Mass Gentoo Installation vs. Ubuntu???

annunaki2k2

Hi everyone,

I have a problem:

At work (a big university in London), I have been asked to research and prepare/demonstrate a managed Linux desktop solution. The specification is very weak and subject to change, but basically It will have to be:

I have a few ideas on how I want to do this, but the issue is: they want to use Ubuntu.

I should clarify; "they" means my colleagues who will have to use and maintain it. As far as I can tell there is no specific reason for this other than they have heard good things of it, it has regular releases and it uses the well known debian package managment system.

Being a Gentoo devote, obviously I'm not happy with this. I want to use Gentoo because I understand the simplicity and flexability of the portage system.

I need to be able to argue a very strong case here becuase otherwise I am on my own.
I'm sure it's been asked/discussed before, but what are the pro's and con's as you see them of gentoo versus ubuntu?

To make a start:-

If I am wrong and Gentoo isn't better than ubuntu at this then I am perfectly willing to back down, so honest answers please.

Thank you all for your time.

Hopefullly you will succed in helping me increase the Gentoo population.
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Ctrl+Alt+Del · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 326 Location: .de

I use Gentoo and Ubuntu, and tbh i would go for ubuntu in that particular case.
I have never deployed Linux Workstations on a large scale, but i fear maintenance cost will be a lot higher with gentoo unless everything is perfectly planned.
-There is a lot more documentation on large scale deployments for Ubuntu/Debian
-Overall Ubuntu has a more polished Desktop experience out of the box, Gentoo needs more tinkering.
I love Gentoo for it's flexibility, but i think for a room full of boxes that should simply work ubuntu is the better choice.

anello · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:53 am Post subject:

Go with Ubuntu!!!

Gentoo is by far the best linux distribution out, but if it comes to desktops its always a question of who will use and administrate it. Like Ctrl+Alt+Del said, its alot of tinkering to get Gentoo to run everything like its supposed and you want it to. Ubuntu runs "out of the box" and it also got special deployment features afaik, so its definitely the better choice for this purpose.
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BRPXQZME · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:06 am Post subject:

DISCLAIMER AND BACKGROUND: I maintained 40 Debian systems concurrently last year and hated every minute of it. I use Gentoo even in places where it really shouldn't be used.

Apt-based systems are far more suited to the task in my opinion, as much as I hate to say it. At my high school (I just graduated, but it will be awkward to use the past tense here, so just bear with), we currently run LTSP off an Ubuntu system (although I don't know what they're cooking up for next year; since they just got a grand-spanking-new 8GB RAM multiple AMD64X2 machine to run it or something like that, I think the guy in charge of that is considering Gentoo just for the sickness of WHEE IT COMPILED IN 40 SECONDS OMFG LOVE).

The crown jewel of the school's computing system is the Linux lab, which runs Debian workstations of varying hardware configurations that we "image" (using systemimager; we can netboot them, too, but that doesn't use rsync and takes a long time for a potential 20GB image).

Basically, APT has a bunch of automagical stuff that makes a lot of the administration hands-off, especially with the different hardware stuff. We had a sysadmin a couple of years back who made even more automagical stuff that we dubbed satanic black magick-with-a-k and we basically started the whole system from scratch and it worked plenty fast (NOTE: if you do it right, it is hard to distinguish the performance of a Debian system and a Gentoo system just by doing normal usage of the system; if you do it WRONG, the Gentoo system is actually annoyingly slower, then again, you can also make the Debian annoyingly slower, but I have no idea how to do that. A lot of it probably had to do with the aforementioned black magick-with-a-k). One of the things we did to get rid of the need for More Magic(tm) was to uniformly use NVIDIA video cards throughout the lab. I wasn't involved in redoing the system (I was lazy among other things

), so I can't tell you what work went into ensuring the correct hostkeys and stuff (which is one of the only annoying problems when doing a lab with an imaging system like that according to the people who did do it). Did I mention we use Kerberos logins and AFS homedirs just to make it even harder on everything?

