[PLUG] Discussion topic - Choosing to run Gentoo vs Debian or Red Hat

Carlos Konstanski ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com
Thu Dec 24 07:21:55 UTC 2009


On Wed, 23 Dec 2009, Tim Garton wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:49:17 -0800
> From: Tim Garton <garton.tim at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help,	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Discussion topic - Choosing to run Gentoo vs Debian or	Red
>     Hat
> 
> Check out http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574 for an interesting analysis
> of gentoo optimizations.
>
> -Tim
>
> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Mike Connors <mconnors1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I recently had a tech interview w. an organization that runs Gentoo on
>> all its
>> servers. Part of the interview was to login into a test box, build a
>> LAMP server,
>> install some software and upgrade some stuff.
>>
>> This was my first time ever doing anything w. Gentoo and I was quite
>> surprised by
>> how different it was than say Debian or RH. Not to mention the lack of good
>> documentation or what I call "build guides" that you can follow and will
>> help
>> you build out a server. Granted, they're never perfect but can usually
>> get you
>> 85% or more of the way home.
>>
>> So, my questions for discussion are:
>>
>> 1. Gentoo's claim to fame is that by compiling each package for the
>> specific architecture that performance gains are realized.
>> Has anyone found this to be empirically true?
>>
>> 2. If I were making the decisions on which Linux distro to run, I would
>> choose
>> one which I think would more people would tend to have experience with
>> and that
>> has a greater mindshare such as Debian or RH.
>>
>> 3. Does anyone have significant experience working on or supporting Gentoo?
>> If so, what has your experience been?

Sorry, deleted the original email, hijacking this one.

Being a gentoo "enthusiast" (to put it mildly), I have deployed it in
production environments. I have laid out a few items of interest
here. The tone is not meant to be persuasive; I only mean to describe
the similarities and differences (mostly the latter) of a gentoo
system.

Gentoo is based on FreeBSD. I have never used FreeBSD, so I can't say
how well the non-linuxy parts of gentoo follow the BSD standard. One
thing is the hiding of runlevels. Being linux, gentoo has runlevels 0
through 6, but they are glossed over with ones called boot, default,
nonetwork and single.

Another difference is the initscripts. Gentoo has its own interpreter
for initscripts called /sbin/runscript. Among its features is the
ability to calculate dependencies, so that it is not necessary to
place the initscripts in any particular order by namimg them with the
numbers 00-99.

Initscripts that require configuration have files in
/etc/conf.d/. This is where you tell apache which optional modules to
load, where you configure network interfaces, choose a console keymap,
a timezone, etc.

System-wide environment variables are set in /etc/env.d/. The command
"env-update" causes all the data in this directory to be copied to a
single file called /etc/profile.env, which gets sourced by
/etc/profile.

And then there's portage, the package management system. I believe
this is a feature that closely follows the BSD way. Won't get into it
here; it's a broad topic. All the stuff about USE flags and CFLAGS
deserves more explanation. One key difference is the portage tree,
which is a copy of every build script needed by every package
available for gentoo. Every gentoo box has a local copy of the tree,
which is kept up to date with an rsync-based utility. It is trivially
easy to turn any gentoo box into a local mirror.

I might be missing some other differences, but I can't think of them
right now. In most other respects, gentoo is very much linux. In fact,
it is a lot like debian when it wants to be, just not the apt
part. For instance, the whole common lisp setup is copied from
debian. Apache is handled in the usual way, as is PHP, postgresql and
mysql. Once you get a basic gentoo box built, and get the LAMP
components installed, configuring them is just like debian, or at
least more like debian than redhat.

The gentoo handbook is a very good piece of documentation for building
a gentoo box. It is comprehensive and very well QAed. I would follow
it to the letter. You do not need a gentoo boot disc to perform a
gentoo build. My favorite boot medium for a gentoo build is a finnix
disc.

In a production environment, I update gentoo boxes once a month if I
have the luxury. I am loathe to go longer than 3 months because things
can get complicated if you wait longer than that. There are no gentoo
releases, no version numbers. There is only up to date, or not. Each
new update added to the portage tree causes the gentoo build to be
newer and a little different. After 3 months, things can get so far
afield that upgrading becomes messy.

Carlos



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