Gentoo. The truth behind the myth

Gentoo is a Linux and BSD distribution that has truly been counting since its founding in 2002, and not only is it one of the top 5 families in Linux, but its package management makes it somewhat unique.

Starting with its founder, we have a controversial free software personality, a down-to-earth man, a genius little known if not perhaps by some users in the Linux world. It's about Daniel Robbins.

Robbins began development of a Linux distribution in the late 90s, Enoch Linux. Its purpose was to create a distribution without binaries, adapted to the hardware and with only what was necessary. Robbins began to improve the compiler achieving a speed increase over the other distros, which led to the name change, Enoch Linux was renamed Gentoo, the fastest penguin breed. Soon its modifications to the compiler became part of all distros.

However, probably the most important fact that marked Gentoo was the very inspiration that Robbins found in FreeBSD. One day his computer had a major error, Robbins realized he had to redefine Gentoo. He stopped development and spent months using and mastering FreeBSD to find a way to improve it, finally creating the most advanced packaging system, the cornerstone of Gentoo, Portage

Who uses it?

Gentoo has always been a popular distro throughout its history, in 2002 when it was founded it was the third most popular distro, behind only the famous Mandrake (Mandriva) and Red Hat. Most people between the ages of 18 and 25, it stands to reason, as the doctor suggests:

I have to say that people I admire use Gentoo. There are currently 143,468 members registered in the forum, 1254.52 topics are generated per day and in total there are 5,817,231 topics

Young people

Nowadays a curious phenomenon occurs, most of those who use Gentoo are people between 25 and 35 years old, so 10 years ago they were people between 18 and 25. I think the reason for this is that the new generations, the so-called "Z" (to which I belong) we are more visual. We grew up with the Internet and it is natural that we hope that things are instantaneous, as with a simple touch of the smartphone.

Those of us between 15 and 19 years old are only 4% of those who use Gentoo according to a survey carried out on the site, even those who are less than 15 years old are still very small. In my opinion, the fact that there are few people under 15 years of age is because most of us know Linux in adolescence and Gentoo is a distro that you have to discover and try, although there is also a lot of misinformation among people and the younger it is. easier to get bored. So if you have questions, I will be happy to answer them. And cheer up.

Among the young people who have installed Gentoo we have Ayortan, He is a brilliant young man, he knows how to program, besides that it is one of his favorite hobbies, he is captivated by history themes and usually wears an avatar of an important Nazi engineer from WWII, I think he is one of the youngest people that He has installed Gentoo, at 15 he must have installed it already, I don't know him directly, but someone like him is worth mentioning. It is said that in the forum there is a 14 year old person who installed Gentoo.

People higher.

One of the interesting features of Gentoo is its group of users ranging from 30 to 60, these users represent 30% of the community, even more remarkable that it is possible to find people older than 60 years.

Roy bamford (neddyseagoon) is probably one of the oldest members of the community, he belongs to the Babyboomer generation, he is current president of the Gentoo Foundation and administrator of the Gentoo forum, he is an electronics engineer, he tells us that software engineers did not exist before, hardware engineers were the ones who created the software for a particular need.

Cesar Zalazar He is a great user, committed to free software, it is possible to find him in gnulibre and he is also a user of desdelinux. He is always willing to help and has a strong sense of personal and societal ethics. He has extensive knowledge of GNU/Linux and computer science. I can describe him as a virtuous person and a great colleague.

I can say that the Gentoo community is very rich and a dedicated community, they are willing to help their users, it is not a community where pride exists.

Gentoo Features. Arch, Gentoo in 10 minutes?

You've probably heard that Arch is a Gentoo in 10 minutes. That's what I thought before trying it:

Arch Linux forever, is the best distro that has ever existed and will exist, nothing compares to it, it is current, practical, neat, it has a super-wiki, with many packages and it does its job. Compile? I've done my research, currently compiling doesn't give any speed benefits. I think that an operating system is to serve the user, it is not very smart to spend time compiling if it does not matter with binaries, in any case if there is improvement, I do not think it is justified, I could spend my time on something else, right? Can we call this fanaticism?

