Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Carlos C. Gonzalez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Mark, Hmm You may have a point here too Mark. I guess I tend to view newbies through the lens of my experience. Since I still consider myself a newbie. I tend to read the documentation and do my own research and frankly oftentimes I find that's it quicker for me to do that than post another question. I find that 99.99 percent of my questions do not have ready answers found in the FAQ's or by a search of Google Linux or the Gentoo forum. Many of my questions come about as a result of having to work my way through holes left in the Gentoo documentation or my relative inexperience with Linux. -nod- I hope you didn't take my comments as a direct reflection on you. I don't know you, nor did I do even a cursory survey of the type of questions you ask. It was in reference to a specific (large) subgroup of users that I've observed over the last 9 or 10 years. But I guess I have to concede that there are many newbies which just want everything fed to them on a silver platter. I can't expect every newbie to put in the time and the effort that I have to getting a Gentoo system up and running and running reasonably well. -nod- Agreed. But that's also why we have easy to use distributions that don't require much thought and planning. ;-) As I mentioned elsewhere, when setting up systems where another admin might take over, I never use gentoo. I don't want to put undue burden on a company when it comes to finding a replacement. Finding someone to efficiently run a gentoo system is significantly more difficult than finding someone who can keep a redhat box running. Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. Namely choice. That's ridiculous. A bit strong here Mark :). I'll take it as an expression of your intense feelings on the subject and not as a personal lambast of what I said. ;-) I apologize. I think it was actually just my being tired of people pulling out phrases like that all the time. Particularly since the spirit of open source/GPL really has nothing to do with choice, but rather with freedom. It might seem like semantics, but it really isn't. I swear that we need a Godwin's law equivelant for this type of argument. Also, after reading some of your other posts in this thread, I can read your arguments here in a better light. You're obviously more well reasoned than this original post would first suggest. I apologize for speaking otherwise. Because I like Gentoo better for various reasons. Certainly nothing to do with the hairy installation or hassles of configurating packages. More with where Gentoo is going, the willingness of forum and list members to help out, and the flexibility that Gentoo gives me in creating the kind of distribution I want for myself or that I want to offer my customers. Keep in mind that there's a certain willingness of forum/list members to help out in part because they can have a reasonable expectation that you have /some/ idea what you are doing, or that if you don't that you're capable of doing some reading to get there. IOW, we don't have to have everything spelled out for us, we just need a push in the right direction from someone who has already been down the same path. But I can see that there is also a responsibility to the Gentoo community that I must keep in mind. How will my newbiesized documents affect the community? Will it indeed cause a flood of spurious newbie questions? Not saying that I will stop creating better documents (for purposes of newbies or those who don't want to re-try installing Gentoo twenty times). I'll have to think about what you said. For sure. I don't think I'd ever suggest that having more documentation would be a bad thing. Honestly, a plethora of documentation only slightly lowers the barrier to entry. The users we should be concerned about never read documentation. Glad to hear you think that Mark but I am not so sure that others in the Gentoo community would agree with you. In regard to those using those enhancements not being dummy's. Heh. I don't disagree. I've run into a fair number of people who take that attitude. There's people on both sides of that fence who feel like they can only choose one method of doing things. I don't how many times I have heard statements to the effect of well, it works for me also. As though that alone should make me realize that if I was a more experienced Linux user the solutions to the problems would be self-evident. Gurus tend to speak down to those who don't know as much as a general rule I think. Precisely because they end up starting to know so much that it starts to get to their heads. Hrm. Well, I can't speak to your specific situation, but it might be that those communicating that thought might actually be trying to help somewhat, albiet in a minimalist fashion. If
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Saturday 05 April 2003 7:14 am, Abhishek Amit wrote: On 05:15 Sat 05 Apr , Vano D wrote: This is why it would be a superb idea for Gentoo to adopt something like Knoppix. What I would really love to see is a Knoppix Gentoo where the whole base is a Gentoo system with portage and all (probably not with the portage tree as this can be huge, but then again the CD is compressed so maybe it is not too much space). With a Knoppix Gentoo you can pop in the CD and have a complete working system at your disposal in 30 seconds with the ability to install Gentoo on the background or even copy the whole system (or sets of it with some portage magic) to the HD. There can also be the possibility to have different Knoppix Gentoo CDs for different architectures (CFLAGS) and even the possibility to have different tastes with different sets of apps. Even better, a program or sctipt which would let someone easily create Knoppix Gentoo CDs. The portage tree isnt that big... it's about 90 megs. I think he means the source packages as well. -- Tom Wesley Please encrypt personal replies if possible. pgp0.pgp Description: signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
begin quote On Sat, 5 Apr 2003 04:16:13 +0300 Sami Näätänen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And here is my comments on them. *) simple configuration of alternate GRP address' (for internal network, make admin make packages and sign, then deply) Should this be like the Portage tree overlay system? It could first look from the user specified location(s), and then fall back to Gentoo CD and finally Gentoo GRP server. Try more like GENTOO_MIRRORS variable, first try a, then b, then c ... //Spider -- begin .signature This is a .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature! See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
But be aware of Gentoo 1.4's glibc 2.3, I could not install 9iR2 on it... ive got a legacy oracle 8.0.5 installed on a gentoo 1.4/glibc2.3 system. its a little outdated (by postgres) :P [ root @ crunch ] /usr/lib emerge -s glibc Searching... [ Results for search key : glibc ] [ Applications found : 2 ] * app-doc/ebook-glibc Latest version available: 2.2.3 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of downloaded files: 835 kB Homepage:http://lidn.sourceforge.net Description: ebook-glibc-2.2.3 ebook based in ebook eclass * sys-libs/glibc Latest version available: 2.3.1-r4 Latest version installed: 2.3.1-r4 Size of downloaded files: 17,701 kB Homepage:http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/libc.html Description: GNU libc6 (also called glibc2) C library [ root @ crunch ] /usr/lib su d [d @ crunch] /usr/lib # svrmgrl Oracle Server Manager Release 3.0.5.0.0 - Production (c) Copyright 1997, Oracle Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Oracle8 Release 8.0.5.0.0 - Production PL/SQL Release 8.0.5.0.0 - Production SVRMGR -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Saturday 05 April 2003 12:58, Spider wrote: begin quote On Sat, 5 Apr 2003 04:16:13 +0300 Sami Näätänen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And here is my comments on them. *) simple configuration of alternate GRP address' (for internal network, make admin make packages and sign, then deply) Should this be like the Portage tree overlay system? It could first look from the user specified location(s), and then fall back to Gentoo CD and finally Gentoo GRP server. Try more like GENTOO_MIRRORS variable, first try a, then b, then c That was what I really was after, but some how got overlay stumble in my mind. ;) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I guess you dont use a modem like a lot of us have to ... :) BillK On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 14:14, Abhishek Amit wrote: ... The portage tree isnt that big... it's about 90 megs. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- William Kenworthy [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
The portage tree isnt that big... it's about 90 megs. I think he means the source packages as well. I actually meant the /usr/portage/ directory without the distfiles dir :-) I don't know why I thought it was bigger than 90 megs. Still, 90 megs is big but good news is that compression will probably make that much smaller. -- Vano D [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Several people in this thread seem to associate graphical installers with precompiled packages, why? When I talked about a graphical installer in a previous post I wasn't thinking about taking away the current portage system, nor using precompiled packages, and absolutely nor taking away the current system of installation. I see this graphical installer as an add on. This is how I see it (I really don't know if this can be done): * For power users installation could remain as it is currently, a command line compilation from the beginning of the system. * For idiot users (sorry, but I wasn't the one that first mention idiot-proof things :o) ) there could be a graphical installer that could start from stage 1, 2 or 3, whatever she chooses, and *hide* all the process with graphical dialogs. So the installer would take care of all the compiling, partitioning, hardware detection, boot manager installation,... *always* using portage and compiling from sources behind the scenes. Once a graphical environmet is set up, this same idiot user (sorry again) would use a graphical emerge, kind of kportage, that again would do all the job using emerge behind the scenes. So what's the problem with this? Power users could still do things the way they like it, and Gentoo could gain mass adoption from people (ok, idiot people, sorry again) that doesn't want to mess up with compilers, boot managers and modprobing. I don't see this as making Gentoo a clone of RedHat. I see this as imporving Gentoo and making it something much better than RedHat. And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all. Regards Jose Mark Saunders wrote: I manage development at a small software firm in Australia. We began running Gentoo on our development systems about 8 months ago, and now have 5 systems in our office running Gentoo. Before this we were using a mixture of windows, redhat and mandrake linux. The primary reason we run Gentoo is because portage is far more user friendly and powerful - far more useable - than any other linux package management system. In my opinion Gentoo is also easier to configure than any other distribution. The Gentoo documentation is great too. Whenever we get a new programmer on i have them install their own Gentoo system from stage 1 - it's a great learning experience (especially for developers who are not very familiar with linux to start with). I have often wondered what difference an idiot-proof installer and binary packages stored on the mirrors for portage would make to Gentoo.. I think it would completely alter the make up of the userbase. It would take away from the advantages Gentoo has over other distributions. It would change the focus of the distribution. If there are people out there that want gentoo with a graphical installer or portage with precompiled binaries - let them build their own distribution based on Gentoo. Would that make everyone happy? On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 10:15, William Kenworthy wrote: Not really: you would be putting a lot of effort in trying to make gentoo into a mandrake/redhat lookalike. Gentoo's advantages are its easy update and software management, both of which you are saying are not needed in the scenario you paint. As far as better installer and hardware detection, gentoo has come a *long* way, but still needs to go further! BillK On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 22:23, Josh McCormack wrote: ... hs with the stable, tested Gentoo of that moment, easily updated each 6 months, and offer training ( a book) and certification. I'd personally lean toward making the CD have a nice installer with hardware detection, possibly built off of Knoppix. Anyone else find this interesting? Josh -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 02 April 2003 9:33 am, Tan, Stephen wrote: At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment. I have to take exception to this. I just did a migration from RH to Gentoo and I'm finding that the Gentoo is MUCH easier to manage. Patches seem to come out sooner. And I don't seem to get into RPM Hell nearly as much. grin (Having had 2 occasions in the past 6 months that I have been running Gentoo where portage/emerge related issues have hosed (a) gcc and (b) libstdc++.so, I'll stand by that statement!) I upgraded gcc w/o any problems. I have Gentoo running on my desktop here at work and at home, but the real production machines are Debian. Debian's stable really is stable! Gentoo is nifty and extremely cool but is prone to nasty emerge issues such as the ones I have just noted. Gentoo rocks as a desktop. Older machines become viable once again. I like it on my servers because Gentoo is so minimal when it's installed. I don't have to worry about security w/ (x)inetd, ftp, etc. Just my $.02 Mike Diehl. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jUDYSrJcwl1jOi4RAnk/AJ4wqjxKDprJeRi/C7gsDffw95taBwCfQUnC 6FUOwS9B+5Ooug0PqTxBl5U= =wnNs -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Well, I got used to setting Oracle on Sun boxes on my previous job and indeed there is a trick to it. I don't know what problems we might have on Gentoo. I guess if all env variables are set and the shared memory is ok it might work smooth. Filip and I will keep the list posted on how we did it if you would like that. Regards, Bram -Original Message- From: Andrew Cowie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: vrijdag 4 april 2003 7:31 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 18:55, DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Yet another example is that we are going to set up a Oracle cluster on Linux. Also using Gentoo. Oracle under Linux tends to be horribly sensitive to variations in libraries. (Heck, it's that way under Solaris too). I'm not going to say be very careful because that doesn't mean anything... but I will say do tell us how it goes as the underlying Gentoo system and it's shared libraries upgrade over time AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I would be interested on that, as probably I will have to do it in a future Regards Jose DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Well, I got used to setting Oracle on Sun boxes on my previous job and indeed there is a trick to it. I don't know what problems we might have on Gentoo. I guess if all env variables are set and the shared memory is ok it might work smooth. Filip and I will keep the list posted on how we did it if you would like that. Regards, Bram -Original Message- From: Andrew Cowie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: vrijdag 4 april 2003 7:31 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 18:55, DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Yet another example is that we are going to set up a Oracle cluster on Linux. Also using Gentoo. Oracle under Linux tends to be horribly sensitive to variations in libraries. (Heck, it's that way under Solaris too). I'm not going to say be very careful because that doesn't mean anything... but I will say do tell us how it goes as the underlying Gentoo system and it's shared libraries upgrade over time AfC -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi, i'm intrested also, i have downloaded the Oracle 9i for Linux (3 cd's) a while ago, and shall install it also in the near future. Patrick On Fri, 4 Apr 2003 11:10:12 +0200 DE SMET Bram (BDSR) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, I got used to setting Oracle on Sun boxes on my previous job and indeed there is a trick to it. I don't know what problems we might have on Gentoo. I guess if all env variables are set and the shared memory is ok it might work smooth. Filip and I will keep the list posted on how we did it if you would like that. Regards, Bram -Original Message- From: Andrew Cowie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: vrijdag 4 april 2003 7:31 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 18:55, DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Yet another example is that we are going to set up a Oracle cluster on Linux. Also using Gentoo. Oracle under Linux tends to be horribly sensitive to variations in libraries. (Heck, it's that way under Solaris too). I'm not going to say be very careful because that doesn't mean anything... but I will say do tell us how it goes as the underlying Gentoo system and it's shared