In the end, though, since we really don't need any of the features Gentoo affords (and also because it's way easier to clean out leftover APT packages than Gentoo stuff), Debian works great, because it's pretty stable, runs fast as it needs to (admittedly, we aren't exactly running a render farm or anything, but we do at least teach supercomputing applications and you don't need USE flags or ricer kernels for that), can pull the correct version of NVIDIA drivers in and out in a jiffy, only needs an apt-get update apt-get upgrade 99% of the time (because the guy who set it up wasn't a moron, unlike the sysadmins who made the image I maintained and probably got ulcers from), can pull new images in the time it takes me to emerge --sync, can easily run various profiles of different systems if we wanted to but we currently don't ("these four will have video apps, these nine will be for Java dev"), supports hundreds of student and teacher logins EVERY DAY with uniform behavior across workstations, etc. etc. etc.

Gentoo can do all of these, but unfortunately it is not fast enough for the impatient sysadmin, nor is it AS easy to pull off all the funky junk we do. Of course, I think the school is running all those LTSP workstations as a test run next year; who knows, perhaps the year after that the majority of the computers in the school will just be running Linux through a super-powerful LTSP server cluster! Computers are fast enough today that we can do it, it's easier to maintain, cheaper, and the fact is that our school has too many computers and not enough computers faster than a Pentium 3 (and one year ago, I would have said Pentium).

I think this is probably the only good thing I'll say about Debian and Ubuntu and binary-based packaging systems in a long time.
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BlackEdder · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:24 am Post subject:

If you can you should come to the london gentoo meeting. There will be a consultant speaking about mass deployment of gentoo:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/gentoo-uk-2006/speakers.htm (Andrew Cowie)

I think there are still a couple of places available. Otherwise you could try to persuade dsd to let you in anyway.

annunaki2k2 · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 2:03 pm Post subject:

BlackEdder · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 2:28 pm Post subject:

annunaki2k2 · Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 4:15 pm Post subject:

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

If all the machines are the same architecture and you want to use Gentoo, then I'd emerge on one box, and then use something like Acronis or Ghost. There are threads floating around also telling you how to mount portage on a shared drive and use one portage (one sync) for multiple machines.

And you don't have to compile new packages on every box. If they have the same setup, compile on one, quick package, and then dump off to the other machines.

I've never tried it, but in theory it should work out fine.
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valkyrite · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 241

Here are my two cents on the issue.

The most important thing that will decide which OS to use is not what helps you as an administrator but what the users are comfortable with.

If you want to setup a linux lab (for students), then I presume you would be needing a distro that is good for a desktop.

I have been system administrator and also the computer secretary at my univ for two years and have managed couple of labs and two HPC installations.

For desktop, I went with mandriva (since it had KDE and was the most useful as a desktop OS). Ubuntu is also equally good and you may go ahead with that. If users are not comfortable with the setup, they will complain which will make you a bad admin.

For HPC, I went with gentoo since it is easiest to administer/maintain (if you know your stuff). With gentoo, it is pretty easy to setup PXE, diskless nodes, and recovery. Almost all the time will be spent on setting up the root node. I followed Adiele linux guidelines.

Another thing, that I would suggest you is once you have got the setup running, make a copy of the installation (aka stage-4) and store it in different partitions. Configure your slave nodes so that they can boot from the network as well as from their HD and also keep a copy of slave image on the HD of the slave nodes. It will drastically reduce the time. In my case, it took only 5 minutes to install gentoo on any slave node (using a bunch of scripts and rsync).

valkyrite · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 241

I would strongly advise you to read the following docs.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/hpc-howto.xml

These itself will answer a lot of your questions.

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

I don't want to start a flame-fest here, but I'm not quite sure why Ubuntu is so famous or popular personally.

