Is Gentoo right for me?

Coign · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 46 Location: Vail CO

I am a Windows savvy person who has worked at an ISP where we specialized in Solaris servers and briefly did a stint with some old Red Hat Mail Server we inheritied. My job was Network Operations Engineer and I specialized in Cisco routers and basic maintanaence and upkeep of our Sun server side queries and scripts we ran to verify our routers and network stayed running and stable. (MRTG is what I am talking about here.)

I am a vi user and although I can not write a script I can debug one. I am familer with basic shell commands and had gone as advanced as creating some custom commands to activate in my shell. (For my ssh sessions mainly.)

I have since been laid off from my Networking job about a year ago after putting 5 years of my life there. Now I want to expand my knowledge. I consider myself a computer litterate user but a Linux newbie. Although I have worked on UNIX/Red Hat servers I have never installed, or been responsible for setting up new modules/programs/server security.

I am looking for a distro that will teach me some backend command line scripts while be friendly to use. I want to install an Apache server, a MySQL server, a GUI desktop, and have it run on a 450 MHZ with 256 ram. It need not be a true screamer as the only user to be visitng my web server/network server will be me.

I want it to recognize my GeForce video card, 3 Com network card, SMC router/firewall, recognize/utilize IP chains, be an FTP server and make coffee.

Basically I want to move from a career as a Network Administrator to a career as a Server Administrator. Other ditros I am considering are Debian, GNU Linux, Mandrake, and FreeBSD.

So, is Gentoo the distro for me?
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<oz> i wonder if i can get a gentoo as a pet
<oz> they are so cute
<ph1zzle> man, that is cute
<ph1zzle> I wonder what they taste like

metallikop · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 12:49 am Post subject:

Of those you listed, Gentoo will be the most difficult to get set up. On the other hands, there are plenty of rewards to using Gentoo. You could say you'd learn a lot of the 'backend' more with Gentoo, but rarely do you ever have to use this. The procedure of bootstrapping and the such from a stage 1 install is a bit unnecessary IMO.

Debian would be my choice if I was just getting in to Linux. You'll learn tons either way. Debian's packages aren't as up to date as Gentoo's, but if you just want to set something up to run at home for practice, they should suffice. Both distros has their up and downs.

If you don't mind waiting around for packages to compile, Gentoo is probably a good choice, and Gentoo has great user forums. If you want a fully working distro in (hopefully) 30 minutes, go Debian.

With Debian you can have XFree with Gnome, mysql, apache, ftp, iptables, etc. all set up in under an hour. Gentoo, expect all that to take around a day or so.

The choice is yours, if you have any more questions, you know where to go.

vega · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 12:53 am Post subject:

I think it may be, my friend.
I've always used RedHat, Mandrake and FreeBSD and after getting too disappointed with RedHat I started to look for a Linux distro that could be fully customizeable to my needs.
I won't lie to you, I'm a newbye to Gentoo but am having a lot of fun with it. The comunity is great, portage is a bless, most of the problems I had were rapidly solved with the help of this forum and #gentoo on freenode.
I have done a stage 3 install cos I can't afford waiting too long to get my system running but already learned a lot doing it. As soon as you start using it you'll see that's not difficult to learn and everything makes sense.

See, I'm a web developer and consultant, not in the server administration buziness but I enjoy learning those things and Gentoo is providing me a great experience.
Go ahead and give it a shot!

agent_jdh · Veteran Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Posts: 1783 Location: Scotland

Why not? Jump in and see. You'll certainly learn more about Linux by installing Gentoo than by installing Mandrake or something. As it's a slower box, you might want to look at a stage 3 install and maybe using precompiled packages, but for the full-on Gentoo effect go stage 1 if you are prepared to wait a while to get things up and running.

Debian was my first linux distro, over 5 years ago now. It was good, and maybe the best choice if you want to go for a precompiled package based distro rather than Gentoo. I still run it, but mainly as backup in case Gentoo breaks. It'll still teach you a lot about Linux, heh, I don't think the installer has changed in all that time you know.

FreeBSD I ran for a few years as well, although it doesn't work with my current (new) hardware. I actually thoroughly enjoyed FreeBSD, and again like Gentoo (and Debian as well to be honest) there is a steep learning curve, but then you get the satisfaction in your self of having learned something rather than just clicked a few boxes during installation.

All three would be ideal; why not be greedy, and install them all?
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Coign · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 46 Location: Vail CO

Well the reason the box is so slow is it is an old/second PC I have not booted in over a year so it is not like I will lose my outlet to the outside world if the install takes forever. Heck when doing a Windows install it takes me a day because of the 400 meg patches and softeware I have to load on it to make it more secure.

One of the things that attracted me to Gentoo is it ability to update it easily once installed. And the fact that most people remark that it uses the latest kernel/modules.

Alright I will probably start setting it up this weekend, or at least start reading the documentation. Expect to hear from me again on the forums in the near future and thanks for the input.

P.S. One of the biggest attractions to Gentoo was reading the posts on this board and the posts on justlinux.org. It seems the Gentoo community seems friendlier and more willing to help noobs than some of the other distros/boards I have been to.
_________________
<oz> i wonder if i can get a gentoo as a pet
<oz> they are so cute
<ph1zzle> man, that is cute
<ph1zzle> I wonder what they taste like

teknomage1 · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 2:41 pm Post subject:

i say install them all and tiple boot...well actually in all seriousness I learned tons from Gentoo when I tried to follow the "Virtual Mail Hosting" guide. So my advice to you is in addtion to installing and playing with a ditrobution go ahead and set what seems like an ambitious goal and work towards it. The process of problem solving is often much more informative and helps direct you towards what you need to know.