libraries upgrade over time AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- Knowledge in a databank,is like food which is in a deepfreeze. Nothing comes out better than what is initially put in. PGP Key: http://users.pandora.be/rivendell/marquetp.gpg Registered Linux User #44550 http://counter.li.org pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] offline gentoo WAS[Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 (1) Create a file containing a list of the packages you wish to install. Mine's called pkglist.txt, and looks like this: sys-apps/vcron app-admin/metalog app-misc/mc app-crypt/gnupg dev-lang/python dev-lang/perl app-editors/vim net-www/apache dev-util/cvs (2) Set your USE flags to be the same as on the target systems. (3) Use portage to check what packages would be installed to satisfy all the dependencies for your chosen packages. # emerge --pretend --emptytree $(pkglist.txt) (4) Use portage to download the files, keeping them separate from your regular distfiles. # DISTDIR=/mnt/raid/my_pkg_snapshot/ emerge \ --fetchonly --emptytree $(pkglist.txt) (5) Burn the downloads onto CD. (6) Copy the downloads to the /usr/portage/distfiles dir on the target machine before doing the installs/upgrades. (7) Run the following command to install your packages: # emerge $(pkglist.txt) This is all off the top of my head, ie. untested. Does anyone see any problems with this approach? And, then if you try it on the target machine, it's portage three is not in sync, and you end up with a big mess. I've tried doing it, completely messing up my gentoo install. When we're at the subject, what do you need to do an offline install, I actually thinks of running a local rsync server on my offline machine, setting it up to make a portage three from a cd. Anyone have a clue what to set as the module in the rsyncd.conf file. should it be set as portage? - -- Sigurd Stordal President of GOGS Experimental Petrologist -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jVbISB4UOs/snOURAim3AJ9P62xqiEIJG0KnqGF39SZ/T9U2+wCbBgZ0 SvKSWh+z/VdqL3ju9xzMnQs= =BEmD -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Well, I got used to setting Oracle on Sun boxes on my previous job and indeed there is a trick to it. I don't know what problems we might have on Gentoo. I guess if all env variables are set and the shared memory is ok it might work smooth. Filip and I will keep the list posted on how we did it if you would like that. I'm going to have to get this up and running soon too, so yeah, please. MAL -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, I'll take the bait... here Several people in this thread seem to associate graphical installers with precompiled packages, why? SNIP And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all. Regards Jose Okay, I might keep a fairly low profile theese days, several reasons, most private, but I have to come in with a point here. please, dont take this as an official Gentoo opinion, its not discussed in the devteam, its not politically correct and its inflammatory and prejudiced and put some good people in a fairly bad light. One thing that scares me with the ease-of-install and simplicity, the lowering of the threshold for users to install Gentoo, is this. Bugs. Most of you folks are horrid at bugreporting. this doesnt work here is very common, the disrespectance between Gentoo bug and User bug is very much odd. People go ages and call a problem obvious without filing a bug. people who claim their bugs are blocking the distribution completely. People file bugs without rebuilding with lower optimizations, common issue, still is : Oh YES! Gentoo, I can use CFLAGS=-ffast-math -force-dropping-coredumps -O99-march=athlon-xp -msse2 -mmmx -m3dnow -megafast -DBREAKTHINGS so of course its your problem that you haven't documented that -megafast would break! Yes, all this could be fixed by hiring folks or getting more users... Or perhaps writing off all such bugs as WONTFIX: USERERROR, but it isn't nice, polite or pleasant thing to do. We try not to, as most of us (if not everyone) want to keep a friendly attitude. Even worse, people who dont file bugs and then claim its broken . Yeyy, how are we to know? No, I dont use all the same packages in the same ways as the users do. Sorry, no can do. Of course, we could get more devs to fix stupid user bugs but that doesn't feel like the right way. unfortunately :/ Another problem with lowering the bar, is that the current installation indoctrinates people on Read the wellwritten manual carefully before you continue .. Graphical /userfriendly installers dont give the same breaktrhough.. Thats why they exists, so users dont have to read manuals. (Joel on Software had this down good, users dont read manuals. In fact, assume users can't read. ) Making the bugreporting harder to get to is another solution. Yey, make it even more difficult to file a bugreport? unfortunately that is rather unpleasant thing to do when you want to file bugs. :-/ How do other distributions come through with this? Debian devs are for all that I've noticed distanced and hard to reach with support and bugs, and a lot of them have the reputation of being flamemongers that do nothing but bicker. *cough* Slackware, I'm not sure, I haven't tried to get support there so I dont know. Somone involved might be able to help there? BSD: see Slackware. Mandrake + Redhat + SuSE .. : Sell the support. Hire folks. all very viable when you have an IPO and sell a product. Not that good for a true opensource project with only community support. Well, Thats my inflamatory rant on the subject of why I fear a userfriendly installer that helps the less advanced users on their path into the project. //Spider -- begin .signature This is a .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature! See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Jose, On April 4, 2003 01:17 am, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote: [snipped] So what's the problem with this? Power users could still do things the way they like it, and Gentoo could gain mass adoption from people (ok, idiot people, sorry again) that doesn't want to mess up with compilers, boot managers and modprobing. I don't see this as making Gentoo a clone of RedHat. I see this as imporving Gentoo and making it something much better than RedHat. And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all. I don't see any problem with what you are saying Jose. Indeed I think it would be great to have a nice graphical installer for those who want to use it. I could be way off in my impressions so take what I am about to say with a grain of salt ya all but I think there is some resistance to this among the Gentoo community... In part I have had the impression from one signature saying used on the Gentoo forum by someone very experienced in Gentoo and interactions on the forum that if too many newbies come into Gentoo as a result of making things easier (such as a GUI installer would) that the Gentoo forums will be flooded with newbie questions and expectations. It seems that there is some concern about this. And a predisposition to not make Gentoo installation and use too easy. The hard time some have installing Gentoo is considered a very valuable learning experience to go through and thus there is again no real motivation to work on a GUI installer and/or to see a real need for one. This all ties into a lot of Gentoo users also wanting to keep Gentoo a power users distribution. A lot of gurus that use Gentoo are able to get around the quirks and problems with it. When they hear about the struggles of others that might be diminished through a graphical installer they might have a hard time sympathising or being very motivated to pitch in to help create a GUI installer. Because Gentoo is supposed to be for power users who know what they are doing. And not for the masses. Many times when I have talked of problems encountered by someone new to Gentoo (on the forum) and how things like a GUI installer would help, along with more newbiesized documentation, I have received responses of the kind that it worked for me leaving me with the impression that the problem was really with me and not so much with Gentoo. So I think bringing in something like a GUI installer is to swim upstream from the way many in the community see Gentoo or would want to keep it. Don't get me wrong Jose. There are very many and very helpful people in the community and I am very thankful for that but my impressions have been formed from a lot of forum conversations I have had with many and I think there is some element of truth in what I am saying. One nice thing about Gentoo though is that regardless of what some think or do not think about a GUI installer and other such things, we are free to start creating one if we wish. There is certainly nothing keeping that from happening. If there is enough interest. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
[gentoo-user] Getting rid of gaudy yellow in KMail (was Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?)
Hi Spider, This isn't related to the subject of your email but when trying to read it, I was presented with a bright gaudy yellow message in KMail (at the top of your email) saying Message was signed with unknown key. The validity of the signature cannot be verified. Problem: OpenPGP plug-in was not specified. Use the 'Settings-Configure KMail-Security' dialog to specify the plug-in or ask your system administrator to do that for you. And at the bottom of your email -- begin .signature This is a .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature! See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end I was wondering if there was some way to keep KMail from turning emails like yours into some kind of gaudy fireworks display. It's hard on my eyes. That's a sincere question by the way. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Agree with you, but... (there's always a but :o) ) First of all, maybe I should mind my own business instead of talking about how things could be better or putting pressure on some developers that do things for free, so please take this as just an oppinion and kind chatting, as I don't intend at all to criticize your work (what the [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think you are doing a great work) So back to the point, I think all of this you have talked about could be solved in the following way: * About the optimization flags, don't give the idiot users the chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only change the processor they are compiling for with --march- and nothing else, I don't know. Or even detect the processor (I think this can be done easily) and automatically compile for it without any further optimization. Ok, they won't have a fully optimized system, but at least they will have a system optimized for their processors, and this is more than they will ever have with another distros. This way the number of bugs caused by agressive optimization flags could be drastically reduced for idiot users. * About the bug reporting, maybe it could be created some automated reporting tool. Gnome has one, I don't know if works well, but it's an idea. By the way, I have curiosity about this... do you all the developers work for free in Gentoo?. Again, I should mind my own business, but I think you have a great product here, and you could start promoting it and selling it to companies, basing the marketing in the improved performance obtained in Gentoo. Gentoo still could be free, but you could make some good money for selling services associated with Gentoo. Have you ever thought about that? Regards Jose Spider wrote: begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, I'll take the bait... here Several people in this thread seem to associate graphical installers with precompiled packages, why? SNIP And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all. Regards Jose Okay, I might keep a fairly low profile theese days, several reasons, most private, but I have to come in with a point here. please, dont take this as an official Gentoo opinion, its not discussed in the devteam, its not politically correct and its inflammatory and prejudiced and put some good people in a fairly bad light. One thing that scares me with the ease-of-install and simplicity, the lowering of the threshold for users to install Gentoo, is this. Bugs. Most of you folks are horrid at bugreporting. this doesnt work here is very common, the disrespectance between Gentoo bug and User bug is very much odd. People go ages and call a problem obvious without filing a bug. people who claim their bugs are blocking the distribution completely. People file bugs without rebuilding with lower optimizations, common issue, still is : Oh YES! Gentoo, I can use CFLAGS=-ffast-math -force-dropping-coredumps -O99-march=athlon-xp -msse2 -mmmx -m3dnow -megafast -DBREAKTHINGS so of course its your problem that you haven't documented that -megafast would break! Yes, all this could be fixed by hiring folks or getting more users... Or perhaps writing off all such bugs as WONTFIX: USERERROR, but it isn't nice, polite or pleasant thing to do. We try not to, as most of us (if not everyone) want to keep a friendly attitude. Even worse, people who dont file bugs and then claim its broken . Yeyy, how are we to know? No, I dont use all the same packages in the same ways as the users do. Sorry, no can do. Of course, we could get more devs to fix stupid user bugs but that doesn't feel like the right way. unfortunately :/ Another problem with lowering the bar, is that the current installation indoctrinates people on Read the wellwritten manual carefully before you continue .. Graphical /userfriendly installers dont give the same breaktrhough.. Thats why they exists, so users dont have to read manuals. (Joel on Software had this down good, users dont read manuals. In fact, assume users can't read. ) Making the bugreporting harder to get to is another solution. Yey, make it even more difficult to file a bugreport? unfortunately that is rather unpleasant thing to do when you want to file bugs. :-/ How do other distributions come through with this? Debian devs are for all that I've noticed distanced and hard to reach with support and bugs, and a lot of them have the reputation of being flamemongers that do nothing but bicker. *cough* Slackware, I'm not sure, I haven't tried to get support there so I dont know. Somone involved might be able to help there? BSD: see Slackware. Mandrake + Redhat + SuSE .. : Sell the support. Hire folks. all very
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Spider wrote: Okay, I'll take the bait... here Thanks for your response. As far as I can tell I agree with you. Gentoo is a 'do-it-yourself' distribution, and very good at it. The (true) bugs people experience and report are inevitable when you take into account the rate of change in the packages. Let's hope we take turns in experiencing an installation (emerge) setback, try to resolve it, and file a bug report with (hopefully) a suggestion for a fix. After the fix is applied, everything is OK again, and we all profit. I don't see much point in graphical installers, and actually not even in the binary packages Gentoo already offers on the CD images. The reason that even a plain RedHat install is bulky is simply because they want to make all people happy, and turn on many --enable flags when building their RPMs. Consequently, many dependencies arise. I don't see how an 'Enterprise Gentoo Linux' install CD would change that. Compiling from source is not really an option for the average Linux user, I think. What I can see is a sysadmin maintaining a master Gentoo system, that has all the stuff the employees of that specific company need (or for a set of systems that suit a particular purpose). The binary packages can be created on that master system, and be applied to other systems when things check out OK. Perhaps some more tools are needed to make that process more painless, but I would focus on that, rather than on ready-made installers. Gwendolyn. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Fri 4 April 2003 11:22, Spider wrote: begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, I'll take the bait... here Several people in this thread seem to associate graphical installers with precompiled packages, why? SNIP And don't forget that I love Gentoo the way it is right now, just I think that a graphical installer would be a great thing for Gentoo to gain mass adoption, that's all. Regards Jose Okay, I might keep a fairly low profile theese days, several reasons, most private, but I have to come in with a point here. please, dont take this as an official Gentoo opinion, its not discussed in the devteam, its not politically correct and its inflammatory and prejudiced and put some good people in a fairly bad light. snip Well, Thats my inflamatory rant on the subject of why I fear a userfriendly installer that helps the less advanced users on their path into the project. //Spider Well said spider, I have learnt more about linux by installing, reading the docs and using gentoo than I ever did with the other distributions. We need to keep the overhead for the official gentoo team to a minimum, the bigest help we could make is to only post relevent questions after reading the docs and checking the bug site. regards Paul ** This message has been sent using GENTOO Linux and kmail * -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Getting rid of gaudy yellow in KMail (was Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?)
