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#1 2004-02-15 03:25:55

snorkel
Member
Registered: 2004-02-11
Posts: 44

Gentoo Users Experience with AL

First,
Let me say I really like AL.  Pacman is very nice.
I just installed it today for the first time and I have everything working.
The base system was incredibly easy to install.  Getting KDE and Alsa up and runnng was a little more daunting but I have it going.

I believe AL can be better than Gentoo, and I plan to continue to use it.
Much faster to setup than Gentoo.

However AL is sorely lacking in docs, it took me forever to get alsa with the 2.6 kernel working.
Why isn't the information contained in this Post added to the official docs?
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=2512

Also I think 2.6.x should be made the default kernel sooner than later.

With a little more polish Arch Linux will really kick ass.

Anyway great job on a great distro.

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#2 2004-02-15 07:26:28

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

snorkel wrote:

However AL is sorely lacking in docs, it took me forever to get alsa with the 2.6 kernel working.

Why isn't the information contained in this Post added to the official docs?
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=2512

gentoo has lots of developers and lots of developers that just work on docs. arch does not. in fact the current doc developer is less useful than herpes. they are working on that.

i would like to state that gentoo has good docs but they can use polish too. when i used gentoo i found more useful information on their forum than in their docs.

Also I think 2.6.x should be made the default kernel sooner than later.

no i completely disagree the default kernel should be a know stable  kernel. i (and many others) would not consider 2.6 to be a production kernel yet. there are issues to resolve. personally until udev is stable in the minds of the kernel developers and some of the bugs i have been hearing about are gone 2.6 should remain an option. as far as i know the next release will give the user the choice of which kernel they want ... as it should be. no default just choice.

personal experience using it in two different distros has proven to me that the only thing i like about the 2.6 kernel is the mouse control. many other performance aspects of it seems much slower (and i have run a slim kernel and a "bloated" kernel)

With a little more polish Arch Linux will really kick ass.

i used arch linux from 0.3 to 0.6 and i never though it needed polish. the only thing that has gone down in quality is the documentation but i trust Xentac to keep hassling for changes there. i don't know what polish is really. i mean it functions just fine and has far less bugs then the "more mature" gentoo. sure upgrading from 0.5 is getting tough but that is only proving the need for 0.6 to come out (screw waiting for the next xfree86 just up the version to 4.3.0.1 and be done with it and realease 0.7 when 4.4 comes out)


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#3 2004-02-15 10:20:22

Bobonov
Member
From: Roma - Italy
Registered: 2003-05-07
Posts: 295

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Yes I agree, arch linux docs can be much better, but I have to say that I noticed that most of the people have problem with linux  standard configuration.
Me too I had problem with alsa.  I had to play a bit  with my alsa, but at first I went to asla website and there I found the solution within user comments

This is something that I realy like about arch. All conf file are where they should be and all file look how the should

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#4 2004-02-15 12:33:47

Mr Green
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From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Hi

Glad to hear you like Arch  smile

I would agree that docs are lacking but a quick search of forum will help you find what you are looking .....

Alsa for me was a pain but in 2.6.2 was very easy to set up...take a look here ...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … light=alsa

As for kernel running two (2.4 & 2.6 ) is not that much of a problem...

Gentoo was fine to start but those configs became hell :evil:

Compiling everything from source took forever....

Arch is a real breath of fresh air  8)

Fast ,light easy to set up....easy to manage.....

Welcome to the future (Linux)

Mr Green


Mr Green

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#5 2004-02-15 20:17:49

snorkel
Member
Registered: 2004-02-11
Posts: 44

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

2.6 is the future, might as well embrace it now.
I have 4 gentoo boxes at work all on 2.6.2 and not one problem with them, they happily run Firebird SQL with 1 million record databases.
I saw a huge performance boost when moving to 2.6.x

2.6.x should be the default with 2. 4 as the option.  It's going to happen anyway, might as well get it out of the way now.

