. The Gentoo project should deprecate and/or mask the gentoo-sources package -- or perhaps rename it to gentoo-2.4-sources -- and make 2.6 the default and recommended kernel for all architectures.
The project team itself appears to be highly organized and well managed, and the forums are an excellent resource for those in need of assistance. I wish the team had done more with this release to advance the state of the operating system, but even as it is it isn't bad if you know what to expect.
Overall, Gentoo Linux 2004.2 is the same as it's been since 1.4 -- it's still a pain to install, but once it gets going it can be a real pleasure to use on the desktop or in the server room.
| Purpose | Operating system |
| Manufacturer | The Gentoo Linux project |
| Architectures | x86, AMD64, PPC, HPPA, SPARC |
| License | The GNU General Public License, but some programs in Portage are under other non-free licenses |
| Market | Desktop tinkerers, Web and dedicated game server hosting |
| Price (retail) | $10 from the Gentoo online store, includes only a single universal LiveCD for SPARC, AMD64, or x86 |
| Product Web site | Click here |
Jem Matzan is the author of three books, a freelance journalist and the editor-in-chief of The Jem Report.
Comments
on Review: Gentoo 2004.2Note: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
The emerge X.org deal was not intended to be a command -- I was using "emerge" as a verb, not as a terminal command. An editor changed that to put code tags around it, thus changing the intended meaning.
I was envisioning a Bash script that asks you the same questions that the installation guide does. The only difference between the script and doing it the old way is the amount of reading the manual and typing or copying in commands required. It's much easier for me if I don't have to sit there and babysit an installation, constantly looking up what to do next. Even having installed Gentoo so many times, I can't do it from memory without leaving something out.
-Jem
I was going to say more about Gentoo as a server, with some specific examples. Instead I took those parts out of this review and made them into a whole separate article/case study on using Gentoo as a production server OS. It ought to be here on Linux.com next week sometime.Fantastic! I look forward to it.
The emerge X.org deal was not intended to be a command -- I was using "emerge" as a verb, not as a terminal command. An editor changed that to put code tags around it, thus changing the intended meaning.That's cool--as I said, it was really only a minor gripe.
I was envisioning a Bash script that asks you the same questions that the installation guide does.This could be helpful.
Thanks again for the nice article & I look forward to reading your next piece.
We've got a specific article on Gentoo as a server publishing here tomorrow.
-Jem
Some even say that it makes a good server, too.Perhaps, as you don't end up with packages that aren't used. MOST gentoo installations do feature compilers (go figure for a mostly sourced-based distro). There are some who wouldn't want to have these tools on their server. Yes, they can compile on some other machine & install binaries. But why not just use (for example) Slackware?
Searching for packages is as easy as using the -s flag with the emerge command, and updating is just as simple.-s to search titles, -S to search descriptions. Also check out esearch, which compiles a database of the programs in portage & allows for much faster searching (though it does take a lot of time to generate the database in the first place).
With a binary Linux distribution the kernel doesn't matter all that much to most users, but Gentoo Linux becomes a whole different operating system when you use the 2.4 kernel as opposed to the newer 2.6 tree.Nonsense--binary users worry about hardware compatibility and an improved scheduler too.
Minor point, but you typset this as code & you'd really want to:<TT>emerge X.org</TT>
<TT>emerge xorg-x11</TT>
You can emerge several programs at once if you like, but make sure that they don't have common packages that will try to compile at once -- both compiles will fail and you'll have to restart the emerge process. If you're smart about emerging, you can have four or five virtual terminals compiling different programs at once without any problems.For single processor machines, you won't always gain that much to do serial compilations. It is probably better to perform parallel emerges, which also solves problems if they have the same or blocking dependencies. Just 'emerge xorg-xll mutt vim' for example. Use ccache to speed up subsequent compiles & possibly '-pipe' as a CFLAG to speed up current installs.
Updating is as easy as typing emerge sync and then emerge -u world.I prefer to:
<TT>emerge -upvD world</TT>to see what I'm getting first. Having the -D flag helps with failed upgrades, as it upgrades dependencies too (some ebuild authors don't always check for the minimum version needed for a dependency, especially with mixed stable (e.g. 'x86') and unstable (e.g. '~x86') packages.
