Re: GENTOO
  By: Angus McLeod to Deuce on Wed Mar 19 2008 09:34 am

 >  > Gentoo is also the only Linux distro that didn't piss me off completely.
 >  > Every other distro I've installed had some mindblowingly stupid bit
 >  > about it that drove me around the bend.
 >
 > I'm not entirely sure I follow.  Something about the distro always pisses
 > you off?  Or something about the process of *installation* pisses you off?

I'm generally fine with anything the installation does... as long as it's
documented (which they generally are).  It's always something about the distro
itself or configuration thereof.

 > If you can muster the thoughts, I'd be glad to hear a couple examples of
 > various distros and what you didn't like about them.

As for specific details, I can't remember them anymore.  However, I can give an
outline of how I set up my Linux boxes so you could perhaps figure out which
bit would be painfull under your distro of choice...

1) Enable rlogin.
2) Create an "admin" account with UID 1000 capable of becoming root.
3) Enable ntp broadcast time synchronization.
4) If the box is sufficiently powered, enable SSH logins.
5) NFS mount /home, /synchronet, and /bbsdev.
6) Enable remote X11 servers.
7) Set up a serial console.
8) Install Synchronet/SyncTERM support libraries (SDL, nspr4, Cryptlib, etc).

 >  > My only complaint about Gentoo is the abitrary
"experimental" vs
 >  > "stable" differences in the portage tree.  The ports
are pretty chaotic
 >  > when it comes to that.
 >
 > Sounds like Gentoo DID have something that pissed you off.  (Although I'll
 > concede that perhaps it didn't COMPLETELY piss you off...)

Right... it was merely irritating.  Every pacakge you use, you need to examine
just how the "stable" version was chosen.  In other words, you
need to pay WAY
too much attention to how the packager selected the version numbers.  At the
end of it all, the initiall install is only very slightly better than
downloading the tarballs by hand... upgrades though a a lot easier.

In general, things that completely piss me off are things that restrict root
(ie: Requiring a "sufficiently" complex password for root) all-inclusive
default settings (including aalib with SDL) braindead dependencies (Sun's Java
DEMOS being *REQUIRED* by the JDK) packaging systems which MUST download
metadata about EVERY package in order to be able to install ONE.  Crazy
configuration (having to edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to
change the default router) phantom device nodes (every MAC address the system
has ever seen gets its own /dev/ethX node so when you add a new permanent card,
it ends up being eth9), not installing libX.so symlinks so that programs using
dlsym(3) need to flail about looking for a library (or install the -dev
pacakge) and, best of all, NONE of this shit being documented anywhere except
in Google Groups so you need a DIFFERENT machine in order to figure it out
since you can't access the internet until you figure out where to set the
default router.

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