Why I'm dropping recommendation of Gentoo

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

Think about it if you position the scroll bar properly it will end up lining up with the text you are trying to read, but because it is pretty much stuck on the right side of the screen with LTR languages you end up having to line up the bar with the last word on a line and would basically have to read backwards in order to keep your place instead of being able to just line the bar up with the origin of the next line which would make it at least a bit harder for you to loose your place when reading.

Think of the scrollbar as a ruler or other straight edge that one might use to help line something up or focus on a specific area and you should better understand my point. Using your finger (or in our case the mouse pointer) isn't nessecarily the best way to keep place in text because the finger can easily drift to the wrong line the scrollbar can and does act as a stable straight edge that can be used to help maintain proper line position.

If you can't or shouldn't use the bar in this manner there is no real point to even having the scrollbar at all because it is very easy to tell when something can move down more. Besides half decent browsers allow one to scroll with the space bar or up/down arrows or pageup/pagedown keys, and it is increasingly more common to have mice that have scroll wheels. Also there are methods of emulating scrollwheel functions with a mouse that only has two buttons or even one button. [Mouse gestures, the "right" way to use a pointing device.]

The only other way I can think of to address the issue is to take a page from programming text editors and provide a way for the active line to be highlighted without the user having to "physically" select the text with the mouse but I am unsure how complicated such a method would be and it is (should be) far easier to just change the position of the scrollbar for most programs even though active line highlighting is theoretically far more effective assuming it could be implemented.

As it is if I can't move the scrollbar to make it useful I would like be able to just turn it off entirely in the programs I use as its current position renders it completely useless.
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SnEptUne · l33t Joined: 23 Aug 2004 Posts: 656

Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

Thats an interesting idea you floated about the FS hierarchy it'd be interesting to see if it could be pulled off.

The fact that not all languages are LTR is the reason that the user should have total control over where the scrollbar is positioned without me having to destroy my localization [this is assuming that changing my locale would result in the scrollbar position changing.] which is what I really want.
_________________
Ware wa mutekinari.
Wa ga kage waza ni kanau mono nashi.
Wa ga ichigeki wa mutekinari.

"First there was nothing, so the lord gave us light. There was still nothing, but at least you could see it."

W3BMAST3R101 · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 197

supernov · Apprentice Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 164

Very much so indeed. Although I've had my share of problems with Gentoo as well, it is still my choice of distro.
When I tried some of the others, I got the feeling of a better running system, but less control over it. Perhaps not justified, but Gentoo simply expects you to have some knowledge about your entire system. And I like that, I like to learn and to become technically an expert. It takes huge amounts of time, but it benefits one so much for the future, when Linux becomes really popular, I can solve (and probably any Gentoo-user) almost all problems people might encounter when using a Windows-like-easy-to-use Linux system. Voila, new job!

That being said, it makes Gentoo a little bit of a hobby-system. But if you have a completely stable core, don't try to have everyting bleeding edge...no reason for it whatsoever, just update a major software package now and then. It's all about trying to sooth the human urge of the "Gimme gimme gimme! Shiny shiny shiny new!"-factor.

Mgiese · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1626 Location: indiana

muhaaa , getting tired of these people...they should learn how to learn

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Drysh · Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 1:58 am Post subject:

QUESTION: Is Gentoo ready for professional environment? Should I recomend it:

1. For a server running mission critical applications?

2. To be used as desktop computers in an office?

Or is Gentoo mission to be a great distribuction to learn Linux, but not the best to run on your production server?

I used it at home, but I switched to something else (I didn't say godbye, I just left). When I left it wasn't ready to be used professionaly -- I want to know if things changed. I won't say what are the problems (you know what they are).

Mgiese · Veteran Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 1626 Location: indiana

jonnevers · Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 2:28 pm Post subject:

Drysh · Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 8:20 pm Post subject:

Possible: Yes
Easy: No

Sorry, I need a system easy to manage. If you said that the problems with using Gentoo in a production enviroment are solved, I would try. But saying it is possible won't solve my problems (and neither convince my boss). Debian for production, Gentoo to play.

Thanks.

Phk · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:26 am Post subject:

Drysh você tá maluco cara

Debian é para meninas, muahahaha

Gentoo rocks. For me. It's religious. I have no choice.

Come on guys, so many distros out there. Choose your one. Give your suggestions. But.. Don't write this crap

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Onkobu · n00b Joined: 10 Oct 2005 Posts: 36

jonnevers · Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 2:22 pm Post subject:

Monkeh · Veteran Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 1656 Location: England

JeroenV · Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:13 am Post subject:

@alistair

actually that tag based filesystem is a nice idea...

metacircular-evaluator · n00b Joined: 09 Jan 2007 Posts: 8

To all the people here, who again and again say that someone has not to update all the time his Gentoo system:

This is simply not true!

