Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 Beta 1

Zardon · Mar 20, 2004, 01:34 PM

Mandrakesoft has released the first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64

Release notes
- Features based on Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community for IA32.
- Improved Serial ATA support, including Promise, Silicon Image and VIA chipsets.
- Experimental support for 32-bit GL acceleration for XFree86 supported cards.

Linuxcompatible

JLP · Mar 20, 2004, 04:26 PM

Oh nice. I might try it but I realy wouldn't like to overwrite my nicely working Gentoo AMD64 install now. Anyone tried this yet?

Zardon · Mar 20, 2004, 04:29 PM

im curious JLP how do you rate the Gentoo AMD64 dist? any good?

JLP · Mar 20, 2004, 04:42 PM

Well I must say I like it more en more every day. At first I was quite scared when I heard that it doesn't have any installation application and you have to do it all by hand. But as there was no real AMD64 Linux distro around I tried it. I quickly found that the installation documentation is written very well and I had no problems with installation. So after some compiling I had everything set up. Emerge is realy great for updating your system with new software. just type emerge mozilla and Gentoo will download the source and patch it and compile it with your setings. Very nice. And to update all things I just type emerge sync (to update the database of software) and then emerge -u world to do it. Very nice. It might not be for newbies but if you have a little Linux experience and fast machine to compile software then it is worth tring. Oh and the Gentoo community is great. On both forums and on IRC.

RIV@NVX · Mar 21, 2004, 10:12 AM

Yeah, Gentoo is OK when you have broadband, but not when you are on dialup...

JLP · Mar 21, 2004, 12:50 PM

Yeah true but nowdays a lot of things just cry for broadband. And even if you have it you could always use more speed. BTW you can always download the ISOs of precompiled Gentoo packages and install that. Or you can ask a friend to download and even compile things for you if you have slow computer and/or internet. Don't know exactly how to do it but I have seen some info about it on their page.

Malus · Mar 22, 2004, 05:57 AM

Gentoo is nifty, but FreeBSD's ports system is much better than Gentoo's portage. I always hated useflags when I used Gentoo a while back.

UberLord · Mar 22, 2004, 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Malus
Gentoo is nifty, but FreeBSD's ports system is much better than Gentoo's portage. I always hated useflags when I used Gentoo a while back.

So whats the pros and cons of each system?

Malus · Mar 27, 2004, 06:15 AM

Gentoo Portage Pros:
- emerge (it's a pretty nifty command)
- Checks and install dependencies
- Tends to be updated very quickly. However, it seems like some maintainers aren't cautious enough to make sure everything works the way it's supposed to.

Cons:
- USEFLAGS
- Tends to have broken ports more often (even my vi seg faulted). Also, this is due to the fact that people push really hard for optimizations, but these same optimizations cause a lot of broken code. -O, -pipe, -march, and maybe even -funrolloops is all you really need.
- Seems to lump included programs with third party programs, which is kind of annoying and disorganized.

FreeBSD's Ports Pros:
- USEFLAGS are set by the developers and maintainers, not the user
- Checks and install dependencies
- portupgrade can easily update all the ports on your system. Also, it can grab packages as opposed to ports, which is useful for slower system or if you don't want to wait a week for Open Office to compile.
- It is independent of the OS's code (I believe Gentoo upgrade both the OS's code and the third party program code). OS source is kept completely separated from outside source code.

Cons:
- Takes a little more effort to use. You have to go into the /usr/ports dircetory, find the program you want, and do a make install clean. While it is second nature after a while, it's a little more intimidating at first.
- You have to run an actual cvsup command as opposed to using emerge rsync. Again, a little more complicated.
- Not updated as quickly as portage, since the applications have to be ported to FreeBSD in the first place.

Maybe I'm just picky, but I really like the way FreeBSD is organized. Linux has always seemed a bit disorganized and chaotic to me.

