• Because people are always curious for screenshots, have a look over at phorolinux, who has published a number of screenshots from the Gentoo Linux 2008.0-beta1 LiveCD, showing the boot screens and various stages of the installer. As this is a beta, I would recommend people who can to test the installer and report any problems if they occur. That doesn’t mean I’m no longer old-school — for a normal install I still recommend the manual method. It’s the best learning experience. ‒ , , | (1)

Why Gentoo?

image by Paul Downey

Recently Distrowatch editor Ladislav Bodnar complained:

I keep saying the same thing every time people come here to defend Gentoo: please write an article explaining why Gentoo is the greatest thing since sliced pickles and I’ll publish it in the next issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Or write a review. Write about your experiences running Gentoo as a desktop or server. Anything. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I really am desperate for some positive coverage of Gentoo! Many of you obviously love Gentoo and have tons of great experiences with it, so why don’t you share them?

Do we Gentoo users write so little about why we love this distro? I didn’t think so, so I fired up Google’s blogsearch and immediately found several blogposts explaining why people use Gentoo, by:

There is also a “Why do you use Gentoo” thread on the forums. So yes, we do share our positive experiences with Gentoo, but maybe Mr. Bodnar isn’t looking in the right places?

So what are our reasons for preferring Gentoo? I think they can be summarized as follows:

  • great degree of control, no wizards, but plain-text configuration files, which empowers the users
  • fine-grained optimization possibilities, through USE flags, multiple available versions of many packages, choosing your own CFLAGS, and so on
  • great documentation available, both official and community generated
  • good learning experience: the manual install method and hands-on configuration offer more opportunities to get to know how things work
  • continuous updates, independent from media releases
  • saner way of handling dependencies, because everything is compiled from source
  • high number of available packages, and ease of adding your own ebuilds
  • great community with many helpful people

And what are your reasons for using Gentoo? Let’s hear it!

7 Apr 08 at 00:39 | , | 19 comments

How to get better help

image by Eric I.E.

Everybody needs a little help now and then. When you stumble upon a problem with Gentoo, and can’t seem to solve it through consulting the documentation (including your friend Google), there are several channels through which you can get help:

In order to use these help channels effectively, there are a number of things you should keep in mind. First of all, there are a lot of people willing to help, both Gentoo developers and users. But we are all volunteers, who are in this for the fun. Struggling with a problem you can’t seem to solve can easily frustrate the best of us. But when asking for help, be polite and patient.

And do your homework! This means first of all, analyze your problem and try to give a short and to the point description of your problem. Also, read the topic in IRC channels, they usually have links to FAQs and frequently occurring problems. On the forums, check the stickies, and of course search through bugzilla, the mailing list archives and the forums if anyone else had a similar problem.

In analyzing your problem, don’t take the “easy” route, but try to get to the real issue. For example, it is not enough to point people to the portage error and the die message, which only tell us which package failed and at what point. It doesn’t usually give an answer about what exactly went wrong. Also the line make: *** [all] Error 2 doesn’t give us any further insight. Usually you need to look up a number of lines to find the real compile error, often something like “In file foobar… error: …” Especially when you are on IRC, it helps if you paste the last ~30 lines or so to a pastebin.

Personally I happen to know a few languages, but there are many more that I don’t understand. If you are not in a channel specifically for your language, set the shell variable LANG=C to get standard English instead of localized messages. This will make it easier for other people to see what’s going on.

When asking for help, show that you are pro-active and have searched documentation. And let people know what you have already tried and what results you got. This will help to pin down the issue, and at the same time show that you’re not a lazy bum expecting other people to do all the work for you.

Finally, follow up on suggestions, give feedback, and be grateful. A “thank you” is so easy to say, but will always be appreciated. Nobody likes helping whining, ungrateful SoBs. Or people that don’t listen to suggestions. A cooperative attitude will make things pleasant for all people involved. And remember, the best method of showing gratitude for the help you received, is to extend that to other people who run into problems you have already met and resolved. That way we keep our Gentoo community alive and healthy.

If you have any other suggestions on how to get better help, I would be happy to read your comments.

2 Apr 08 at 17:24 | , , | 2 comments

  • For people using my overlay, I just want to pass on a warning about the package move from media-libs/x264-svn to media-libs/x264. The x264 development repository had been moved to git, so the -svn name is no longer appropriate. After emerging x264, you can add media-libs/x264-svn-20089999 (for example) to /etc/portage/profile/package.provided for other packages depending on that. ‒ , | (11)

Doesn’t feel like spring

image by Nadya Peek

Three days ago spring started, in this part of the world. The weather here doesn’t seem to have noticed, treating us with a very rare White Easter. Also, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy the last few days, I hope I’m not getting the flu that’s been going around. At the same time my father turned 60, so we’ve had some celebrations. Which all accounts for the lack of updates on my blog. I do have the next post in the “Successful Gentoo User” series outlined, so I hope to flesh that out later today or otherwise tomorrow.

