Why I ditched Gentoo

Khannie

So this is just a bit of a blab. Read at will. Ignore at leisure.

I've recently gotten an iPhone. In short: iPhone + linux = pain in the hole. So I eventually settled on using a virtual machine + shared folder to get videos onto the phone (I watch a lot of video on it on the train). This was *incredibly* slow. Around 5-700KB/s. When you're transferring 5G, this is a problem.

So I have an Ubuntu box in work. I've been playing with virtualbox as part of my job recently and decided to give that a bash for transferring stuff to / from the iPhone to see if it would be any faster than vmplayer. I got somewhere around 4MB/s. Super! So I go home, install virtualbox on my gentoo machine. Recompile the kernel to add in virtualisation support, restart the box, hardware virtualisation working I press ahead, install XP, iTunes, do the ridiculous sync workaround and start copying files. Totally crap. Same speed as vmplayer. Time wasted. Google around and it seems this problem is common enough with a linux host and windows guest.

So I decided to see if there was something about the hardware or something about my gentoo setup and installed Ubuntu 9.10 side by side with my gentoo (10 minute job as I already had the cd). Now I hadn't actually used Ubuntu 9.10 (though I have used xubuntu 9.10). I was pretty impressed by the slickness / polish of it to be honest, but the thing that I most liked was, when I booted up the livecd it immediately told me that my primary hard drive was f*cked.

Now I know what you're gonna say...."Oh, Gentoo can do that too". And yes, it can, but it's a pain in the hole to set up things like that.

So it was going like this:

Gentoo Pro's:
_Super_ fast
Uses very little ram (Around 80MB fully booted into Gnome).
Compiling source uses all 4 cores so is very fast. Nearly as fast as downloading and installing a binary.
I "just like" using a source based distro. It feels....pure or something.
No useless rubbish installed
I know how to use it now
I've learned a *huge* amount about linux from using it
The latest and greatest features are always available in individual packages once you're happy using the unstable branch
Good documentation

Gentoo Cons:
Requires a lot of maintenance
Upgrading kernels is more painful than it should be
Slick features are a pain in the bum to add
Dealing with compile flags is irritating
revdep-rebuild always breaks things

Ubuntu Pro's:
Stuff just works
Slick / polished
Tells you when your hard drive is gonna die

Ubuntu Cons:
The base install is not that minimal
Lots of stuff running in the background compared to Gentoo
uses a lot of ram at boot (around 260MB)
Seems to use a lot of ram during use (was hovering around 600MB last night with very little open).


Now I only have 2G of ram in the box and upgrading it isn't on the cards for now, so memory is a concern. In the end though, stuff just working / not requiring lots of maintenance outweighs the cost of maintenance + benefit of speed. So there you have it. I've more or less decided to switch to Ubuntu.

I feel a bit weird though. Been using gentoo for a few years now. I honestly thought I'd never have another linux install I was so in love with it when I got it working.

loldog

Yeah, there's a lot to be said for stuff that just works. I presume it was Palimpsest that told you about your hard drive?

I use the Ubuntu minimal minimal install, it just gives you the basic stuff you need and then I just add a few more things to get a desktop. Then, I just install stuff as I need it. I followed the guide here:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal

It's a lot faster than normal Ubuntu.

.

Khannie

loldog wrote: »

I presume it was Palimpsest that told you about your hard drive?

It was yeah. Very nice piece of kit. The hard drive is a 4 year old seagate so still within warranty so I'm RMA'ing it. It was top of the line when I got it so still reasonably fast.

loldog wrote: »

I use the Ubuntu minimal minimal install, it just gives you the basic stuff you need and then I just add a few more things to get a desktop. Then, I just install stuff as I need it. I followed the guide here:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal

It's a lot faster than normal Ubuntu.

Yikes. That's pretty fugly. When you say "get a desktop" do you have a normal gnome install? I could be interested in that, though I might miss out on the nice things like palimpsest then.

My install of 9.10 seems to hover around ~400MB most of the time. Free and Top report that almost all of the 3GB is used but all of that apart from the 400MB are buffers that the system will reclaim if required.

loldog

Khannie wrote: »

Yikes. That's pretty fugly. When you say "get a desktop" do you have a normal gnome install? I could be interested in that, though I might miss out on the nice things like palimpsest then.