JustaGuy · Mar 28, 2004, 04:01 AM

Okay, here are a few thoughts on your list of pros/cons:

- How can useflags be a bad thing? They let you build a system entirely to your needs... In other distros, if you want to install Mplayer for the console alone, for instance, you can't (yes, there are people who want no X but still want to watch their videos). You can barely install anything if you're going for an X-less install. Same thing applies for most useflags: KDE, Gnome, multimedia stuff... It's not like you have to define them or anything. If you want the same behaviour as in other distros, just set your useflags to nothing and Portage will use the defaults.

- On broken apps: if people push hard on optimizations, you can hardly blame the ebuild maintainers or the Portage system. If you don't want to risk it and use settings that can cause problems, you're free to do so. My settings are relatively optimized for my CPU and have never caused me any problems. And I've never seen a stable (not ~arch) package refuse to compile.

- I really don't understand what you mean with "included programs" and "third party programs". Maybe you mean free (as in speech) versus proprietary software? I can only say that Portage will not install anything you don't ask it to (or is depended on by something you install).

I have never used BSD or the Ports system, so I will try to restrict the following comments to their impact on Portage.

- There is an easy way to upgrade the whole system on Gentoo as well: emerge -uU world. That upgrades everything you have installed and avoids any downgrades that could happen if you installed software that is not stable, for instance.

- There is a way to install some packages from binary sources. It's called the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP), and as far as I know you just have to add "-k" to the emerge command. I've never used it myself, but it's great for getting a system up and running in no time. There are packages for several architectures.

- Portage is not embedded in the Linux kernel in any way. It is not even directly embedded in the general Gentoo Linux environment, as there have been some sucessful experiments on using Portage in other distros (see http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125553, for instance).

Also, if all of this is not enough for you, I suggest you take a look at the design goals of the sucessor of Portage: Portage-ng. It solves a number of problems.

I'm not trying to convert you or show you the light or anything.

Just clearing a few misconceptions...

raid517 · Apr 4, 2004, 05:54 PM

Mmm.... well sorry to come late to the party and all - and I'm not really interested in all this evangelist stuff - but really if you are looking for a quick and easy way to install Gentoo and don't want to invest the 50+ hours it commonly takes just to get a desktop and a few useful apps up an running you could always use Gentoo Anaconda http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/35.

There are a lot of good things about Gentoo - and a lot of bad things too. Mostly as has been mentioned the biggest fault is that it is a bleeding edge distro - that is often on the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge - so as nice as portage is - it doesn't always seem to work quite as advertised.

If you are looking for a distro that 'just works' - and which is reasonably fast - and up to date - I would say go with SuSe. SuSe 10 will be out soon - and my experience of SuSe is that it is the closest yet anyone has come to getting a usable desktop Linux distro going - although even at 10.0 there will still no doubt be quite a way to go.

What the hey anyway - I just use Linux for fun and as a hobby. For me it makes a good desktop. But I can see why it isn't so easy for everyone.

PS

For a great looking Distro that is as pretty as anything Done by MS - try Connectiva - again they have a new release due soon - and they tend to be one of the more forgotten big players in the Linux world.

Malus · Apr 7, 2004, 03:48 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by JustaGuy
- I really don't understand what you mean with "included programs" and "third party programs". Maybe you mean free (as in speech) versus proprietary software? I can only say that Portage will not install anything you don't ask it to (or is depended on by something you install).

I was refering to prgrams included with the OS, like grep or ls, as opposed to third party, like XFree86. I'm assuming that Gentoo lumps them all together in Portage, which is kind of disorganized in my opinion. I have always felt that a ports system should just include third party applications. I shouldn't be emerging kernels from the same place as mplayer or XFree86, but that's just a personal preference. On the other hand, I guess Linux is just the kernel, so pretty much every program ends up being a third party program.

