Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo

["Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields <laebshade@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine.  I feel a
>> little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
>>
>> A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no
>> longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via
>> SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs.  I was busy at the time, first
>> deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go.
>>
>> Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up,
>> and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all.  Whatever
>> it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year,
>> and I can't even run the consoles.  The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the
>> motherboard.  Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe
>> support got dropped.  But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the
>> ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put
>> together these pieces:
>> * Two XEON chips.  I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores.
>> They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips.  I got the slowest still being
>> made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz.  On 4 cores, it's not bad at all.
>> *  2GB of DDR ECC memory
>> * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata
>> drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect.  Some of these are in EZ-Dock
>> docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site).
>> The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy.
>> * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer.
>>
>> So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of
>> laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just
>> fine).
>>
>> The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port.
>>
>> 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site.
>> 2) Postfix
>> 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by
>> the cron daemon.
>> 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account)
>> 5) NTP client and server
>> 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years.
>>
>> My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic
>> when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the
>> most out of it.  I can still do that for specific applications I'm working
>> on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now.  I have gotten pretty tired
>> of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up
>> that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so.
>>
>>
>> So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not).  I'm just not in the target
>> market for Gentoo any more.  It was fun, though.
>> --
>> Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
>>
>>
>
> You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system
> scare you away?
>
> Have you tried using an older live cd?  If it's a video issue, maybe
> detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's
> an option for that)?
>
> It's doable man, don't give up.
>

Of course it's doable.  It's just the last straw.  This left my web site
down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's
requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar
with.


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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