You just get a basic gnome desktop, without many applications. You can then install anything you want after that and theme it however you like. The advantage is you don't have things installed and daemons running that you don't need, like Bluetooth.

.

Khannie

baz8080 wrote: »

My install of 9.10 seems to hover around ~400MB most of the time. Free and Top report that almost all of the 3GB is used but all of that apart from the 400MB are buffers that the system will reclaim if required.

I got a bit of a shock when mine hit 600. I honestly can't remember (aside from when using VM's) the last time I went over 1G in use on my gentoo box.

loldog wrote: »

The advantage is you don't have things installed and daemons running that you don't need, like Bluetooth.

I may go the other way around....remove the bluetooth and other junk and see what that gets me. Just because it's already installed.

I just checked again and it is at 517MB at the moment. The laptop has been up for three days with moderate to heavy firefox and eclipse usage. That is just the desktop running with compiz, hdaps and caffeine. It has all the bells and whistles though so I don't think the memory usage is all that bad.

eightcell

loldog wrote: »

Yeah, there's a lot to be said for stuff that just works. I presume it was Palimpsest that told you about your hard drive?

I use the Ubuntu minimal minimal install, it just gives you the basic stuff you need and then I just add a few more things to get a desktop. Then, I just install stuff as I need it. I followed the guide here:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal

It's a lot faster than normal Ubuntu.

.

Debian with fluxbox, always have and always will.

Eliot Rosewater

loldog wrote: »

Yeah, there's a lot to be said for stuff that just works.

Perhaps Canonical will steal the iconic phrase from Apple, seeming as they're already making moves to take the desktop look


I run Ubuntu on only 1gb of RAM (its currently at 358mb). When Ive all of Firefox, Inkscape and GIMP opened it can slow done. Yet, I converted from XP just under a year ago, and even Ubuntu at its slowest/most annoying still blows that Windows OS out of the water!

pljudge321

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Perhaps Canonical will steal the iconic phrase from Apple, seeming as they're already making moves to take the desktop look

Damn, the general brown fugliness of ubuntu on a fresh install has always been something thats off-putting, that new logo and those GTK themes look damn slick though.

Eliot Rosewater

Yup, a big improvement on the brown look.

I actually put a lot of stock in the look of a newly installed OS. A lot of potential users are very superficial. If they check out the live CD and find its ugly (as a friend of mine did) they probably wont be bothered giving it the full chance it deserves.

loldog

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Yup, a big improvement on the brown look.

I actually put a lot of stock in the look of a newly installed OS. A lot of potential users are very superficial. If they check out the live CD and find its ugly (as a friend of mine did) they probably wont be bothered giving it the full chance it deserves.

Well yeah, it seems superficial, especially in the case of the gnome desktop because you can change it all in a jiffy but I suppose the care and attention put into making the desktop look nice is interpreted as a reflection of what lies under the surface. I've got the impression that Sabayon is a very slick distro - based purely in how it looks out of the box.

.

loldog

The other thing about Ubuntu is that the default swappiness is set to 60, so if your RAM is limited, it will start using the swap area sooner than maybe other distros would:

* swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100
* swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
* swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

Many people set swappiness much lower, which can make a difference to performance if you have a lot of applications open... see how to change it here.

.

KAGY

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

I run Ubuntu on only 1gb of RAM (its currently at 358mb). When Ive all of Firefox, Inkscape and GIMP opened it can slow done. Yet, I converted from XP just under a year ago, and even Ubuntu at its slowest/most annoying still blows that Windows OS out of the water!

Looking at these figures I'll have to do a bit of pruning on what's happening on my Kubuntu machine. 1GB and quite often it will be using 6-700M of swap (chug chug chug)
xorg runs around 200M, amarok 150M, Firefox 100M+, shreader /thunderbird well over the 100M. Throw in all the plasma stuff, and daemons and there's feck all for anything else. And that's with desktop effects off.

BopNiblets

All that for the iPhone when Ubunut 10.04 will support it out of the box according to this
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/02/confirmed-ubuntu-1004-supports-iphone.html

Oh that's been updated, it's a combo of usbmuxd/gtkpod/libiphone that enables the support, but I wouldn't touch an Apple product with poo on a stick.