Desktop performance is also much higher with 2.6    try compiling 3 big QT apps with 2.4 (vanilla) and see how responsive your system is, or play a video with mplayer etc etc etc.

Having a little polish means that little things should just work, like a init script to save alsa setting on start and stop, should just be there. Java should just work etc etc etc.

sarah31 wrote:
snorkel wrote:

no i completely disagree the default kernel should be a know stable  kernel. i (and many others) would not consider 2.6 to be a production kernel yet. there are issues to resolve. personally until udev is stable in the minds of the kernel developers and some of the bugs i have been hearing about are gone 2.6 should remain an option. as far as i know the next release will give the user the choice of which kernel they want ... as it should be. no default just choice.

personal experience using it in two different distros has proven to me that the only thing i like about the 2.6 kernel is the mouse control. many other performance aspects of it seems much slower (and i have run a slim kernel and a "bloated" kernel)

With a little more polish Arch Linux will really kick ass.

i used arch linux from 0.3 to 0.6 and i never though it needed polish. the only thing that has gone down in quality is the documentation but i trust Xentac to keep hassling for changes there. i don't know what polish is really.

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#6 2004-02-15 20:27:37

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

lack of "polish" is why i stopped using gentoo. when building from source without the ebuilds provided better working packages or printed official solutions to issues provide no resolution then your distro is not polished at all. my experience with gentoo was a pain the ass. upgrading hosed everything, running etc-update hosed everything, during install i experienced a broken build that took several hours of asking for help on the forum and trying to be heard on irc.

java did not work, alsa did not work, xfree86 and flux box did not work. i cam eto arch and everything did. if there were bugs i reported them and they would be fixed within a day.

needless to say my experiences with arch were far more satisfying than genpoo. then again there are worse distros out there like mandrake which is a walking takling bug factory.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#7 2004-02-15 21:40:33

snorkel
Member
Registered: 2004-02-11
Posts: 44

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Wow, I never had problems like that, you must have used it like in 2002 when it was really new.  1.4 is really nice and I never have had problems with it.  Of course my servers at work are Xless, no GUI at all.
etc-update has never hosed up anything, it actually works well now.

Snorkel

sarah31 wrote:

lack of "polish" is why i stopped using gentoo. when building from source without the ebuilds provided better working packages or printed official solutions to issues provide no resolution then your distro is not polished at all. my experience with gentoo was a pain the ass. upgrading hosed everything, running etc-update hosed everything, during install i experienced a broken build that took several hours of asking for help on the forum and trying to be heard on irc.

java did not work, alsa did not work, xfree86 and flux box did not work. i cam eto arch and everything did. if there were bugs i reported them and they would be fixed within a day.

needless to say my experiences with arch were far more satisfying than genpoo. then again there are worse distros out there like mandrake which is a walking takling bug factory.

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#8 2004-02-16 04:41:48

dave
Member
Registered: 2004-02-13
Posts: 12

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

I loved gentoo, but I got tired of compiling everything.  I usually would let it run over  night, but lately it seems as if it would bomb out in the beginning and I would have to start over in the morning.

arch is really nice so far.  it does remind me of gentoo back in '01.  if it progresses at a similar rate, the it can shoot to the top much like gentoo.

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#9 2004-02-16 10:08:34

d3c3it
Member
From: Manchester, UK
Registered: 2003-09-10
Posts: 112
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

arch seems alot more flexable to me. i was/am a gentoo user still, but the compiling really got on my nerves after awhile. when you got critical updates for packages that take around 2hrs to compile really cuts into work. arch thou because of the binary packages and abs you have a choice, such as theres a few packages on arch i didnt like the set up of, such as mplayer *-alsa i want alsa support smile* i just repackaged it with abs and i was off. its also nice to use a distro at the start of its life *i know its been around for a year or so but its still feels new to me smile*

both gento and arch have the strength weakness;s, gentoos i believe is its unstoppable growth it will emplode on them