USEFLAGS are evil. As I said, I just hated setting them to my liking, and the defaults don't always work. Ports is nice enough to take care of hassles like that for you. Usually, there isn't a need to set flags at compile time, since it's automated for you. Mplayer is non-gui by default, there is a seperate port for gui support I believe. Lots of ports just make it so that when you run make install, you can just set an option or two if you need something specific. There really isn't a multitude of options to worry about though. By the way, why don't they have a list of all the available USEFLAGS? At the time I used Gentoo, I could never figure what the USEFLAGS were in the first place. Do they have a central listing now?

emerge -uU is similar to portupgrade -a, except portupgrade -a will only upgrade ports, so anything in the src tree will not get updated. I'm not sure if emerge -uU will update stuff like ls and grep every time you run it. I guess some people would find that preferable, though I prefer to update by base system less often then my ports.

And why don't they include vi with the base install? That's sacreligious. Hopefully they changed that. I almost had a heart attack when I tried to invoke vi while installing Gentoo.

Honestly, I don't know that much about it anymore, since I don't follow it anymore. After it stopped working and corrupted my hard drive with it, I decided to stay away from it. Saved me the trouble of trying to figure out why vi segfaulted all the time or why KDE constantly spouted out sigserv errors. Even with only a few optimizations, like -march and -O2, I still ran into quite a few broken programs. Other than those setbacks, I did like it. I usually stuck with Slack when I used Linux though, since the system was organized to my liking. The fact thatt the *BSD's are so well organized and documented makes them pretty easy and intuitive to use, which is why I stick with them.

I guess I shouldn't go as far as saying that ports is better than portage, but I find that they was ports works is better than the way emerge works. Most of my gripes probably stem from my disatisfaction with Linux.

The new portage sounds interesting. You also might want to follow what the DragonFlyBSD guys are doing with their ports system (if they ever get it off the ground). Looks promising as well.

raid517 · Apr 7, 2004, 08:02 AM

Is there any easy to install BSD versions out there? I remember once I tried to install BSD (can't remember the version) and by comparision Gentoo's install guide was a breeze.

I sometimes get bored with the aguments and might like to try something else for a change.

GJ

JustaGuy · Apr 7, 2004, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Malus

USEFLAGS are evil. As I said, I just hated setting them to my liking, and the defaults don't always work. Ports is nice enough to take care of hassles like that for you. Usually, there isn't a need to set flags at compile time, since it's automated for you. Mplayer is non-gui by default, there is a seperate port for gui support I believe. Lots of ports just make it so that when you run make install, you can just set an option or two if you need something specific. There really isn't a multitude of options to worry about though. By the way, why don't they have a list of all the available USEFLAGS? At the time I used Gentoo, I could never figure what the USEFLAGS were in the first place. Do they have a central listing now?

Ah well, I like USEFLAGS, they help me customize my system. I suppose in the end they could be eliminated, by analysing what you have installed and assume you want support for that, but I like being able to point everything out. And as far as I know there has always been a central USEFLAGS directory: /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc or online, at http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/use-index.xml. Also, you can find out which USEFLAGS a package can use by doing an 'emerge -pv <package>'.

Quote:

Originally posted by Malus

And why don't they include vi with the base install? That's sacreligious. Hopefully they changed that. I almost had a heart attack when I tried to invoke vi while installing Gentoo.

Well, because of the EMACS people

I think their concept is a lot about choice, and VIM and EMACS are 'heavier' and mostly alternative (to one another). But I agree, they should be on the live CD (maybe they are now, I don't know, I installed my system with a 1.4 live CD).

Quote:

Originally posted by Malus

Honestly, I don't know that much about it anymore, since I don't follow it anymore. After it stopped working and corrupted my hard drive with it, I decided to stay away from it. Saved me the trouble of trying to figure out why vi segfaulted all the time or why KDE constantly spouted out sigserv errors. Even with only a few optimizations, like -march and -O2, I still ran into quite a few broken programs. Other than those setbacks, I did like it. I usually stuck with Slack when I used Linux though, since the system was organized to my liking. The fact thatt the *BSD's are so well organized and documented makes them pretty easy and intuitive to use, which is why I stick with them.

