Gentoo up and running both at the office and at home

I reported earlier on my installation of Gentoo Linux at the office. There are many things that are appealing about Gentoo Linux: it is managed from a non-profit corporation, it leverages the power of free software by being source-based, it has a cool package management called Portage written in my favorite language, Python, and finally, it is constantly updatable: you may never need to install an OS again on your machine because there is no version number, a Gentoo machine is always up-to-date (just type emerge sync; emerge -u world; env-update once in a while). It is not GUI-driven like Mandrake, Suse, or RedHat. So, you actually need to learn a lot of things before you can install it properly. Some say it is a bad thing. I disagree. I actually almost gave up on it when I found out that you needed to actually follow instructions and type the commands by hand: I’m glad I didn’t. I must say that the compile time is long.

Setting it up at the office was rather painless. After all, the toughest part was getting samba to get me on the network, and that was mostly some reverse-engineering of the network topology: just make sure you jot down everything you possibly can about the network before formatting the drive for good.

At home, it was more of a challenge. For one thing, I wanted to try the new 2.6 kernel and it is sweet: very low latency for highly responsive GUIs. Second of all, I wanted the sound to work: at the office I don’t have speakers yet, so I couldn’t care less. And finally, I have a lot of scripts on my machine which do many magical things for me: I have lots of clever scripts everywhere including on this web site, I love scripts. But scripts have dependencies and you need to install specialized software.

The one true lesson I learned about Gentoo is: forget Google. Go straight at Gentoo Bug’s database. For me, almost all my problems were solved by reading the bug reports and the comments related to them. The only thing that I had to figure out on my own was that the new 2.6 kernel includes alsa, so you don’t need to compile it separately. (Alsa is the sound library used under Linux these days.) Well, there is one other thing is that if you have a PDA, you want to include pda in your USE flag. Everything else, I learned through the bug database and the excellent installation guide provided by Gentoo.

This reminds me of some complains Stephen had about Linux: I recall that I told him to go see the Mozilla bug database and sure enough, there were bugs related, some of them with my name on it. Now, I’d probably claim that Stephen would have less problem in the long run with Linux if he went with Gentoo instead of Mandrake. Mandrake might be user-friendly, but it appears like a very monolithic project to me: if the Mandrake developers are not working on your problem, you can’t easily help fix the distro.

Still stuck in a Microsoft-only world? There is hope. Be daring. Install Linux now.

Update: Marcel Ball, of OO JDrew fame, correctly points out that he is the one who got me to have a lot at Gentoo. Marcel is probably one of the top 5 undergraduate student I ever met. I might very well be the best, but then, because he has no web site to call his own, I can’t give him too much credit.