You have to update, just because of security reasons. (And with update here I mean to get the new portage tree.)
And with every new portage tree I get new versions of the packages. That is the problem with Gentoo.

If I install a Gentoo server with only the - so called - stable packages, and then just look out for security updates,
and such a security update comes then I get in Gentoo a whole new package - the new version of the package with
the security fault patched out -. And in many - if not most - times this new package brings in new libraries.

If I want a setup a server then this server has to have only the same packages with the same version compiled with always
the same compiler and so on.

Tell me, please, how you can establish something like that in Gentoo.

Ohh, is not possible?

Then don't always tell the people that it is possible to make a server. Yes, it is possible to set up a computer that responds to
requests over a network. But this is not a server. A server has some more quality factors.

So with that all said: This very long thread here just shows the wish of all the Gentoo people who want to run a real server
- not just a responding machine - with their favorite distro to the Gentoo developers that finally a real stable portage tree is needed.
We want Gentoo on the real servers, we want to run our favorite distro.
But not with the ever updating portage tree.

JeroenV · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:46 am Post subject:

I have been running a Gentoo windows domain PDC (samba, LDAP, fileserver, proxy, gateway, app-server) with 10+ clients in a production environment for more than 3 years with very little maintenance requirements (average 2h/month?), administering it remotely for 95% (from 500 km distance), with almost no problems.

I don't see the problem in updating libraries or the system in general, since the dependency system of portage is quite robust, and changes are usually small. In worst case you'd have to rebuild a package depending on an updated library, and even that is semi-automatic (revdep-rebuild), or slightly change a config file.
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jonnevers · Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2007 2:28 pm Post subject:

nebula8080 · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2005 Posts: 6

sageman · Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:23 pm Post subject:

jonnevers · Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 2:26 pm Post subject:

golding · Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2007 1:41 pm Post subject:

LockeAverame · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Jul 2003 Posts: 108

Hi,

i'm also a systemadministrator and i want to say that what labrador is thinking is not always correct. He forgets one thing. In binarydistributions like debian you have a really big distribution update after two or three years where you have to update all packages and test it. This also leads to informing and supporting the users which things changed what can nearly be everything including removed or exchanged packages. I had this nightmare now for some systems like servers and clientmachines running suse or debian.
With binarysystems you need the same testingeffort as with source based distributions like gentoo, because not every update works as well as one thinks, history can tell you.
Syncing clients or servermachines with rsync and such is normal, the distribution does not matter in this case. The only extra burden is compiletime and majorchanges but only for a small amount of packages if you regularly update. So the testamount can be nicely handled. The incremental update nature of gentoo never leads to the updatehell of binarydistributions which is one of the things why we use gentoo. Flexibility is also a good point as is security. I don't know how much distributions really use ProPolice or a hardened kernel with a hardened toolchain but debian is not doing it. Gentoo can be optimized to a minimalistic and quite secure and stable system without outdated packages. And especially if you want to use a specialized apache for your needs you can ignore the binarypackage of it in nearly all cases, they are mostly compiled to crap.
Well the only problem which really is annoying are stable packages which don't work as expected because they don't compile or their testsuite failes especially on a hardened system. The high maintainance other talk about here is not really so much as one thinks, i only need one day for updates of all clients and servers including compiling/testing/rollout, the rest of the week is other special work like migration to gentoo. Well, we wrote quite some scripts to get a better automatism, this would be needed for other distributions too. So to sum up, i would say gentoo can be a very good distribution in production work if you need high flexibility and high security with only a medium to low maintainance all the time not only until the next distributionupdate which does not exist for gentoo.

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

LockeAverame · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Jul 2003 Posts: 108

You are absolutely right Syntaxis it depends very much on the needs of the system. For developer machines a gentoo system is often a better choice because of newer development tools against which the selfmade software can be tested against as for example sun-jdk-1.6 which can be nicely integrated thanks to java-config. For debian this mostly leads to a complete selfcompiled packagetree which we have for one machine (we will switch it). Yeah i know of the alternatives approach in debian but it is not so nice developed as the java-config part in gentoo which allows very fine grained control of which jre/jdk shall be used in which environment. Well one point with source based distributions is the maintainance afford if there are major toolchain upgrades, but this happens quite rarely especially on hardened. As others have said, tomcat is not working on sparc, well this is a special case. The sparc architecture is very new for the gentoo system and there are not very many users/developers on this platform. It's an example of the lack of manpower in gentoo so one can't blame them for this. It's really bad that i don't have the time as of now to support gentoo more in this approach as a developer.

cu