"Covered in blood, Cant understand" - Biffy Clyro

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#10 2004-02-16 15:47:39

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Gentoo was the principal distro on my network until about a month or so ago. I had / for Arch and one other distro on two other partitions and a common swap. After running emerge -u world doing routine maintenance on Gentoo one day, I learned that my window manager and a number of associated programs had been taken out. The damage was irreparable. Bringing the matter up tactfully on the Gentoo forums, I was abused rather thoroughly by one of their developers. After having three workstations and a web server lacerated by their updating mechanism, let me tell you how I felt about that episode. Knowing that I was not likely to get anything from the forums administrator there but an attempt at a "balanced" interpretation of events, I took the matter of the abuse directly to the distro's creator, Daniel Robbins. A public apology was made. Now if that were where things stopped everything would be just fine, but not so. To add insult to injury, I then got a private message that very nearly fits a conservative definition of hate mail from their forums administratror. I had gone over his head and he was furious. Given the background, I went back to Robbins with another complaint. I have never gotten a reply. I guess if you're abused publically by one of Gentoo's developers that that's not OK with Robbins, but private abuse by one of his administrative figures is acceptable. So much for appearance and substance at Gentoo.

Nothing would ever cause my returning to Gentoo and that not because of the average user there. There's an old Greek expression that seems rather appropriate to this experience: "The fish rots from the head". You'd never know otherwise by me.

jlowell

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#11 2004-02-16 16:14:44

Mr Green
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From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
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Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

As I was told on there forum "Gentoo is for Guru's not newbies"

I am not surprised to hear you had problems..Gentoo forum is a dark unfriendly place :cry:

Gentoo is susposed to be a fully optimized linux distro...re takes forever to compile ,update & use...

about as user friendly as a pit full of rattlesnakes...but don't let me put you

off try it yourself if you have nothing better to do ....o you might need a phd to get it installed stage 1 whatever lol

Arch...no problem.... 8)


Mr Green

Arch user & proud 8) :


Mr Green

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#12 2004-02-16 16:15:11

dp
Member
From: Zürich, Switzerland
Registered: 2003-05-27
Posts: 3,378
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

"emerge -u world"

... how egoistic! ... you order the !!World!! to emerge ... they never read "Small Gods" the creators of Gentoo


The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.

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#13 2004-02-16 16:19:56

Mr Green
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From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
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Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Hi dp

What have got to say on the matter o master of Arch lol

Mr Green


Mr Green

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#14 2004-02-16 16:23:53

d3c3it
Member
From: Manchester, UK
Registered: 2003-09-10
Posts: 112
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

your not the first person thats said that, theres been alot of abuse by devs and board admins of users.


"Covered in blood, Cant understand" - Biffy Clyro

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#15 2004-02-16 16:29:04

sarah31
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From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Mr Green wrote:

As I was told on there forum "Gentoo is for Guru's not newbies"

wahahahahaha any idiot that can read can use gentoo. i mean what do these guys think they are geniuses? the majority of them praise gentoo simply because they could not install debain and so never had the opportunity to use a good package manager instead of RPMs. take a look the majority of their users are former RPM distro users. they have so little idea of how a distro functions.

i used gentoo after using debian and libranet and i found it very easy to "administer" i mean all i had to do was tyope what they said like some robot. then if i had problems i figured out quickly not to bother asking the "community" i just searched their forum and asked ONE question on irc (and was mostly ignored because the majority of the people there have zero ability to troubleshoot compiling/installing errors by installing errors i mean the i did not make an error one of their stupid ebuilds had issues)

i learned way more from debian and libranet and from three days using arch than i did using gentoo for two weeks. btw i used whatever version was around in august 2002 ... a version which was supposed to be a well working one.

gentoo is also no longer a power distro. it has gone from kiss to kludge and many of their ebuilds are invasive.

their users are pretty stupid too on irc .... they usually log as root.  roll

i have no respect for the distro or the community as they are a snobby bunch of trash talkers.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#16 2004-02-16 16:32:41

Mr Green
Forum Fellow
From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
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Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

ouch say what you think don't hold back...... lol

What is the future then ?

