Bravo kubuntu, Bravo... or not.

[MRD]

Also, if I got a new rig, I could install Gentoo in the time it takes to copy a filesystem... I'd simply boot up any old livecd, partition and mke2fs -j for /boot and /, mirror an existing install, change the hostname, edit fstab if necessary, delete the udev references to a specific mac address, edit the ip address in the net config file, run grub to write the mbr, and reboot. Done. The actual manual work is about 10 minutes for me, if that, counting boot time for the livecd. The copy over the network might take a bit, but it's probably as fast as copying ubuntu off a cd and then downloading the updates from the internet (not to mention I don't have to spend the time downoading the CD image, I have everything right here).

 

[Stratus_ss]

Also, if I got a new rig, I could install Gentoo in the time it takes to copy a filesystem... I'd simply boot up any old livecd, partition and mke2fs -j for /boot and /, mirror an existing install, change the hostname, edit fstab if necessary, delete the udev references to a specific mac address, edit the ip address in the net config file, run grub to write the mbr, and reboot. Done. The actual manual work is about 10 minutes for me, if that, counting boot time for the livecd. The copy over the network might take a bit, but it's probably as fast as copying ubuntu off a cd and then downloading the updates from the internet (not to mention I don't have to spend the time downoading the CD image, I have everything right here).

We use CentOS at work but we use gentoo to do the exact steps MRD describes. We have our dd if= file.sda on the server, we boot a gentoo live cd grab it, mount the network drive, copy the image over change the host file and away she goes basically. FStab stays the same because all the hardware is the same.

We have one image for the /boot and the partition table that gets copied first and then copy the /dev/sda3 file and we're done. Doesn't take that long either even going at our average speed of 13 Mb/s

 

[MRD]

You can also do a cp -axv instead of a dd. I've used both depending on the situation. dd is great because it copies bit by bit, so you get an exact copy. That works well if you have exactly the same size hard drive. dd doesn't work well if:
1) the new hard drive is smaller than the image - even if the amount of data is actually smaller than the target drive, dd copies everything (including every 0 and 1 that are not even holding data and are just set that way by chance), and it will run out of room creating a non-functional filesystem
2) the new hard drive is bigger than the image - it may work, but it won't fill the drive. You can expand the image with ext2resize (I think that's what it's called) or the utility appropriate to your filesystem
3) the hard drive's physical geometry differs from that of the image - the partition table that dd transfers doesn't work
4) the image has a small amount of data and a lot of garbage space - As mentioned before, dd copies EVERY bit on the drive. So if you have a 5gb Gentoo install on a 500gb image, and you want to put that on an identical 500gb drive... it'll work fine. However, it will spend a LOT of time copying over the EXACT image of the disk, filling in random 1's and 0's (in the same pattern as were on the other disk).

If you do compress a dd created image, make sure to use /dev/zero to fill in all the unused bits on the filesystem with 0's. This will result in essentially 100% compression of that space and the image will only take up as much space on disk as the actual data (and that will get somewhat compressed too).

Because my hard drives are relatively heterogeneous, I just repartition each drive, make the filesystem, and copy the files over nfs with cp -axv.

Either way can work, but dd and pure imaging work best in areas of very homogeneous hard drives (which it seems like Stratus has at work). As long as there isn't too much blank space on the image, it works well to use dd in these cases (even with a lot of blank space it will work, it will just be slow-ish). You can get around some of this with partitioning too (keep blank space on a diff partition so the image you install doesn't contain the garbage info held on the unused part of the drive).

Unlike Windows, which will **** a brick if you try this, simply copying over a filesystem with the cp command from one hard drive to another works quite well and creates a fully functional OS. (It does leave the partitioning, file system creation, and GRUB/MBR work to you though, which is not necessary when using dd on 2 identical drives.)

 

[Kuroimaho]

however, the above is not true if you know what you are doing and actively maintain the health of your system.

Moving to modular X and just a few months before that rings any bells ? When gentoo forums were swamped people with problems thanks to portage.

A system left unmaintained for a while will become very hard to add new packages to or upgrade.