Fitzsimmons · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 3:49 pm Post subject:

Dr Gonzo · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 5:40 pm Post subject:

I don't want to sound like a spoiled sport, but on a 450 MHz box, Gentoo is going to be miserably slow to install. I, personally, love it, but I think if I had anything less than a 1GHz processor, I'd probably crawl out of my skin.

As far as a good learning distribution goes, Debian can be pretty good. However, I actually switched to Gentoo because Debian testing contained, at least when I was installing, a number of broken packages that eventually made it impossible for me to get in to X. I just about threw the damn monitor through the window.

So, which one should you install? I think you should consider Slackware. It's simple, meaning that it is mainly configured through scripts. The scripts are, in fact, very well documented. The user community on the linuxquestions.org Slackware forum is second only to this one. It's not too hard to update, especially now that there are programs like slapt-get (a slackware port of apt-get) and swaret, another tool that lets you update easily. Slackware puts out a new release ~every 6 to 9 months, but you can run from their current tree (using swaret, perhaps) and keep on the relative bleeding edge. Maybe not quite so bleeding edge as Gentoo, but Pat Volkerding (the creator/maintainer of Slackware) almost never patches software and doesn't let it into current until it's pretty much stable. Slackware was the only distribution, before I installed Gentoo, that I wasn't frustrated with when I left it -- just anxious to try something new. That's when I went to Debian.

Don't mean to be an advertisement for Slackware here, and if you don't mind waiting for a couple of days for your Gentoo installation to finish, go right ahead. However, you can learn just as much on Slackware as you can on Gentoo. The choice is yours.
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metallikop · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 7:03 pm Post subject:

I'm definitely with docGonzo2000 on this one. Gentoo will be way too slow on your PC. Yes, it'll run fine, but compiling will take a long long time, especially to get a working X environment, unless you want something minal. Just forget about openoffice (unless you use the binary packages).

Gentoo is a great distro, but not for a slower PC. Debian still gets my vote.

PowerFactor · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 8:40 pm Post subject:

metallikop · Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject:

ShockValue · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 137

It's ironic that the slower the machine is, the more benefit it would have from running gentoo (cflags, use flags, less bloat), yet the slower the machine is, the less likely someone is to install gentoo on it...

I have gentoo running on a 400mhz, 800mhz, and 3 2.66Ghz machines.

DISTCC is a godsend

rowdy · Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2004 9:06 pm Post subject:

I'm running Gentoo on a PII 300Mhz, with 196 Mb ram... And it's fast enough to even run Gnome...

I'm using it as a webserver, router, firewall, and it's running much faster then my Win2K server was...

And I can really recommend it, I learned so much this last few weeks, and indeed, the Gentoo-community, and the people on this board are GREAT!

Thnx to those wo did help me with my questions...

dreas · Guru Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 359 Location: Germany

A full gentoo-X-gnome install takes less than a day on my P3-700 laptop, so what?! And with 256MB RAM you will be able to run gnome perfectly well, I'm sure. When I had only 128MB it was a bit heavy on the swap usage and went hick-up a lot though. I'd say with 160+ MB RAM you're set to run anything on that box.
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alpox · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 5

I have a p3-733 system and Gentoo runs great. Yes, it took like 16 hours to fully emerge KDE but it's not like I was in a rush. I've learned a ton about Linux by installing Gentoo. I have even upgaded to the 2.6.5 kernel from 2.4 just using the help on these message boards. Everyday I sit down to give myself a new challenge on this box to get me to learn even more. This computer used to be my old win 98 system that I hadly ever used. Now I use it constantly. If I had just used Redhat or Mandrake I'm sure I wouldn't have learned nearly as much. If you have patience and the desire to learn Linux, Gentoo is a great distro.

Dire Penguin · Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:57 am Post subject:

Too slow? No way, Gentoo flies on my Celeron 400. Sure compiling takes a long time, but I can do other tasks at the same time and I notice no slowdowns whatsoever. The 2.6 kernel rocks.

Installing Gentoo took a while, but you only have to install Gentoo once unlike Windows. ;-)

ed0n · Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2004 11:10 am Post subject:

Gentoo is right for everyone that likes to run it.

ebrostig · Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2004 6:05 pm Post subject:

On an old machine, I'd recommend going with GRP and then, gradually, upgrade the system when new versions beceome available through emerge of the source packages. this way you'll ahve a working system really fast and benefit from the unique features of Portage.

Erik
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rmbalfa · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 9:01 pm Post subject:

Only one way to find out, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

playfool · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 9:02 pm Post subject:

Dr Gonzo · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 9:55 pm Post subject:

OK, well, I agree now with those who do recommend installing it on slow machines. I installed Gentoo (finally) on my P3 500 laptop, and it's much faster than any distro I've tried in the past on that slow-ass hardware.

I just hope the original poster actually read all of this...
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"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."

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WaterSoul · Apprentice Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 158

Oh , putting Gentoo with gnome with stage 3 grp optimized for P2 on my P2 400 mhz took 45 minutes... Then when you do nothing, like sleeping, you can updates some packages, or if you go out for a week just redo the stage 2 ( emerge system )

If you use the possibility of portage, you can easily control your compilations, using -pv to know what packages will emerge and with time, you will know that when you're looking at the code size, how many time will it takes to compile. example : I know that 5mb of source takes about 5-10 minute to compile while I do ? and ? things meanwhile on my ???mhz computer. With gentoo you'll learn how to KNOW your PC much better.

PS: My 400mhz runs as a desktop with fvwm and is much faster than running winxp with a 800 mhz cpu. I haven't tested mandrake but I think it would be kinda slow... Mandrake is usually always slow, no matter where I try it.

Also, if you choose Debian, to get it easily up just install Knoppix on the harddrive

It will end up into a Debian distro with all the Knoppix apps already in, really handful!