[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
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