[PLUG] gentoo-sparc impressions
Jack Morgan
jack at bonyari.com
Fri Jan 2 17:50:02 UTC 2004
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 10:24:23AM -0800, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> ... snip...
>
> Gentoo is the first Free, well behaved, and up-to-date distro that's
> really felt good on this machine, which serves as my network gateway,
> mail server, and web-development server. In the latter capacity, it's
> running MySQL. I think it will soon be my LDAP server as well, but
> there are some sticky replication issues that need to be ironed out.
You might check into ssh/ssl libs as i don't think Gentoo includes some fixes to improve performance. ssh tends to take longer on gentoo-sparc64 to authenticate a ssh session for example.
> Here are some impressions:
>
> * The installation documention wasn't included in the CD ISO. How
> wierd is that? The installation instructions are split over a
> dozen or so HTML pages, so I had to pre-download them before
> proceeding.
It used to be...
> * I did the compile-the-whole-thing installation rather than go with
> the pre-compiled stage3 packages. It took about a day to get the
> basic system up and running; most of that time was spent compiling
> glibc and gcc.
This is the only way to install Gentoo IMO :)
> 2. The sendmail and ssmtp packages don't work and play well. The
> vixie-cron ebuild requires a virtual-mta package, which is
> supposedly supplied by sendmail, but portage insists on
> building ssmtp, which stomps all over sendmail.
grep mta /usr/portage/profiles/default-sparc64-1.4/virtuals is your anwser to this problem. s/ssmtp/sendmail should fix that.
> * I communicate with this box over a serial console and ethernet.
> There's no keyboard or monitor -- and I haven't (and probably
> won't) install X -- so I can't report on using its graphics
> subsystem. Ditto for USB and FireWire.
Works fine. Some people have had issues with XFree86 and ATI video chips.
> * Most of the core ebuilds are kept fairly up to do for the sparc
> platform -- but many that aren't as central to the system aren't.
> The default SpamAssassin for sparc is 2.4x, which is way, way out
> of date (so I just grabbed the latest from CPAN :-). Inexplicably,
> the DocBook stuff is also quite old.
This is mostly due to Gentoo Sparc developers not updating keywords then ebuilds not "working" on sparc64. I've done ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~86" emerge -pv "ebuild" without too many problems :)So i suggest updating keywords in ebuilds yourself then report back to Gentoo Sparc developers when you find a newer version working on your blade.
> * I dropped this script into /etc/cron.daily to give me a nightly
> report concerning newly updated ebuilds.
>
> #!/bin/sh
> EMERGE="/usr/bin/emerge"
> GREP="/bin/grep"
>
> if test -f $EMERGE
> then
> $EMERGE --quiet --nospinner sync 2>&1 | $GREP '^>>>'
> sleep 10
> sync
> $EMERGE --pretend --nospinner --update --deep world
> fi
As a side note, I'd be leery of automating any updates. Portage and the portage rsync tree are its greatest strength and biggest weakness.
--
Jack Morgan
pub 1024D/620F545F 2002-06-18 Jack Morgan <jack at bonyari.com>
Key fingerprint = B343 94EB 0658 E19B D91D 7EA5 15E1 FD24 620F 545F
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.pdxlinux.org/pipermail/plug/attachments/20040102/c6f5e239/attachment.asc>
More information about the PLUG
mailing list