I’ll try to make it short this time and share some experience I’ve had with the ‘new user’ side.
Installation
- I’ve had absolute Linux newbies successfully install Gentoo as their first Linux ever, with *very* little input from my side. (I guess I should just praise the efforts of the documentation team at this stage: You’ve done a nice job!)
- I’ve also had more experienced users fail on the installation, even multiple times.
Conclusion
- The Gentoo Handbook will reliably get you up and running if you follow it closely. It’s easy to stray off, though, simply by skipping a line. You’re also very much in the dark if ‘something bad’ happens (grub won’t install, for example) or you’re on non-mainstream hardware. I think the first part can be helped, the second part only to little degree, of course.
Suggestion
- Maybe a bit of simple formatting could already help, meaning whitespace. If you install Gentoo, chances are that you’re using links to view the documentation, and it’s very easy to get lost there. Really, this is not a joke. I’ve seen it multiple times: People follow the doc, skip a line and end up in a mess.
- Maybe some more background info (even better maybe to have a background document/wiki to link to, although that only works for online users) could make things clearer, too. Meaning if I don’t know about grub I can get some hints or read what others have written in the gentoo-wiki, for example. That might also help the ‘in the dark’ part a bit. If anybody from docs is interested I’d be willing to contribute.
Maintenance
I run Gentoo on multiple servers and workstations. It is by far the best manageable Linux on the planet. Here’s the pros & cons:
Pros
- I call Gentoo a ‘streaming distro’, since there are no releases (okok, there *are* releases, but you know what I mean .-), resulting in Gentoo being the only distribution that completely misses to make me explode in anger because I need to go through an ‘upgrade’. I have had dangerously high blood pressure with any other distro, SuSE being notoriously ugly in wrecking systems (back in the < v.7 times, at least). Even Ubuntu failed to upgrade from 5 to 6 in a really smooth manner (it worked, but there were quite some quirks left that were difficult to figure out). I can even upgrade the toolchain without fearing for my life. So far Gentoo has prolonged my life quite some, since blood pressure that thigh sure ain’t healthy.
- Portage is just great. It figures out dependencies and (almost always) does ‘The Right Thing (TM)’. Probably I’m just too stupid to use rpm, but I’ve had the hell of a time with that thing. Need some extra feature? USE it, build it, done. Great, great, great. I don’t even have to figure out obscure packet names of dependencies .-)
Cons
- You really need to keep updated. There’s no real path of *not* updating. No security backports, for example. That is a little dangerous on the servers. If you don’t keep up, you may easily be buried under a lot of changes; especially since you need to keep updated on those changes, too (mailing lists/announces etc.). Chances are, you don’t have all the information at hand if you wait too long before updating. It gets problematic on stuff you might not want to update, say PHP. When PHP6 comes it, it will break a lot of apps, presumably. Now, we still have 4.x in the tree (and 5.x didn’t break as many apps as 6 will do, IMHO), but for how long?
- That also means Gentoo is still high maintenance. I have little problem with that, but I think some may have. I use to update all boxes frequently (at least once a week), so it’s basically continuous work, but short periods only. Nevertheless, you need to have some time to put aside for maintenance.
- Things break. This comes in waves. All can be fine for months, and then you have a week where everything breaks. I have no clue how this happens, but it happens. The bad thing is that with all the configurability you can’t test everything (unless you have completely redundant servers). I have some ‘single’ machines that are backed up by standby hardware and backups, though, that don’t have a test environment assigned. An update that merges fine on 4 test and 4 productive machines may still break on the next box due to a different USE flag, for example.
- Design changes. Those really hurt. Like Apache. Reminds me of the SuSE times again (every release did everything completely different; it was so unbelievably bad to have to look for all the stuff in different places every time …). Sure, if you make a bad design choice, you’ll have to fix it at some time. It’s probably better for everybody’s sanity than keeping wrong stuff around for ages (see Windows .-). But it hurts.
Suggestion
- Most if not all b0rkage can be avoided by using portage logging or ELOG. I have wanted this from the beginning, and now it’s been around for some time, it’s great, and everybody should use it. Though none of the new Gentoo users around here knew about it. That’s bad. It needs to go somewhere in bold and big.
- Given the number of times you need to revdep-rebuild something, ‘gentoolkit’ should IMHO be in the default profiles.