Gentoo seems like an unprofessional, untrustworthy and unstable system, with a very divided community and I'm afraid I'm not on their "level" and that they will forget that I'm also a person who started out with doubts like anyone else and that I criticize for asking things you are supposed to already know. If you actually show me higher times it might start to interest me.

Maybe I can call it an academic distro, well the truth is, I've always wanted to know how light a system can be, I have a project in mind that Gentoo could help me with ...

When I started to install it through an experiment, I realized how impressive it was, it is not about performance but about possibility, it is a mechanism to shape your ideas, it is the way to transmute lead into gold, sources in binaries, this is, the philosopher distro. I realized all the prejudices I had of this distro and that it is easier to criticize without knowing.

I wanted us to get into perspective, finally, let's consider the following aspects:

Performance: Performance really increases when installed on low-resource computers, among other things applications take up less RAM and applications are less heavy. For example in Arch or Debian you could have 15 tabs open in Firefox and start having problems, in Gentoo you can probably have 25 and only then will the problems start. In my experience when Arch runs out of memory it will take longer to unfreeze than Gentoo.

Universality and Flexibility: It is the essence of Gentoo. Gentoo can be a powerful workstation, a distribution for gaming, an embedded system, a server, your desktop, used on your cell phone. In short it is self-describing with almost unlimited adaptability so that it can be adjusted to practically any need. It currently supports more architectures than Debian.

Stability and Bleeding: Gentoo offers stable and tested packages similar to Debian Testing. Furthermore, it offers different versions of packages such as the kernel, at the moment Gentoo supports the stable kernel series: 3.10, 3.12, 3.14. 3.16, 3.17, however it is very easy to tell Gentoo to use the newer kernel such as Arch Testing. In the same way, Gentoo can be instructed to use the newer versions of many programs and they will fit very well with the overall system.

Free: Gentoo is serious about freedom in its entirety, it is not an FSF endorsed distro, but thanks to Portage you can easily create a 100% free system with FSF approved packages if you want. Gentoo is the foundation of Ututo, the first distro to be recognized as 100% free by the FSF. "You even have the freedom to be free or not"

Init system: Gentoo by default does not use systemd, it uses Openrc which is quite similar to traditional init but improved, it supports parallelization as well as systemd among other things. This init system is the same that Manjaro uses and is fully integrated with Gentoo. In Gentoo it is also possible to install Systemd and use the two init systems interchangeably by selecting them in grub, having the system fully integrated for both.

Documentation: Gentoo has one of the most complete wikis in the Linux world, it will really allow you to learn a lot about how Linux works. Also the manual to install Gentoo is very well explained and is exactly the same translated in several languages.

Packages: Gentoo is one of the distributions with the largest software available, it has 37,166 packages at the time of this writing, compared to almost 60,000 for Ubuntu or Debian.

User Repository: Gentoo in a similar way to Arch's AUR, Chakra's CCR and the Slackware system has user repositories, the difference is that Gentoo maintains different repositories for different purposes, some have stable packages, others that are not yet ready to enter the branch Mainly, others are very specific projects, others complement Gentoo packages.

These are the main ones: Stuff, Swegener, and Sunrise, where it is the starting point to start contributing ebuilds.
All of this can be easily managed with layman.

Compilation

Gentoo is the best distro to compile, beyond what may seem obvious there are good reasons: Compiling in general requires dependencies to be installed, running at configure, make y make install. All of this is done automatically by Gentoo and only requires you to use "emerge" similar to how apt-get, pacman, yum, etc ...