On Friday 04 April 2003 12:54, Carlos C. Gonzalez wrote: Hi Spider, This isn't related to the subject of your email but when trying to read it, I was presented with a bright gaudy yellow message in KMail (at the top of your email) saying Message was signed with unknown key. The validity of the signature cannot be verified. Problem: OpenPGP plug-in was not specified. Use the 'Settings-Configure KMail-Security' dialog to specify the plug-in or ask your system administrator to do that for you. And at the bottom of your email Look at my kmail+aegypten howto at my homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv/kmailgentoo.php Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Researcher Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv pgp0.pgp Description: signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Friday 04 April 2003 13:00, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote: Agree with you, but... (there's always a but :o) ) First of all, maybe I should mind my own business instead of talking about how things could be better or putting pressure on some developers that do things for free, so please take this as just an oppinion and kind chatting, as I don't intend at all to criticize your work (what the [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think you are doing a great work) So back to the point, I think all of this you have talked about could be solved in the following way: * About the optimization flags, don't give the idiot users the chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only change the processor they are compiling for with --march- and nothing else, I don't know. Or even detect the processor (I think this can be done easily) and automatically compile for it without any further optimization. Ok, they won't have a fully optimized system, but at least they will have a system optimized for their processors, and this is more than they will ever have with another distros. This way the number of bugs caused by agressive optimization flags could be drastically reduced for idiot users. Why would we want idiot users. I personally believe gentoo should not want to be an all-users distro. Please let the noobs run redhat, mandrake, caldera, suse whatever. The installation manual is an excelent way to filter out those users who are not quite ready for gentoo yet. This will make sure that the traffic on gentoo-user is not quadrupled (and all devs and knowledgeable people leave it). It will also make sure that the amount of invalid bugs doesn't increase considerably. Gentoo is a linux distribution for power users by power users. Everyone is welcome to use gentoo, but as yet it could mean that users who are not qualified get disappointed. That's bad luck for them, but I don't really care that much. For gentoo we need people who are going to help to make the distro even greater than it is now. People who really need a graphical install are not going to be those people. * About the bug reporting, maybe it could be created some automated reporting tool. Gnome has one, I don't know if works well, but it's an idea. There are allready too few developers. Automated bug reporting generates incredible amounts of noise. Many emerge failures are caused by user error (nonintentional), that many people on this list are happy to help them resolve, but are not bugs. By the way, I have curiosity about this... do you all the developers work for free in Gentoo?. Again, I should mind my own business, but I think you have a great product here, and you could start promoting it and selling it to companies, basing the marketing in the improved performance obtained in Gentoo. Gentoo still could be free, but you could make some good money for selling services associated with Gentoo. Have you ever thought about that? While I'm not a gentoo developer I believe no-one get's paid for gentoo, not even Daniel. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Researcher Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv pgp0.pgp Description: signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Friday 04 April 2003 13:36, Gwendolyn van der Linden wrote: I don't see much point in graphical installers, and actually not even in the binary packages Gentoo already offers on the CD images. The reason that even a plain RedHat install is bulky is simply because they want to make all people happy, and turn on many --enable flags when building their RPMs. Consequently, many dependencies arise. I don't see how an 'Enterprise Gentoo Linux' install CD would change that. Compiling from source is not really an option for the average Linux user, I think. I'll tell you why I like the GRP. I like gentoo a lot as a distribution. There is one disadvantage in gentoo. It takes a lot of time until the system has compiled all packages that make it usable for work. Some time ago I got a computer to work from at a company that participates in my research project. Of course I installed gentoo there. But I do have something better to do with my time then waiting for all compilation to be finished. That's why I got a cd with the GRP. I started with installing kde and mozilla (+deps) from the CD. From that moment on I could work. Of course As soon as I ran my desktop I started to emerge the packages according to my preferences, and get recent versions. But I didn't need to wait looking at the compile progress while it was busy. This was a pentium two, so getting to a useable state without the GRP would have taken me a lot of time (at least 24 hours). I do not like the redhat install either because of the same reasons that you give, and I do not believe in using the binary packages at any other place than installation, but during initial installation they are extremely useful. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Researcher Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv pgp0.pgp Description: signature
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Somehow I do not quite agree to that Paul. Some strange problems could be found by letting people work gentoo as their first Linux experience. Your words sound like Gentoo should be an _elite_ (meta-) distribution and I do not think that's going to do Gentoo any good. This is a know 'bug' that has been around for many years in the Linux community. We should be willing to help people where we can. Beside, have you ever seen such nice documentation online? Yes, I tell people that switch from Windows to use SuSE or Redhat. I started with Slackware as my first distro. It was hard, but I think it's the only way I could get the knowledge I have now. As long as we don't get stuck because of a certain sence of being a hard core linux distro. I do NOT want this project to bleed to death over such elite feeling. regards, Bram -Original Message- From: Paul de Vrieze [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: vrijdag 4 april 2003 15:32 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? On Friday 04 April 2003 13:00, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote: Agree with you, but... (there's always a but :o) ) First of all, maybe I should mind my own business instead of talking about how things could be better or putting pressure on some developers that do things for free, so please take this as just an oppinion and kind chatting, as I don't intend at all to criticize your work (what the [EMAIL PROTECTED], I think you are doing a great work) So back to the point, I think all of this you have talked about could be solved in the following way: * About the optimization flags, don't give the idiot users the chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only change the processor they are compiling for with --march- and nothing else, I don't know. Or even detect the processor (I think this can be done easily) and automatically compile for it without any further optimization. Ok, they won't have a fully optimized system, but at least they will have a system optimized for their processors, and this is more than they will ever have with another distros. This way the number of bugs caused by agressive optimization flags could be drastically reduced for idiot users. Why would we want idiot users. I personally believe gentoo should not want to be an all-users distro. Please let the noobs run redhat, mandrake, caldera, suse whatever. The installation manual is an excelent way to filter out those users who are not quite ready for gentoo yet. This will make sure that the traffic on gentoo-user is not quadrupled (and all devs and knowledgeable people leave it). It will also make sure that the amount of invalid bugs doesn't increase considerably. Gentoo is a linux distribution for power users by power users. Everyone is welcome to use gentoo, but as yet it could mean that users who are not qualified get disappointed. That's bad luck for them, but I don't really care that much. For gentoo we need people who are going to help to make the distro even greater than it is now. People who really need a graphical install are not going to be those people. * About the bug reporting, maybe it could be created some automated reporting tool. Gnome has one, I don't know if works well, but it's an idea. There are allready too few developers. Automated bug reporting generates incredible amounts of noise. Many emerge failures are caused by user error (nonintentional), that many people on this list are happy to help them resolve, but are not bugs. By the way, I have curiosity about this... do you all the developers work for free in Gentoo?. Again, I should mind my own business, but I think you have a great product here, and you could start promoting it and selling it to companies, basing the marketing in the improved performance obtained in Gentoo. Gentoo still could be free, but you could make some good money for selling services associated with Gentoo. Have you ever thought about that? While I'm not a gentoo developer I believe no-one get's paid for gentoo, not even Daniel. Paul -- Paul de Vrieze Researcher Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.cs.kun.nl/~pauldv -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
[gentoo-user] Optimizing and bug WAS [Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?]
