Gentoo not as reliable as before...

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

I'm new to posting to the forums (my first post), but have been using Gentoo for over a year now. I find it very stable, and very easy to use and keep up to date. Any problems I've encountered have been easy to solve by looking through the docs or browsing the forums. I always stick to packages considered stable, and never play with the masked ones.

In the past 4 months or so, it doesn't seem quite so easy to keep updated. I've noticed that every time I upgrade my system, it breaks something. Usually if I sync again after a couple of days it gets fixed, but this does tend to get annoying. The stability and reliability of Gentoo made me decide to get rid of windows, but now it doesn't seem quite so reliable. I guess I'm wondering if there has been some major change with the way things are declared stable, or if someone different is making these decisions now. Things just seem a little more buggy lately.

This is just a little food for thought from an average user who likes the distro, but is starting to wonder. Any feedback from the more experienced users, or just average users like myself, would be appreciated.

ciaranm · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 5:54 pm Post subject:

Are you running ~arch? Are you using dodgy CFLAGS? Are you running a broken kernel? Are you running a broken filesystem? Are you doing insane things in make.conf?

MdaG · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 6:15 pm Post subject:

I've been wondering why the attr and acl packages are switching from being a dependancy to not being needed at all (checked with emerge -p depclean)?

ciaranm · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 6:26 pm Post subject:

Oh, that? If you change core-system USE flags, expect to have to rebuild your system. If you're installing from a stage 3, use the same USE flags as the stage. This has always been the case.

MdaG · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 6:32 pm Post subject:

The only flags I've added are

USE="alsa cdr dvd dvdr imap nptl -kde -gnome "

Liquid · n00b Joined: 18 Nov 2003 Posts: 59

MdaG · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 6:39 pm Post subject:

I'm running the stable branch and I'm apart from my USE I'm using the defaults. I'm not having any problems at all, I just wondered about attr and acl.

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

Chaosite · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:07 pm Post subject:

Knowing ciaranm, what he is actually asking is:

Are you using CFLAGS that break executables?
Are you using a -love or -nitro kernel, or any other kernel with loads of mostly untested exprimental patches ?
Are you using Reiser4?
Is your make.conf similar to this one?

Seems like the answer to all of these is "no".

( What he is trying to do is rule out user brain damage. You seem to be talking about actual Gentoo problems that are not your fault, though )

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

wirwzd · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:47 pm Post subject:

When I was using ~arch things were getting a little wacky, but I believe that can be attributed to a pickup in the pace of development and growth over the past 6 months. Which is a Good Thing®.

Not surprising as after all testing is by its definition is "A procedure for critical evaluation; a means of determining the presence, quality, or truth of something". So more testing == better Gentoo.

Switching to stable arch and over to the new /etc/portage system has evened things out greatlyas well. Toned down the CFLAGS to "-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" and switched to the hardened toolchain. I was using "-O3 -ffast-math -mfpmath=sse,387 -march=pentium4 -pipe -fstack-protector-all"

On my laptop, most of the time I run the hardened kerenel with PaX/Grsecurity with fbspash/vesafb-tng patched in but switch between this, nitro, gentoo-dev-sources, and vanilla 2.6.11-rc1 with the ck patches, fbspash, vesafb-tng tossed in. My desktop and ultra-5 web/mail server run Gentoo as well.

There seems to have been much change lately, but it seems to be converging on a much easier to manage system (use flags, controlling updates, etc).

Also documentation has goten much better as well (except for maybe documentation of local use flags, but then again if you dont't know what it does, you probably shouldn't touch it :wink:

.Maybe someting like emerge -l for use flags?)

Note this is not directed at the original poster (as above they seem to be running a pretty vanilla setup) just my $0.02 on the current state of Gentoo.
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Keith Alan Landry
My Band: Twelfth of Never

titan100 · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2004 Posts: 61

I've not noticed this, I upgrade world every week, nothing has broken the last untold number of times. Most of the time when soemthing breaks, it's becuse I do something really stupid like rm some lib

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wirwzd · Posted: Sun Jan 23, 2005 8:16 pm Post subject:

Also, is most testing done with the 2.6 kernel/headers now?

Ive only been using gentoo for a few months and have never used the 2.4 kernel outside of my sparc server. I only do what's neccesary for security updates to this one.
_________________
Keith Alan Landry
My Band: Twelfth of Never

Pajarico · Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:05 pm Post subject:

crohnnie to me it seems like you screwed your /etc files. Did you do etc-update every now and then?
:wink:

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Doc7 · Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:31 pm Post subject:

i think i get crohnnie's point.

Lately there were more upgrades that needed manual intervention.

e.g.:
- problem regarding lidstdcc (or something), after last upgrade of gcc
- some broken snapshots, using emerge-webrsync
- about any kde-app "broken", when "-arts" did get a different behavior on kde-3.something
- some portage update, that wiped all use-flags
- kernel-2.6.9 had trouble with cdr
just to name some problems i realized.

These probs weren't really hard to fix most of the time, but at least they are annoying and prevent me from running updates unattended anymore

ohh... btw... i don't use any experimental use-/cflags either :roll:

krolden · Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2005 4:39 pm Post subject:

I've been getting the feeling that it's getting more unstable lately.
I use a pretty vanilla setup though.

I might put Debian (prolly Woody... yeah Woody) on this box. I simply need a stable box.

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

wirwzd · Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 2:22 pm Post subject:

Whats ironic about this discussion is right after I posted, my GCC was borked by the GCC upgrade/downgrade BS...lol.

But then again if I didn't have GCC marked for testing, I wouldn't have had the issue. So now I have it locked at gcc-3.4.3-r1 ~X86.

Was a pain to recover from
_________________
Keith Alan Landry
My Band: Twelfth of Never

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

As an example of my original point, I upgraded one of my systems to an AMD64 on an MSI Neo MB this week. I spent 3 full evenings and all day Saturday trying to get a reasonably stable system running on this box. I ran into no less than a dozen compile errors that I had to overcome before I could get the system to load gnome. The system was crashing regularly.

The solution that I finally came up with was to download and install Fedora. I spent 1.5 hours to configure and install the OS and boot into a functional desktop (gnome or kde, I installed both). This compares to several days to get an unstable desktop with Gentoo. I mean no disrespect to those who are dedicated Gentoo users, but sometimes a person just wants something that works.

I guess I'm just a little tired of fighting against my OS in order to be productive.

ciaranm · Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 11:12 pm Post subject:

crohnnie · n00b Joined: 23 Jan 2005 Posts: 9

Lokheed · Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 2:23 am Post subject:

People buy inferior mainboards and wonder why their systems are such a mess. Its the heart of your system guys...get quality, dont get cheap (yes I know there is worse than MSI, but its certainly not the most solid of boards). See the difference when you buy superior hardware.

I also dont understand how you spend an hour and a half installing a binary distro? It should take no longer than 10 mins. to copy the files from disk. Thats about it, you copy all the files and you are up and running. There is no extended install or extended partition formatting like Windows. Linux is basically setup with "cp". Aslong as the files are in the proper place, you are good to go. I setup up FC2 in 7 mins...

You shouldnt get mad at the hammer because you hit yourself in the thumb with it, but that is often the mentality of the person isnt it? You know how many posts I have seen where people swear up and down they hate Linux and Gentoo, and post back saying it was there mistake and now everything is peachy...

Gherald · Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 2:38 am Post subject:

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truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801