If, for example, I want to install Firefox, I just have to run:

sudo emerge firefox

Also Gentoo includes a few binaries to save time: Firefox, Google Chrome, libreoffice, virtualbox

in that case I would run:

sudo emerge firefox-bin

Notice the ending bin

The compilation in Gentoo is very refined and really very reliable, it is very rare when something does not compile. They told me that in Debian using apt-build to use sources instead of binaries was not very polished, I cannot give this done although I can say that I tried in Arch the ABS (Arch Build System) to compile my whole system.

Despite a script available in the AUR, it also seems to me that Arch is not very polished when it comes to handling a 100% compilation based system. There were some bugs in compilation, and it lacks better handling of compiled packages.

The cornerstone of Gentoo: USE and Flags

So far you have known the basic use of Portage and its command line front-end emerge.

Thanks to the flexibility of Gentoo and the centralized configuration of Portage (/etc/portage/make.conf). We are able to build a package for the exact characteristics of our system and our needs. This is the so-called «FLAGS» and «USE» system.

What is a USE?

"USEs" are environment variables that Portage reads to know what features to compile:

If for example you ran:
export USE='gnome kde bluetooth alsa'

It means that when I do emerge PROGRAM KDE and Gnome support as well as bluetooth and audio (alsa) will be included if available.

There are two types of USES, global y individuals:

Global uses affect the whole system and all packages, to set them permanently they must be added in the file /etc/portage/make.conf in the line that starts with USE, for example mine:

USE = "jack -ipv6 -accessibility -qt4 -kde gnome -bluetooth bindist mmx sse sse2 dbus vim-syntax systemd -consolekit unicode policykit -networkmanager pulseaudio scanner dmx"

Particulars affect specific packages and must be written to /etc/portage/package.use per line, first the full name of the app-editors / emacs package, followed by the uses app-editors / emacs gtk gtk3 png images

Note that in / etc / portage are all portage settings

Thanks to the USE system we are able to specify a large number of configurable characteristics per package.
This greatly facilitates the administration and maintenance of the system and its flexibility in dedicating a system to a specific task.

If you don't know what each USE does, don't worry, you can always run:

equery uses PROGRAMA

this will tell you what each USE of the program does.

Inkscape installation example - same colors that would appear in a terminal -:

# emerge -p inkscape

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies ... done! [ebuild N ] dev-libs / boehm-gc-7.2e USE = "xxx -static-libs -threads"[ebuild N ] media-libs / sk1libs-0.9.1-r3 PYTHON_TARGETS = "python2_7"[ebuild N ] media-gfx / uniconverter-1.1.5
[ebuild N ] app-text / aspell-0.60.6.1 USE = "nls"LINGUAS ="-af -be -bg -br -ca -cs -cy -da -de -el -en -eo -es -et -fi -fo -fr -ga -gl -he -hr -is -it -la -lt -nl -no -pl -pt -pt_BR -ro -ru -sk -sl -sr -sv -uk -vi"[ebuild N ] app-dicts / aspell-en-7.1.0
[ebuild N ] media-gfx / inkscape-0.48.5 USE = "gnome lcms nls spell -day -inkjar -postscript -wmf"PYTHON_TARGETS ="python2_7"

*IMPORTANT: 13 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
* Use select news to read news items.

This is not a simple resolution of dependencies, but with a single package (inkscape in this case) we can have several possibilities
Let me explain:

To emerge I added «-p«, This option is to pretend that it does an installation, it shows you the changes it will make without making them, another option is -a (–Ask), is similar, only that it asks you if you want to continue or not.

At the beginning it appears in brackets ebuild N, ebuild refers to being installed from source code, Portage can generate binaries from what they install, but usually it doesn't, useful for reinstalling or having multiple computers with Gentoo. In that case it would appear as binary

Followed we have N, the second section tells us the type of operation, if it is updating (U), if it is new (N), if we are rebuilding it (R), or if there is a conflict blocking it from installing (B).

Then the package name follows with its version number, then the use variable appears where the uses to be included with red are the uses that are going to be included, and those that are not with blue, notice that the blue ones begin with a minus sign. There are also negative USES and they can use it to avoid some or some USES that come by default.
PYTHON_TARGETS it has to do with the python implementation to be used, you will probably never have to move it, so don't pay much attention to it for now.