23 Mar 08 at 14:54 | | Add your comment

Know your distro: Gentoo features

image by David Barrie

Gentoo has a number of features you should familiarize yourself with, if you want to use and administer it successfully. In today’s part of this series, I am not going to explain everything, but I’m sending you back to the resources we covered yesterday. (I’m mean like that.)

The first place is taken by portage, the package manager. You should read the Portage Introduction in the Handbook, man emerge, /etc/make.conf.example and man make.conf. Also, for a more in-depth write-up, read the Working with Portage part of the Handbook. You should get an understanding of the used files and directories, such as /etc/portage/ for overriding keywords, setting per-package useflags and masking unwanted versions. This means you need to understand what keywords are, what useflags are, and what valid package atoms are. Just take a couple of small packages, such as bashburn and htop, and play around with masking/unmasking and package atoms, to get a feel for how things work.

Besides those, you should also get to know etc-update and rc-update. Another handy tool is eselect. When you just type in eselect, you will get an overview of available modules. If you then choose one module and type for example eselect binutils, you will then get usage options for that module. If you have read the documentation I suggested, you should know what a profile is. You can use eselect profile to switch to a desktop profile for example. This will affect the useflags used by default, so have a look at emerge --info and see if you maybe want to disable some useflags set by the profile.

Another important feature is elog. When emerging packages, you will get messages, for example about post-install configuration. The elog system offers various ways to deliver these messages to you. You can view the options in /etc/make.conf.example. If you choose to save the elog messages, you can then later review them with the elogv utility (which has an ncurses interface), or the graphical frontends elogviewer (GTK+) and kelogviewer (KDE).

If there is anything unclear, after consulting the documentation, then don’t hesitate to ask! Next time: how to get better help. Stay in touch!

20 Mar 08 at 02:24 | , , | 1 comment

Know your distro: Gentoo documentation sources

image by worak

Of course the first step to being a successful Gentoo user should be to get to know the distro you’re using. This may seem self-evident, but the opposite human tendencies of curiosity and laziness may battle over this. You may dive into the handbook just enough to get the operating system installed and running, without grasping the finer points of Gentoo system administration. To really know how it works, and to get the most out of it, you should familiarize yourself with the various sources of documentation.

The Handbook really is the best start. It contains all the information you need for a normal installation. But apart from that, it also introduces you to the workings of portage, the package manager. That is important knowledge for system administration and daily usage. Furthermore, it has a “comprehensive guide to Networking in Gentoo.” What cannot be stressed enough, is that you really should get to know what is probably the single most powerful and defining feature of Gentoo: USE flags. Not grasping the concept of useflags, is like rowing a boat with a teaspoon.

Apart from the Handbook, there is a lot more documentation on the Gentoo website. You should take the time to go through that list, so that you have at least an idea of what is to be found there. It contains a wealth of information, so use that to your benefit! For example, for desktop users it has a guide on X configuration, nVidia and ATi guides, howtos for the most common desktop environments, the KDE Split Ebuilds howto (another important Gentoo feature), as well as guides for sound configuration, localization and using unicode. There are also introductions to vi and zsh, guides for databases, kernel configuration, security, and so on.

Do not forget you also have a lot of documentation right there on your system! Man pages are an important source of information, as is the documentation (in plain text or HTML form) installed by many packages in /usr/share/doc/. There are even manpages for configuration files, such as make.conf!

The forums are also a source of knowledge, as many problems have already been discussed there. Also, there is a “Documentation, Tips & Tricks” subforum, where users share their insights. And most subforums have stickies with important information on often recurring problems.

More user-generated documentation and tips can be found on the unofficial Gentoo Wiki. There is a lot of useful information on there, but you have to realize some of it is outdated. You could help by flagging such problems and possibly editing articles to bring them up to speed with the current realities. Sharing what you’ve learned is the life-blood of the free software movement.

Then there is also the friend of every online person: Google. Knowing how to use search engines is a very important skill, and one that you should continue to refine, as the wealth of information (as well as rubbish) online is growing explosively. Familiarize yourself with Google’s features and smart ways to refine your searches. I could probably devote a whole series on this topic alone. And indeed, books have been written on this. In this day and age, no education can be considered complete without learning how to find useful information. (Can you tell I’ve been a teacher?)