Wow, filesystem corruption and segfaults with -O2? That's gotta be rare! I've always used -O3 and never had any problems (well, I've heard OpenOffice is quite sensitive to compile options, but I just can't be bothered to wait for it to compile when there's a nice binary version).

Quote:

Originally posted by Malus

The new portage sounds interesting. You also might want to follow what the DragonFlyBSD guys are doing with their ports system (if they ever get it off the ground). Looks promising as well.

I think I will check that out. Smarter package management systems seem the way to go, and you never know where the next great idea will come up

Malus · Apr 8, 2004, 08:43 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by raid517
Is there any easy to install BSD versions out there? I remember once I tried to install BSD (can't remember the version) and by comparision Gentoo's install guide was a breeze.

I sometimes get bored with the aguments and might like to try something else for a change.

GJ

FreeBSD takes like 20 minutes to install; it is a breeze.

Emacs is evil. Stay away from it.

Mar 20, 2004, 01:34 PM	#1
Zardon DriverHeaven Founder Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 32,480 Rep Power: 179	Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 Beta 1 Mandrakesoft has released the first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.0 for AMD64 Release notes - Features based on Mandrakelinux 10.0 Community for IA32. - Improved Serial ATA support, including Promise, Silicon Image and VIA chipsets. - Experimental support for 32-bit GL acceleration for XFree86 supported cards. Linuxcompatible

Mar 22, 2004, 05:57 AM	#7
Malus BSD SMASH! Join Date: May 2002 Location: A rabbit hole. . . Posts: 1,170 Rep Power: 0	Gentoo is nifty, but FreeBSD's ports system is much better than Gentoo's portage. I always hated useflags when I used Gentoo a while back. __________________ quad (FreeBSD/amd64 8-CURRENT): Intel Q6600 - Asus P5E-VM HDMI - 2x2 GB Kingston PC6400 DDR2 Ram - Seagate 320GB 7200RPM HD - 2xSeagate 1TB 7200RPM HD in RAID 1 via ZFS - Lite-On 20x DVD Multi Recorder - Coolermaster Centurion 5 router (FreeBSD/amd64 8-CURRENT): Intel E4500 - Intel D945GCNL - 2 GB PC6400 Mushkin Ram - Lite-On 48x24x48x16 - Seagate 320GB 7200RPM HD - Silverstone SST-SG02-F wanderer (FreeBSD/i386 7-CURRENT): Lenovo Thinkpad T61p mini (OS X 10.5): Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.8Ghz, 4 GB Mushkin PC5400 Ram - Headroom MicroDAC Portable sound: Rockboxed iPod Video -> Westone UM2's Not-So-Portable Sound: Headroon MicroDAC -> Singlepower PPX3-SLAM -> Grado RS-1's or Beyerdynamic DT-880's Very-Not-Portable-Sound: Squeezebox v3 -> Denon AVR-1507 -> B&W 683's & Sunfire HRS-10

