Gentoo Install

[kolla]

Ditch gentoo and get ubuntu,no need for anything else,a good install of ubuntu blows away any distro of gentoo.

So where do one find a good install of ubuntu? I have searched everywhere.

[kolla]

As such I certainly wouldn't recommend Gentoo for anyone as their first Linux experience.

Why not? Afraid they might learn something? I'd argue that Debian has a heck lot more nuts and bolts than Gentoo, they are just obfuscated behind a blurry curtain of commands starting with dpkg, db, deb, apt, update ...

[kolla]

Untrue. With Debian you get to choose the type of the system you want to install.
Just deselect everything and you have very basic system without any extra packages.

That's an old picture, current Debian has "SSH server" in the list.

How does Gentoo give you any more control than say Debian?

Gentoo lets me pick combos of features and versions of software, whereas Debian forces me to use certain versions, very often badly packaged, with mostly unwanted dependencies. For example, for a very long time Debian was shipped with libldap-2.1 from openldap, and all software with LDAP dependencies were linked to libldap-2.1. The OpenLDAP packages though (like ldap-utils), were 2.4 and linked to libldap-2.4. So there were no ldapsearch or whatever linked to libldap-2.1 shipped, and debugging LDAP problems were a major PITA, and libldap2.1 was broken in so many ways, so there was plenty of problems. In general, Debian tends to ship with outdated and broken software that is not recommended by the upstream devs. And Debian support, which you of course have to use, since no upstream devs will bother with you as long as you run ancient versions that Debian have patched beyond FUBAR anyways, is a tiresome slow mess to deal with. So you end up building from source, and the build systems on Debian (yes, there are several) are far from elegant and easy to use.

For the record, I use Debian and Ubuntu professionally, I get paid for installing and maintaining Debian and Ubuntu systems, I get paid for packing software for Debian and Ubuntu systems. Do I enjoy it? Not much, it's quite often a PITA and reporting bugs is tiresome, they take forever (months and years) to get fixed. Privatly I run Gentoo on around 20-30 machines of a wide range of systems and architectures.

[kolla]

Also, I'm not badmouthing Debian or Ubuntu at all...I have Ubuntu on the family computer because it's easier to update and maintain for other members of my family.

Oh, I am badmouthing Debian and Ubuntu, all right. I rather have family members use Windows and OSX than Debian or Ubuntu, far less problems for both them and me.

[kolla]

The downside I found was that if you left a significant period between world syncs (ie, > 3mths) you'd find that they'd moved so far forward it was easier just to do a full reinstall.

Never had that problem, all my systems have only been installed once, some installs are much older than the hardware they run on, like the install I run on my EeePC, which started off in 2002, the very first time I tried out Gentoo.

Now I'm back to Ubuntu because I really don't want to waste time building everything from source - whats the point of portage if you're going to be using PORTAGE_BINHOST for everything?

Well, I'm not, and if I was, I'd be using Sabayon.

And Ubuntu packaging seems to be fairly well done .. well, better then RH ever was.

I've got plenty of issues with current Ubuntu, both 10.04.3 LTS and 11.04. My problem is probably that I care about whether stuff works or not, whilst "most people" don't.

Of course, if Unity/Gnome3 continue to be pains and Ubuntu insists on pushing Unity onto us, then I might reconsider Gentoo.

Unity is just a small part of the Ubuntu Ayatana project, and I actually think it's great that Ubuntu do these "wild things", like trying to break away from x11. Too bad that the end result will just be a somewhat borken OSX clone, and nothing really unique. I will rather use the real thing then.

lol, I had the opposite - paid to install and maintain Gentoo systems (probably close to a hundred over a couple of years) yet at the same time having a growing number of Ubuntu machines running loose within the family.

That's funny, indeed

[kolla]

On small systems (slow IO and low on memory), the optimization flags actually do matter, and debian with all its dependency bloat and non-optimization really is both slower and less stable (OOM killer strikes). Sure, make all the jokes you like, but please make some new ones that are actually funny? And what CFLAGS I use varies with system, arch and packages, Gentoo allows me to do this easily, unlike Debian.

[kolla]

Could be, then again Debian stable is rather err, stable. Of course you don't get the latest 0day warez with that.

Have yet to see any real documentation of the so called stability of Debian stable. I have plenty of experience with Debian stable being nothing but crash party due to old broken hardware drivers, borken libs, incompatible mixes of libs and apps etc.

If I want the latest 0day warez I use Debian Unstable. That's what I run in my desktop systems.

And if you don't want 0day warez, but rather latest _stable_ from upstream for the software you care about, with the advised versions of libs etc? Gotta compile yourself, that's what.

Alternate solution is to use http://backports.debian.org/

Not a solution, merely a very slow work around when you're too lazy to figure out how to build packages yourself, typically the software you want is not there and you have to "order" it. Backports also introduces you to a new level of dependency hell, and pinning is trivial and easy huh? The apt/preferences* parser is  not exactly state of art.

[kolla]

At the end of the day, its all linux.

That's true for Linux as a desktop system on a PC, but there's way more to Linux than just that. I find it nice that I can use the same system on a whole range of hardware... m68k, mips, arm, powerpc, amd64, ia32, hppa, sparc, sh and more. I run Gentoo on mips and arm based router boards, old m68k amigas and macs, various NAS boxes, wii, gamecube, xbox... pretty much anything. And Gentoo goes beyond Linux, you can use portage with BSD as well, and you can use it to build and maintain software on OSX, Solaris (and its spinoffs) etc.

Also, not all first time Linux users are alike, why is it wrong to have a distro that has different goals and different target than that of "most users"?