Gentoo Frustrations - Back to PC-BSD
Using Gentoo Linux, you have to get used to things just breaking, especially in the last couple of years. Portage is probably one of the best package management systems in the open source community. I have been quite impressed with Portage 2 the last couple months. Things seem to be improving.
Yesterday I woke up to check some email. Later I needed to do some web development for an NGO. I booted up and by the time I got to the graphical login screen, I noticed that I had a problem with my screen resolution.
I checked xorg.conf but there was nothing wrong with it. I kept restarting X only to get a very low resolution screen. Everything worked fine. I experienced this problem before with Sabayon Linux and an earlier version of Gentoo. No configuration files were changed in the last couple of days. I had not emerged and updated newer versions of nvidia-drivers, xorg, or KDE.
Sadly, the same thing happened back in 2005 which forced me to switch to Kubuntu.
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re: Gentoo
Funny how the guy says Gentoo now breaks too often so he'll stop using it on his desktop and focus on using it ON HIS SERVER.
Why do so many people (no matter what their choice of OS is) apologize for, and put up with, such crappy stuff?
Interesting but I never said
Interesting but I never said "Gentoo now breaks too often". Gentoo packages, like any other distro, breaks once in a while. Strangely enough, I do not remember apologizing either...
I found out that Compiz-Fusion messed up my screen resolution so I just removed it. The same thing happened when I installed Sabayon, I just needed to disable Compiz.
Gentoo resurrection with simple fixes ? More attention to what ?
Gentoo is quite stable with kernel 2.4.x. So the attention has to be kernel 2.6.x overrides. Namely USB hotplug events from /usr rather than /dev. Unionfs etc. does not work for desktop synaptic, but for distributed servers mysql. Udev obsoletes /dev drivers. So, the kernel switcheroos has to be studied from other successful distros, who learned the hard way, no thanks to Linus and Andrew.
Dynamic bugs on the fly is usually due to installed dram shortages(1 gb minimum to be sure); can not keep ext3 etc. journals faithfully. Any overload on drams by extra applications beyond firefox can be havoc. But can be fixed with swap file and garbage collection for safe guard of data.
Anyway, it is just a clear understanding of kernel 2.6.x and its ways of changing the 2.4.x architecture(directory and file names for bindings). And making sure users can adjust swap file size to extend any dram shortages in their computers.