Mar 27, 2004, 06:15 AM	#9
Malus BSD SMASH! Join Date: May 2002 Location: A rabbit hole. . . Posts: 1,170 Rep Power: 0	Gentoo Portage Pros: - emerge (it's a pretty nifty command) - Checks and install dependencies - Tends to be updated very quickly. However, it seems like some maintainers aren't cautious enough to make sure everything works the way it's supposed to. Cons: - USEFLAGS - Tends to have broken ports more often (even my vi seg faulted). Also, this is due to the fact that people push really hard for optimizations, but these same optimizations cause a lot of broken code. -O, -pipe, -march, and maybe even -funrolloops is all you really need. - Seems to lump included programs with third party programs, which is kind of annoying and disorganized. FreeBSD's Ports Pros: - USEFLAGS are set by the developers and maintainers, not the user - Checks and install dependencies - portupgrade can easily update all the ports on your system. Also, it can grab packages as opposed to ports, which is useful for slower system or if you don't want to wait a week for Open Office to compile. - It is independent of the OS's code (I believe Gentoo upgrade both the OS's code and the third party program code). OS source is kept completely separated from outside source code. Cons: - Takes a little more effort to use. You have to go into the /usr/ports dircetory, find the program you want, and do a make install clean. While it is second nature after a while, it's a little more intimidating at first. - You have to run an actual cvsup command as opposed to using emerge rsync. Again, a little more complicated. - Not updated as quickly as portage, since the applications have to be ported to FreeBSD in the first place. Maybe I'm just picky, but I really like the way FreeBSD is organized. Linux has always seemed a bit disorganized and chaotic to me. __________________ quad (FreeBSD/amd64 8-CURRENT): Intel Q6600 - Asus P5E-VM HDMI - 2x2 GB Kingston PC6400 DDR2 Ram - Seagate 320GB 7200RPM HD - 2xSeagate 1TB 7200RPM HD in RAID 1 via ZFS - Lite-On 20x DVD Multi Recorder - Coolermaster Centurion 5 router (FreeBSD/amd64 8-CURRENT): Intel E4500 - Intel D945GCNL - 2 GB PC6400 Mushkin Ram - Lite-On 48x24x48x16 - Seagate 320GB 7200RPM HD - Silverstone SST-SG02-F wanderer (FreeBSD/i386 7-CURRENT): Lenovo Thinkpad T61p mini (OS X 10.5): Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.8Ghz, 4 GB Mushkin PC5400 Ram - Headroom MicroDAC Portable sound: Rockboxed iPod Video -> Westone UM2's Not-So-Portable Sound: Headroon MicroDAC -> Singlepower PPX3-SLAM -> Grado RS-1's or Beyerdynamic DT-880's Very-Not-Portable-Sound: Squeezebox v3 -> Denon AVR-1507 -> B&W 683's & Sunfire HRS-10

Mar 20, 2004, 04:26 PM	#2
JLP DriverHeaven Lover Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Slovenia Posts: 249 Rep Power: 0	Oh nice. I might try it but I realy wouldn't like to overwrite my nicely working Gentoo AMD64 install now. Anyone tried this yet?

Mar 20, 2004, 04:29 PM	Thread Starter #3
Zardon DriverHeaven Founder Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 32,480 Rep Power: 179	im curious JLP how do you rate the Gentoo AMD64 dist? any good?

Mar 20, 2004, 04:42 PM	#4
JLP DriverHeaven Lover Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Slovenia Posts: 249 Rep Power: 0	Well I must say I like it more en more every day. At first I was quite scared when I heard that it doesn't have any installation application and you have to do it all by hand. But as there was no real AMD64 Linux distro around I tried it. I quickly found that the installation documentation is written very well and I had no problems with installation. So after some compiling I had everything set up. Emerge is realy great for updating your system with new software. just type emerge mozilla and Gentoo will download the source and patch it and compile it with your setings. Very nice. And to update all things I just type emerge sync (to update the database of software) and then emerge -u world to do it. Very nice. It might not be for newbies but if you have a little Linux experience and fast machine to compile software then it is worth tring. Oh and the Gentoo community is great. On both forums and on IRC.

Mar 21, 2004, 10:12 AM	#5
RIV@NVX Freedom is a feature. Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Croatia, Rijeka Posts: 4,476 Rep Power: 0 System Specs	Yeah, Gentoo is OK when you have broadband, but not when you are on dialup...