I prefer KDE greatly personally, and even if Ubuntu weren't Gnome-based, I can see plenty of advantages that distros like Suse or Mandriva have over Ubuntu. Honestly, Ubuntu's popularity is a big mystery to me.
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Ctrl+Alt+Del · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 326 Location: .de

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

Let's just take SuSE for example.

- SuSE has the best Linux installer I've seen to date.
- YaST allows for those unfamiliar with Linux to customize their desktop experience easily.
- YaST also controls package management. With one interface to install, configure and update your system, it certainly keeps consistent and polished.
- AppArmor
- SuSE allows for more flexibility given they support both Gnome and KDE. And while some distros only give lip-service to one side, both get adequate treatment.
- Again there is more freedom in choosing either the free version, or opting for a more commercial distro version if you want support for your product.
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annunaki2k2 · Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:27 am Post subject:

annunaki2k2 · Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:37 am Post subject:

annunaki2k2 · Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:46 am Post subject:

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

http://www.suse.de/~sh/YaST2-Package-Manager/pic/y2pkg-selections.png

http://www.suse.de/~sh/YaST2-Package-Manager/
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annunaki2k2 · Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 3:51 pm Post subject:

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

No, but having the same interface to do the initial install, to configure the system and to update the system makes for a consistent feel.
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chrismortimore · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 7:27 am Post subject:

As much as I hate it, my uni use Fedora in the computer science labs (I don't know how many floors the labs are, but there are a lot of computers) and from what I hear it gives them very few headaches in terms of maintenance. Perhaps a look into that?

I'm also quite liking Arch Linux just now (under VMware anyway, I'm gonna do a test install later when I have more time). If all of your machines are i686, you could look at that, but I'm not sure what fancy features you might want for mass-admin are actually there...

And for the "Why is Ubuntu great?" post earlier, I like Ubuntu because it gives you all the fun of Debian (ever seen apt-build? It's cool), but with nice tools so that "human beings" (read "idiots") can use it, and a fairly up to date package tree. Yes, it is gnome based, but if you type "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop", as if by magic it becomes KDE based. Likewise, if you type "apt-get install xubuntu-desktop" it becomes xfce4 based. And you can put in others like fluxbox if you want them. I'm going to assume that given you havn't noticed that, you dismissed it without exploring it properly

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enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

valkyrite · Apprentice Joined: 19 Sep 2002 Posts: 241

Let me tell you two big advantages of ubuntu over other distros. I am a die hard gentoo fan though.

Mandriva/Mandrake: In order to get the full system (with all the utilities you want), you shall have to buy the powerpack, the 3 cd version won't give your everything.
Suse: The single cd version is crap, you shall have to buy suse linux pro to get all the functionality you want.
Fedora: It is good but since RedHat has an enterprise version (which is supposed to be better), people tend to feel that fedora is half-baked version of RHEL and is intended for getting the community help and serves as a test-bed for their enterprise offering.

Ubuntu is completely free (both as in beer and freedom).

All the drake tools in Mandriva and Yet another suse crap is broken and do not always work, are buggy, the system freezes, blah blah. These tools need to be tested with different hardware/software setting to remove all the pitfalls etc.

Ubuntu on the other hand is a very polished distro, the only thing, I dislike about it is absence of KDE (I have not tried kubuntu).

I always recommend ubuntu to a newbie.

I use gentoo, because I have got used to it and gentoo is definitely (significantly) faster than all others. No other distro gives me as much control as gentoo. I can configure gentoo exactly to my test and liking, something which I cannot do with others unless I tweak those distros more than their developers already have. That is one of the reasons, why Gentoo is called a meta-OS.

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

With Mandriva there is the PLF to get the non-free stuff they can't bundle (like fonts, codecs, etc).

SuSE seems polished and stable to me. With YaST/App Armor and all the fun stuff is on the free version.

SuSE's installer is even more n00b-friendly that Ubuntu, and YaST makes it easier to configure.
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punter · Guru Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 506