Where do we go from here.....

Mr Green


Mr Green

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#17 2004-02-16 18:03:11

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Mr. Green,

Truthfully, I think the blush is off the rose at Gentoo. It's beginning to suffer from some of the same symptoms that took Red Hat out of the community recently, i.e. (1) the curse of over-popularity, (2) certain concessions that are inimical to its core concept, and (3) having a phony for a CEO. All of this in addition to the kind of complaints more typically encountered such as the ones we read above. It wouldn't surprize me to learn at one point that purely business considerations of one kind or other have insinuated themselves into and driven the decision making process at Gentoo if that hasn't happened already. The myth of the self-giving, misunderstood genius, refused pride of place by the bastards that ran the distro to which he had made his initial contributions then setting out on his own to found a new, revolutionary Linux concept is beginning to wear a bit thin at the elbows. It's certainly worn thin with me.

jlowell

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#18 2004-02-16 18:28:33

Mr Green
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From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
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Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

I am worried that Linux will become a commercial  product (RH is already)...How can you sustain a cutting edge OS's without finiancial backing..

I have a friend who without my knowledge...on the other side of the globe who has spent two days installing Gentoo ...& he unlike me  knows what he is doing..:lol:

At the end the day it is up to  the user what they want ...play games,surf the net etc...

I would glady (not that I would ) go back to Mandrake (some people on the forums might like that !) but I would never install Gentoo again ( I have forgotten how anyway) lol

Mr Green

At home with Arch 0.6 8)


Mr Green

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#19 2004-02-17 11:44:35

d3c3it
Member
From: Manchester, UK
Registered: 2003-09-10
Posts: 112
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Mr Green wrote:

I am worried that Linux will become a commercial  product (RH is already)...How can you sustain a cutting edge OS's without finiancial backing..

I have a friend who without my knowledge...on the other side of the globe who has spent two days installing Gentoo ...& he unlike me  knows what he is doing..:lol:

At the end the day it is up to  the user what they want ...play games,surf the net etc...

I would glady (not that I would ) go back to Mandrake (some people on the forums might like that !) but I would never install Gentoo again ( I have forgotten how anyway) lol

Mr Green

At home with Arch 0.6 8)

ive just reinstalled gentoo on my tv out as it happens, dont know why just did, if im seriously considering changing over to arch, its not even finished yet *the pc* so it wouldnt matter no data lost. thats a question does oxine support music?

But i have to agree, since gentoo has been getting huge limelight the community has gone to shit, theres so many nasty viscious people on that forum i dont even look at it anymore. so much so that this lunch time im wiping gentoo from my works machine and putting on arch in its place, 48hrs it took to install gentoo *its a p3 500* with xfree etc, it will probally take 30mins to install arch. woo


"Covered in blood, Cant understand" - Biffy Clyro

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#20 2004-02-17 16:25:07

sarah31
Member
From: Middle of Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 2,975
Website

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

geek wrote:

Mostly I believe that this is related to the amount of time that has gone into the Gentoo documentation versus the Arch documentation.  It is nothing that some effort cannot fix.

absolutely. the docs do not need to be as "comprehensive"/verbose as gentoo. but as you say covering the bases is essential including possible issues whether they arise after the iso release or not.

One suggestion that i might make would be changing the default editor to nano over vi.  That or provide a vi cheat sheet.  Once you get used to using vi it is very efficient, but the learning curve is might step compared to nano.

having nano in the base and during install would be good for some. but perwsonally i think if you are trying arch you know the basics of vim already. that being said nano could be an option or a vim basics in the install docs would be good.


AKA uknowme

I am not your friend

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#21 2004-02-17 18:22:43

skparkes
Member
Registered: 2003-12-11
Posts: 52

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

I will say that arch has been very nice to me.  Most of the problems I have read on gentoo in this thread seem to just be the community.  Any community that large will have its share of silly sods.