Which does not cause problems for a few other package managers.

Also, my system is set up so that I can build a Gentoo system faster than an Ubuntu system. However, this took extensive customization on my own part and it took me years to get to that level of understanding.

It is sad that those who created gentoo could not find the real value in Free BSD and ports and created a ricer OS instead, this speed bragging is comes up in every second gentoo post and is usually a based on apples to oranges comparisons.

Not many would believe that compiling a program is faster than installing it just think of OpenOffice as an example.

If you mean by building the system that you can copy and existing system to another drive I can't see what took years to understand it when the instructions are on the gentoo forum for years.

 

[mbentley]

Not many would believe that compiling a program is faster than installing it just think of OpenOffice as an example.

If you mean by building the system that you can copy and existing system to another drive I can't see what took years to understand it when the instructions are on the gentoo forum for years.

not to speak for MRD or anything, but i have picked his brain about how he has his gentoo boxes set up. what he is talking about with his setup is that when he compiles anything, he stores the compiled binaries that way if another system needs the same thing to be compiled, it just installs the pre-compiled binary.

i think what MRD was basically trying to say is that the way that he has everything set up, installing gentoo on a new box is no more difficult than it would be for someone to install a distro with pre-compiled binaries.

so he basically gets the best of both worlds. he can install binaries (in a way) and he can have his programs optimized for his system. it is really pretty neat how he has it done.

i certainly don't believe that people find gentoo faster from an installation standpoint (nothing to gui) when installing on a stand alone system. i know that compiling openoffice from source does take forever. its just as bad as installing gnome in terms of time to compile.

some people just like to have that extra control and customization with their operating system and gentoo provides some of that i am not saying it is the best distro out there, but it is best for what i need.

 

[curtis1552]

If Gentoo had a bug-free install program, which included automatic local hardware atuo detection (with a possible manual override) it would really increase mainstream appeal.
I REALLY like the idea of using Gentoo, but I have yet to get a working install with optimization.
I always seem to bugger something somewhere that doesn't show up until you try to load a GUI ot after the install. Since the install is so long I don't know where I'm screwing up, cause it always seems to be a minor point that buggers it all.

 

[Stratus_ss]

I have successfully installed gentoo a few times. Twice with MRD's help. After that and following the wiki I havent had any problems. However I know its not optimized nearly as well as it could be because I still dont understand some of the USE flags or kernel options. I havent had the time to really buckle down to learn that stuff yet. If it sounds like I might need it I compile it or add it to the USE flag.

 

[MRD]

Gentoo is built completely differently from other distros. It is meant to be more cutting edge, and the philosophy is that people should constantly upgrade. This doesn't make it better or worse... just different. I'd use Debian for a production server, because if there's a security hole, they'll backport patches to old versions, while Gentoo will tell you to upgrade, which might pull in more dependencies, etc. ANY source based distro is going to be more fragile in making large jumps than any binary distro. Binary distros are just a matter of unpacking a tarball, not very hard. Making sure a system is set up so that it will build a program correctly is much harder for a package manager.

Not many would believe that compiling a program is faster than installing it just think of OpenOffice as an example.

When people talk about Gentoo's speed, they are not talking about installation or compile time, but run time.

If you mean by building the system that you can copy and existing system to another drive I can't see what took years to understand it when the instructions are on the gentoo forum for years.

I'm not. The setup I have is very involved (consider about 20 key directories mounted from a fileserver over NFS, over 40 scripts that run on the cron, a complete local mirror, a single portage directory which is automatically synced, use of distcc, multiple separate local repositories of binaries that I build to my specifications for each arch, automatic synchronization scripts for user id's and group id's, distributed computing of transcoding over a mythtv network of 8 computers, a custom designed firewall/router with traffic shaping internally, automatic verification of dynamic linking consistency on a daily basis, automatic checking versus the linux security advisories and fixing if necessary, and a bunch more things.

The point is, all of this integrates only between the Gentoo systems. I can install an entirely new Gentoo system WITHOUT using cp or dd in under 30 minutes that is fully optimized to my system.