Finally mention that there are 13 items that I must read, they are all the news from the last 3 years regarding important changes, I already read them, but I have not indicated it to portage. I think this is a feature that Arch's pacman should have.

Updated:

Gentoo update is different from other distros, it can be done superficially like using:

emerge -u world

to the most complete, which is:

emerge -uavDN –keep-going world

If in doubt, use the last form, then you will notice the differences. I recommend doing it daily if you can, and the best per week, at most every 15 days, no matter your processor, do not go over the month, you do not want to be manually resolving conflicts.

But even if they last 5 years without updating Gentoo they can do it, at least this article talks about how to update a normal one-year installation without updating:
http://gentoovps.net/gentoo-updating-old-system/

Graphic managers:

Gentoo has graphical package managers, there is porthole and himerge

Hymerge:

port hole:

I think now you know the basics to administer Gentoo, well understood this I don't think they have problems with masked packages, unstable, licenses, cleaning perl modules, toolchain updates, Python updates, solving package locks which is more easy than it sounds.

Time and difficulty

It is very common for Gentoo difficulty to be exaggerated, especially on image boards like 4-chan. I like to think that installing Gentoo is easy. Difficult is a very relative concept, very imprecise, if you compare it with Ubuntu it can be difficult, if you compare it with Arch it may not be easy or difficult.

There are 3 basic things that are needed to install Gentoo: some Linux experience, perseverance, as well as the processor. They all complement each other and what you lack on one side you can have on the other.

What do I do if my processor is low on power?

Someone with an average computer, with regular knowledge of Linux can get along very well with Gentoo, while someone with an Atom or Pentium 4 processor if it is going to take time and / or work to install them. But do not think that this is an obstacle, there are those who install it that way.

What I always recommended in these cases is to have a chrooted Arch installation on your Gentoo, so that you can install binaries in an emergency and run them with some script. Also if they can make a cluster with distcc, so they compile using several computers or a more powerful one. Why? Because after so many hours compiling you know that the performance is worth it, that your system is more secure and more flexible.

real life cases

In the forum someone commented how long it took to compile glibc for the raspberry pi, this is… interesting. Anyway, I like DJ_Dexter's blog, I'm amazed at how much it does despite its hardware, I don't know if it still has its Pentium 4, but it installed Gentoo on it. Below your desk from the official Gentoo contest you entered.

http://sc.gentooligans.com/image/djdexter/2011/07/12/djdexters-fluxbox-desktop

I had an Intel Atom, I really wanted to install Gentoo, wait for me when I have something more powerful? Am I going to let the situation dominate me? I dared to install it, I used it for many months as my only operating system.

Compiling the kernel took me 3 hours or more, what delayed me a bit is that I had to compile built-in kernel support for my SATA disk, and some options for the X server. It was two days of research. Exactly a year ago of that, also suddenly I did not know how to solve some conflicts, but insisting I was solving it, maybe it took me a total of 5 days to have a Gentoo with what I could need. It was a great experience.

But still I didn't give up and insisted on installing KDE later on on my own intel atom.

I only updated it once a month, updating with all KDE took 20 hours, even so it was only once a month, as I compiled firefox to have even more performance it was 8 more hours. So updating took me 30 hours. But I never had a problem with that, I even had an Arch in a folder in case I needed something emergency, I never needed it. I had everything I needed on Gentoo.

In Taringa Novatovich also joined #gentooinstallbattle by installing Gentoo on his netbook

Anyone can install Gentoo:

What is certain is that I have never heard of someone who started the Linux world by installing Gentoo, but if I know of someone who went from Ubuntu to Gentoo within a month of starting Linux, it is a hard experience, almost resembling when the prince Buddha, future heir to the throne, left the palace and took the life of a beggar to understand human suffering, how much pain the one who finally reached the enlightenment must have undergone to make special emphasis on the fact that extremes are bad.

