Gentoo for Mac OS X Released

joeljkp writes "According to today's Gentoo Weekly News, Gentoo has released a new project: Gentoo MacOS (sic). This new distribution adds Portage, Gentoo's package manager, to Mac OS X, among other things."

Cool

[AlexanderYoshi]

How long until I can get Gentoo for my Xbox?

I see that it's a catchy headline, but ...

[burgburgburg]

how exactly is this a problem for Apple?

emerge karmawhore

[Stevyn]

Gentoo is one of the best distros out there. I use it on x86 and it was easy to install and set up. I had more trouble on mandrake than on gentoo. The best thing it has going for it is portage. This system of automatically downloading and compiling software is only appriciated when you've gone through RPM hell or dependency hell when compiling from scratch. I was using mandrake previously, and this is definately faster. I encourage everyone who uses a distro like mandrake, fedora, or SuSE to look into gentoo.

I've only been using linux for a few months and gentoo for a week or so but I already see how well produced it is. I used to get annoyed at gentoo zealots, but I see what they were talking about.

Oh, and the compiling software isn't that bad. I've spent more time searching for packages and dependecies than typing "emerge k3b". Don't believe all the hype of course, but don't believe the FUD either. Gentoo is where it's at!

Now to make this a little more on-topic, I'm happy that gentoo is trying to make more headway into apple hardware. I think that this will only encourage apple to help and contribute to the OSS community even more. MacOS is probably the most refined modern operating system, but giving it a little more competition can't hurt.

Gentoo MacOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

um, isn't that 'Gentoo MacOS' a tad misleading? It's like calling x86 Linux 'Linux Windows'

Am I missing something?

[Moofie]

I read that blurb, and I still don't know what the significance of this release is.

"Right now, you can use it to install TeX! Someday, you might be able to install some other stuff!"

I mean, I suppose this is kool and the gang, but what is the problem that is being solved here? Maybe I'm just not clear on the concept.

In case you don't get it.

[torpor]

This means (sorta, as in 'soon') that a Mac-user will be able to rebuild their own OSX box, using the Gentoo scripts, and still be able to maintain compatability with all OSX apps.

In other words, a 'better build system: a public one' has been unleashed on a commercial operating system, so that - separate from the company itself - alternative builds of the OS can be done, publically.

Why is this good? Because with Gentoo you can take personal risks that Apple can't. Gentoo allows you to build a system "Just for You", whereas Apple have to compile/link things "For Everyone".

Expect to see highly-tuned Gentoo boxes running GentooMacOS in the future, smokin' 'Factory OS' setups. I'll be digging into this a bit further, next point release sort of thing, and if I get the same results out of applying Gentoo to my OSX machine as I have with my Linux boxes, I'm excited. I may man I can put off a hardware upgrade or two and just 'Take Things To The Next Level' on my aging Powerbook...

Oh, and in case you think Apple should be 'worried about' this, it seems to me that they already get the point. With all the OS releases they've been doing lately, and the upgrades/improvements in the one area 'open source' is lacking: usability, and it seems to me that they're positioned well to be 'competing with the Open Source Base' ... but thats just my personal opinion.

My Only Question

[tunabomber]

Will it handle the X11 dependency gracefully? I spent many, many hours trying to get Fink [sourceforge.net] either to recognize that I had XFree86 installed as a binary or to compile it from source without getting errors all over the place. I'm not a newbie to package managers like apt and ports, but despite this I eventually ended up giving up trying to install X11 apps with Fink because I just didn't have the time to spend trying to get it to work properly. As a result, I am now using Quicken instead of GNUCash.

Re:OK, so...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you'll find the GUI API source anywhere. I have been using these switches for a PowerBook G4

-02 -mcpu=7450 -pipe -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mpowerpc-gfxopt -fsigned-char -mstring -mmultiple

Resistance is Futile

[Locarius]

...all your base are belongs to gentoo I can not say enough good things about the direction this Distro is going. Future of Linux, or the future of all OS's?

Re:I see that it's a catchy headline, but ...