With these tools at hand, you should be well on your way now to become a successful Gentoo user. Please tell me if you’ve found this useful or if you have anything to add that is missing here.

Tomorrow we will continue on the subject of “Know Your Distro,” looking into some of the features and inner workings of Gentoo Linux. So come back for more, or subscribe if you haven’t already done so!

19 Mar 08 at 01:22 | , , | 5 comments

How to be a Successful Gentoo User

image by James Gordon

This week I want to write a series of blog posts on “How to be a Successful Gentoo User.” I regularly spend time in #gentoo, our IRC support channel, as well as on the forums. Having been a Gentoo user myself for over 5 years now, maintaining a public overlay for the last few years and now recently having become a dev, I have always tried to help other users, but have seen certain types of issues coming back again and again.

The first thing you should ask yourself as a (potential) new user, is if Gentoo is right for you. It has a notoriously steep learning curve. And no, that is not a myth. First of all, you should not be afraid of the commandline. If you want something that “just works out of the box” without you having to go edit some textfiles to configure things, then Gentoo is not for you. If you like your operating system to make most choices for you, then Gentoo is not for you. If you don’t want to read manuals, then Gentoo is not for you.

But if you are a power-user, a tweaker, a bit of a geek, who loves to dive “under the bonnet” to see how things work and what can be fine-tuned, to make the system run the way you want, then Gentoo is for you! Gentoo gives you the power, hands you tools to control your system with fine-grained configuration options. With Gentoo you are the wizard! Are you up to the task?

I promise you, if that is what you are looking for, then Gentoo is very rewarding. You will need to put in some effort, read manuals, use your brain, analyse problems and be pro-active in looking for answers. But with those efforts and the tools Gentoo offers you, you can be the proud owner of a fine-tuned system. You can be a successful Gentoo user.

Of course, nothing in this universe is perfect, and both hardware and software can behave in sometimes unexpected ways. You will from time to time meet frustrating problems, that’s the nature of the beast. Then it is good to remind yourself of the saying “no pain, no gain.” And realize how happy you will be when you have mastered the tools and overcome the problems. So, do you want to be a successful Gentoo user?

Tomorrow: know your distro. Subscribe to this blog, or come back for more!

18 Mar 08 at 00:04 | , , | 6 comments

While waiting for the next Gentoo release…

I know some people are desperately waiting for the 2008.0 release, in order to have an up-to-date LiveCD and fresh stages to install Gentoo with. The beta release was originally planned for last week, but has suffered a little delay (but I can assure you that our Release Engineering team is working hard to get it out of the door very soon). I know there is newer hardware that doesn’t work with the previous release, and people are still running into the expat upgrade problem.

There are ways around these, though. I’ve been (privately) recommending to use the SystemRescueCD, which is an excellent little LiveCD based on Gentoo Linux. It has just seen its 1.0.0 release, and includes a lot of handy system tools, as well as a basic X environment with WindowMaker. At a mere 179 MB, and sporting a 2.6.24.2 kernel, it is an excellent platform to start a Gentoo installation with. The x86 version also includes a 64bits kernel, so you can use it to chroot into an amd64 stage. There is a whole range of partitioning and filesystem tools, including Reiser4, as well as read-write access to Windows filesystems with ntfs3g.

With a choice of 3 browsers (lynx, links and firefox) you can easily access the online documentation, as well as the forums. Then there is irssi to get live support on our #gentoo IRC channel. And you even get the choice of 4 shells: bash, ksh, tcsh and zsh. Nano, emacs and vim are among the editors provided. SystemRescueCD also has tools onboard for hardware testing, cryptography, network analysis and unpacking all kinds of archives.

Apart from a recent LiveCD, you may also want a recent stage3 to kickstart your Gentoo install. Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins is providing unofficial stages of the current stable, at
http://funtoo.org/linux/. I’ve found these very helpful and as these have an up-to-date expat version, they can prevent a lot of problems.

Of course, soon we should have fresh official stages and release media.

10 Mar 08 at 20:41 | , , | 4 comments

  • Qt 4.4, of which a beta was just released, has the exiting new webkit module (the rendering engine behind Safari, based on KDE’s KHTML). As a demo, one of the developers has made a browser. This could grow into a very interesting project, so I’ll certainly be following it! ‒ , | (1)

  • I’ve updated the feed locations to use feeds.liveforge.org, which forwards to FeedBurner. This way, visitors who open a feed in their browser will get a nicely formatted page, while it gives me the opportunity to better track subscriptions. DNS propagation may take up to 24 hours, so if it doesn’t work now, try tomorrow. ‒ , , | (0)

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