Would like to try Gentoo next

Misfit138 · Dec 6, 2006

I would like to try Gentoo as my next distro, and since it is the OS of the month I was wondering if we could start a thread with some pointers for those of us who have not tried it.
My first questions that come to mind are:

1. I have (sig rig) an AMD64, but would like to use it in 32 bit mode.. should I
a. Download the AMD64 and configure make.conf to use 32 bit mode or
b. Download x86
2. What is the flag for smp and where, exactly, should it be added?

splat · Dec 6, 2006

x86. SMP is enabled in the kernel, so when you build the kernel, look for it

matva · Dec 6, 2006

my suggestions:
research your hardware before you go to install. this will help you a lot when you go to customize your makeconf, build your kernel, and configure your xorgconf. All 3 require research and thinking... the rest is just monkey work.

use lsmod for figuring out what modules you might need for your system.
also check out linuxquestion's hardware database.
i also recommend building all modules into your kernel to start... that way you won't have to mess with loading them.
if you are having trouble with making a good xorg.conf, boot the latest ubuntu live cd and copy the xorg it makes. lol, this beats the hell out the config utilities x provides, and definitely beats writing one by hand. a proper xorg.conf can save you a lot of troubles with black screens of death / nvidia driver related issues (assuming you're using an nvidia card).
make sure you have a working system before you go and start emerging your desktop environment etc. also make sure you've figured out what use flags you need / don't need.
lspci is also excellent for figuring out what drivers you need.

Misfit138 · Dec 6, 2006

Sounds like good advice. I will try lsmod.
I am currently using Arch, which, from what I am told is somewhat similar to Gentoo. I have never modprobed for my lan which is a Realtek 8201, however, the nvidia video driver from the Arch repo works flawlessly. I used nvidia-xconfig, which also worked perfectly....and later added evdev for my mouse. With evdev, my mouse buttons all work, especially in Firefox, for forward and back.
I have a feeling lsmod will help out immensely, as you suggested.

Suicide Al · Dec 6, 2006

gentoo has the nvidia drivers in portage. you'll need to find the chipset for that board and get that in the kernel, the smp is an option in the kernel. the realtek lan card is an option in the kernel (hint it's under device drivers>Network device support > Ethernet (10 or 100MBit)>EISA,VLB<PCI and on board controllers) and depending on sound card you should be set to go.

satandole666 · Dec 12, 2006

Wow...talk about timing.

I have been looking for alternatives to Microsoft since I started reading about Vista.

I've installed Linux a few times (Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu) and had limited success with it. I could get the basics working but I have always had small problems. On my main rig its the sound and the new ATI drivers. On my laptop I can't get the resolution switching to work at all with Ubuntu. Anyway...

I've been looking for a challenge. I've been in the process of installing OSx86 on my laptop. Since the processor is only SSE2 its not that great. I just spent about 2 hours reading the Gentoo installation guide and it seems pretty challenging for a Linux noob like myself. I'd like to do a stage one just see if I can do it.

Just to clarify (as it wasn't 100% obvious in the guide) a dual core Opty is AMD64 with SMP? Windows is a bit fuzzy with the difference between SMP and dual core, so I didn't want to mess one of the first steps up.

I'll be downloading and partitioning my main drive here soon to make room for this install. Wish me luck.

funnyperson1 · Dec 12, 2006

SMP is support for symmetric multi-processing, essentially the ability to take advantage of dual cpus/cores/virtual cores (Hyper Threading).

A dual core Opty needs SMP support for the OS to be able to use both cores.

splat · Dec 12, 2006

satandole666 said:
Wow...talk about timing.

I have been looking for alternatives to Microsoft since I started reading about Vista.

I've installed Linux a few times (Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu) and had limited success with it. I could get the basics working but I have always had small problems. On my main rig its the sound and the new ATI drivers. On my laptop I can't get the resolution switching to work at all with Ubuntu. Anyway...

I've been looking for a challenge. I've been in the process of installing OSx86 on my laptop. Since the processor is only SSE2 its not that great. I just spent about 2 hours reading the Gentoo installation guide and it seems pretty challenging for a Linux noob like myself. I'd like to do a stage one just see if I can do it.

Just to clarify (as it wasn't 100% obvious in the guide) a dual core Opty is AMD64 with SMP? Windows is a bit fuzzy with the difference between SMP and dual core, so I didn't want to mess one of the first steps up.

