Gentoo

All things Gentoo

Well, it’s now about noon on the 20th of September, 2002 and I am writing this to you from my main computer running Gentoo. For the last few weeks I’ve been running RedHat’s (null) beta’s. They were making me upset because of the general slowness that RH seemed to be creating with all their bloatware. Meanwhile, I kept hearing good things about Gentoo, both from linux-friendly sites, and friends (mainly Trojan, who btw still runs that “other” OS, but hangs out in an IRC channel where everybody runs Gentoo). I kept getting more and more interested in Gentoo, so I finally had to take a look for myself. Reading the instructions on the Gentoo website made my head spin. But if everybody says it’s worth it once it get’s compiled, I’ll take their word and try it. Below is my story containing the details of my road to glory. Warning: This isn’t a distro for the faint of heart. If you want something that comes together out-of-the-box, please go to RedHat or SuSe or Mandrake.

Here we go

I began downloading Gentoo 1.4rc1 just after midnight on the morning of the 18th. You download this 100 MB file and put it on a cd that they refer to as the “livecd”. This may seem like a lot, but it isn’t. Redhat has you download over 2GB from the start! Yikes! 100 MB doesn’t seem so bad now. About an hour later I was done downloading the file, and began to realize what would happen if this entire install borked. If it borked I would lose all my files, so I needed to back them up. So, one hour later I had finished backing up about 20 GB of stuff onto Lelu, my server, and I had the livecd burned. I was now ready to begin.

Thirty minutes later, I began bootstrapping my computer after setting up basic computer functions such as my filesystem and networking. This wasn’t so bad because the instructions on the Gentoo website are really informational and while they may be overwhelming at first, taken one line at a time, they aren’t so bad. THREE and a half HOURS later, I now had a Stage 2 system. The website said it would only take 1-2 hours, but bootstrapping on my computer took what seemed like years. I didn’t know who was going to die first; me or my processor.

Another 1.5 hours passed and I had the greenlight to go on to Stage 3. This consisted of actually compiling the kernel. Well, about an hour later, I had everything set, including most of my /etc files configured correctly and was ready to hit the reboot. This would be the one time I didn’t want to screw up compiling my kernel. *Whew* My computer booted just fine! By 5:15pm that evening, I had Gnome 2.0.1 merged. And about 30 minutes after that I had my mouse working. Now, if you haven’t been keeping track of the time. Let me point out that I’m now 17 hours into my install process. And I just now got my mouse to work. Heh. So I wasted 30 minutes trying to get my nVidia driver to work. It wasn’t playing nice. Oh well. I’ll worry about that later I said.

Three hours later I had sound. What joy sound is when you have waited over 20 hours to hear the precious sound of a mp3 playing. I was very happy when I finally started seeing results. Gnome 2.0.1 looked very nice. There were a few “issues”, but I wasn’t going to deal with those right now. I have to continue emerging. By 1am (a day after I started) I had a web browser and could now read the instructions on the web as I actually performed them. Before I was using one of my other computers to do this, which while it worked, was irritating to have to switch back and forth. I love my OmniCube. Two hours later I had Evolution and gFTP. My mail transferred smoothly and I was in a good mood. Two hours later I had my screensaver installed and themes, but the themes didn’t work. I wasted a good amount of time trying to get them to work. By 9am I had more of a system…I had mplayer, gphoto2, gqview, gimp, gnupg, gnapster, realplayer, nmap, licq, xchat, and cups all merged successfully.

The entire rest of the day was figuring out what was going on with the gtk1 and gtk2 stuff. Compiling certain things with gtk1 caused them not to carry a theme, but some programs weren’t gtk2 compatible yet. So, it made for a little confusing. But thankfully portage makes use of the USE command, and this seemed fairly intuitive. I found that evolution and mozilla still needed gtk1, and everything else could go gtk2. However, at this point, I still had about 10 problems that needed to be worked out. I needed to get my printer working. I needed to get my digital camera working. I wanted my nVidia drivers up and running so I could test out the new UT 2003 and of course play Quake3. I wanted my font problem fixed. I had this quirky error with my keyboard where it wouldn’t let me use my apostrophe key or my quotation key. The titlebar’s seem unresponsive to theme changes. Gnapster doesn’t want to work. Galeon was the only program that crashed, and I didn’t really take time to look into why it’s crashing. And did I mention I had a font problem? Hehe. Oh yeah. I needed sleep. And on the second day Toid finally took a nap.

Later that night though, I came home from work and went at it with renewed hope. I wanted it to work. I wanted THIS to work. Gentoo is what the heart of every penguin hackin’, fragging, non-llama wants in an OS. It’s fast, and it compiles everything by source. The speed was noticeable over a system running RedHat’s (null) betas. (Which I tried, but didn’t like, which is why I got mad enough at RedHat and tried Gentoo…ps – Thank You RedHat, I’m not going back to your product for a while) Two days after I started I finally got my nVidia drivers to work. How I did this I’m not really for sure. All I know is I kept trying and eventually they booted. An hour later I had my printer working! Yes! Even though I hardly use my printer it was a sign saying I did something right. I had change back to 1.1.14 version of cups, but hey, it solved the issue 1.1.15 was having.

Now, for some reason, I must have lost my head for the next few hours. I recompiled my kernel 8 times for no real reason at all. You see, I was trying to get my digital camera to work. I had the latest gphoto2 emerge along with gtkam. I kept thinking I had usb issues, and had them compiled wrong in my kernel. Let me say this, I had compiling a kernel down by the time I finally gave up on it. I timed it. It took 13 minutes on my 733mhz. That’s fast, IMHO. I don’t think RedHat could touch that. The biggest speed difference between RH and Gentoo is definitely Nautilus. It opens when I click it, not twelve seconds later. So anyhow, I decided to screw my digital camera and go get a coke. Ahh, the power of coke. It dawned on me that I had the right USB things intalled otherwise my USB printer wouldn’t be working. Maybe it was a permissions problem. Sure enough, I ran gtkam as root, and what do you know, there were my pics. Sheesh. I felt so stupid.

So that was at about 8 am, and here I am around noon, typing this up. Since then I have emerged Gnome 2.0.2rc1, and many other things. I’m starting to get the hang of it. I also solved my keyboard quirk (I had my keyboard mapped as us_intl, instead of just us) The fonts I’m still working on, but you know what? It’s time for a little sleeping action. That might be good. Seems how all I have been doing the last two days is sitting in front of my computer.

My Thoughts

If I may reflect back on the whole process and share my thoughts with you, I’ll do that right now (since, ya know, it is my website and all) Gentoo is here to stay. It’s not just a fad. It’s a revolution in the making. It may not ever take out RedHat, but it’s definitely in the heart of every linux power user. If you like to download bleeding edge packages, or even not so much bleeding edge, or if you like being able to pick and choose which packages you want installed without getting trapped in dependency hell…by all means…give Gentoo, or any other distro like it a shot. Yes, the installation instructions may sound difficult, and they might be. Depends on your outlook. If you’re willing to put the time in compiling, Gentoo will save you it in time waiting for your apps to launch later on. The Gentoo community is great, and most every answer to your questions can be found on the Gentoo Forum. And if I could say one last thing….Gentoo 0wNz.