I just really love pacman.  It has never ever let me down.  It always gets everything figured out, and never bails on me.  Nothing else has ever been this good.  Apt I have always had problems with.  I still remember when I installed apt-listbugs on debian, which is supposed to flag packages with bugs, and it hosed my apt.  Recently I tried Ark linux for the fun of it.  Apt installed one package fine, but then it had a cow with some missing library.  Pacman rules!

I also love the slackware simplicity of Arch.  Not everything is ran at startup, and you just edit your rc.conf to set everything up.  It's so quick to boot and easy on the system.  And unlike slack, you don't have to install the kitchen sink to avoid dependency issues.

Speaking of which, I'll throw in how I did my alsa.  I just added snd-emu10k1 to the list of modules loaded at startup.  I believe there is one other module you need to load for oss emulation too.  Then just set your volume with alsamixer, save the settings with alsactl, and then load them with alsactl in rc.local.  Anyone have a better way?

Right now though, my arch is out of commision.  I've really been trying to get my networking fixed, but it keeps eluding me.  I know I've recieved some suggestions on here, and I have been trying them, but I've been to busy to respond.

Long live arch!

Later,

Isamoor

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#22 2004-02-18 10:27:59

dave
Member
Registered: 2004-02-13
Posts: 12

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

gentoo is suffering from both popularity and zealots.  hopefully arch won't reach that stage.

i like having a distro that is not ravaged by the masses.

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#23 2004-02-18 13:12:08

Egil.B
Member
From: Universitas Osloensis
Registered: 2004-02-14
Posts: 116

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

It feels good to leave the "just another gentoo zealot"-mark behind  tongue

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#24 2004-02-18 13:21:54

Moo-Crumpus
Member
From: Hessen / Germany
Registered: 2003-12-01
Posts: 1,487

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

There will allways be uppers and downers in new distros. I remember the same discussion with debian and suse, once they where young.

If the distro is good enough, it will make it's way through. There is a light, over there ...


Frumpus addict
[mu'.krum.pus], [frum.pus]

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#25 2004-02-19 02:32:35

ubermartian
Member
From: Edinburgh
Registered: 2004-02-06
Posts: 32

Re: Gentoo Users Experience with AL

Firstly:

gentoo is suffering from both popularity and zealots. hopefully arch won't reach that stage.

From reading comments in this thread and in others, I have to laugh at that.  There are a ton of arch-zealots on here.

I used gentoo from just before the forums there started up, back then it was a fantastic distro, probably better than arch is now.  It wasn't popular back then and problems were quickly solved on the mailing lists.  Then the forums came, they were brilliant; friendly, informative and stacked full of knowledge, I used to direct linux newbies using other distros there.  I noticed the decay a few months before the zynot fork, the forums had degenerated, people no longer searched  and just posted their problems so you had 30 pages of search results to trawl through, all saying the same thing.   

As for the distro, it suffered from lack of scaling and planning.  Portage was never really meant to stay as it was this long, it was iirc always a test case.  But it just grew and grew into the ugly mess that it is today with all the use flags etc.  The rewrite that is going on now should have happened a long time ago.

Gentoo in many ways is a superior distro to Arch, and would be a lot better if the developers had planned its growth properly.  There is a lot of work going on to rectify the problems, if they get it right it could become great again.

Arch needs to look at Gentoo, learn from its successes and failures if it is to grow into a good distro.

For the people who say that configuring arch is easier, I laugh at that.  Gentoo is definitely easier providing that emerge doesn't break your system.  It didn't used to be that fragile.  I was hoping that arch would be a good replacement for Gentoo, so far it has been a mild dissapointment, but not as much as the dissapointment that Gentoo has become.   

The only benefits arch has over gentoo is that its a binary install, hasn't grown into a hulking mess of an OS and doesn't have a ton of users who cba to RTFM, use google or the search function of the forums.  Everything else is either on par or subpar.  Arch will go the same way as Gentoo if it isn't careful.  Good management and sticking to a clear vision is important.  Gentoo was origionally meant to be a lean distro for developers, now it wants to be the kitchen sink.

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