Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 04:15:02
Message-Id: BANLkTi=K8sc88xZsA+M3Y7agPmX98qiPbQ@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo by Mark Shields
1 On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:57 PM, Mark Shields <laebshade@×××××.com> wrote:
2
3 > On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@×××××.com>wrote:
4 >
5 >> It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine. I feel a
6 >> little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
7 >>
8 >> A few months ago, an update made the machine headless -- well, it could no
9 >> longer bring up X but I could use the console-mode for admin, and log in via
10 >> SSH from my laptop and run GUI programs. I was busy at the time, first
11 >> deciding and then implementing my retirement, so I let it go.
12 >>
13 >> Now, a couple of months into my retirement, I'm trying to fix things up,
14 >> and the latest Gentoo live disk cannot talk to my monitor at all. Whatever
15 >> it's trying is unacceptable to the HD monitor I've had on there for a year,
16 >> and I can't even run the consoles. The video card is an ATI Rage XL on the
17 >> motherboard. Like the rest of the machine, it's vintage 2000, so maybe
18 >> support got dropped. But I'm not inclined to drop the machine -- it was the
19 >> ballyhooed thing in Linux Journal in 2002 when I finished my PHD, so I put
20 >> together these pieces:
21 >> * Two XEON chips. I didn't know it right away but that means 4 cores.
22 >> They are old Pentium IV-based 32-bit chips. I got the slowest still being
23 >> made, so the clock speed is 1.6 GHz. On 4 cores, it's not bad at all.
24 >> * 2GB of DDR ECC memory
25 >> * about a dozen hard drives (some old, but mostly 500GB - 2TB Sata
26 >> drives), I feel it's still worthy of respect. Some of these are in EZ-Dock
27 >> docking stations and are used for rotating backups (including off-site).
28 >> The main directories are on hardware RAID 1 so I have ongoing redundancy.
29 >> * a Smart UPS 1500 for everything except the laser printer.
30 >>
31 >> So, since I am familiar with Ubuntu from work, and have it on a couple of
32 >> laptops, I'm installing from the Ubuntu 11.04 live disk (video is just
33 >> fine).
34 >>
35 >> The real headache is all the stuff I'm going to have to port.
36 >>
37 >> 1) Apache and dynamic (Python CGI) web site.
38 >> 2) Postfix
39 >> 3) About a dozen accounts that just do wget(1) data gathering triggered by
40 >> the cron daemon.
41 >> 4) DNS (I run my own domain on a commercial DSL account)
42 >> 5) NTP client and server
43 >> 6) Whatever else I forgot I set up over the years.
44 >>
45 >> My original reason for using Gentoo is that this machine was pretty exotic
46 >> when I bought it, and I wanted to be able to tweak the compiler to get the
47 >> most out of it. I can still do that for specific applications I'm working
48 >> on, but otherwise it's really a non-issue now. I have gotten pretty tired
49 >> of updates that take over 48 hours to compile, and the occasional mess-up
50 >> that once or twice led me to rebuild with empty-tree and took a week or so.
51 >>
52 >>
53 >> So I guess I shouldn't complain (and I'm not). I'm just not in the target
54 >> market for Gentoo any more. It was fun, though.
55 >> --
56 >> Kevin O'Gorman, PhD
57 >>
58 >>
59 >
60 > You let a small problem like the latest live cd not booting your system
61 > scare you away?
62 >
63 > Have you tried using an older live cd? If it's a video issue, maybe
64 > detecting your monitor wrong, how about turning on the framebuffer (there's
65 > an option for that)?
66 >
67 > It's doable man, don't give up.
68 >
69
70 Of course it's doable. It's just the last straw. This left my web site
71 down for a week; I obviously can't always keep up with Gentoo's
72 requirements, so I'm going to an easier distro that I'm equally familiar
73 with.
74
75
76 --
77 Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com>