Attempting to install GENTOO
 

This has, so far, been kind of an adventure. I've been compiling now for the last 12 hours non-stop on my Athlon 700 box and there is no end in sight. Have anyof you out there had any experience with Gentoo Linux? I'm thinking of canning winblows alltogether on my primary machine and going strictly Gentoo with Windows XP access limited to rare VMWare sessions. So far I have learned more about linux during this install process than I have in the last year ....

Re: Attempting to install GENTOO
 

I installed Gentoo 1.2 from stage 1 previously. Long process on a 1GHz Athlon. Currently trying to update glibc so's I can re-emerge/update everything. Compiler issues keep popping up.

Getting impatient enough to just load the GRP and customize from there. :mad:

Gentoo is the shiz IMHO as far as Linux distros go. Still hard to relinquish Windows completely (sentimental attachment to my MCSE status as well as my career [supporting Windows, Linux, and some other obscure OS's]). I still want to get off Windows in favor of Linux for most operations (mail, surfing, Office-type stuff).

Bob

That is the idea. Everything will be done in Linux except for that which can not: certain games. Some of those I'll be able to run through VMWare, and others I'll just dual boot into, but for everything else I want to go to Linux. Since I've been using mozilla.org apps for all of my internet needs and I can use OpenOffice or Office XP (via Crossover Office) in Linux, why bother with using them in winblows?

Ugh, this is getting old. It is monday morning and I've been doing this since Friday afternoon solid. One of my two machines is up somewhat, and the other I have restarted three times. It seems that the current Linux kernel doesn't like NForce2 SATA, and the current XFree86 distro doesn't like the 9800 Pro. I'm almost ready to put my old 8500LE back in just to make this thing work ... what a frickin nightmare. I'm hoping to have my primary PC up tonight, but I'm not counting too heavily on it.

The good thing, though, is that I have learned more than I ever wanted to learn about the inner workings of Linux ... and I have a feeling that more education is to come.

When I installed Gentoo from a 1.4 stage 1 CD, it didnt take that long to compile. The longest was the bootstrap process. Everything else went fairly smoothly

hmm, I should probably renew my WineX subscription and start using linux more... windows can just be so annoying sometimes, like right now I'm 'missing' half a gigabyte from my C: drive.

damn, i have some respect for the linux comunity, god knows even i have wasted weekends on truying to get mandrake up and running. all things considered, why should i bother wasting heaps of time getting internet sharing going just to find out i have to download fonts to get even google looking like it should. went back to winblows where such futilities are not a crusade. maybe for a setup and 'forget' dbase or webserver it might be ok, but for an enthusiast pc where most components don't live very long without upgrading, it is just too much of a hassle for meh.

although, respect ppl

hey guys! been a while , but i have to chime in..

If you don't understand why people bother with linux then you aren't cut out for it , stick with windows..

As for Gentoo , I just did a gentoo install on my xbox last night. I let it compile overnight and woke up and it was ready for reboot. I do know it was well over the 3 hours I spent sitting there.

To the guy that couldn't get mandrake working: It was enough for you just to say "i couldn't get mandrake working" for me to derive my opinion of your tech skills.

Insults? Wow.... Some people are just assholes.... :eek:

Well our LANparty (me and my brother throw em) have all gentoo servers. And it takes anywhere from 8 hours to 4 hours depending on cpu and internet connection. We install from stage1, and when we are finished most kernels are under 1.2 mb. Very slim and fast system once completed. Highly recomended over here.

BrianW

fs1::~> du -sch /data/downloads/Linux/mirrors/gentoo/
38G /data/downloads/Linux/mirrors/gentoo


That was my fix for downloading things and speeding up the install. Took me about two good days, not the whole 48 hours though, to rsync the gentoo tree. And if you run an rsync every night or multiple times a day the number of things to downloads isn't a lot, maybe a few updated packages in the distfiles area. In your make.conf file just point to your local server ftp://mymachine/blah and you are downloading packages average 9 MB/sec. Which really helps out a lot when you are doing this on multiple machines or doing it over and over again for fun :D

Okay, I got it up and going. I now have to figure out why the MozillaFirebird and Mozilla ebuilds are busted and get everything configured right, but I am doing good. Three days and I'm finally at a bulletproof desktop. I even have trillian up and running, hehe. Now back to the grind ... arr ....

