5 years with Gentoo Linux

Old laptop

This month has been 5 years since I installed Gentoo Linux on a new one then HP nx6125 . Since that time, the support for desktop hardware has improved dramatically, and if we compare it with my recent experience installing Gentoo on the HP EliteBook 8440p , the difference is huge. The kernel version on the distribution was 2.6.15 and became 2.6.36, and this difference made it all that in my opinion made the use of Linux OS on desktop systems today not a challenge, but a very pleasant experience.

That first time after the installation, the ACPI was in a completely deranged state . Along the way, 3D hardware acceleration did not start, hanging the system or falling like that. However, the system often hung up and fell quite regularly until the very end, for a variety of reasons: booting from Kernel Modesetting , downloading audio-video content via the Internet via USB headphones, not the settings in the xorg.conf file, etc. , sent bug reports and continued to use Gentoo.

Lyrical digression

I had Windows XP on the same computer, which I used much less often and which did not fall at all. Correlating these facts I made several conclusions. The first thing that happened to me last time was the unusually disgusting ATI Xpress 200m chipset, for which stable video drivers with 3D hardware acceleration were written rather late . Comments from users and developers have confirmed this. The second is that Windows XP is quite stable in contrast to earlier versions. Talking about "that Linux is more stable than Windows" for desktops starting with Windows XP seems to me to be far-fetched. Nevertheless, every time I load Windows, I clearly feel in someone else’s, uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory. The reason is that the choice of Linux is not imposed but not motivated by practical considerations. This choice is most often consciously-valuable . Some set of IT skills and values ​​make you move to Linux. And only then find in it a lot of advantages and get used to it. And this is my third conclusion.

New laptop

Over the past 5 years, many good things have happened at Gentoo. Emerge has become more smart and overgrown with new features. A new package manager and a new system of boot scripts have appeared , although they have not yet switched to a stable branch. Therefore, installing Gentoo on the HP EliteBook 8440p , was much easier and I only slowed down in one place, setting up WiFi with WPA2 via wpa_supplicant in the wpa_supplicant.conf config file. The wireless network card uses the iwlagn driver. I could do with the Network Manager utility in KDE for configuring WiFi by connecting to the Internet via an Ethernet cable, but I thought it wasn’t sporty. It turned out that it was necessary to use the driver nl80211 instead of wext .

For this we prescribe.
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modules=( "wpa_supplicant" )
wpa_supplicant_wlan0="-Dnl80211"
wpa_timeout_wlan0=15

among other things, in the /etc/conf.d/net file. In general, wpa_supplicant is lousy, documented, lousy logs, but once you have set everything up, you can safely forget about everything.

In addition, the installation on the new hardware was quick and without errors. The package building speed has significantly increased: even the monstrous LibreOffice / OpenOffice is assembled in less than 5 hours, Chromium in 2, the rest of the heavyweights an hour or less. For reference:

model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 540 @ 2.53GHz
bogomips: 5054.48
MemTotal: 3842972 kB

Thus, quite quickly we have a very flexible customizable system that does not depend on releases, that they either exit too often or too rarely, and with the slightest inattention, they tear down network connections or something else. I prefer the sliding - permanent release adopted by Gentoo, when there is time to comprehend each innovation and place it in the system as it should. But sometimes you have to "slide" with dead ends. For example, xorg-server from 1.4 to 1.9 I would like to update in one fell swoop, when in 1.5 InputDevice was transferred to HAL, fdi xml format files and then in version 1.8 they changed it back.

Finally

And at the end a couple of tips Gentushnikam.

• Use elogviewer . They write all sorts of warnings after installing the package. Often problems arise exactly there and as it is written in the comments. For example, a problem with libpng12.so.0 , due to which I had to reassemble the Gnome, was in elog.
• Read the Gentoo developer blog . Mostly there are programmer records, but sometimes there are detailed guidance on a particular topical issue and warnings about the rakes scattered here and there.