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 * About the optimization flags, don't give the idiot users the chance to change sensitive compile flags. Maybe they could only change the processor they are compiling for with --march- and nothing else, I thought you could specify the CFLAGS in the ebuild, so it wasn't using to agressive Cflags, Or am I wrong. - -- Sigurd Stordal President of GOGS Experimental Petrologist -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jZh/SB4UOs/snOURAuKgAJ9RwA/9mezy7PXxFq6icfo80lLLZQCffiU0 GVEp6GMuXJ1DG2Mt7vrwy6c= =lAiR -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Bram, On April 4, 2003 06:59 am, DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: [snipped] This is a know 'bug' that has been around for many years in the Linux community. I didn't know that this elitest attitude had been around for so many years in the Linux community. Hmm...interesting. I have only recently plunged into Linux and that is one of the first impressions I have been left with when discussing Linux quirks with those more experienced than me. As long as we don't get stuck because of a certain sence of being a hard core linux distro. I do NOT want this project to bleed to death over such elite feeling. I'll second that :). One other thing if I might comment on it. The term idiot when referring to users. I know it's in quotations and all that but all of us are idiots in things that we do not have experience in. Might be good to keep that in mind and use a different term to convey a more open and friendly congeniality. If one is inclined to want to present Gentoo in the best light of course. Otherwise I guess in one sense, it doesn't matter what term we give to inexperienced users.. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
* DE SMET Bram (BDSR) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [20030404 11:07]: Well, I got used to setting Oracle on Sun boxes on my previous job and indeed there is a trick to it. I don't know what problems we might have on Gentoo. I guess if all env variables are set and the shared memory is ok it might work smooth. It works smooth with Gentoo 1.2. Actually Gentoo 1.2 with xfs performed 40% better than RH 8.0 in certain situations. But be aware of Gentoo 1.4's glibc 2.3, I could not install 9iR2 on it... Sandor -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Spider [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 10:17:36 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, I'll take the bait... here One thing that scares me with the ease-of-install and simplicity, the lowering of the threshold for users to install Gentoo, is this. I agree with what you had to say as well spider. I don't think it's necessary to make the installation process artificially difficult (hiding documentation, or even not having any, etc) but I wouldn't want to make a significant change (like a gui installer) even one that allowed for the same level of customization. I also don't think it's all that politically incorrect. I think someone else already said this, but I think the install makes for a good barrier to entry. If you can't handle that, then it's not going to get better/easier for you, so you should hold off and gain some more experience with another distribution and come back later when you start getting frustrated with its limitations. Note that this preference to exclude a group isn't a permanent exclusion. I think any linux user that sticks with it has the potential to use and enjoy gentoo. In fact, I think it's /inevitable/ that they'll come here, once they start feeling the limitations of their current distribution. This is not a superiority thing. I don't think I'm better than any of these people, I've just got more experience and/or have worked harder at it. With time and effort there's no reason that most people couldn't have at least as easy a time at this as I do. I'm nothing special in this regard, I don't have some special gentoo gene or anything. -- No one is more hopelessly enslaved than the person who falsely believes he is free. --Johann Goethe -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Carlos C. Gonzalez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Robert, On April 3, 2003 08:11 am, Robert Spahr wrote: [snipped] Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! It never ceases to amaze me how adding a nice installer and hardware detection front-end to Gentoo and other such things is considered by many to be a dumbing down of Gentoo. Honestly. I just plain can't understand it. It's easy. If you have an easy installer, you have a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, and then they get in and surprise this distribution isn't redhat. Nor is it as easy to administer as redhat. Surprise bad things can happen, and you have to be able to fix them. How would adding something like an automated install and hardware detection dumb Gentoo down? The command line and the opportunity to install things manually (aka the hard way to do things) would still remain available. It's not about what remains available. It's about who that kind of distribution attracts. And once you have newbie's here, who've just barely managed to get the install done, you'll have them spamming the lists and forums with questions that are answered in documentation, or that they should just plain already know before using a distro like this. As a result, people who actually know what they are doing, and can answer /real/ problems and questions will leave the list to avoid the noise. And the developers will get so tired of being pestered about things that they should never have to deal with that they'll make changes to dumb gentoo down to avoid it. They can't be blamed for this btw, it's just self-defense. A perfect example is this whole optimizaiton thing. Someone capable of setting up gentoo, particularly one setting all those optimization flags, should know enough to try rebuilding with a lower setting if weird unexplainable things are going on. But because we are ALREADY at a point where we have too many people below that bar constantly making bug reports that can be fixed by reducing optimizations we now have a problem of trying to protect them from themselves so that we can reduce the workload of the developers, from all their bogus bug reports. If by dumbing down we mean that Gentoo will not challenge one's to rise to the vigarous exercise of learning how to tinker, and configurate, and pull their hair out once in a while as they learn the intricacies of power use then it seems to me that to not give people the chance to skip some of that is to limit their choices. Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. Namely choice. That's ridiculous. You have plenty of choice. If you don't like gentoo's install you can choose to install redhat, or suse, or whatever. Do you go to redhat's mailing lists and complain that they aren't offering choice because they don't have an installer like gentoo's? Aren't they limiting choice by not doing so? If all distros have to offer all the options so that everyone has your definition of choice then why would we even bother having different distros? Are we limiting choice by not having redhat packaging as an option? Not to mention dpkg, and autopackage, ad nauseum? As it stands now people have no choice in this matter. It's either gut it out and spend tons of time working through all kinds of Gentoo quirks and idiosyncracies or go to another distribution. Exactly. Wait ... either ... or ... isn't that pretty much a perfect example of choice? I can't wait to become an expert on Gentoo and to have the time to create my own distribution based on Gentoo. That will take the best of Gentoo and add a healthy dose of what I call ease of use based on what Redhat and other distros are doing. Look. If you like what redhat and other distros are doing why don't you use those distros? I'm not trying to be mean, it's an honest question. Why try to make gentoo like another distro you like instead of just using the distro you like? But if this is what you want, you are sure as heck welcome to start your own distribution based on gentoo with a graphical installer. The license certainly allows for that. Just make sure you don't point your users here for support. I honestly don't understand it. Especially when anything having to do with making Gentoo easier to install and use is seen as dumbing down Gentoo. Ease of use in my thinking is not equal to dumbing down a distribution. As if everyone using such ease enhancements would be a dummy. I and many others who are no dummies, would use such enhancements for the simple reason that they save time, add consistentcy, and allow us to get the most out of Gentoo quicker. As well as sell it more successfully to our bosses or our customers. No, using those enhancements doesn't make you a dummy. It doesn't negatively reflect on the user at all. However, it is indisputable, that some people are /only/ capable of using
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Friday 04 April 2003 11:13 am, Mark Bainter wrote: As a result, people who actually know what they are doing, and can answer /real/ problems and questions will leave the list to avoid the noise. I would tend, for the most part to disagree. Those few that do leave will be replaced by those they have helped, and the knowledge base will continue to grow. You can't expect gentoo to be all things to everyone. It has a specific target. It's meeting that target very well. You can't criticize it for not hitting targets it is not aiming at. AMEN! I came over to Gentoo primarily because after 3+ years of using Linux, I had learned very little. I use Gentoo specifically BECAUSE it forces me to learn. I started my first install on New Years Eve (last) So, after 3 months I'm far from a Guru but I've learned a lot more than I did in all my time with the big 3 distros -- Regards, Ernie 100% Microsoft and Intel free -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Spider, you make some very valid points. I've written a (small, kludgy, in-house, will never be fit for prime time) text installer in python that essentially asks all the pertinent configuration questions (root partition, boot partitoin, swap partition, what filesystem type(s) one wants, static ip address v. dhcp, dns v. nis, etc.) and then does the rest of the install unattended, essentially following the installation guide and desktop howto, then further customizing per my company's needs. Which led me to the idea of a TEXT BASED, split window installation program that would LEAD or GUIDE one through the install WITHOUT dumbing it down, with a lynx window in the (upper or right) half of the screen and a text prompt, or text editor (choosable at the beginning between vi, nano, emacs, ??? perhaps) when appropriate for configuring the system. Help available at the console at all times, with an explanaition of what you are doing (e.g PURPOSE: network configuration; ACTION: editing /etc/conf.d/net, followed by an explanaition a la the install guide). All interactive work (edits, etc.) would be done at the beginning, then one walks away and lets the compiler run. My script is nowhere near anything like this ... it takes some (ugly) prompts, gets the minimal information it needs, and sets up a system tailored to my and my employer's needs (hard coded in the python script), but this approach would seem to address most of the complaints requesting an installer of sorts, without dumbing the process down and lowering the bar as a Mandrake-style installer might. Those wanting eye candy might be disappointed, but those simply wanting a little less manual difficulty with the installation, and those who simply thing that hand installs come across to their corporate masters as too unpolished, ought to be satisfied for the most part, with no dumbing down of the process involved. I agree with you 100%: any installer that hides and denies the user knowledge is, in the medium and long term, a great disservice, and I agree with your concerns as to what the ramifications would be (even less clueful people posting even less clueful bug reports, etc.). So, with that in mind, an ideal installer for gentoo from my perspective would be: 1) NOT graphical, but rather text (curses?) based, so it can be run remotely in a chrooted environment on a working, installed system (clean upgrades from scratch, which are often desired) 2) poses all interactive questions at the beginning and end of the process, so one can walk away from a week long compile (literally, on a P2/233) after spending a few minutes answering questions and editing files, then come back at the end of that (day|weekend|week), edit rc.conf, enter a root password, and perhaps answer another couple of questions and then reboot. I.e. no interactive work done in the middle of the install! 3) NOT dumbed down. User should be GUIDED and EDUCATED, not, and I repeat, not have the underlying architecture and complexity hidden from them. Knowing where to hand edit a file from the beginning makes later tasks (putting the machine on a new network, changing its name, upgrading its kernel, etc.) vastly easier and faster than doing a quick, slick, fancy-schmancy graphical install and then having no idea what (Red Hat|Mandrake|Suse) file to edit when changes are needed later. I prefer no installer to a graphical installer, but would find something like the above both very useful from a time and convinience perspective, and useful in educating newcomers to how Gentoo and Linux works in perhaps a less daunting fashion than the hand editing process is (meaning we'd likely get more clueful users as a result, rather than clueless ones). Alas, I am so swamped with work (moving office, etc.) that I won't have time to even think about this stuff for several months, but if one of the folks clammering for an installer wants to take a crack at it, I humbly submit my (non-patented, free for any non-proprietary use) thoughts as a possible starting point. regards, Jean. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I heard Mark Bainter said: Look. If you like what redhat and other distros are doing why don't you use those distros? I'm not trying to be mean, it's an honest question. I don't know about Carlos, but here's my own reason. I use Gentoo to save time. All in all, I'm freaking tired of computers as a whole. They don't work, they crash, or you have to spend hours to get them to work the way you want, or they try to force ads/trojans/spyware on you, or want to force THEIR (generally corporate) ways on you. I tried and ended up staying with Gentoo because it Just Fucking Works. Installing new software is easy. Maintainance is very easy (Gentoo's init subsystem, among other things, is the single best I had the luck to come across). And the default packages are very recent, which matters quite a lot for a workstation. Neither RedHat, Mandrake or SuSE are gifted with that ease of keeping the OS very up to date. Not without a cost in stability, anyway, and instability is a major source of time waste. But I dislike having to jump through countless hoops to get Gentoo installed. I don't care about having to compile the base system, as long as I can be doing something else in the meanwhile. But I would love a small curses-based utility that would let you configure the system, would ask for the base ebuilds to install, and then do its business on its own for as long as it wants. Including the installation of a default precompiled kernel, if at all possible. Configuring a kernel for compilation is a lengthy and annoying process. Well, actually, having to compile a kernel isn't so bad, if only you didn't have to configure it manually, option by option by option by option. Maybe compiling automatically after some Known To Work defaults (maybe that of RH or MDK, since they work well), possibly with some USE modifiers, would be doable? That's exactly the Gentoo way of doing things, after all. So, to answer your question, I -like- what Gentoo is doing, but I don't like ALL of it, and the installation is something I indeed don't like much. As far as what I look for in an OS is concerned, Gentoo is the best choice so far, but can still be improved, and an installation tool would be such an improvement. Sorry about the F word. What can I say, I'm kind of fond of it. :) But if this is what you want, you are sure as heck welcome to start your own distribution based on gentoo with a graphical installer. I wonder why, whenever this kind of 'ease of use' thread erupts, people often confuse automation of the installation and graphical installation? The two are actually almost entirely orthogonal, and most people who would like an installation tool, don't give a flying duck about it being graphical. Or so I think, anyway. :) -- S. