Thread: Welcome to Gentoo

Cool! Expect to see posts from me ;D

Well I finally had time to finish a really basic install. ;D I do have one problem with the kernel module for my NIC. I get unresolved symbol errors when I try and load it. It doesn’t appear to be a problem with the kernel source, but possibly a problem with it not compiling correctly. I tried compiling the Red Hat kernel source, which I know works, and I get unresolved symbol errors with it. I will have to look at it later today if I have time. Going to have to get this working or I won’t be able to play with Gentoo very much. :'( Hard to work without network access. 😛

Jim H

I am typing this out from my Gentoo install. ;D The problem with the kernel module for my NIC turned out to be a minor one. For some reason when it tries to load the module for my NIC it first doesn’t preload any other dependencies. A quick edit to modules.atuoload to have it preload the dependencies and I was up and running. ;D

I will have to look at the docs when I get the chance. The Gentoo init scripts are a lot different from what I am used too. They seem to be using some things from Debian.

Jim H

hey Jim, i am really curious as to what all these distros offer. what kinds of things is Gentoo known for? what are some advantages and disadvantages?

Originally Posted by babbing

what are some advantages and disadvantages?

Advantage would be more control over your system with reqards to optimizing it more for the specific hardware you have. Portage seems to be a pretty nice package management system.

Disadvantages. It requires a lot more work my the user in setting up and configuring it. It tends to use a lot of packages that would be considered to be "bleeding edge". This can lead to stablility issues. There isn’t the same level of QA testing that you would see with a major Linux distribution.

Jim H

I’d like to add to some of the advantages that portage has:

Since Gentoo is a source based distribution, it allows the user complete control over the features and support built into installed apps.

Gentoo’s method of defining USE settings help facilitate this by defining options used for the whole system to configure applications during their compilation process. For example, I use gnome as my DE, so one of my USE setting is "gnome". By defining this, any application I compile will use "gnome" as a compilation flag (if the application has such a flag; if not, then the USE setting is ignored). Any built-in gnome functions that the app may have will be used.

Also, there are flags for processor specific settings. Since i have a p4 processor, i have these in my make.conf file:

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe"

These could be changed of course (but i don’t know enough about these to change them).

Having one file to configure to optimize all app compilation will ensure that they are all optimized for your system. Thus, no more ./configure, make, make install (and whatever other flags you have to put).

Some disadvantages:
Of course with all the USE settings that one may have, compilation could take a long time. I guess that is the price you pay for optimization and configuration.

Configuration may not be for the Linux timid, since most of it will have to be done even BEFORE you log into you brand new Gnome/KDE environment. So guys used to configuring from gui, you’ll have to learn some new skills (i.e. knowing where all the config files are for your system: you should know where they are anyway ) Oh yeah, knowledge of your hardware is needed as well (when it come to xf86config).

Anyway, Gentoo offers very helpful docs on their website:
http://www.gentoo.org/index-docs.html

Check it out 8)