- Users need to be informed of changes, so something like GLEP 42 would be more than helpful.
Verdict
Gentoo is not a ‘dumb user’ distro, and I guess we all know that, and I guess we’re not really aiming for that, either. Nevertheless, we still fall a small step short of what we can do for the ‘educated user’, what is what I’d call the Gentoo target. If we can push it a little more, we’re on solid ground. I think it’s amazing how mature this project has become already.
Nevertheless, I’d like to remind everybody that we should not ignore users with low level of expertise. Our forums are known as one of the top resources to get Linux help. Our users are known to be helpful, our devs are know to be skillful. There is no need to ignore the lower end, and, seeing that the 2006 releases contain a graphical installer (didn’t try it, though), it seems we aren’t, either.
So, in my opinion, we should do whatever is possible to help new users (and gain new users, in that regard). I’m about to discuss some ideas with the re-formed PR project and we’ll see how that goes. My two cents are simply: Don’t redline somebody when in doubt, only when you’re sure you have very good reasons .-)
-frilled (hmm, was that ‘short’?)
Excellent assessment of Gentoo. I think I more or less agree with everything here 🙂
Before writing that, you _really_ should try graphical installer on 2006.0 ;o)
Boy, what a crap. Not only that, but there is no obvious way to do it manually, 2005.1-way.
No docs at the expected place, no stage3, nothing…
When you have a couple of generations of machines on the same place and Gentoo on all of them, things begin to wear you off. If you are not updating one machine, you are troubleshooting the other(s).
For all its utility value, Portage is just a bunch of scripts, which evolved slowlu over last a couple years. Sure, it changed, but it is now what it supposed to be at the beginning, nothing more.
Also, Portage seems to be like a working horse in the fact that it doesn’t like to backtrack at all. Try unmerging some complex package (like kde) and keep Portage from emerging it at every next update, for example.
Branko, it’s not wearing me down, and I have various generations of servers up and running .-) In fact I’d have a lot more gray hair if I wasn’t running Gentoo here (or I’d still be on yesterday’s software under RHEL3 or something like that).
I have actually installed from a 2006.0 release, but using the minimal CD, since Internet connection isn’t really a problem here. But you made me curious about the graphical installer, I guess I should try it in a VMware … maybe the 2006.1 test drive, though.
Re: Installation Docs
I recall my first install.. it did go fine.. but I have stuffed up other installs resulting from skipped instruction lines. 🙂
Suggestion: How about adding a tick box at the end of each line of install documentation? ..and/or some fancy javascript to change the background to a different colour?
The user is less likely to skip a step if they come back to the install page and easily see where they are at.
@frilled:
I see you’re still not past the stage of denial. Not good against any addiction ;o)
@Branko:
Unfortunately, you are not going to get much sympathy or objectivity here. Most everyone who will happen upon this site will already be running Gentoo, and will be a fan. I actually agree with your main thrust that Portage, for all its usefulness, does frequently result in borked systems. It may not be portage per se, but the ebuilds. This occurs even when upgrading packages marked stable. I have learned my lesson to stay clear of the packages marked testing–>nothing but heartache in that path. The only testing package I run is the kernel (ck-sources).
With regard to the 2006.0 installer, I also have not gotten the graphical installer to work for me. However, you are mistaken about there not being a stage 3. There is. Also, if you, don’t want to work with GUI installer you can just open a terminal and do a “killall gdm”. This will take you to the “classic” Gentoo cli. Gentoo remains fun for tinkering, and I suppose if you are a developer Gentoo allows you to very precisely control the libraries and othe packages on your system. Personally, the knowledge I have gained about my hardware has made my Gentoo experience worthwhile.
@frilled, RE:VMware
Judging the quality of the installer based on an installation within VMware is a bit like cheating. If the hardware and software already work on the machine on which you are running vmware, then they will almost certainly work within your virtual machine regardless of the distribution. With that said, my guess is the Graphical installer will hang at some point and then fail even within vmware. I actually think the graphical installer is a praiseworthy goal, but right now it is broken.
@Greg:
I ewasn’t looking for sympathy, I was offering feedback, as I have understood, that was the OP was asking about. This means ignoring for the moment the things that rock and exposing and focusing on the the things that suck…
Obviously, there are good things in Gentoo, or I wouldn’t be using it exclusively for last few years. But this thread is about exposing difficulties with using Gentoo.