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I for one would LOVE having the ability to chose the options I want, customize the settings, start the script and come back in a week to find the system completely compiles and ready to go. Ohh yea, and cut the graphics - I like the text idea w/ explanation! Now, having said that I must admit to being one of those mostly clueless idiots when it comes to Linux... but I'm hoping to change that as I have time (graduate school doesn't leave much time for extra's) which is the primary reason I haven't done much with Linux. just my thoughts ps The reason I switched to gentoo was because it the site looked cool, everyone seemed to give it high praises, and the instructions are well laid out. Having said that, what keeps me with gentoo is the fact that I am actually forced to learn Linux, which in my opinion is a good thing! -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 12:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? Spider, you make some very valid points. I've written a (small, kludgy, in-house, will never be fit for prime time) text installer in python that essentially asks all the pertinent configuration questions (root partition, boot partitoin, swap partition, what filesystem type(s) one wants, static ip address v. dhcp, dns v. nis, etc.) and then does the rest of the install unattended, essentially following the installation guide and desktop howto, then further customizing per my company's needs. Which led me to the idea of a TEXT BASED, split window installation program that would LEAD or GUIDE one through the install WITHOUT dumbing it down, with a lynx window in the (upper or right) half of the screen and a text prompt, or text editor (choosable at the beginning between vi, nano, emacs, ??? perhaps) when appropriate for configuring the system. Help available at the console at all times, with an explanaition of what you are doing (e.g PURPOSE: network configuration; ACTION: editing /etc/conf.d/net, followed by an explanaition a la the install guide). All interactive work (edits, etc.) would be done at the beginning, then one walks away and lets the compiler run. My script is nowhere near anything like this ... it takes some (ugly) prompts, gets the minimal information it needs, and sets up a system tailored to my and my employer's needs (hard coded in the python script), but this approach would seem to address most of the complaints requesting an installer of sorts, without dumbing the process down and lowering the bar as a Mandrake-style installer might. Those wanting eye candy might be disappointed, but those simply wanting a little less manual difficulty with the installation, and those who simply thing that hand installs come across to their corporate masters as too unpolished, ought to be satisfied for the most part, with no dumbing down of the process involved. I agree with you 100%: any installer that hides and denies the user knowledge is, in the medium and long term, a great disservice, and I agree with your concerns as to what the ramifications would be (even less clueful people posting even less clueful bug reports, etc.). So, with that in mind, an ideal installer for gentoo from my perspective would be: 1) NOT graphical, but rather text (curses?) based, so it can be run remotely in a chrooted environment on a working, installed system (clean upgrades from scratch, which are often desired) 2) poses all interactive questions at the beginning and end of the process, so one can walk away from a week long compile (literally, on a P2/233) after spending a few minutes answering questions and editing files, then come back at the end of that (day|weekend|week), edit rc.conf, enter a root password, and perhaps answer another couple of questions and then reboot. I.e. no interactive work done in the middle of the install! 3) NOT dumbed down. User should be GUIDED and EDUCATED, not, and I repeat, not have the underlying architecture and complexity hidden from them. Knowing where to hand edit a file from the beginning makes later tasks (putting the machine on a new network, changing its name, upgrading its kernel, etc.) vastly easier and faster than doing a quick, slick, fancy-schmancy graphical install and then having no idea what (Red Hat|Mandrake|Suse) file to edit when changes are needed later. I prefer no installer to a graphical installer, but would find something like the above both very useful from a time and convinience perspective, and useful in educating newcomers to how Gentoo and Linux works in perhaps a less daunting fashion than the hand editing process is (meaning we'd likely get more clueful users as a result, rather than clueless ones). Alas, I am so swamped with work (moving office, etc.) that I won't have time to even think about this stuff for several months, but if one of the folks clammering for an installer wants to take a crack at it, I humbly submit my (non
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I didn't know that this elitest attitude had been around for so many years in the Linux community. Hmm...interesting. I have only recently plunged into Linux and that is one of the first impressions I have been left with when discussing Linux quirks with those more experienced than me. Well, I think this is not a linux problem only, I've seen this often in the java world, around the J2EE platform (there are real holy wars between J2EE and .NET) and around some popular open source projects. I think this is negative for the platform/project/whatever that gets this feeling around it. One other thing if I might comment on it. The term idiot when referring to users. I know it's in quotations and all that but all of us are idiots in I started using the term idiot as a joke, sorry if anyone fetl insulted, was not my intention. Anyway, I consider myself in this group, as I have little experience with linux. I managed to put this system to work thanks mainly to the excellent documentation in the web, so I don't feel superior to anyone else. And I admit it, my mixer still doesn't work well, I have no image from my 3Com web cam, and today I tried to record sound from my micro and I couldn't, so I am possibly the greatest idiot in the mail list :o) HELP :oD About the main point of the thread, all of this started because we were talking about corporate use, and convincing IT managers that Gentoo is a good option for using it in a corporate environment. The graphical installer issue, unexperienced users and all of that came out when talking about branding Gentoo. So let's sum up... I think Gentoo could be a good option for corporate use, using some of the suggestions that have been mentioned in this thread for improving stability and administration of corporate networks. The question is: do Gentoo developers want Gentoo to be adopted by the masses? Do Gentoo developers want Gentoo in the corporate environment? I see a possible money income from this scenarios, I don't have the knowledge to make a Gentoo based distribution for corporate environments, but I think that someone with such a knowledge could make some good money from such a distribution. Regards and peace !!! Jose -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 05:31, Paul de Vrieze wrote: Why would we want idiot users. I personally believe gentoo should not want to be an all-users distro. Please let the noobs run redhat, mandrake, caldera, suse whatever. The installation manual is an excelent way to filter out those users who are not quite ready for gentoo yet. This will make sure that the traffic on gentoo-user is not quadrupled (and all devs and knowledgeable people leave it). It will also make sure that the amount of invalid bugs doesn't increase considerably. Gentoo is a linux distribution for power users by power users. Everyone is welcome to use gentoo, but as yet it could mean that users who are not qualified get disappointed. That's bad luck for them, but I don't really care that much. For gentoo we need people who are going to help to make the distro even greater than it is now. People who really need a graphical install are not going to be those people. Sorry, but I disagree. I think that portage makes gentoo a much better newbie distrobution than redhat or mandrake. I also think that our irc channel is WAY better at helping newbies than #redhat (i dont even know if there is a #mandrake channel so I wont comment on that), and our web forum is imho the best out there, period. Yes, Gentoo is missing is a graphical installer. BUT I think thats a good thing, because I can remember how much I learned the first time I installed Gentoo (I even learned more than the first time I tried to install LFS) because our installer documentation was just so excelent. The command line installer :) is excelent for teaching tool for newbs.. which is how we get people to _STOP_ being newbs.. by teaching them.. not by excluding them from the oportunity to learn. Gentoo: newbies check in, they dont check out. -- alex ps. I dont think we should change a single thing as far as our bug system goes, we have bugs.gentoo.org for real bugs, and we have this mailing list and #gentoo for everything else. So far it has always managed to bail me out. pps. I think charging for support is a good idea. I would happily let someone pay me to help them install gentoo over the phone :) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
begin quote On Fri, 04 Apr 2003 21:01:08 +0200 Jose Gonzalez Gomez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'll bite again :) I think Gentoo could be a good option for corporate use, using some of the suggestions that have been mentioned in this thread for improving stability and administration of corporate networks. The question is: do Gentoo developers want Gentoo to be adopted by the masses? Do Gentoo developers want Gentoo in the corporate environment? I see a possible money income from this scenarios, I don't have the knowledge to make a Gentoo based distribution for corporate environments, but I think that someone with such a knowledge could make some good money from such a distribution. Some things I'd like to see, see this again as personal ramblings and perhaps more or less something that might be worth looking at, but not an official Gentoo position, ok? *) improved secure portage, gpg signing, md5 hash and a generally improved infrastructure there. (on its way as we speak) *) improved binary / GRP support, prebuilt binaries with default USE flags for a system, avaiable and signed, with a feature to download theese instead of building from source if you choose. *) merging stage 2 /3 into GRP packages( not completely insane IMO, but perhaps a bit impractical) *) simple configuration of alternate GRP address' (for internal network, make admin make packages and sign, then deply) *) simplify GRP package building (Documentation mainly) *) nice partitioneditor on the cd (haven't tried/Checked recently, might be there) with a visual display of partitions and capable of resizing things... including ntfs. *) kernel autoconfiguration, or decent default for a bloated but functional kernel. (emerge laptop-config, depends on virtual/linux , perhaps?? ) Well, theese are some thoughts to ease the deployment into more corporate usages. Documentation on how to do backup and logging server configurations for machines would also be nice, but thats also something I'd expect a unix admin to be able to handle on their own. //Spider irate developer -- begin .signature This is a .signature virus! Please copy me into your .signature! See Microsoft KB Article Q265230 for more information. end pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Mark, On April 4, 2003 09:13 am, Mark Bainter wrote: It never ceases to amaze me how adding a nice installer and hardware detection front-end to Gentoo and other such things is considered by many to be a dumbing down of Gentoo. Honestly. I just plain can't understand it. It's easy. If you have an easy installer, you have a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, and then they get in and surprise this distribution isn't redhat. Nor is it as easy to administer as redhat. Surprise bad things can happen, and you have to be able to fix them. You know I think I am beginning, albeit just beginning, to see the logic of keeping Gentoo from being too easy. Hmm. How would adding something like an automated install and hardware detection dumb Gentoo down? The command line and the opportunity to install things manually (aka the hard way to do things) would still remain available. It's not about what remains available. It's about who that kind of distribution attracts. And once you have newbie's here, who've just barely managed to get the install done, you'll have them spamming the lists and forums with questions that are answered in documentation, or that they should just plain already know before using a distro like this. Hmm You may have a point here too Mark. I guess I tend to view newbies through the lens of my experience. Since I still consider myself a newbie. I tend to read the documentation and do my own research and frankly oftentimes I find that's it quicker for me to do that than post another question. I find that 99.99 percent of my questions do not have ready answers found in the FAQ's or by a search of Google Linux or the Gentoo forum. Many of my questions come about as a result of having to work my way through holes left in the Gentoo documentation or my relative inexperience with Linux. But I guess I have to concede that there are many newbies which just want everything fed to them on a silver platter. I can't expect every newbie to put in the time and the effort that I have to getting a Gentoo system up and running and running reasonably well. As a result, people who actually know what they are doing, and can answer /real/ problems and questions will leave the list to avoid the noise. And the developers will get so tired of being pestered about things that they should never have to deal with that they'll make changes to dumb gentoo down to avoid it. They can't be blamed for this btw, it's just self-defense. Hmm...good point. If by dumbing down we mean that Gentoo will not challenge one's to rise to the vigarous exercise of learning how to tinker, and configurate, and pull their hair out once in a while as they learn the intricacies of power use then it seems to me that to not give people the chance to skip some of that is to limit their choices. Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. Namely choice. That's ridiculous. A bit strong here Mark :). I'll take it as an expression of your intense feelings on the subject and not as a personal lambast of what I said. You have plenty of choice. If you don't like gentoo's install you can choose to install redhat, or suse, or whatever. Do you go to redhat's mailing lists and complain that they aren't offering choice because they don't have an installer like gentoo's? Aren't they limiting choice by not doing so? If all distros have to offer all the options so that everyone has your definition of choice then why would we even bother having different distros? Are we limiting choice by not having redhat packaging as an option? Not to mention dpkg, and autopackage, ad nauseum? I guess when I consider Linux as a whole there are indeed plenty of choices. I still say that Gentoo does not offer much of a choice between an easy installation and one that in my mind is terribly quirky but I can see where it's a matter of perspective. That is whether the choice is Linux or Gentoo specific. I can also see the value of having a distribution to cater to a specif group of Linux users. Namely power users. I can't wait to become an expert on Gentoo and to have the time to create my own distribution based on Gentoo. That will take the best of Gentoo and add a healthy dose of what I call ease of use based on what Redhat and other distros are doing. Look. If you like what redhat and other distros are doing why don't you use those distros? Because I like Gentoo better for various reasons. Certainly nothing to do with the hairy installation or hassles of configurating packages. More with where Gentoo is going, the willingness of forum and list members to help out, and the flexibility that Gentoo gives me in creating the kind of distribution I want for myself or that I want to offer my customers. I'm not trying to be mean, it's an honest question. Thanks for clarifying that. The