I have come to say that to really learn you have to try the distros by difficulty, start with Ubuntu, continue with OpenSUSE, then Fedora, then Debian, then Arch, then Slackware, and finally Gentoo. LFS ?, maybe. Maybe I read it on a blog, but it is natural for humans to try harder things. Although I think we can simplify it to: Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo.

Installing Gentoo is like installing Arch, but adding the USES theme and package control, and the kernel.

Installation time

Most of those who install Gentoo do not need more than 24 hours to install it, the average to install it is 2 to 6 hours. Some require more than 10 hours, there are also those who require 2 to 7 days. It really is a myth that it takes months to set it up, I give them one day at most, and I'm taking a chance.

I can't tell you how long it takes someone who has never installed Gentoo to install it.

To cheat.

Something that consumes time is the configuration and compilation of the kernel, in this case you can download a kernel from sabayon and copy it to boot as well as the initrd, do not forget to download the modules and unzip them in / usr / modules, finally you will need the source code, they can temporarily add the sabayon-distro overlay and install sabayon-sources with a USE that prevents it from compiling.

You can also copy the kernel configuration from LiveDVD with:

zcat /proc/config.gz

And take advantage of other LiveDVD configurations to take less time to configure, but it would be a generic Gentoo and it would lack a lot of customization. Copying the contents of / etc / portage, later in the next section I will mention the NeedySeagon guide which can serve as a reference.

Have you heard of Funtoo?

Funtoo is a Gentoo-based distro, maintained and founded by the creator of Gentoo, some time ago the creator of Gentoo parted ways with the project. So then he created this distro that maintains certain innovations with respect to Gentoo. In this regard, it greatly simplifies the kernel installation, it is faster to update the portage tree, and it is said that its use is easier. Maybe you should start using this distro.

Program compilation time:

One of the references that it took to know how long each application takes to compile is to enter its Linux From Scratch page, in LFS some units called SBU are handled, it is a unit proportional to the time required, to obtain its equivalence you must compile a program and dividing it by the number of SBUs, that will give you the value of one SBU.

These are the programs that take me the longest to compile on an intel i7:

1. Chromium - 87 minutes
2. Libreoffice - 75 minutes
3. gcc - 37 minutes
4. firefox - 28 minutes
5. calligra - 22 minutes
6. wine - 18 minutes
7. vlc - 14 minutes
8. xbmc - 9 minutes
9. gimp - 9 minutes
10. virtualbox - 8 minutes
11. dev-libs / boost - 5 minutes
12. x11-misc / synergy - 5 minutes
13. gauge - 4 minutes
14. fretsonfire - 4 minutes
15. mpd - 4 minutes
16. pidgin - 3 minutes
17. seahorse - 3 minutes
18 perl - 3 minutes
19. transmission - 3 minutes
20. pavucontrol - 3 minutes
21. qsynth - 2 minutes

92% of programs take me less than three minutes to compile:
83 of the 193 programs that I have in / var / lib / portage / world took less than a minute to compile, 73 took about a minute, 22 about two minutes.

These times vary, in portage there is an option to keep parallel jobs which tries to optimize multitasking as much as possible, in /etc/portage/make.conf I add:
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS = »- jobs = 5 ″

It means that it maintains 5 parallel jobs such as download, ./configure, decompress, etc. and it is the one that gave me the best results. This option was not known to me and before that portage compiled applications one by one, so the time recorded was almost constant. For example GIMP when installing it separately takes 4 minutes, vlc also takes me 4 minutes.

These times are increased on a Core 2 Duo around 3 times, on an intel atom around 10 times, on a pentium 4 around 20 times, on a raspberry pi around 50 times.

Make estimates of how long it will take

Genlop is a good tool for making time estimates and getting information on past builds.

