Flavors of Linux, the Gentoo distro
If you have a computer with 3G harddrive and 128M memory. What do you do if you want to install a linux distro on it? This kind of computer configuration is probably considered archaic and unusable. Even the main stream linux distros are having trouble with it, including Fedora core, Opensuse, Ubunto. Here comes Gentoo for the rescue.
The gentoo quick installation guide shows the user the full control on how the system can be built. With a network connection established, the system can be built from a remote shell by executing a bunch of command line commands! This convenience is invaluable, considering that you don't have to sit next to a noisy box and stare at its screen. The base system uses only about 1G harddrive space with most of the useful development tools installed.
The gentoo 'emerge' system provides decent package management features that most other small linux distros don't have. Therefore you pretty much get the best of both worlds (the all-in-one big desktop distro and down-to-the-earth barebone small distro). The only drawback is emerge usually needs to compile a package from source, the '-k' flag rarely works. :( But fortunately for what it's good for, you shouldn't have to emerge big apps all the time.
One of the headaches of using gentoo is what I call 'dead patch' problem. Sometimes, the ebuild info came with a distro or portage does not get updated to reflect patch changes and you end up with dead patch files that are no longer available from gentoo distfiles sources. In this kind of rare situations, one has to create new ebuild files and update the package ebuild database. The steps are:
1. after emerge failure, figure out a live patch file and note the difference between dead patch number and live patch number
2. cd /usr/portage/category/package-name/
3. cp deadpatch.ebuild livepatch.ebuild, make necessary changes in livepatch.ebuild, as of 2007.1 distro, it is no longer necessary to modify the newly created livepatch.ebuild as the ebuild system automatically deduct the patch number from the ebuild file name.
4. issue command: ebuild livepatch.ebuild digest This will update the ebuild database
5. redo emerge and repeat the process if there is remaining errors related to bad ebuild info
References:
1. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml
2. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=10
The gentoo quick installation guide shows the user the full control on how the system can be built. With a network connection established, the system can be built from a remote shell by executing a bunch of command line commands! This convenience is invaluable, considering that you don't have to sit next to a noisy box and stare at its screen. The base system uses only about 1G harddrive space with most of the useful development tools installed.
The gentoo 'emerge' system provides decent package management features that most other small linux distros don't have. Therefore you pretty much get the best of both worlds (the all-in-one big desktop distro and down-to-the-earth barebone small distro). The only drawback is emerge usually needs to compile a package from source, the '-k' flag rarely works. :( But fortunately for what it's good for, you shouldn't have to emerge big apps all the time.
One of the headaches of using gentoo is what I call 'dead patch' problem. Sometimes, the ebuild info came with a distro or portage does not get updated to reflect patch changes and you end up with dead patch files that are no longer available from gentoo distfiles sources. In this kind of rare situations, one has to create new ebuild files and update the package ebuild database. The steps are:
1. after emerge failure, figure out a live patch file and note the difference between dead patch number and live patch number
2. cd /usr/portage/category/package-name/
3. cp deadpatch.ebuild livepatch.ebuild, make necessary changes in livepatch.ebuild, as of 2007.1 distro, it is no longer necessary to modify the newly created livepatch.ebuild as the ebuild system automatically deduct the patch number from the ebuild file name.
4. issue command: ebuild livepatch.ebuild digest This will update the ebuild database
5. redo emerge and repeat the process if there is remaining errors related to bad ebuild info
References:
1. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-quickinstall.xml
2. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=10
posted by Fei Liu | 12:40 PM
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