Gentoo Linux development seems to be moving very slowlyI suspect that this is partly because upgrades are so easy--you can install it once & just use portage to get the latest version. Thus, portage is improved & the installation process not-so-much.
Even doing a stage 3 install takes a little too long -- the process could be mostly automated by using the simplest of Bash scripts.I think the philosophy is to have the freedom to choose. So they don't want to offer simple shell scripts that make choices for you. Because the scripts could be trivial, you can write them or get them from the forums if you want non-interactive deployment.
The 2.4 kernel is a horrible choice for GentooBut 2.6 kernels are included on the 2004.2 disc (2.6.7), and in both the stable and unstable branches of portage (both 2.6.8). 2.6.5 was even included in 2004.1. Once again, the choice is yours.
Please don't make too much of my minor criticism--this was, overall, a worthwhile review.
On the issue of sound and ALSA: OSS works just fine on the 2.4 kernel for most of my systems. ALSA installation on 2.4 isn't particularly difficult, either. There's an excellent guide on the Gentoo documentation web site.
On installation scripts: I wrote those myself in about an hour. The first script formats all the partitions and unpacks CD # 1, the second script unpacks CD 2, the third script does everything that needs to be done at "chroot" time to install the base system, and the fourth installs all the binary packages from the second CD.
I generally install with stage 3 plus *everything* from the i686 second "packages" CD. Total install time for a stage 3 install using the i686 binaries is about three hours on my 1.3 GHz Athlon T-bird, slightly less on a 2.4 GHz P4 and slightly more on the Athlon XP laptop because the hard drive is dog-slow.
There's not all that much that needs to be compiled when you do it this way, and i686 code with the Gentoo-selected default optimizations isn't a lot slower on most functions. Where I do need optimization -- number crunching -- I use higher levels of optimization and architecture-specific flags.
Once I have a stage 3 / Gentoo Reference Platform built from CDs without network, I do an "emerge sync" to update the Portage tree. Then I add the packages I use regularly<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... this adds another few hours for the compiles. Eventually, as packages get updated from the level on the release CDs, they get recompiled, but you get a pretty good system by doing a stage 3 / GRP install off the CDs.
The biggest downside to Gentoo that I've found is the large disk requirement for all the source packages. My "/usr/portage/distfiles" is about 3.5 GBytes and climbing. I've moved it to a separate partition so I can manage it better, and I have a mirror of it on a 20 GB USB hard drive, which makes installs on multiple boxes easy.
The biggest upside to Gentoo that I've found is the quantity and quality of Java-based software. The "other" large community-based distro, Debian, has a somewhat slanted take on the "freedom" of Java and software written in Java. A whole bunch of software I use and like -- the PEPA performance modeling tool, DBDesigner 4, jMAX and other audio software, the Protege ontology software -- is written in Java.
Ed Borasky
http://www.algocompsynth.com/
http://www.najatech.com/InstallInstructions
Quite honestly, none of us are really supporting this anymore. So just send bug reports and feature enhancements to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/dev/null
<TT>It still uses the 2.4 kernel by default, the AMD64 edition is still a nightmare to install, and the installation procedure for all architectures is still tedious and time-consuming.</TT>
This is the nature of Gentoo if you don't like it you can choose not to use it. I personally like the installer, it weeds out those who are not yet ready to see what their computer is doing.
I'd like to comment on the following statement which is targeted at me:
My chief complaint about it is that it badly needs a competent editor; the authors get too chatty and go into details that are best left for footnotes or a separate section or sidebar for special-case situations.
I'm sorry to hear that you find the Gentoo Handbook incompetently written. I encourage you to go visit the Gentoo Bugtracking website and search for all the bugs regarding the Gentoo Handbook that have been resolved so far. You'll notice that the current Gentoo Handbook is written with the users in mind and with all (well, most) user feedback integrated.
Writing documentation isn't easy, on the contrary. It is impossible to satisfy everybody. My GDP (Gentoo Documentation Project) fellow writers and I have the quite difficult job to write documentation that pleases most users.
