Back to the future… again!

Rant August 24th, 2007


Ok so first things first.  Gentoo is  really just hot garbage wrapped in… more garbage.

Here are a few reasons why:

  1. The LiveCD is mostly worthless.
    • Installing must be done in a certain manner or you waste hours of time compiling.
    • If you install via the reccomended manner, you end up with an out of date system.
    • “emerge -U world” breaks your system.  How the hell am I supposed to be able to use this heap o’ garbage if I can’t update the system (see #4)
  2. The minimal install CD is usable only by someone with a 98 page manual in their hands.
    • I’m NOT kidding!  98 pages.  I wont bore you with a link.
  3.  Gentoo does not support one of two things which are not working by default:
    • ATI Video Card
    • Nvidia Video Card
  4. After some hours of research, the “proper” way to update the system is run these commands:
    • emerge sync
    • emerge -uDpv world
    • emerge -uDv world
    • emerge -pv depclean
    • emerge -v depclean
    • revdep-rebuild -av
    • revdep-rebuild -v
    • dispatch-conf
  5. EIGHT COMMANDS!  I’m done with Gentoo for quite some time.

I’m back to running Ubuntu right now.  It’s a temporary solution because I was unable to burn a CD from a LiveCD.

 Someone suggested on Digg that I give Slackware a try.  I think I should do him one better and try Solaris x86.  But I know for a  fact that I can’t get past the bootloader because my cdrom drive is Serial ATA and will not work - period.

 I think the next Linux distribution in my path is going to be … PCLinuxOS.  A LiveCD with heavily touted hard drive installation based on Mandrake.

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6 Comments to “Back to the future… again!”

  1. Rob | August 24th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

    Hey Mate,
    Try Arch Linux (clean,simple and fast)

  2. del-boy | August 24th, 2007 at 4:33 pm

    Hi…
    If you are looking for linux that just works, Gentoo is not for you. Then you sholud use Ubutnu. On the other hand, if you don’t like default settings and want to optimize system for your computer, then you should use Gentoo. Once you set it up, it works excelent.

    Sorry for my bad english…

  3. Richard | September 27th, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    Hi mate, i understand you, but disagree with some few points.

    Now when i look again , it’s all five.

    1.Install is hard only the first time, it took me 2 weeks back in 2004 when i compiled my first running kernel with custom config. Now ? I have working system in around 45 minutes.

    2.LiveCD is not useless as the Installation manual is on the web or on the CD and after gentoo install number 51 you start to remember the steps. Also the CD can be used as recovery.

    3.emerge -a nvidia-drivers
    Check http://www.nvidia.com for proper settings or your xorg.conf
    Takes 10 minutes.

    4. emerge -auDN world is enough, it will tell you if it need to update the /etc/ or you will see if some app stopped working, But this happens rarely on stable branch.

    5. You are not done., I believe that you run Gentoo right now. You can’t stop smoking because Gentoo is addictive.

    I do also have similar days when emerge -avDN world destroys it. Last time it was the xorg 1.4 w/o nvidia support. So i wiped the disk with ubuntu.
    In 60 minutes i am configuring latest ubuntu, removing all ubunu artwork, removing Gnome, adding enlightenment and fluxbox. But this lasts 3 nights and my old love “gentoo” is back on the laptop, and now happy again.
    What i learned? : don’t go too experimental is my rule now. so no system wide keyword unmask, only specific apps.etc. keep is light, so enlightenment.

    did check Arch linux while ago, sounds attractive.

  4. Jeff | October 10th, 2007 at 6:58 am

    Indeed, Gentoo is Addictive. I have a Gentoo partition WIP right now, I’m not sure what I’m gonna do with it, but it’s there.

    I love the control of Gentoo, hate the frustration of setup. I did an install from stage 1 once….in 2004…it seemed easier then.

  5. yoshi314 | December 17th, 2007 at 2:15 am

    you should switch your gentoo package manager to paludis. you can avoid tons of breakage this way, as it is more strict and robust at the same time.

    i’ve been using gentoo since 2004 and i never really regretted it. it also helped me learn tons of things about linux in general, which “newbie-oriented” distribution would never give me chance to.

    i used it to install my system, build a friend’s system, create embedded systems and generally doing some more crazy things :]

    btw you can install gentoo via chroot from any linux distro, as long as you are running 2.4 or 2.6 kernel (that matters _a lot_ when you’re building glibc in a chroot)

  6. David | January 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Ah yes, Gentoo is very definitely a love-hate relationship. I have it running on 7 machines right now, but I would never use it in real production. (I have a CentOS box for that.) I just about blew away Gentoo on my laptop to try Ubuntu again, because I think the bluetooth stuff on there would allow me to use Nautilus to swap files with my new cell phone. (It’s only available on amd64 in Gentoo.) However, I recall that I’m NOT running Ubuntu on that machine because of problems with Ubuntu’s evolution-exchange module, which I need for work, so I didn’t move. I guess I could try building from source or making an ebuild, but that sounds like more work than I have time for right now.

    Love your site. I’m glad you switched to Linux in general. Your articles have been great. We need more like you in the Linux “community.” (I reprogramming all of my personal site, but I hope to get that done and get some technical content back “out there” soon.)

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