I had Gentoo installed for a while. Took me 5 full installs to finally get it right, then another 3 or 4 days to get everything running right. I had to give it up though, because I play to many games, and it was too big of a hassle to keep switching back and forth between Winblows and Linux. If I ever get a 2nd box, I'll install Linux on it, because I loved the speed of the damn thing!

Still trying to get Moz and Firebird to compile ... I have Firebird untarred into a home subdirectory with a cheap hack to get flash to work, but until I can get it compiled through portage I can give up on ever getting java to work. Damn.

Tonight I'm hoping to tackle that and the fact that I have no sound. I still haven't managed to get any sound output, which disturbs me. I have emerged nforce-audio and alsa ... what the heck else do I need?

The Gentoo community over at the Gentoo Forums is extremely helpful.

Good luck w/ your newfound uber1337 OS!

Sound support seems to be the achilles heel of Gentoo. I've yet to get mine going also.

The odd thing is, I can drop a knoppix CD in here and the sound works perfectly straight off. Major ass-pain! :mad:

Bob

airspirt, I thought Mozilla ships all their stuff in prepackaged binaries. You might just want to download their stuff from the web. Might not have that extra 2-4% speed up as compiling for your architecture but it works.

I think "emerge -k <package>" downloads pre-compiled binaries.

Bob

No packages from the web are precompiled. That's the benefit: everything is tailored to your system the way you want it. I'm running i686 && -O2 -march=athlon-xp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow -ffast-math -mfpmath=sse -pipe right now with use flags (software bindings) only for the things I'm going to use.

The sound issue was solved. I have alsa working ... the NVidia drivers are shit and that is what gave me problems.

I found out why Moz wouldn't compile (and the binary install could cause other programs in a gentoo environment to go nuts because of USE dependencies): I somehow managed to bootstrap my last install as an i686 in the HOST line and flagged it as a pentium. I fixed the error after the bootstrap, but that probably irreversably damaged the compiler and libraries. I've started from scratch, and now that those are compiled with mad optimizations, my compile times are dropping through the floor ... I can crunch a kernel in less than a minute, hehe.

edit: emerge ati-drivers && emerge xfree used to take around six hours from scratch on my old misoptimized compiler ... I just finished it in two on a properly configured one. This is the benefit of a roll-your-own linux distro.

If you are looking for more flags, or if anyone in general is looking for better optimization I would have to recommend this link.

FreeHackers.org

Those guys are crazy, or they're using those XP flags on an underclocked 2000+. I tried the experimental flags and it blew up 10s into the bootstrap.

BTW, I'm starting from scratch with some further optimized settings and I will be done in a couple of hours ... mainly the amount of time needed to go through the ATi driver support maze again. Damn binaries ....

These are my make settings right here

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -falign-functions=4 -fprefetch-loop-arrays"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://10.10.0.2/Linux/mirrors/gentoo/"



Got to love these Hyperthreaded P4s, they are pretty slick running SMP and make -j3. And having the mirror local on your network makes things go by much faster.

there is a thread about using a mpfmath=sse,3## (I forget) that forces your processor to use all of its registers when doing math thereby doubling your math throughput. If you are really into the hardcore optimization you might want to try that.

I'm going to do it next time I emerge world.

By the way, I have to admit: XFCE4 rc3 is the sexiest window manager I've ever used. It runs faster than an illegal from the INS. I have never had a WM move this fast with this many features ... it is more responsive on my Athlon 700 than KDE, GNOME, or WinXP is on my uberclocked XP box. I am prolly never going to go back to the KDE/GNOME bloatware after this.

I am thinking of giving fluxbox a whirl, too, once they hit v1.0 though I think it may be a bit too sparse on the old features, eh?

I use blackbox. :rolleyes:

When I was installing Gentoo with a friends help, it took us 3 days before we figured out that the reason that the computer wasn’t booting properly was because we didn’t implement support for ext2 in the kernel so it couldn’t see /boot.

Now I’m trying to get X to work with my ATI Radeon9700pro and for my USB kbd and mouse to get recognized.


bikr, could you give some more info on your xbox running Gentoo?