I'll be downloading and partitioning my main drive here soon to make room for this install. Wish me luck.

stage one? really? that's what the developers do to debug everything. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just more work than needed. The easy way is to install from the live cd using the gui install. The "normal" way is to install from the minimal cd with command line, download a stage 3 tarball and a portage snapshot tarball. The method is very well documented, and there is even a x86 "quick install" guide which is very good.

Suicide Al · Dec 12, 2006

i wouldn't recommend that someone new to gentoo should use the x86 quick install as it doesn't give an indepth explanation of what's going on like the full handbook does. once you've done a gentoo install a couple times then the quick install is alright.

I speak this from experience as my roommate printed out the quick install guide and said "go at it i'll help if you need." Didn't work out as well as he wanted to and I ended up printing the full thing in the end just so I could understand what was going on.

Flamed_Chip · Dec 12, 2006

Stage 1 & 2 tarballs are no longer supported for installation, there is little point in doing it "to see if you can" as it consists of just 2 extra things to do, namely bootstrap.sh and emerge system, both of which take a fair amount of time. If you desperately want to recompile the few packages in the base system using new cflags then you can do an emerge -e system after you're done with the stage 3.

CFLAGS wise I'd recommend sticking with something sensible such as -o2 - pipe and perhaps -fomit-framepointer if debugging installed applications will never be needed. Using extreme optimizations such as -o3 and others will produce more bloated binaries that use more memory and take a lot longer to compile.

splat · Dec 12, 2006

and, the handbook actually has you sync portage (emerge --sync) and then upgrade everything (emerge -uDN world) as part of the stage 3 install, so everything in your system will be up to date.

I generally leave my cflags at their standard, only changing the -march (especially if running the amd64 port and you want a ful 64bit environment: -march=k8 for a64, -march=nocona for intel)

cloim · Dec 12, 2006

I agree with the last couple posts about the stage 1 install.
The "challenging" parts are stage 3 and beyond. Configuring the kernel with the proper options, possibly getting your network up, and getting X up and running. Configuring configurations. And from everything I hear, getting an ATI graphics card to work well.

With my former dialup ISP, I did stage 1 installs because they were quicker. Large file downloads slowly degraded in transfer rates. I either had to stop and resume numerous times, and hope that it wasn't corrupted, or go with smaller pieces to begin with. In the end it was best to do stage 1.

With dsl now, and recently installed via stage 3 for the first time. Also first time installing from a Gentoo CD (never managed to get a non-corrupt ISO from dialup).

Stage 1 and 2 don't have any advantages. The additional steps are just "type this into a console and wait".

But if that's what you want, then go for it. There's no real advantage to mountain climbing or sky diving, but people still do it. Just keep in mind that it is no longer officially supported. Meaning there are no up-to-date instructions on it, and getting help if something goes wrong may not be easy.

On the dual core questions:
AMD64 is x86_64. Which would be any of the 64 bit AMD processors and the newer 64 bit Intels (Core2, not sure what else, but not Itanium(?)).

Symmetric multi-processing support in the kernel is required for multi-core cpu's and multi-processor motherboards.

Hyperthreading support is for P4's. Maybe others? Core2 doesn't use it, I don't think any Amd uses it.
<edit - removed inacurate comment>

satandole666 · Dec 13, 2006

I guess I didn't read/understand the install guide as well as I thought.

I just want to install a completely optimized Gentoo for my system. I thought that compiling everything for your system (including the Kernel) was considered stage1. If that can be done from stage3 then that's probably what I meant to say.

And thanks for clarifying the SMP support question.

SuperFarStucker · Dec 13, 2006

Just as long as you get the right stuff for your filesystem in it doesn't really matter if you miss some stuff when building the kernel. They don't take too long to rebuild and having things you don't actually need rarely hurts. Gentoo is for those with OCD though. You have to keep a relatively new snapshot of the portage tree on your machine otherwise you will end up with toolchain problems and your system will be an irreconcilable ball of **** that will not be worth your effort to fix.

A lot of things take an unreasonably long time to build from source even on a relatively fast machine so you will spend a lot of time just rebuilding applications on your machine. In my experience the speed difference was unpercievable. It is assinine to think throwing a couple of flags at the compiler is magically going to make your system noticably faster, but of course the ricers on gentoo.org will tell you to the contrary all day long.

