[ale] New Twiki topic LinuxInGASchools

[Charles Marcus]

> From: Mike Panetta [mailto:ahuitzot at mindspring.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 11:27 AM
>
> Hmm.  That may be intresting to look at.  BTW, if you hate
> RPM because of some of the problems that occur (ocasionally)
> in a redhat distro due to dependancies and conflict resolution,
> don't blame it on RPM.  Do blame it on RedHat.... Some of the
> older redhat versions had some really broken RPM's that created
> some really messed up dependancy issues due to the way the
> packages were dependant on each other.  I had many problems
> due to this kind of thing.  In general I think packages are a
> cool thing, and I like the way both RPM and (what I know of) deb
> works.  Its just the implimentation that sucks :P

Fair enough - but after experiencing Gentoo, I couldn't possibly ever go
back to RPM - it'd be like going from a full T-1 back to a dial-up...

> I really do not care what dist its based on, just so long
> as it works. I need to take a look at gentoo to see how
> they do things I guess.  That way I can figure out what
> would need to be done to create a distro based on their
> work.

The only major drawback to Gentoo is it is source-based, thus requiring a
high-speed connection and lots of patience for your first install.

The good news is, once we get the scripts written and perfected, we could
easily define some base hardware requiremnets (CPU type, etc) and make an
install CD.

>> Well, the good thing about using Gentoo is you could create
>> different Server Profiles relatively easily - ie, 'SSK-3'
>> (School Server K thru 3rd Grade), 'SS3-7', 'SS8-12', 'Biz-
>> Banks', etc etc.  All you'd have to do is write some scripts
>> that would install the proper ebuilds, and possible customize
>> the config

> This is where Gentoo starts to sound really cool.  Are there
> any docs on the web that describe how to set this kind of
> thing up?

http://gentoo.org/

Scroll down to User Docs and Developer Resources (in the left frame), and
start reading.

I will have to admit this... although the use of 'System Profiles' as I
described is not specifically supported *yet* in Gentoo, it is planned, and
it is still possible to do, it just will require a little more work.

So, I apologize if I got a little ahead of the developers - I did sound like
this functionality was fully supported right now.  Bottom line, though - it
is very doable, even as I described.

>> Sure I do, and again, although I'm not a hacker, wouldn't
>> a post-install script that copied pre-designed config
>> files for each Server Daemon / Application that was
>> installed work just as well on a vanilla system (like
>> Debian or Gentoo)?  For example, If Sendmail is installed
>> (ugh - much rather use QMail or Postfix), copy the
>> included config file to the correct location, renaming the
>> vanilla/default config file in the process.

> Sure I guess.  But I am a purist in this respect.  I like
> the config to stay with the package. Even of we have to
> rename the package from say "sendmail" to "sendmail-ourconfig"
> or whatever.

Understandable, and very doable in Gentoo, but might I suggest an
alternative?

How about keeping the base package just that - the base package.  Then, you
have a second 'config' package, which contains your custom configurations -
you might even get creative and write a text-based script that prompts you
for config info like IP address, etc.  This way you could have as many
different config files as you wanted without duplicating the base
application files for each one.  May not be a big thing for smaller
applications, but what about things like KDE or X?

>> A Gentoo system is much faster and more stable than
>> a Redhat system.

> I would guess that would be true if everything were
> compiled explicitly for the particular CPU you were
> running :)  On RedHat everything is compiled for an
> i386...  RPM allows for CPU specific builds, but in
> general RedHat does not seem to use that feature (our
> companies distro did though, and everything that was
> important to be fast I had built for several different
> CPU's).

There has been some discussion on the Gentoo list on this subject, and
apparently (warning: hearsay evidence being offered ;), it is not as much
the CPU optimizations as it is the code being compiled on your machine
against the actual libs that are on your machine.  Some people were talking
about little to no noticable improvement in performance when you take a
prec-compiled binary for, say, i686, and moved it to an i686 Redhat machine
and compared it to the i386 binary.  But, everyone who has installed a
Gentoo system seems to agree - the performance improvements are very
noticable - the Desktop is much snappier, logins are faster - everything
just works faster and better.

> The cool thing about RPM (I do not know how gentoo
> works in this regard, so I cannot comment) is I can
> say rpm -ba --target=i386,i486,i586,i686,athlon and
> after a bit I will have packages built for all the
> CPU's I listed, each in their own arch directory.

This could easily be scripted in Gentoo, but I can see no need for it, since
all anyone has to do is type 'emerge kde' and Portage d/l the source,
compiles and installs kde along with any/all dependancies (X included), and
cimpiles everything according to the 'USE' variables you have setup - see
list of USE variables and discussion on their use here:

http://gentoo.org/doc/use-howto.html

Charles


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