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I'll tell you why I like the GRP. I like gentoo a lot as a distribution. There is one disadvantage in gentoo. It takes a lot of time until the system has compiled all packages that make it usable for work. Some time ago I got a computer to work from at a company that participates in my research project. Of course I installed gentoo there. But I do have something better to do with my time then waiting for all compilation to be finished. That's why I got a cd with the GRP. I started with installing kde and mozilla (+deps) from the CD. From that moment on I could work. Of course As soon as I ran my desktop I started to emerge the packages according to my preferences, and get recent versions. But I didn't need to wait looking at the compile progress while it was busy. This was a pentium two, so getting to a useable state without the GRP would have taken me a lot of time (at least 24 hours). This is why it would be a superb idea for Gentoo to adopt something like Knoppix. What I would really love to see is a Knoppix Gentoo where the whole base is a Gentoo system with portage and all (probably not with the portage tree as this can be huge, but then again the CD is compressed so maybe it is not too much space). With a Knoppix Gentoo you can pop in the CD and have a complete working system at your disposal in 30 seconds with the ability to install Gentoo on the background or even copy the whole system (or sets of it with some portage magic) to the HD. There can also be the possibility to have different Knoppix Gentoo CDs for different architectures (CFLAGS) and even the possibility to have different tastes with different sets of apps. Even better, a program or sctipt which would let someone easily create Knoppix Gentoo CDs. The Gentoo LiveCD is a nice attempt, but, really, Knoppix is something else :-) It might be a nice idea to gear GRP towards a live system. After all, GRP and Koppix are both compressed, so what is the difference between packages on a CD and a compressed live CD other than the live factor? Ok. Enough of asking and dreaming for now. -- Vano D [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi there, More than an installer from scratch, what would be really usefull would be a simple script (can be done in a few hours, but it would be nice to have it included for people who already know Gentoo) to install the base system *post stage3*. That is, the system logger and the rest of the basic stuff asking the user for which choice of software. Nearly everybody needs a system logger, so this has to be installed along with other very basic software (vim ? :). Really what I am talking about is a basic software installer for essential ebuilds needed for a normal system. Mainly to speed of admin work for people who know Gentoo. This will avoid admins to try to remember what needs to be installed and to make them go check the install docs everytime (Yes. It is easy to remember all the pre stage3 stuff to do, but not the rest. I once forgot to install a system logger as a matter of fact :-) -- Vano D [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 05:20:16PM -0700, Carlos C. Gonzalez wrote: I don't how many times I have heard statements to the effect of well, it works for me also. As though that alone should make me realize that if I was a more experienced Linux user the solutions to the problems would be self-evident. Gurus tend to speak down to those who don't know as much as a general rule I think. Precisely because they end up starting to know so much that it starts to get to their heads. Most of the time when I make comments about 'it works for me', it's not looking down at the person, it's more a comment on 'Well, it _can_ be done, but I have no idea what you're doing wrong so I can't help you other than to give you encouragement that it isn't impossible.' ---+--- Bryan Feir VA3GBF|The professor holds the keys to the gates of Home:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | knowledge; not to let the student in, but to let | him get out and on to better things. -- Leacock ---+--- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Bryan, On April 4, 2003 08:44 pm, Bryan Feir wrote: Most of the time when I make comments about 'it works for me', it's not looking down at the person, it's more a comment on 'Well, it _can_ be done, but I have no idea what you're doing wrong so I can't help you other than to give you encouragement that it isn't impossible.' That makes sense Bryan and I appreciate your clarification on an alternate meaning to that statement. One I will have to keep in mind. Perhaps I have been taking such statements to mean something other than what the statements were intended to mean. I'll have to watch that. It's just that so often the only thing that is said is Well...it works for me and said in a way that makes it seem more like Well...it works for me so I don't see what the problem is. Perhaps you need to RTFM more! Thanks for pointing out that the phrase It works for me does not always convey the intended meaning very clearly. I undoubtedly have taken it to mean the worst more than once. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On 05:15 Sat 05 Apr , Vano D wrote: This is why it would be a superb idea for Gentoo to adopt something like Knoppix. What I would really love to see is a Knoppix Gentoo where the whole base is a Gentoo system with portage and all (probably not with the portage tree as this can be huge, but then again the CD is compressed so maybe it is not too much space). With a Knoppix Gentoo you can pop in the CD and have a complete working system at your disposal in 30 seconds with the ability to install Gentoo on the background or even copy the whole system (or sets of it with some portage magic) to the HD. There can also be the possibility to have different Knoppix Gentoo CDs for different architectures (CFLAGS) and even the possibility to have different tastes with different sets of apps. Even better, a program or sctipt which would let someone easily create Knoppix Gentoo CDs. The portage tree isnt that big... it's about 90 megs. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I completely agree with you, Mitchell, but we must take into account two things: branding and IT managers. Let's face it, although we all love it, Gentoo has a long way until it becomes a popular linux distribution. Here in Spain, when you talk about linux, people thinks about RedHat, Debian, Suse... that's branding, they managed to make their distributions popular. This doesn't mean their distributions are better than Gentoo, that only means that they have better marketing, maybe they are more user friendly when installing for totally novice users, ... So when we talk about corporate usage we must think also about IT managers. They are the one who are going to approve your crazy idea of putting in production that Gentoo distribution that they haven't ever heard of. He is the one that is gonna be kicked ass if the damn thing doesn't work. So if the RedHat stuff doesn't work, they always may blame RedHat and their certification program and move to another distro, so they feel backed in some sense. If the Gentoo stuff doesn't work, they will be probably fired, as there is no one else to blame. Do you know that phrase no one ever got fired for buying IBM? Perhaps we could apply the same here. So what should Gentoo do or provide for becoming a first order distribution (always in my humble opinion)? First of all, I think it should provide a graphical installer and updater for silly users in order to gain popularity in the desktop area. I mean, if a newbie with no linux experience has to decide between the linux from scracth approach of Gentoo and the graphical installer from RedHat, I bet he will pick RedHat (what the hell, I did it before I knew Gentoo). The graphical updater could use emerge behind the scenes, and always work in the stable branch, so this user doesn't break anything by accident (yes, I know about kportage, but I think it provides access to dangerous functionalities of emerge for a newbie). And second, I don't think this certification stuff is bad at all for Gentoo. This could provide a money income for Gentoo developers, as they could manage this certification stuff, and I think Gentoo would be better considered in the corporate environment. Add to this some scripts to the distribution or standardize the procedures described by some of the people that posted here for improving stability, and add a little marketing about speed and ease of maintenance and I think Gentoo could be soon the leading one in the IT boxes. Regards Jose gabriel wrote: On April 2, 2003 07:00 pm, Mitchell James wrote: Gentoo must have a CD distribution with certified training classes before it has a chance at my company. I also have had problems acheiving a stable configuration and wouldn't recommend your standard desktop user be exposed to that much pain. i have to say that this sort of response is VERY surprising to me. while i only have a small network here @home, i've had very few problems when it comes to stability (mostly the linux learning curve). and what's this about certified training classes? why would you need that? just pick up a book and go nuts. i've always felt that certification is just the windows world thinking being imposed on linux. ...i mean, how is having some piece of paper mean you can do your job? this, like everything else i post is not meant to be a match in a gas-filled room, but i find this thinking very odd and would like to hear if there are others who swing this way. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I work in a windows based company as a new oracle dba. Having experience as a UNIX administrator for quite a time and working with linux since 2.0.35 (slackware), I had a hard time to learn how to work in a windows based lan with windows servers. Lucky for me, I have someone working here that loves Gentoo as much as I do. The result is clear: last week we placed the first Linux server in production, a gentoo box running Squid. This is just the start (I've been here less then 2 months). The chief is in doubt, but for the first time he can see that there is a cheaper way to provide better answers to the problems that come in a windows based enviroment. Yet another example is that we are going to set up a Oracle cluster on Linux. Also using Gentoo. Our developers are using Rogue Wave source pro C++ for some of their applications. They compile those on a Gentoo machine too. This machine uses distcc to speed up the compiling. As you see, the two of us ARE using Gentoo on the workfloor and the nice thing is... we are slowly getting rid of windows ;-) Bram Filip -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Trying to understand the perspective of the 'business people,' as we call them in mixed company, I can kind of understand. First off, Redhat is like the IBM/Microsoft of Linux, so selling management on why Linux != Redhat is a challenge. So lets say you tell them they can run their ancient, junky machines and they'll scream and the security is serious, and it's updated like every 20 seconds, and they bob their heads around like you're getting to them. Now you need to close the deal. Redhat has training classes, certification, and professional services. Reassuring. Mitigated risk, is what those business types call it. And version #s make life easier for some people. Seems reasonable to me to come out with a CD every 6 months with the stable, tested Gentoo of that moment, easily updated each 6 months, and offer training ( a book) and certification. I'd personally lean toward making the CD have a nice installer with hardware detection, possibly built off of Knoppix. Anyone else find this interesting? Josh Date: Wednesday, 02 April 2003 18:00:57 -0600 From: Mitchell James [EMAIL PROTECTED][Save address] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? [Show all headers] [Printer-friendly version] We are using Gentoo for image generation systems used for high end training simulators (our product). The IT department supplies Redhat for the desktop systems. This is more a problem of IT being able to get certified training on Redhat and therefore something that they feel that they can put on a resume for the next job. Also IT is not interested in having current updates on the desktop, all they want is one stable load that can last several years before the next update. They have just decided to go to Redhat 8.0 from 7.2. That should happen in the next year. Most of the desktops still run Windows 2000 or earlier. Gentoo must have a CD distribution with certified training classes before it has a chance at my company. I also have had problems acheiving a stable configuration and wouldn't recommend your standard desktop user be exposed to that much pain. Mitchell James EASY and FREE access to your email anywhere: http://kralweb.com/mail Need cheap webhosting? Visit: http://genialt.no -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Seems to me the spirit of Gentoo is not to 'compete' with redhat or any other distribution. Being more a meta-distribution allows the user to control what they have on there machine. That and the portage systems keeps my machine up to date with the software I choose to install. It also allows me to avoid rpm dependency nightmares. (Anyone remember what it was like installing Xine on RedHat?) If a company can not understand those issues, (Linux != RedHat) they should stick with Redhat, and more power to them. But to expect Gentoo to become like RedHat seems to me a way of limiting choice. Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! my 2 cents - -- Robert Spahr http://www.brainwrench.com PGP Public Key http://www.brainwrench.com/rob/public_key On Thursday 03 April 2003 09:23 am, Josh McCormack wrote: Trying to understand the perspective of the 'business people,' as we call them in mixed company, I can kind of understand. First off, Redhat is like the IBM/Microsoft of Linux, so selling management on why Linux != Redhat is a challenge. So lets say you tell them they can run their ancient, junky machines and they'll scream and the security is serious, and it's updated like every 20 seconds, and they bob their heads around like you're getting to them. Now you need to close the deal. Redhat has training classes, certification, and professional services. Reassuring. Mitigated risk, is what those business types call it. And version #s make life easier for some people. Seems reasonable to me to come out with a CD every 6 months with the stable, tested Gentoo of that moment, easily updated each 6 months, and offer training ( a book) and certification. I'd personally lean toward making the CD have a nice installer with hardware detection, possibly built off of Knoppix. Anyone else find this interesting? Josh Date: Wednesday, 02 April 2003 18:00:57 -0600 From: Mitchell James [EMAIL PROTECTED][Save address] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? [Show all headers] [Printer-friendly version] We are using Gentoo for image generation systems used for high end training simulators (our product). The IT department supplies Redhat for the desktop systems. This is more a problem of IT being able to get certified training on Redhat and therefore something that they feel that they can put on a resume for the next job. Also IT is not interested in having current updates on the desktop, all they want is one stable load that can last several years before the next update. They have just decided to go to Redhat 8.0 from 7.2. That should happen in the next year. Most of the desktops still run Windows 2000 or earlier. Gentoo must have a CD distribution with certified training classes before it has a chance at my company. I also have had problems acheiving a stable configuration and wouldn't recommend your standard desktop user be exposed to that much pain. Mitchell James EASY and FREE access to your email anywhere: http://kralweb.com/mail Need cheap webhosting? Visit: http://genialt.no -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jE8W/+o2J7d7xT0RAgUZAJ9mj/7N3vGS6JTO3/j5ifomtGKqBgCg0pKX D/7zqPGBI99OEtsVhbQJrS4= =NmAH -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Seems to me the spirit of Gentoo is not to 'compete' with redhat or any other distribution. Being more a meta-distribution allows the user to control what they have on there machine. That and the portage systems keeps my machine up to date with the software I choose to install. It also allows me to avoid rpm dependency nightmares. (Anyone remember what it was like installing Xine on RedHat?) If a company can not understand those issues, (Linux != RedHat) they should stick with Redhat, and more power to them. But to expect Gentoo to become like RedHat seems to me a way of limiting choice. Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! Anyway it is always possible that a third company picks up Gentoo and aims it for the corporate world, as in Gentoo-Enterprise or some such. For some reason Gentoo is a meta-distribution as you said. This implies that people can build specific distributions out of the current system. I am still wondering why nobody has done this. It seems like a great idea. You have the base, free, completely non-commercial oriented meta-distro Gentoo, and then you have other companies offer specialized versions aimed at different sectors. It is a win-win situation. -- Vano D [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Robert, On April 3, 2003 08:11 am, Robert Spahr wrote: [snipped] Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! Nothing personal Robert but your comment here was something I simply could not restrain myself from commenting on :). It never ceases to amaze me how adding a nice installer and hardware detection front-end to Gentoo and other such things is considered by many to be a dumbing down of Gentoo. Honestly. I just plain can't understand it. Having such things would make Gentoo much easier and more consistent to install for those who want to just get it working. While if one wanted to tinker, and configurate, and manually get their fill of the command line, they could just as easily skip the automated installation and use cryptic switches and other manually wonderful trinkets to their hearts content. How would adding something like an automated install and hardware detection dumb Gentoo down? The command line and the opportunity to install things manually (aka the hard way to do things) would still remain available. If by dumbing down we mean that Gentoo will not challenge one's to rise to the vigarous exercise of learning how to tinker, and configurate, and pull their hair out once in a while as they learn the intricacies of power use then it seems to me that to not give people the chance to skip some of that is to limit their choices. Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. Namely choice. As it stands now people have no choice in this matter. It's either gut it out and spend tons of time working through all kinds of Gentoo quirks and idiosyncracies or go to another distribution. When I first came to Gentoo I was absolutely incredulous as to how one's reported having to restart their installations of Gentoo up to 10 times!! I don't mean to be blunt but that's ridiculous. It shouldn't have to be that way. I can't wait to become an expert on Gentoo and to have the time to create my own distribution based on Gentoo. That will take the best of Gentoo and add a healthy dose of what I call ease of use based on what Redhat and other distros are doing. Please don't take what I am saying personally Robert. It's just so frustrating to talk about ease of use with so-called power users sometimes who defend the complexity that is Gentoo as if defending a religious dogma. I honestly don't understand it. Especially when anything having to do with making Gentoo easier to install and use is seen as dumbing down Gentoo. Ease of use in my thinking is not equal to dumbing down a distribution. As if everyone using such ease enhancements would be a dummy. I and many others who are no dummies, would use such enhancements for the simple reason that they save time, add consistentcy, and allow us to get the most out of Gentoo quicker. As well as sell it more successfully to our bosses or our customers. Granted! This might be a different use for Gentoo than many might use it for. But it would definitely enhance Gentoo in the sense of giving everyone a greater degree of choice over why and how they want to use Gentoo. I hope I didn't come across too strongly Robert. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Not really: you would be putting a lot of effort in trying to make gentoo into a mandrake/redhat lookalike. Gentoo's advantages are its easy update and software management, both of which you are saying are not needed in the scenario you paint. As far as better installer and hardware detection, gentoo has come a *long* way, but still needs to go further! BillK On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 22:23, Josh McCormack wrote: ... hs with the stable, tested Gentoo of that moment, easily updated each 6 months, and offer training ( a book) and certification. I'd personally lean toward making the CD have a nice installer with hardware detection, possibly built off of Knoppix. Anyone else find this interesting? Josh -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Carlos, You seemed to miss my point completely. I did not mean that an easier installer would dumb gentoo down. Making a CD of binaries issued every 6 months, and rejecting the portage system would be missing a large part of what makes gentoo so interesting. Gentoo gives you more control over what is on your system, as well as allow you to compile it specifically for your hardware. If you need a CD of binaries use redhat. Why convert gentoo into a redhat clone? Now if you wanted to make a new bianary distribution for enterprise based on the current gentoo, well go for it and good luck. I am not offended and do not feel you came on too strong. I just think you missed my entire point. - -- Robert Spahr On Thursday 03 April 2003 05:39 pm, Carlos C. Gonzalez wrote: Hi Robert, On April 3, 2003 08:11 am, Robert Spahr wrote: [snipped] Educate the companies.. do not dumb down Gentoo! Nothing personal Robert but your comment here was something I simply could not restrain myself from commenting on :). It never ceases to amaze me how adding a nice installer and hardware detection front-end to Gentoo and other such things is considered by many to be a dumbing down of Gentoo. Honestly. I just plain can't understand it. Having such things would make Gentoo much easier and more consistent to install for those who want to just get it working. While if one wanted to tinker, and configurate, and manually get their fill of the command line, they could just as easily skip the automated installation and use cryptic switches and other manually wonderful trinkets to their hearts content. How would adding something like an automated install and hardware detection dumb Gentoo down? The command line and the opportunity to install things manually (aka the hard way to do things) would still remain available. If by dumbing down we mean that Gentoo will not challenge one's to rise to the vigarous exercise of learning how to tinker, and configurate, and pull their hair out once in a while as they learn the intricacies of power use then it seems to me that to not give people the chance to skip some of that is to limit their choices. Something that seems contrary to the whole spirit of open source and GPL. Namely choice. As it stands now people have no choice in this matter. It's either gut it out and spend tons of time working through all kinds of Gentoo quirks and idiosyncracies or go to another distribution. When I first came to Gentoo I was absolutely incredulous as to how one's reported having to restart their installations of Gentoo up to 10 times!! I don't mean to be blunt but that's ridiculous. It shouldn't have to be that way. I can't wait to become an expert on Gentoo and to have the time to create my own distribution based on Gentoo. That will take the best of Gentoo and add a healthy dose of what I call ease of use based on what Redhat and other distros are doing. Please don't take what I am saying personally Robert. It's just so frustrating to talk about ease of use with so-called power users sometimes who defend the complexity that is Gentoo as if defending a religious dogma. I honestly don't understand it. Especially when anything having to do with making Gentoo easier to install and use is seen as dumbing down Gentoo. Ease of use in my thinking is not equal to dumbing down a distribution. As if everyone using such ease enhancements would be a dummy. I and many others who are no dummies, would use such enhancements for the simple reason that they save time, add consistentcy, and allow us to get the most out of Gentoo quicker. As well as sell it more successfully to our bosses or our customers. Granted! This might be a different use for Gentoo than many might use it for. But it would definitely enhance Gentoo in the sense of giving everyone a greater degree of choice over why and how they want to use Gentoo. I hope I didn't come across too strongly Robert. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list - -- Robert Spahr http://www.brainwrench.com PGP Public Key http://www.brainwrench.com/rob/public_key -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+jM8u/+o2J7d7xT0RAoGzAKC3Eeyq3dL1XzUQxROylm0JIW+brgCeO7G/ TvmUqSyCRxj+SOd6557svss= =qyiT -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
I manage development at a small software firm in Australia. We began running Gentoo on our development systems about 8 months ago, and now have 5 systems in our office running Gentoo. Before this we were using a mixture of windows, redhat and mandrake linux. The primary reason we run Gentoo is because portage is far more user friendly and powerful - far more useable - than any other linux package management system. In my opinion Gentoo is also easier to configure than any other distribution. The Gentoo documentation is great too. Whenever we get a new programmer on i have them install their own Gentoo system from stage 1 - it's a great learning experience (especially for developers who are not very familiar with linux to start with). I have often wondered what difference an idiot-proof installer and binary packages stored on the mirrors for portage would make to Gentoo.. I think it would completely alter the make up of the userbase. It would take away from the advantages Gentoo has over other distributions. It would change the focus of the distribution. If there are people out there that want gentoo with a graphical installer or portage with precompiled binaries - let them build their own distribution based on Gentoo. Would that make everyone happy? On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 10:15, William Kenworthy wrote: Not really: you would be putting a lot of effort in trying to make gentoo into a mandrake/redhat lookalike. Gentoo's advantages are its easy update and software management, both of which you are saying are not needed in the scenario you paint. As far as better installer and hardware detection, gentoo has come a *long* way, but still needs to go further! BillK On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 22:23, Josh McCormack wrote: ... hs with the stable, tested Gentoo of that moment, easily updated each 6 months, and offer training ( a book) and certification. I'd personally lean toward making the CD have a nice installer with hardware detection, possibly built off of Knoppix. Anyone else find this interesting? Josh -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- Mark Saunders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cytek Pty Ltd -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Hi Robert, On April 3, 2003 05:17 pm, Robert Spahr wrote: [snipped] You seemed to miss my point completely. I did not mean that an easier installer would dumb gentoo down. Making a CD of binaries issued every 6 months, and rejecting the portage system would be missing a large part of what makes gentoo so interesting. Sorry Robert. I stand corrected. I think I took one sentence out of your post and went off in left field with it :). Rejecting the portage system in my mind is definitely not good. It's one of the best things Gentoo has going for it. A CD of binaries might be nice too but not really what I had in mind since compiling programs is really no big deal once one has a working Gentoo system. With nice -n 15 emerge... one can compile in the background and hardly skip a beat. I think in the future I will have to take a breather, step back, and calmly evaluate what is said rather than coming back with a knee jerk reaction. It's just that when I see anything that seems like more of the let's not make Gentoo as easy to use as possible because it's strictly for power users or good enough for us philosophy coming through, I tend to jump on my soapbox and start preaching to the gurus :) No disrespect to any gurus intended. Sorry about that. Carlos www.internetsuccess.ca . -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 18:55, DE SMET Bram (BDSR) wrote: Yet another example is that we are going to set up a Oracle cluster on Linux. Also using Gentoo. Oracle under Linux tends to be horribly sensitive to variations in libraries. (Heck, it's that way under Solaris too). I'm not going to say be very careful because that doesn't mean anything... but I will say do tell us how it goes as the underlying Gentoo system and it's shared libraries upgrade over time AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd Australia +61 2 9977 6866 North America +1 646 270 5376 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 19:34, Carlos C. Gonzalez wrote: Hi Robert, On April 3, 2003 05:17 pm, Robert Spahr wrote: [snipped] You seemed to miss my point completely. I did not mean that an easier installer would dumb gentoo down. Making a CD of binaries issued every 6 months, and rejecting the portage system would be missing a large part of what makes gentoo so interesting. Sorry Robert. I stand corrected. I think I took one sentence out of your post and went off in left field with it :). Rejecting the portage system in my mind is definitely not good. It's one of the best things Gentoo has going for it. A CD of binaries might be nice too but not really what I had in mind since compiling programs is really no big deal once one has a working Gentoo system. [% snip %] I realize this wasn't really asked, but this thread got me thinking about what would be involved in creating a set of binaries for offline installations. It seems to me that portage makes this quite simple: (1) Create a file containing a list of the packages you wish to install. Mine's called pkglist.txt, and looks like this: sys-apps/vcron app-admin/metalog app-misc/mc app-crypt/gnupg dev-lang/python dev-lang/perl app-editors/vim net-www/apache dev-util/cvs (2) Set your USE flags to be the same as on the target systems. (3) Use portage to check what packages would be installed to satisfy all the dependencies for your chosen packages. # emerge --pretend --emptytree $(pkglist.txt) (4) Use portage to download the files, keeping them separate from your regular distfiles. # DISTDIR=/mnt/raid/my_pkg_snapshot/ emerge \ --fetchonly --emptytree $(pkglist.txt) (5) Burn the downloads onto CD. (6) Copy the downloads to the /usr/portage/distfiles dir on the target machine before doing the installs/upgrades. (7) Run the following command to install your packages: # emerge $(pkglist.txt) This is all off the top of my head, ie. untested. Does anyone see any problems with this approach? Thanks, -- Doug Gorley | [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenPGP Key ID: 0xA221559B Fingerprint: D707 DB92 E64B 69DA B8C7 2F65 C5A9 5415 A221 559B Interested in public-key cryptography?http://www.gnupg.org/ -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment. (Having had 2 occasions in the past 6 months that I have been running Gentoo where portage/emerge related issues have hosed (a) gcc and (b) libstdc++.so, I'll stand by that statement!) I have Gentoo running on my desktop here at work and at home, but the real production machines are Debian. Debian's stable really is stable! Gentoo is nifty and extremely cool but is prone to nasty emerge issues such as the ones I have just noted. (I do love Gentoo - don't get me wrong - that's why I run it my own desktop!) St -Original Message- From: gabriel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 02 April 2003 17:12 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? i'm hoping the lot of you will be able to help me convert my own company to gentoo with some usefull stats: can someone fill me in on what big companies out there use gentoo? if i get a reasonably strong list, it'll serve as some helpful ammunition in convertin this (mostly redhat) office to gentoo. thanks -- your old road is rapidly aging please get out of the way if you can't lend a hand for the times they are a changing - bob dylan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list DISCLAIMER The contents of this e-mail and any attachments are confidential to the intended recipient and may also be legally privileged. Unless you are the named addressee (or authorised to receive for the addressee) of this email you may not copy, disclose or distribute it to anyone else. If you have received this email in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and then delete the email and any copies. The Sega Group have made all reasonable efforts to ensure that this e-mail and any attached documents or software are free from software viruses, but it is the recipient's responsibility to confirm this. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Tan, Stephen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment. (Having had 2 occasions in the past 6 months that I have been running Gentoo where portage/emerge related issues have hosed (a) gcc and (b) libstdc++.so, I'll stand by that statement!) I have Gentoo running on my desktop here at work and at home, but the real production machines are Debian. Debian's stable really is stable! Gentoo is nifty and extremely cool but is prone to nasty emerge issues such as the ones I have just noted. I have to agree with you here. I'm currently using gentoo on production servers (webservers, database servers, and a couple of others (dns/mail/etc) I love gentoo, but in a corporate environment there are a few problems. Gentoo is a cutting edge distribution. If you stick with stable, you're generally ok, but even then (as mentioned above) you aren't immune to problems that can crop up. Myself, I've made my own custom setup that keeps a custom portage overlay around with the package versions I want to use. I just copy over the new ones I want as they come out from the real portage tree whenever I want to update. But this is an extra bit of administration. It's no big deal to me, neither is adjusting dependencies in the overlay to avoid upgrading other packages unnecessarily. However, I'm not the rule when it comes to admins. In my experience, the unix sysadmin field is fairly flooded with barely competant to completely incompetant people. For every true admin I meet, I meet 2 that couldn't tell me the difference between NIS and NFS. In addition, most commercial applications tend to lag behind in development. I have several that just plain won't run on gentoo 1.4 because they haven't gotten around to rebuilding it on the newer glibc yet. That's a real pain. It's not gentoo's fault, it's the curse of using closed source applications, but we don't always have a choice in these matters. It's unfortunate that there's no compat library for the 2.2 glibc. Because of these things, we'll probably be switching to redhat advanced server when the next version is released. It makes me ill to think of all the work it's going to take to clean those servers up, and rewrite/rebuild all those packages so they make sense and don't have all those stupid dependanciesbut in the end, if I get hit by a bus they'll have a much easier time finding someone else competant enough to keep the servers running that way than if I left it the way it is now. I love this distribution, and it'll probably stay on some of the servers (monitoring) that are not commercial software dependant, and are not mission-critical, but the rest will switch. It'll be a sad day. :-( -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
gabriel wrote: i'm hoping the lot of you will be able to help me convert my own company to gentoo with some usefull stats: can someone fill me in on what big companies out there use gentoo? if i get a reasonably strong list, it'll serve as some helpful ammunition in convertin this (mostly redhat) office to gentoo. thanks Not so big in absolute comparison but big for us are: - Banco Popolare di Verona e Novara www.bpv.it (a main group banks of Italy) in the company proxy, in the company reverse proxy, in the SFTP server and more - Antex SPA www.antex.it (a main companies consultant) in the company SQL server (firebird) for the elaboration of italian tax module (called 730) of more than 150.000 persons - many other Bank groups (SANPAOLOIMI, GERICO, ESABAN) for web services, mainly for publication of 1.5Tbytes of images regarding important documents Can this make someone change idea? Andrea -- Andrea Gagliardi Euronia srl Via Palazzina, 224 37134 Verona -o) Voice (+39)0458202578 Fax (+39)045507490 /\\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.euronia.it _\_\\ -- Prendi GRATIS l'email universale che... risparmia: http://www.email.it/f Sponsor: Sindrome da Regalo? Segui i consigli di Babbo Natale da Oliviero.it: a ciascuno il suo Clicca qui: http://adv.email.it/cgi-bin/foclick.cgi?mid=1073d=2-4 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Tan, Stephen wrote: At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment. snip -Original Message- From: gabriel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 02 April 2003 17:12 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage? i'm hoping the lot of you will be able to help me convert my own company to gentoo with some usefull stats: can someone fill me in on what big companies out there use gentoo? if i get a reasonably strong list, it'll serve as some helpful ammunition in convertin this (mostly redhat) office to gentoo. I agree with Stephen on this. I've been running Linux servers for a long time. I'm only in charge of five servers right now. Four of them Debian. I have one system that started life as a Debian 1.2 system and has been coaxed along until today it is an overtaxed 486 running Sid (unstable testing Debian). The fifth is a Gentoo server that I built about a year ago -- April 2002. It has been handling a few fairly busy mailing lists and some web pages. It distributes about 15,000 emails a day on average, and handles a moderate amount of web traffic. The Gentoo server has given me more trouble than any two debian. It is also clearly the fastest, not taxed at all by its load. But it is more trouble than I would accept if it wasn't a hobby server. I had Gentoo on my old laptop. It was also installed back in April '02, and was noticably faster than the Debian install it replaced. Unfortunately, I left it un-emerged for a few months and it became hopelessly out of sync. I suppose I could've figured out what was wrong and coaxed it into emerging again, but instead I Debianed it and gave it to a friend. Right now I'm debating whether to Gentoo or Debian my new laptop. Crusoe, Crusoe... woe... -Jon -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
Quoting Tan, Stephen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: At the risk of having someone flame me, I'm not sure I'd run Gentoo on Corporate desktops or servers. I don't think that it's stable enough for a production environment. It is more stable than most commercial distributions (Red Hat and Mandrake in particular). We use it in a corporate environment, and are doing so very successfully. HOWEVER, it is a rapidly moving target, and as such you have to manage your own releases. I do this by maintaining a local rsync (portage) and http (distfiles) mirror, and pointing all our local machines to a particular release on that mirror, e.g. in /etc/make.conf: SYNC=rsync://192.168.1.40/2003-spring GENTOO_MIRRORS=http://192.168.1.40/gentoo http://oregonstate.edu...etc; I do not do nightly upgrades into 2003-spring, I keep that frozen (and merge in security fixes by adding those ebuilds, digest files, and meta-data caches by hand). New targets are in a different, testing directory. When upgrade time comes (1 per quarter, 1 per month, whatever), I modify the SYNC entry in make.conf on the clients to point to the new internal release (e.g. 2003-summer), and run an emerge --deep -up world by hand. This only after thorough testing of the new target, and always in a chrooted environment on a second set of partitions so that, if despite the testing things go bad, I can boot up the old installation and revert in no more time than a reboot requires. I never, ever run major emerge --deep -up worlds on the only existing production partitions, but always against a second set of identical partitions. Always leave a way out. Doing this results in a more stable and better performing production environment than with any other distribution I've used, including all of the major ones (Debian, Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.). This approach works very well, and Gentoo has proven itself to be vastly better than average in a very demanding corporate production environment. Jean. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On Wednesday 02 April 2003 10:00 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I do not do nightly upgrades into 2003-spring, I keep that frozen (and merge in security fixes by adding those ebuilds, digest files, and meta-data caches by hand). I am doing the same thing for our gentoo servers, with one variation. I try to keep the stapshot completely clean, and add updates using PORTDIR_OVERLAY. So far this has been very stable for us, and I am very pleased with the arrangement. I am about to migrate our last few redhat servers over the next few weeks. So far there has only been one problem The ebuild for a recent openssl update needed a more recent portage than we had been using, the updated portage needed a newer bash, and the updated bash ebuild also needed a newer portage. deadlock! We have now adopted a policy of updating portage every 8 weeks, even on the stable servers, even when we dont think we need an update. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
We are using Gentoo for image generation systems used for high end training simulators (our product). The IT department supplies Redhat for the desktop systems. This is more a problem of IT being able to get certified training on Redhat and therefore something that they feel that they can put on a resume for the next job. Also IT is not interested in having current updates on the desktop, all they want is one stable load that can last several years before the next update. They have just decided to go to Redhat 8.0 from 7.2. That should happen in the next year. Most of the desktops still run Windows 2000 or earlier. Gentoo must have a CD distribution with certified training classes before it has a chance at my company. I also have had problems acheiving a stable configuration and wouldn't recommend your standard desktop user be exposed to that much pain. Mitchell James gabriel wrote: i'm hoping the lot of you will be able to help me convert my own company to gentoo with some usefull stats: can someone fill me in on what big companies out there use gentoo? if i get a reasonably strong list, it'll serve as some helpful ammunition in convertin this (mostly redhat) office to gentoo. thanks -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
On April 2, 2003 07:00 pm, Mitchell James wrote: Gentoo must have a CD distribution with certified training classes before it has a chance at my company. I also have had problems acheiving a stable configuration and wouldn't recommend your standard desktop user be exposed to that much pain. i have to say that this sort of response is VERY surprising to me. while i only have a small network here @home, i've had very few problems when it comes to stability (mostly the linux learning curve). and what's this about certified training classes? why would you need that? just pick up a book and go nuts. i've always felt that certification is just the windows world thinking being imposed on linux. ...i mean, how is having some piece of paper mean you can do your job? this, like everything else i post is not meant to be a match in a gas-filled room, but i find this thinking very odd and would like to hear if there are others who swing this way. -- the great only appear great because we are on our knees - james connolly -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
gabriel wrote: i have to say that this sort of response is VERY surprising to me. while i only have a small network here @home, i've had very few problems when it comes to stability (mostly the linux learning curve). and what's this about certified training classes? why would you need that? just pick up a book and go nuts. i've always felt that certification is just the windows world thinking being imposed on linux. ...i mean, how is having some piece of paper mean you can do your job? this, like everything else i post is not meant to be a match in a gas-filled room, but i find this thinking very odd and would like to hear if there are others who swing this way. I completely agree with you that having a piece of paper that says you know what you're doing doesn't necessarily mean you do. It also works the other way around. Just because you don't have a piece of paper, it doesn't mean that you know absolutely nothing. But then again, I did just take the 2nd part of the test today for my A+ Certification. I hate conforming -- Andrew Gaffney -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
This could actually be a seperate post on another forum but I will just say this. You can stumble through your Microsoft certs, which means they hold about the same weight with me as Helium. However, when it comes to RHCE or the other leading Linux cert program (the name of it skips me right now but its bad ass) skip one too many times and you trip and fall. I would take a Linux cert over a MS cert any time, any day :) Doc On Wed, 2003-04-02 at 18:15, Andrew Gaffney wrote: gabriel wrote: i have to say that this sort of response is VERY surprising to me. while i only have a small network here @home, i've had very few problems when it comes to stability (mostly the linux learning curve). and what's this about certified training classes? why would you need that? just pick up a book and go nuts. i've always felt that certification is just the windows world thinking being imposed on linux. ...i mean, how is having some piece of paper mean you can do your job? this, like everything else i post is not meant to be a match in a gas-filled room, but i find this thinking very odd and would like to hear if there are others who swing this way. I completely agree with you that having a piece of paper that says you know what you're doing doesn't necessarily mean you do. It also works the other way around. Just because you don't have a piece of paper, it doesn't mean that you know absolutely nothing. But then again, I did just take the 2nd part of the test today for my A+ Certification. I hate conforming -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] survey: gentoo corporate usage?
ds wrote: You can stumble through your Microsoft certs, which means they hold about the same weight with me as Helium. However, when it comes to RHCE or the other leading Linux cert program (the name of it skips me right now but its bad ass) skip one too many times and you trip and fall. I would take a Linux cert over a MS cert any time, any day :) I agree. I think that a trained monkey could get their MCSE. Unfortunately, some employers hold it in high regard. -- Andrew Gaffney -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