Naikon

I like Gentoo because it really does give you a deep knowledge of the GNU userland. Still, you can't beat a nice polished RedHat/CentOS installation because of the corporate sponsership.
Used to use FreeBSD a lot, and it's a fine system that sadly does not get much corporate attention. To conclude, learn something like LFS/General Unix programming if you are inclined, and
then move to a well known platform simply because it pays the bills. It took me a while to realize that the tool is just a means to an end, and politics really don't matter for the most part. No
point in bashing Ubuntu because it is easy to use because that is it's priority. Kinda like bitching about OpenBSD because it's fork() implementation is not as fast as a less secure CURRENT
version of Arch Linux. The tools worth learning are the ones that will get you a job in the end. Everything has it's strong/weak points.

Kinda rambling on here. All Linuxes have a purpose, use the best tool for the job depending on the context imo. I still detest the Windows culture in general mind you : p

Khannie

BopNiblets wrote: »

All that for the iPhone when Ubunut 10.04 will support it out of the box according to this
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/02/confirmed-ubuntu-1004-supports-iphone.html

That just made my fuppin' day. Seriously.

BopNiblets wrote: »

Oh that's been updated, it's a combo of usbmuxd/gtkpod/libiphone that enables the support, but I wouldn't touch an Apple product with poo on a stick.

It's actually an ANIMAL piece of hardware. It's a real pity it's crippled. Mine is jailbroken so I have some really nifty stuff on it including a very nice terminal app. Having said that, I'll be looking to android for my next phone. That'll be a long time from now though.

Oh, and I didn't have much choice at the time of purchase. Only set me back 100 euro though (company account but I had to pay the upgrade). Delicious.

Khannie

loldog wrote: »

Many people set swappiness much lower, which can make a difference to performance if you have a lot of applications open... see how to change it here.

.

Cheers. Done. I also cleaned up the started up apps. Slightly better now.

Johnboy1951

Ubuntu Pro's:
Stuff just works
Slick / polished
Tells you when your hard drive is gonna die

Ubuntu Cons:
The base install is not that minimal
Lots of stuff running in the background compared to Gentoo
uses a lot of ram at boot (around 260MB)
Seems to use a lot of ram during use (was hovering around 600MB last night with very little open).

I quite like it when I get a warning about something going wrong, what I do not like is that Ubuntu liveCD will write to a Win partition to correct an unclean file system without either asking user permission or informing the user it has done so.

It is MY PC and I decide when something gets corrected!

Ubuntu has been dropped like a hot spud because of this.
Heck even Windows gives the user the option to cancel a filesystem check!

Then there is always the fear that if Ubuntu does this without permission what else might it be doing now or in the future?

No thanks. I will use something that does not behave in such a manner.

regards.

pickarooney

loldog wrote: »

Well yeah, it seems superficial, especially in the case of the gnome desktop because you can change it all in a jiffy but I suppose the care and attention put into making the desktop look nice is interpreted as a reflection of what lies under the surface. I've got the impression that Sabayon is a very slick distro - based purely in how it looks out of the box.

.

I was sorely tempted to install Mint after booting to the LiveCD. Lovely greenness and all those codecs - 2 minuts work to set up on a 'buntu box but it does make a difference when the default is pretty.

Khannie, have you ever tried thinliquidfilm?

Khannie

pickarooney wrote: »

Khannie, have you ever tried thinliquidfilm?

I haven't. I use mencoder in a script. Might give it a lash though. Cheers.

edit:

Upload encoded files to your ipod directly

Yum!

Mathiasb

What in Ubuntu told you that your HDD was dying? Did you use the S.M.A.R.T daemon in Gentoo?

Khannie

Mathiasb wrote: »

What in Ubuntu told you that your HDD was dying?

Palimpsest on the livecd informed me as soon as I booted the livecd.

Mathiasb wrote: »

Did you use the S.M.A.R.T daemon in Gentoo?

Probably not. I have checked the SMART status on the drives before but you're a bit like a cow looking over a nine bar gate at times. It was nice just to be told "eh, hello, your hard drive is probably bollixed".