Is Gentoo still for me?

[Resurrection]

Deep in my heart, I love my stable and fast Ubuntu system.

However, as an experiment to learn and see something different I tried Gentoo. On a separate hard drive of course!

Well, my experience has not be positive. It took me a week just to get X to install correctly using portage, and that was the first thing I installed after putting in a bare functional system. Then, I was able to get GDM installed (after some effort) with the goal of using fluxbox. I never got that far. I have been distracted by the fact that system is unable to GLX with my nvidia GeForce 5500 card. Keep in mind that the same hardware runs Ubuntu 6.10 with Beryl flawlessly. And it ran Badger and Drake flawlessly as well. Gentoo forums and even nvnews forums have been unable to solve my mysterious "glx" failures.

But I really want to stick with trying Gentoo, because:
1) I don't like being beaten by a machine
2) I actually love the idea of portage. Being able to easily (somewhat true) and quickly compile software natively is the biggest draw to me.

I am only going to "play" with this setup, it won't be for any kind of daily use or production. Thats what Ubuntu is for!

So my question is, should I just try a reinstall (maybe something is so deeply borked that I won't find it)? Or give up? Or is there an alternative out there that gives me a Portage-like software management system that maybe won't break things the way that Portage and Gentoo sometimes can?

Seems like with linux distros you have three choices: Download source and compile on your own (ala LFS, which can be painful), use a Portage system to download and compile (removing some pain, but adding breakage), or use packaged software and managers (and possibly add bloat to your system). Is there some other choice I'm missing?

Of you other Gentoo users out there, have you ever been completely conquered by problems on the distro?

As a side note, this forum is more friendly than Gentoo forums. Did not have a personal bad experience there, but saw some people take a few beatings if you know what I mean. Thanks for that!

[pay]

You could try Sabayon. It's based on Gentoo but has everything setup for most users with kde and fluxbox installed.

[Rodneyck]

You might want to look over this post I started and look at the link in my initial post, it covers some of what you speak of in this thread.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=361550

To answer you question, you might want to start over again. I have read on forums where things do not configure properly or break, a complete re-install/re-compile can do the trick. Not sure why, but it does. I think this is mentioned in the article in that link, if I am not mistaken.

[maxamillion]

Gentoo is a brilliant distro and I must give credit where credit is due ... but I am truly too impatient to run it on anything I own.

[Rodneyck]

Originally Posted by maxamillion Gentoo is a brilliant distro and I must give credit where credit is due ... but I am truly too impatient to run it on anything I own.

LOL... I admire your honesty.

[Resurrection]

Thanks Rodneyck. I think I will give it one more try (just because I am already 70% through a reinstall right now ) but I don't have my hopes up. After reading the article you linked to, it would seem that gentoo reminds me of something else: I know some military guys who are tankers for a living (they operate abrams tanks). Tanks seem uber cool until after talking with these guys you realize that for every hour they spend "having fun" driving their tanks and shooting, they spend about 5 or 6 hours just doing maintenance. It would seem that Gentoo is that way. For every week you spend tweaking and experimenting, you seem to spend more weeks trying to figure out how to un-break the things that broke from an emerge.

I just wish once and for all, someone could settle definitively the myth about whether natively compiled software is faster or not. That is Gentoo's big drawing card, minimal size and max speed, but is it really true? I wonder............Then maybe we would all know if we are wasting are time compiling or not.

[rai4shu2]

In my experience, it depends on the hardware. Some CPUs are better with natively compiled kernels, and others see no real difference.

For example, if you're using a stripped down version of a P4 with a small level 1 cache, you would be better off optimizing for space than speed. It flushes the cache less often, and therefore gives you a huge speed improvement.

[runningwithscissors]

Originally Posted by Resurrection I have been distracted by the fact that system is unable to GLX with my nvidia GeForce 5500 card. Keep in mind that the same hardware runs Ubuntu 6.10 with Beryl flawlessly. And it ran Badger and Drake flawlessly as well. Gentoo forums and even nvnews forums have been unable to solve my mysterious "glx" failures.

Well, I saw your thread there. Getting GLX working is usully as simple as emerging nvidia-drivers and using eselect to set the nvidia driver to handle GLX. (eselect opengl set nvidia) and enabling the Load glx line in xorg.conf.

Originally Posted by Resurrection I am only going to "play" with this setup, it won't be for any kind of daily use or production. Thats what Ubuntu is for!

Well, I use Gentoo for daily production use _and_ for play

Originally Posted by Resurrection So my question is, should I just try a reinstall (maybe something is so deeply borked that I won't find it)?

No! Nothing is ever so broken with a Linux system so as to require a reinstall. Usually the problem can be tracked and solved without a reinstall.

Originally Posted by Resurrection Or give up? Or is there an alternative out there that gives me a Portage-like software management system that maybe won't break things the way that Portage and Gentoo sometimes can?

To be honest, maybe you just had some tough luck. I've known lots of Linux CDs refuse to work correctly for many people. Maybe you just hit bad luck with Gentoo.

Originally Posted by Resurrection Of you other Gentoo users out there, have you ever been completely conquered by problems on the distro?

Nope.
Currently I am battling my broken SELinux policy, but that is not something that is easy to set up to begin with. I am just not finding the time to read the reams of documentation to better understand it.

Originally Posted by Resurrection As a side note, this forum is more friendly than Gentoo forums. Did not have a personal bad experience there, but saw some people take a few beatings if you know what I mean. Thanks for that!

The Gentoo forums are known to be rather friendly. They were founded with an express desire to _not_ be like typical Debian IRC and mailing-list users (who were notorious back then for yelling at people asking the most innocuous of questions).
Yes there are a few people who have the #debian mentality (you shouldn't touch Gentoo without a copy of TFM) and they can be a bit abrasive to people who say stuff like, "but this works so easily in Windows", but overall they're as friendly as online forums can get.

[yabbadabbadont]

Originally Posted by runningwithscissors The Gentoo forums are known to be rather friendly. They were founded with an express desire to _not_ be like typical Debian IRC and mailing-list users (who were notorious back then for yelling at people asking the most innocuous of questions). Yes there are a few people who have the #debian mentality (you shouldn't touch Gentoo without a copy of TFM) and they can be a bit abrasive to people who say stuff like, "but this works so easily in Windows", but overall they're as friendly as online forums can get.

Just stay out of the "Off The Wall" forum and you should be fine. OTW is not nearly as heavily moderated as are the Cafe and Backyard here. Just FYI.

[runningwithscissors]

Originally Posted by yabbadabbadont Just stay out of the "Off The Wall" forum and you should be fine. OTW is not nearly as heavily moderated as are the Cafe and Backyard here. Just FYI.

Thanks. I'll try to cut down on my OTW trolling.