As for being the most up to date distro, that is a flat out lie. Gentoo was one of the last distributions to roll out a stable gcc 4.x system. Due to the nature of the beast migrating your tools is an absolute nightmare that you have little chance of figuring out short of somebody telling you. If you're using x86_64 the stable tree is doubly a joke.

I think Arch is a pretty decent distribution.

petteyg359 · Dec 13, 2006

FYI, on any AMD processor, make sure you enable 3dnowext and mmxext in make.conf (in addition to 3dnow and mmx). Some packages will use them, but they aren't in the Gentoo USE docs as of last time I looked.

SuperFarStucker said:
Gentoo is for those with OCD though. You have to keep a relatively new snapshot of the portage tree on your machine otherwise you will end up with toolchain problems and your system will be an irreconcilable ball of **** that will not be worth your effort to fix.

Hardly. I only emerge --sync once a month or so and update everything then. Have had no problems. Just read the weekly newsletters, and they'll tell you anything that has changed (ex. modular X, java 1.4.2+1.5)

blueswitch · Dec 13, 2006

I h ave tried to get Gentoo to work on a 939 venice at work without success but I haven't dived into it so maybe tomorrow. I'll have to check out Arch *heads for wiki*

Flamed_Chip · Dec 13, 2006

SuperFarStucker said:
In my experience the speed difference was unpercievable. It is assinine to think throwing a couple of flags at the compiler is magically going to make your system noticably faster, but of course the ricers on gentoo.org will tell you to the contrary all day long.

Agreed, this is one of the major misconceptions about Gentoo, and because of such ricers Gentoo receives bad press. It is unlikely Gentoo will be noticeably, if at all faster than any binary distribution. Often using exaggerated cflags such as -o3 and -funroll-loops result in more bloated, slower binaries.

Portage is source based because it is based mostly on the BSD ports system, and designed to work in a similar way. The BSD's also compile most packages from source, as is traditional in Unix systems. The main advantage to this is the ability to customize the packages at compile time, using USE flags in Gentoo or some menuconfig-esque system in BSD. Compiling from source also negates a few issues that binary distributions can suffer with differing library version dependancies. A side effect of compiling from source is the amount of time it takes.

SuperFarStucker said:
Gentoo was one of the last distributions to roll out a stable gcc 4.x system. Due to the nature of the beast migrating your tools is an absolute nightmare that you have little chance of figuring out short of somebody telling you.

Gentoo is kept more up-to-date than most distributions because it doesn't really have a regular release system such as Debian/Ubuntu. New packages can be added to the portage tree and unmasked at any time, without having to wait for the next release.

Gentoo has in the past also used forked versions of GCC which were "newer" than the current released, with the changes eventually getting merged into GCC 2.9. The reason GCC 4 took a long time to be introduced was because a number of packages would not build using it, once these problems were fixed, 4 was introduced.

Misfit138 · Dec 13, 2006

blueswitch said:
I h ave tried to get Gentoo to work on a 939 venice at work without success but I haven't dived into it so maybe tomorrow. I'll have to check out Arch *heads for wiki*

Arch is what I use, and I love it. I can't think of anything bad to say about it at all. It is the fastest, most simple, most streamlined and stable distro I have tried, and I have tried about 2 dozen. (Gentoo is just about the only one in the DW top 25 I haven't tried) Arch boots up in 1/2 or 1/3 the time of most other distros, and once inside a KDE environment, is much more responsive as well.
I guess the Hi-Performance Gamer inside of me is part of what is driving me to try Gentoo, mostly to see if it is faster than Arch. :burn:

Captain Newbie · Dec 19, 2006

splat said:
x86. SMP is enabled in the kernel, so when you build the kernel, look for it

The flag is CONFIG_SMP if you're rooting around the files for it. I forget which submenu under make menuconfig you can find it under.

Postinst...To confirm you are running a SMP-enabled kernel after installation, type uname -a and look for the release number (e.g. "2.6.18-r4-gentoo"), which should be followed by SMP (and optionally, PREEMPT, if you have built a preemptive kernel). Such as:

Code:

Linux piper 2.6.18-gentoo #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Oct 8 20:15:59 UTC 2006 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Full disclosure: I'm lame and use Sabayon, with is Gentoo with kid gloves.

splat · Dec 19, 2006

i believe it's under "Processor Features"...one of the first 3 options on the main menu.

Would like to try Gentoo next

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