Submitted by Techgage has taken a hard look at the latest release from Gentoo, particularly its installation process. Although there is a revamped installer, using it proved to be a less than perfect experience: “This installer does not function like the previous ones. Before, the installer would wait until you made changes to the last option before it began installing. Now, everything is installed along the way.”
Gentoo 2007.0 Review
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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no review is required every Gentoo release is simply the best!
Yes, this sounds very fair and objective. Thank you for your non-contribution.
That made me laugh, but only because a friend of mine used worked with a guy who compulsively repeated “Simply the best… it’s Tina Turner, man” every two or three minutes.
I couldn’t use the previous version of Gentoo because it would wipe out my partition map for no good reason, even when I made no changes to the partitions themselves. Fortunatly I did get an update to the bug report I filed saying it was fixed in the 2007.0 installer the other day, but I’m still not sure I want to take that risk. Besides, Ubuntu is working just fine.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=811&slide=2…
Updating to the 2007.0-desktop profile didn’t make any difference for me except I could remove some use flags and a few
Oh the greatness of customization
(Disclaimer: If you don’t mind bothering with details and submit ebuilds for missing packages – otherwise just use Ubuntu or any other binary distribution 
EDIT: Fixed typo in first line.
Edited 2007-05-13 02:27
Per norm when there is a Gentoo story on here….
http://gentoo-install.com
The good old way of installing Gentoo without all the fluff and issues of the GUI install.
Heh, I definitely prefer the good old way of CLI installation. I can still remember when the devs switched the default from a stage 1 installation to a stage 3 installation. It took me quite a few attempts to get that right – it was suddenly waaaay to easy to install gentoo
For me, it depends on what you use Gentoo for – and hey, if they’re offering both types – build your own and prebuilt, its all good.
Then again, I’m tempted to give it ago once I’ve finished ripping my cd’s
admittedly I won’t be using insane, but it’ll be interesting to see just how bloated some distros have become vs. something that is relatively stripped down/clean.
Well, it depends on the definition of “bloated”. I’d say my gentoo system is somewhat bloated. Perhaps not as bloated as other Gnome-oriented systems since I’m using an extended version of gnome-light, but still bloated compared with minimalist WM’s. OTOH I don’t have Beagle, using Tracker instead. The number of python, perl and ruby applications are extremely minimal to reduce clutter and so on. And I don’t have kdelibs installed on my gentoo (but then I don’t have gnome libraries installed on my DesktopBSD
)
Or put another way – as a minimalist system my installation is bloated
– I have QT3, QT4, GTK+-2, mono, python, perl, ruby and a “gazillion” use flags (and only a couple of those are disabling functionality)
Almost a full scale Gnome installation but not quite. No Evolution front end (using Pimlico Project instead).
For me, bloat more has to do with boot up/shut down speed – snappiness of the operating system itself; IMHO the price paid for some niceties is far higher than what they actually deliver in the way of improvements.
“For me, bloat more has to do with boot up/shut down speed – snappiness of the operating system itself; IMHO the price paid for some niceties is far higher than what they actually deliver in the way of improvements.”
The OS’s boot time and shutdown time does not matter very much. Okay, maybe I’m a bit old fashioned. I’m coming from a world where we do not restart our computers twice an hour so these time requirements don’t matter. We say, these amounts of time are constant, O(1). Nobody cares.
If you’re refering to application start times – yes, there I agree, this is an effect of bloat (not bloat itself).
In my opinion, bloat refers to inelegant implementation where, let’s say, the memory consumption, the runtime and the HDD space needed is O(n^2) where it could be O(1). So the quotient speed = hardware / software stays nearly the same over the years. Tjos is caused by bloat, which is the opposite of efficient conceptions and programming.
Allthough I’m not a Linux guy, I tried this Gentoo version. Quite nice, runs fine. The Gentoo developers did a good job offering a GUI installer because this is what newbies want, and finally it’s the thing that lets Linux get more usage share (and oh joy oh market share). And it even does not look ugly! =^_^=
— my 0.014766686 EUR —
os boot times matter a lot. i always set my computer to hybernate or standby, thus consuming power. i do this because of the long boot times. if my mac&pc booted as fast as my c64 or at most my amiga i would turn it off. actually my amiga boots faster than my mac can get out of hybernate
in my opinion bloat refers to the amount of overhead to get a task done. thus a normal program using O(n^2) can be faster than a boated program using O(n) because it has less to do elsewhere.
about gentoo, i don’t have a compile fetish, so it’s not my cup of tea.
So still no default reiserfs support?
It’s in the kernel sources – just compile the kernel with support for reiserfs.
So still no default reiserfs support?
?
Reiserfs has been supported for years.
I see in one of the screenshots there is a menu entry called “WPA_Supplicant Administration GUI” — what is that? Is that a Gentoo-only gui tool? I’ve never seen a wpa_supplicant gui tool.
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=811&slide=2…
wpa_supplicant has featured a gui front-end for some time (wpa_gui) as an alternative to the cli (wpa_cli), it’s not distro-specific. You don’t see it much though since most distros are either relying on networkmanager or building wpa_supplicant support into their own network subsystem, making it much more transparent.
Honestly, I would think that a review should cover more than the installation procedure?
*rolls eyes*
That could be a tad difficult since there isn’t really such a thing as a default installation.
But it could be done though. They could have made a review of what a gentoo system looks like when using the 2007.0/desktop profile. Or the server profile, and compare the profiles with other distributions. But it would be awkward because of the nature of gentoo. And when installed gentoo just tend to work with no further problems. It’s getting there which is the difficult thing.
seriously now this is not a review.
3 pages of chatter about bug 1 and bug 2 of the installer.
you call that a distribution review?
5 thumbs down! waaaaay down!
what’s there to review?
The target audience doesn’t really need one they know.Besides 9 out of 10 install gentoo the “old fashioned way”.
The only thing to really focus on in a new Gentoo release is the installer. It was mentioned in the intro that it was an article focused more towards previous Gentoo users, hence the lack of explanation on a lot of things.
It’s difficult to review a distro that people are meant to create on their own. Each Gentoo install will be different, depending on tastes.
Gentoo isn’t your average distro like ubuntu or Fedora. It is meant for advanced or beginner users who want to learn in the in and out of linux.
So it’s completely customizable with flags and other configuration which will make it difficult to review.
Edited 2007-05-13 19:22
Both the GUI GTK based and the command line installers are buggy and under powered; CentOS/Redhat still the best in stability arena.
The system that was rejected installed all possible versions of linux and VMS in the world:
1. Fedora/Redhat/CentOS
2. Mandriva
3. Xandros
4. Sun Solaris 11/Nexenta
5. ZetaOS
6. Apple OSX 10.4.7
7. Windows server 2003/XP/Vista
Pentium 4 @ 3.2 GHz
1GB DDR dual channel
D-link Network card
nvidia GF4600ti
Gigabyte Mobo
74GB Raptor HDD @10,000rpm with enterprise reliability
All Hardware were funtional and tested for any instability before installation and just single HDD was used on a single channel SATA and defaults were used during the whole process of installation.
DVD live disk was used and checked against MD5SUM for integrity. Disk burned with nerolinux which uses turbobuffer.
I downloaded 2007.0 for my PPC. I was hoping to be able to try out the Live CD and graphical installer but its only available for X86 and AMD64 versions. Still nothing wrong with the traditional install method (makes ya feel more geeky)