Is Gentoo difficult to use ? It _SURE_ can be, and it is from time to time. No way around that. For me, it is still head and shoulders above anything else in Linux world, but that does not make life with it any easier.
Re: 2006.0 and installer:
I know one can stil do it old way, but how to do this is not obvious. Stages are somewhere else ( IIRC stage3 is autogenerated from packages on CD), documentation is somewhere else etc. And there is no README on obvious place for this, explaining the changes and new rules…
What good is some functionality, even _IF_ it works, when it isn’t appropriately documented ?
As it is, 2006.0 is done with new installers in mind, with distant possibility of manual install, as if the new installers ( curses and gui) are tested, reliable, sure thing.
But they are far from it. I have had installer croak because it couldn’t mount the partitions it created and formated itself ! Not even with default settings !
I have tried it on:
-Dual Opteron -64 bit Gentoo
-P4
-P4M in toshiba laptop
-AMD Athlon XP (2700 ?) and Sempron
-IIRC also VIA EPIA M10000 (C3 on 1GHz)
I couldn’t _NEVER_ complete the (GUI or curses ) install, on none of the machines above, even with default settings.
Funny part is, after 2006.0 came out there were many “BRAVO!!! It works 100.000%” posts and practically no critical or warning feedback. Almost like just about everyone else using Gentoo lives in another universe-until you talk “in flesh” with other Linux users on the matter of “Why not Gentoo ?” and realise you are not alone, far from it…
BTW: One of my machines with Gentoo( P4- 1.6 GHz@1.8 GHz) wasn’t used for maybe a bit under a year, so when I found a new use for it, I decided it’s time for an update…
It’s emerging stuff for a _FOURTH_DAY_ now. Sure, its speed is not exactly stellar, and there were quite a few packages, and i decided to recompile everything with gcc-4.1.1 and optionally ( where 4.1.1 croakes) with 3.4.6, but FOUR DAYS ? ;o/
With EPIA and similar machines, situation is even worse. If one is serious about using this as a desktop machine, he should either:
– compile SW for it on some fast machine
– have one EPIA doing just emerging of everything new and then “steal” finished binpkgs from “real-work” machines
-stay with old versions of programs for long time and never do emerge -uD world
– use poor EPIA just for compiling stuff without the time to really use it…
Something Microsoft does in their installers (eg for Exchange) is present it as an HTML page and put checkboxes next to the items you need to do. You check them as you do each item. It doesn’t enforce that they have to be checked (some Javascript could do that). It may be worthwhle doing something similar for the HTML install guide.
Branko,
Four days for compilation is not that surprising in my experience. I have an older Pentium 4 1.5GHz Dell Dimension 8100 (without hyperthreading) that used to house Windows Me. I have been running Gentoo now on this machine for the past three-four years. Everytime there is a major upgrade whether it be Gnome or X11, several days of compilation have been the rule. I suspect it would be much faster with a more modern processor. I will be replacing this machine with a new Intel Core Duo Extreme machine with a 2.9 GHz processor. I will try a Gentoo install on it when it arrives. I hope I get a significant speed up in compilation. One other thing that may help is distributed compilation if you have another computer handy. I have read about it but have never tried it. I am thinking of installing Puppy Linux on the older machine to keep it usable.
I have tried distcc, but got burned and dropped it.
It worked if you had _exactly_ the same machines with the same libraries etc.
Once there was disparity betwwen them, distcc would produce bad results.
It could even be a simple case of not emerge-uDp ing glibc on all machines at the same moment.
These problems might be fixed by now, but I’m not eager to try again. My Opterons are quite capable of doing this alone, so there is no problem, while all slower machines are alone- I don’t have more similar machines on-line to make a group.
Mixing dissimilar (32/64 bit) machines in the distcc group seems like a bad idea.
Sure, it should work in theory, but this is Gentoo and too many things could go wrong…
I am currently running Windows ME,
Windows XP, Freespire, PCLinuxOS,
Ubuntu, Mandriva and Mepis on my
computer. Of the bunch, I think PCLinuxOS
is the best. Thought I would try Gentoo
but can’t get past the mount point
operation. Have really never had to fool
with mount points and this has me
stumped. Bob Williams