Meshta Ankarith

Last week I decided that my Linux box steorragaet had become far too messy, and that it was time to retire the install of Red Hat 9.0. I have been meaning to try out Gentoo for a while, attracted to it by the control and optimisation it offers. So, I backed up some stuff over the network, checked a few times for anything I’d missed, then rebooted the machine with the Gentoo 2005.0 CD in the drive.

The install was uneventful and easy. I opted for the stage 3 install, since the machine is primarily just a web server accessed mostly by me, and not in need of high optimisation. Furthermore, I was in somewhat of a hurry, and the machine is not the fastest thing you’ve ever come across. It’s very nice that iiNet provide a Gentoo mirror so that I can get all the packages without counting against my download limits. I just followed the installation guide, which was straight forward and simple.

The most annoying problem was trying to emerge PHP 5, some of the features of which I do actually use. Try as I might, no amount of package.use-ing or package.unmask-ing would let me get the PHP 5 Apache2 module. In the end, I had to unmerge what had installed, and use the download from php.net. Undesirable, but at least it works. Anyway, everything else has installed perfectly through the Portage system, and I find it so very much easier and less painful than RPM or compiling ‘automanually’. For instance, the other day I found I needed a plain FTP client to upload some stuff. I just typed emerge -av ftp, upon which Portage told me exactly what would be installed (including dependencies) and with what compile options, then after confirmation, downloaded, compiled and installed FTP. Simple. Easy. Fun.

The Gentoo Wiki’s HOWTOs are very useful, but in many cases they don’t cover the particular configuration one is after. This is understandable, and the backup brain is always useful in such situations.

So in the end, I find that everything works noticeably faster, there is no longer any cruft build up, and stuff works that never worked before. The install wasn’t nearly as difficult as some say, though I’m not without some prior knowledge and experience.

Gentoo is good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.