Mar 21, 2004, 12:50 PM	#6
JLP DriverHeaven Lover Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Slovenia Posts: 249 Rep Power: 0	Yeah true but nowdays a lot of things just cry for broadband. And even if you have it you could always use more speed. BTW you can always download the ISOs of precompiled Gentoo packages and install that. Or you can ask a friend to download and even compile things for you if you have slow computer and/or internet. Don't know exactly how to do it but I have seen some info about it on their page.

Mar 28, 2004, 04:01 AM	#10
JustaGuy DriverHeaven Junior Member Join Date: Dec 2002 Posts: 44 Rep Power: 0	Okay, here are a few thoughts on your list of pros/cons: - How can useflags be a bad thing? They let you build a system entirely to your needs... In other distros, if you want to install Mplayer for the console alone, for instance, you can't (yes, there are people who want no X but still want to watch their videos). You can barely install anything if you're going for an X-less install. Same thing applies for most useflags: KDE, Gnome, multimedia stuff... It's not like you have to define them or anything. If you want the same behaviour as in other distros, just set your useflags to nothing and Portage will use the defaults. - On broken apps: if people push hard on optimizations, you can hardly blame the ebuild maintainers or the Portage system. If you don't want to risk it and use settings that can cause problems, you're free to do so. My settings are relatively optimized for my CPU and have never caused me any problems. And I've never seen a stable (not ~arch) package refuse to compile. - I really don't understand what you mean with "included programs" and "third party programs". Maybe you mean free (as in speech) versus proprietary software? I can only say that Portage will not install anything you don't ask it to (or is depended on by something you install). I have never used BSD or the Ports system, so I will try to restrict the following comments to their impact on Portage. - There is an easy way to upgrade the whole system on Gentoo as well: emerge -uU world. That upgrades everything you have installed and avoids any downgrades that could happen if you installed software that is not stable, for instance. - There is a way to install some packages from binary sources. It's called the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP), and as far as I know you just have to add "-k" to the emerge command. I've never used it myself, but it's great for getting a system up and running in no time. There are packages for several architectures. - Portage is not embedded in the Linux kernel in any way. It is not even directly embedded in the general Gentoo Linux environment, as there have been some sucessful experiments on using Portage in other distros (see http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125553, for instance). Also, if all of this is not enough for you, I suggest you take a look at the design goals of the sucessor of Portage: Portage-ng. It solves a number of problems. I'm not trying to convert you or show you the light or anything. Just clearing a few misconceptions...

Apr 4, 2004, 05:54 PM	#11
raid517 DriverHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Posts: 2,518 Rep Power: 0	Mmm.... well sorry to come late to the party and all - and I'm not really interested in all this evangelist stuff - but really if you are looking for a quick and easy way to install Gentoo and don't want to invest the 50+ hours it commonly takes just to get a desktop and a few useful apps up an running you could always use Gentoo Anaconda http://gentoo.vidalinux.com/?q=node/view/35. There are a lot of good things about Gentoo - and a lot of bad things too. Mostly as has been mentioned the biggest fault is that it is a bleeding edge distro - that is often on the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge - so as nice as portage is - it doesn't always seem to work quite as advertised. If you are looking for a distro that 'just works' - and which is reasonably fast - and up to date - I would say go with SuSe. SuSe 10 will be out soon - and my experience of SuSe is that it is the closest yet anyone has come to getting a usable desktop Linux distro going - although even at 10.0 there will still no doubt be quite a way to go. What the hey anyway - I just use Linux for fun and as a hobby. For me it makes a good desktop. But I can see why it isn't so easy for everyone. PS For a great looking Distro that is as pretty as anything Done by MS - try Connectiva - again they have a new release due soon - and they tend to be one of the more forgotten big players in the Linux world.

Apr 7, 2004, 08:02 AM	#13
raid517 DriverHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Posts: 2,518 Rep Power: 0	Is there any easy to install BSD versions out there? I remember once I tried to install BSD (can't remember the version) and by comparision Gentoo's install guide was a breeze. I sometimes get bored with the aguments and might like to try something else for a change. GJ