I successfully installed Gentoo for the first time today!

H2207@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 471 points –

Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info

I followed Mental Outlaw's 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.

I'm planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.

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How much maintenance does Gentoo need once installed? I don't mind a complicated install but it's the constant tinkering I can't deal with.

If you've done arch, it's like long arch

Gentoo probably doesn't have all packages. One of the reasons I love Arch is because it almost always has any package in the AUR. It's a lot more work to try and get something installed on Ubuntu related distros. They try to keep up by using snaps and stuff but it's still no comparison. Arch has everything.

Still it's gets a bit boring now since I know it so well, so want to try Gentoo at some point also.

Nix has entered the chat.

And one day I'll figure out how to use it.

Gentoo has overlays which are similar to AUR, I haven't felt like I'm missing packages compared to when I ran arch

Ok cool, even more interested in trying it now.

one of the reasons I love gentoo is how easy it is to package things for it.

You know how for pkgbuilds you have to explictly write out the whole configure make make install stuff that pretty much every package uses some variation on? Gentoo abstracts that out to libraries (eclasses) that handle that sort of thing for each build system so you can focus down on anything unique to the package, like build system options.

Also sounds really cool.

Heres an example, ebuilds are named package-version.ebuild and that version in the filename is used to define variables (such as $P here which is the name-version) to make new versions as simple as copying the ebuild with the new version in the filename.

use_enable is used to generate the --enable-(option) or --disable-(option) as set by the user.

For more info, see the devmanual. They're nice relatively straightforward bash like PKGBUILDs, but with the repetitious stuff taken out.

# Copyright 1999-2022 Gentoo Authors
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

EAPI=8

DESCRIPTION="GNU charset conversion library for libc which doesn't implement it"
HOMEPAGE="https://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/"
SRC_URI="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/${P}.tar.gz"

LICENSE="LGPL-2+ GPL-3+"
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~amd64 ~ppc ~sparc ~x86"
IUSE="nls"

RDEPEND="!sys-libs/glibc"
DEPEND="${RDEPEND}"

src_configure() {
	econf $(use_enable nls)
}

Try lfs

Yeah I did when I was new to Linux, several times. It was an awesome learning experience.

I've done Arch a couple of times but don't care to ever do it again to be honest. Maybe I'll try Gentoo one day.

It's pretty maintenance free.

The following will make the experience a bit more seamless:

  • use stable packages
  • use sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel or syskernel/gentoo-kernel-bin
  • use sys-boot/grub or better yet sys-boot/refind which auto-recognizes the latest kernel in your boot directory

I don’t mind a complicated install

After you have "installed" Gentoo there will be quite lot of installing of different programs to build your own customized distro. However if you yse systemd you'd get quite a lot in one strike, since systemd contains a whole lot of the central core components, like system logger (journald). The other route is to use OpenRC and with it sysvinit or openrc-init and choose the rest of the components.

Asking your question (the one I'm replying to) at the Gentoo forums may give you better answers and tips how to build maintenance free setup.

Afaik, albeit this system is only like 6 hours old, just an updating everything should be enough. Again though, I've still never ran Gentoo semi-permanently nor on bare metal so I can't really help you out there.

@Carter @H2207 You don’t really have to tinker with any distro. Once you set it up just let it be with a schedule of updates that fits your usecase. If you feel compelled to constantly update and rejigger, that’s you, not the distro. I have a Mankato machine that has been sitting for a couple of years with monthly security updates.

I installed Arch last week and it crashed within hours and then refused to boot due to an fstab issue. I switched to openSUSE and haven't had any issues.

Not much. Updates take a bit longer because you're compiling, although Gentoo now has an official binary package host if you want to skip that step - you'll only compile things that you've changed compile-time features to the extent that they don't match the binhost now!

You don't need to constantly tinker to keep the system running, at least, news is good for major changes, and we have a good 'config file changed' system.

Gentoo now has an official binary package host

With some limitations:

The binhost packages have the USE flags set as in an unmodified 17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd profile (with the exception of USE=bindist). The packages can be used on all amd64 profiles that differ from desktop/plasma/systemd only by USE flag settings. This includes 17.1, 17.1/desktop/*, 17.1/no-multilib, 17.1/systemd, but not anything containing selinux, hardened, developer, musl, or a different profile version such as 17.0.

Oh, I'm not talking about the experimental one. Keep an eye on news.

Haven't seen any news about it.

I don't have anything concrete to point you at, only conversations with developers, but the binhost project seems to have produced an official binhost that is just pending documentation and the formal announcement. :)

Edit: There's a cool graph here that seems to line up with when I figure the non-experimental binhost started coming online with package numbers and things: https://www.akhuettel.de/~huettel/plots/mirrors/binpackages-month.png