Gentoo linux

[noppid]

Well, right now I'm in Fedora Core. XMMS doesn't feel like working, neither is my sound though... bah.

Get xmms from the livna.org repo.

[Matthew Gordon]

Fedora kinda started pissing me off. Couldn't get sound to work, and sndconfig said that my kernel wasn't compiled with some sound support, so I just said the hell with it. Back in Knoppix, and looking at Gentoo and Slackware now.

[RichM]

I would not want to spend a day installing an OS, i'd just get frustrated and annoyed. I too had problems getting my sound to work with Fedora, so i recently installed SuSE linux.. Seems fine to me.

[splooge]

Stage 1: compiling the compiler. Not really necessary. 2 days on a P2-350 to get KDE up.

Stage 2: Precompiled compiler, you compile the rest of your programs. 1.5 days to get KDE up on a P2-350.

Stage 3: Precompiled compiler, precompiled base programs. 1 day to get KDE up on a P2-350.

Stage 3 with GRP: Precompiled compiler, base programs, XFree and KDE (and much, much more). 2 hours to install on a P2-350. This is basically the same as any other linux distribution.

On a more 'ordinary' machine (read: low end p4) you can drop the above times by 75% or so.

[splooge]

Oh, just to add. I've used Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Suse and Gentoo. There's no way in hell I'd run my VB on anything other than Gentoo.

Though if it was a mission-critical commerical production environment I'd probably use FreeBSD even though I'm not that good with it. My company uses BSD for all infrastructure needs and our boxes have over 600 days uptime.

Our flagship site Realtor.com runs on IIS and each server needs a reset every hour. The web farm consists of ~100 servers and we have a "rolling reset script" that takes the server out of the load balancer, resets IIS, and puts the server back in. wtf? To hell with IIS.

[noppid]

Our flagship site Realtor.com runs on IIS and each server needs a reset every hour. The web farm consists of ~100 servers and we have a "rolling reset script" that takes the server out of the load balancer, resets IIS, and puts the server back in. wtf? To hell with IIS.

You'd think M$ would supply those reset scripts.

[Chroder]

I wanna try Gentoo now but I'm kinda dumb. To download it, i go into the mirrors, into releases, into x86, 2004.0, stages right? There I'm presented with a x86 and pentium4 directory (amongst others). Which one should I download from? the pentium4 directory only has stages 2 and 3, so do I download stage one from the x86 directory? And they're all in .tar.bz2 format, do I extract then burn? I'm used to ISO

I bet that made me look pretty damn dumb lol

[Jerry]

Our flagship site Realtor.com runs on IIS and each server needs a reset every hour. The web farm consists of ~100 servers and we have a "rolling reset script" that takes the server out of the load balancer, resets IIS, and puts the server back in. wtf? To hell with IIS.

Yup had the same at a certian Tier 1 carried that I worked for in the UK that isn't BT.....

IIS didn't do us any favors at all, migrated onto it from some unix kit, then went back.

[Jerry]

I wanna try Gentoo now but I'm kinda dumb. To download it, i go into the mirrors, into releases, into x86, 2004.0, stages right? There I'm presented with a x86 and pentium4 directory (amongst others). Which one should I download from? the pentium4 directory only has stages 2 and 3, so do I download stage one from the x86 directory? And they're all in .tar.bz2 format, do I extract then burn? I'm used to ISO

I bet that made me look pretty damn dumb lol

What specification of machine are you planning on installing onto ?

[NTLDR]

I wanna try Gentoo now but I'm kinda dumb. To download it, i go into the mirrors, into releases, into x86, 2004.0, stages right? There I'm presented with a x86 and pentium4 directory (amongst others). Which one should I download from? the pentium4 directory only has stages 2 and 3, so do I download stage one from the x86 directory? And they're all in .tar.bz2 format, do I extract then burn? I'm used to ISO

I bet that made me look pretty damn dumb lol

If you want the ISOs get the install-x86-universal-2004.0.iso from:

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/x86/2004.0/livecd/universal/

That contains a bootable CD with all the stages for various processors so you don't need an Internet connection when installing.

If you want the pre-complied packages (XFree, KDE, Gnome etc) the download this ISO in addition to the one above (if you don't have a P4 then go up a level and choose the correct one):

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/releases/x86/2004.0/livecd/pentium4/

[Jerry]

As long as you arn't installing on to an Alpha etc

[MarkB]

Hmm - I'm downloading packages-pentium3-2004.0.iso - what stage is this? Do I still need to get the universal ISO?

[NTLDR]

Hmm - I'm downloading packages-pentium3-2004.0.iso - what stage is this? Do I still need to get the universal ISO?

That only contains the compiled (GRP) packages, like Gnome, KDE etc, you still need the universal ISO I posted a link to above.

[Squee]

This a completely different vein than the thread has been going, but it fits nonetheless

We've been running Gentoo for our servers for about a year now, and we've been having far less problems than we ever had with some other linux distros (*cough* Red Hat *cough*). As well as speeding up our system significantly by compiling all our packages (we have really evil server load/bandwidth usage), it made our servers far more stable. Plus, while it may take slightly longer to compile updates than for downloading binaries, it's far easier to upgrade than before, because everything works far better right after the emerge, rather than taking hours reconfiguring. In other words, we're loving it.

A Gentoo linux server (rather than desktop) success story. Go Gentoo! Go Linux! BOOOOOOoooo SCO!

[MarkB]

Damn, another 4 hour download!