[Resolved] gentoo -- is this normal?

[thorpe]

ok... only new to this. been using fedora core for the last few weeks. loving it! my first linux os. decided i wanted to download and test gentoo on my old pII 500mhz.

ive decided to do a stage 2 install, though i havent tweaked anything (not real sure what to tweak).

anyway... ive gotten to step 7 in the manual.

emerge --emtytree system

the first time a ran this it got to downloading portage 10 / 88 (i think thats what its doing) and i got an error... something about 'files not found in manifest'. i had a look around and found that if put;

FEATURES="-strict"

in my /etc/make.conf file it would stop this complaint. this seeems to have worked.

my question.... this command has been running for 7+ hrs and is still running. not exactly sure how far through it is now (im at work), but it does seem a little odd.

is this normal?

ps: i am installing this from a minimal boot disc.

[mtmosier]

Since you're compiling the majority of your software, and on a 500mhz machine no less, 7 hours doesn't sound odd at all. The person on this page (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/5/2003/11/3/54835) says you might expect 3 - 4 days of compiling a stage 2 install on a 450mhz.

[thorpe]

wow! well... im in no rush. thanks for the info.

[thorpe]

ah... just got home from work and it appears to be finished. dont know what time it stopped, but it means it was under 15hrs.

anyway, onto the next step.

[LordShryku]

Just as a note about Gentoo....

I switched from Fedora to Gentoo a while ago. Just wanted to test it out and play with it. It has, by far, the longest install time of any OS I've ever used. When you dig down into the why of that though, it justifies itself. Most OS's come with their standard packages put in a standard bundle which is built for the standard x type system. So you're getting [Desktop] type build for standard [i386] architecture.

Gentoo on the other hand is compiling everything against your specific system. There's no standard. It's all going to be tailored and optimized for what you're running. Beyond that, there's also no bloat. It doesn't install lick one of software. While this contributes to the build time, you're left with a system that is built to your hardware, customized to how you wanted the kernel built, running only the applications you told it to install.

It really is the higher end of Linux IMO. It takes the most amount of effort to get going, but if you're really serious about Linux, this will all be worth the time spent.

</soapbox>

[dalecosp]

<tallerSoapBox>FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org)</tallerSoapBox>

:D :D

Incidentally, Gentoo, then, installs itself, then does a source update and recompiles itself?

Kinda cool.

I have a 3 stage shell script for FBSD that does a lot of this stuff for me ... including ports.

Ran it on a 266 this week ... about 2 days, give or take....

[goldbug]

Originally posted by dalecosp

Incidentally, Gentoo, then, installs itself, then does a source update and recompiles itself?

Depends on which stage you start the install at. Stage 1 (LONG install time) bootstraps some initial toolchain elements, builds some new toolchain elements, then uses those new bits and the existing bootstrap to completely rebuild the whole toolchain (gcc, binutils, glibc, etc...) from scratch, with any compiler optimizations/targets you set in /etc/make.conf (I'm partial to -march=pentium4 -pipe -O2, with maybe loop unrolling thrown in)

Then you are technically at "stage 2". If you had started from stage2, you would have first downloaded a somewhat-targeted (although not perfectly exact) toolchain for your architecture. Stage 2 builds the core system binaries.

Stage 3 then builds off from that point (but you can start from stage 3 as well, using a generic toolchain+core binaries), and builds the "peripheral" binaries that make the system complete (kernel build at this stage IIRC--might be stage 2... been a while since I installed Gentoo).

After that, it's a matter of emerging whatever apps you want (much like the FBSD ports tree).

All this, is why when I run linux (instead of FBSD), I stick with Gentoo.

[thorpe]

alright... ive managed to get gentoo up and running on my old pc, but am struggling to get x11 running. i didnt really arm myself with enough info about the hardware. but anyway.. thats cool. im now doing another stage 2 install on my good pc, armed with plenty of hardware info, so with any luck x11 wont be so hard. i really want to get fluxbox installed (i had just started playing with it on my fedora box).

anyway... no problems, really enjoying the challenge. im sure i'll do a few installs before i really understand what is going on, but hey... its the only way to learn right.