Together with this comes the fact that the Gentoo Installation allows for great flexibility. Not all users want to be informed about this flexibility, but most are. That's why the Gentoo Handbook is written so verbose: users who want to learn can do this easily by reading the Gentoo Handbook. Those who don't can just follow the steps needed to install Gentoo and skip the less relevant parts.
Taking the history of the gentoo installation instructions in mind, they have evolved from a 3-page document into a 90+ pages booklet. This is not because the editors and I have so much time on our hands that we continuously add new sections to it, but because we take all user feedback into account from which we clearly hear the need for a complete installation document which covers each and every task of the installation.
I encourage you to report any issues you came across while reading the Gentoo Handbook. If I am too chatty at certain sections, please tell me where and I'll see if I can update the Gentoo Handbook if appropriate.
With kind regards,
Sven Vermeulen
Gentoo Documentation Project Lead
I've been a recent convert to Gentoo, coming from years on the learning-curve of RedHat, Debain and other wannabe-distros.
My first encounter with Gentoo was obviously the install doco. I thought it was necessarily concise and very well written. It covered the logic to install for a newbie but at the same time for an experienced user.
The pointers over and to sections were well placed and clear. It does what I previously thought impossible by allowing all types of users to install all types of configurations. It is a difficult task, writing documentation, and usually not too fun, so to make it effective at the same time takes talent and deep understanding.
I must say, I'll be supporting Gentoo for sometime from now, and a lot to do with that pledge is the superb documentation, the centrepiece of the Gentoo experience.
Well done Sven!
d.
I must cammend you on your HandBook
I'm new to gentoo and I've always been a Slackware user. I found your handbook very good.
as for the chatty stuff, I liked that it was chatty. I don't like reading formal documents
Linux was meant to be fun, and I feel that it lost some of that fun, until Gentoo came around
it makes it fun again<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
make all the smiley faces you want man<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
just wanted to say keep up the good work
Dactry
Remember Always look on the bright side of life
However, I don't agreee with you on the documentation. I followed it closely with the installation and proved to be an excellent resource. Some examples such as installing CUPS proved extremely helpful to me.
Previously, I have installed other distros (RedHat, SuSe and Mandarke) but Gentoo is by far the most challenging. You learn a lot from installing Gentoo than with the above distros.
Overall, I recommend Gentoo highly. The documentation provides a good guidance to a very complex task.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "The lack of an installation utility" as Gentoo is meant to be a do-it-yourself Linux flavor. People have created installation versions (search Gentoo forums for installs).
"Overall, Gentoo Linux 2004.2 is the same as it's been since 1.4 -- it's still a pain to install" I suppose this is true if the only time you ever installed it was twice (first being your 1.4 review and then again for this one). Though for most of the seasoned Gentoo users (and ones who needed to install it 15 times at first due to one mishap or another) the installation process is quite simple. I have my own method of installation which is very easy to follow and I have given it to friends who agree.
I did like your opening paragraph and I must say it lured me in as it should, however you lost me many times by changing what appeared to be an experienced view point.
Gentoo Linux as a server works great as well, I'm running a mail server with it. "..the less opportunity there is for broken circular dependencies and other Portage-killing debacles." In regads to this startment, I'm assuming you installed some packages which were masked and you are referring to updating the system? The ebst method for such things is to install them without the USE flag and rather setup your package mask file in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/portage which keeps a record of masked packages you allow to be compiled.
I'm most confused at what you said here though:
Statement #1 --
"Gentoo will probably never replace Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, or FreeBSD in the Web hosting market,"
Statement #2 -- (same paragraph)
"the OS itself has enough fans to merit a place for it in the server market. In addition to hosting companies, there are also about a half dozen custom hardware companies worldwide that offer Gentoo Linux preinstalled on new computer systems, both for desktop and server use."
Pardon the large quote but to me when you say "..In addition to hosting companies.." that means you feel Gentoo has a place in the hosting market, and I think you might just regret saying Gentoo will never replace those other distrobutions. You did through the 'probably' in there, so kudos for remembering to cross your fingers behind your back, thats great journalism!
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