The following command shows the history of everything they have installed and when

genlop -l

This command displays the time it took to install the indicated program each time

genlop -t PROGRAMA

Genlop can also be used to calculate concrete operations like a system update, the total time with dependencies of a certain program, etc. I tried it to measure the time it would take to recompile my entire system on my i7, 1 day and 6 hours, consider that I use Gnome 3, Cinnamon, before I used KDE but I still have several applications that I like and I have not eliminated it completely ...

Example:

emerge -p firefox | genlop -p

Estimated update time: 0:23:36 23 minutes.

Where I used the -p parameter in emerge to pass it as output to genlop, which also has the -p parameter to calculate the time it will take, and practically any emerge operation can be passed to it.

Installation

Gentoo currently has a Live DVD With different desktops and window managers like Gnome 3, KDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, i3, XFCE and LXQT, by default it starts in KDE, but you can close section and choose another environment.

The difference with other distros is that this DVD does not have an installer, but it does not mean that they cannot install the LiveDVD, at least there are 10 ways to install Gentoo -which should not be used are crossed out-:

1. The official

2. From your Linux distro

3. Stage 1 (for developers)

4. Install LiveDVD

5. Use LiveDVD packages to install Gentoo Instant (Advanced)
See: https://dev.gentoo.org/~neddyseagoon/HOWTO_DVD11.xml, use as reference for method 6 as well

6. Use LiveDVD settings or other installation

7. Using scripts: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-950912.html

8. Install Lilblue which is a Gentoo flavor with XFCE officially released, updated weekly and ready to go

9. Extract Gentoo from a distributed virtual machine image

10. Install a Gentoo prefix on any Linux, MacOS, BSD, Solaris or any other POSIX system

Install LiveDVD

The fourth method is probably the easiest way to install Gentoo, but it is also the most strongly discouraged method. It is true, when you finish you will have your Gentoo 100% functional with most of the programs you may need, installing something may not be a big problem, but you will have a distribution that weighs 11GB, and a distribution with old packages.

Every new LiveDVD takes a long time to come out, one came out to celebrate 10 years of Gentoo and now that Gentoo is around 15 years old the new LiveDVD came out again. It means that if in 2016 they install it with this method, they must install 2 years of updates, since they are installing a Gentoo from a specific date, the date of the LiveDVD.

To install any distribution from a LiveCD or DVD, copy all the files to the new partition, the cp command is not enough, they require rsync to copy all kinds of attributes and permissions
for example with the following command:

rsync -aAXv / --exclu

Another option is to unzip the squashfs file directly to the partition.

Followed adjust the fstab and grub.

The Lilblue facility

This is truly a great alternative, as it is an official Gentoo image with XFCE, programs, and increased security that is updated weekly, it could also fit on a CD easily, however it is based on the Uclibc branch, Uclibc is a replacement from the main Linux library, glibc. Its main feature is that it allows making smaller programs from the same source code.
It implies totally breaking the compatibility of many binaries, for example if you want to download firefox and install it it will not be compatible, the same for java, etc ... It is also possible that some package does not compile successfully, etc ...

Plans for this flavor of Gentoo in the future is to create a repository of binaries, I highly recommend trying it either to get familiar with Gentoo, have a really lightweight system or be your main distro.

Download: http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo/experimental/amd64/uclibc/

Official installation notes

The official installation and from another Linux distro is practically the same, only the first steps change.

It is the method that I recommend the most, you can also use guided scripts that could even be more efficient than manual or normal installation, but you will learn less, it is also uploaded by users and no one will support you.

Know that to install Gentoo you do not need any guide, only the official manual, the Gentoo wiki and Google are enough, but a guide will be very useful for the tips they can provide, for example Tete's guide:

Gentoo Linux Step-by-Step Installation Guide

Personally, I do not use a guide and only use the manual to consult some specific things, I follow my own order.

recommended reading (2003)
http://es.tldp.org/Presentaciones/200309hispalinux/4/4.pw

I wish you good luck and encouragement, happy new year!