[homer_ca]

or you could run GNU and other open source software on Windows. There's already a Gentoo on Cygwin [toso-digitals.de] project too.

Re:emerge karmawhore

[Joseph Vigneau]

gentoo's strenth is its' ability to squeeze 0.0008 percent more processing power out of your 2.4ghz computer

Actually, that is not Gentoo's primary strength. Its strength is from the amount of flexibility that portage provides for package dependency. With binary-oriented distributions, you are forced to use the same configuration settings that were chosen by the package maintainer. Portage has the concept of "USES", which is basically a list of flags that the build uses to figure out what options to use during compilation. For example, many packages can be integrated with GNOME. I don't use GNOME. With other distributions, if the package was built with GNOME dependencies, I'd be forced to install GNOME. If the package was built without GNOME, some GNOME user wouldn't be able to take advantage of GNOME-specific features. With Portage, you can specify via the USES variable whether or not you want to have a dependancy on GNOME or not. As a side effect, you get the CPU-optimization "for free".

Re:make sense?

[Joseph Vigneau]

Ask [ibm.com] these [sun.com] guys [dell.com].

Re:emerge karmawhore

[bob670]

I'm going to agree with you on all points. I bought a Shuttle SK41G, GeForce4, Athlon XP 2000+ and 2x256 DDR a few weeks ago. From out of the box, assembly time and then OS install was about one hour 15 minutes with all hardware recognized correctly, all updates installed and a usable desktop, office suite, Internet tools, etc... A quick install of the nVidia driver updates and some extra software gooodness via urpmi and I was off and running in about 90 minutes.

Compared to a couple days to get the same results with Gentoo, which is an outstanding distro, but not the distro to break Linux onto the mainstream desktop. Any casual PC user who has built a gaming PC or even tinkered around with his Dell could get Mandrake up and usable in less than an hour, Gentoo however is another story. Of course Gentoo wasn't aimed at that market, but the parent poster can't possibly paint Gentoo as easy to install and not expect some rebuttals.

Re:Yea, and?

[Otter]

I could well just be missing something, but I've had a lot of problems with the selection granularity in fink -- e.g. trying to build x-chat without dragging in all of GNOME. USE flags would be a very nice alternative.

Re:In case you don't get it.

[torpor]

You can still -RUN- all that stuff, its just that Gentoo will let you fine-tune all the goodness (kernel, system /bin's, /usr/bin's, etc) even further, around it, and yet still maintain a fully working properly configured system.

This one really does go up to 11.

And since its Open Source, Apple can instantly turn around, and start using it themselves.

Its not "Apple, we have a problem.", its "Apple, we have source."

They (Apple) certainly get the point...

Re:emerge karmawhore

[Zapdos]

How f..cked up is mandrake in order to install sdl-dev i have to install arts-dev wich of course needs kde-libs-dev etc.. etc..
Now does sdl really need arts? Nope it was a packaging decision made for you by Mandrake. In order to feed the need of the unwashed masses that is what they have to do.

Gentoo's strengths are many:
1. Better optimizations
2. USE statements allow you to fine tune your system libraries
3. Upgrades to the latest version is as simple as using emerge.
4. etc...

how's its hygiene?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most awesomeliest things about Fink is that it installs everything in root /sw, no exceptions (i.e. /sw/bin, /sw/usr/lib, etc). That means you don't have to worry about contaminating the Apple-controlled parts of the OS, and uninstalling all customizations is just a matter of trashing /sw. I would never even think of installing anything in /usr or /usr/local (because it "belongs" to Apple).

Does Gentoo MacOS do the same thing? If not, why not????

Re:how's its hygiene?

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing in /sw is the stupidest part about fink. It should be /opt at worst, but /usr/local is perfectly safe to use. It's just a lot easier to use that way. It's a cinch to compile external apps from source because they already know how to deal with /usr/local. It was a pain in the butt trying to get all the right flags when fink was installed in /sw. Apple will not touch stuff that you put in /usr/local. They don't "own" that directory. It exists for the very purpose of the administrator installing his own packages. The "danger" of installing to /usr/local is overstated and you should just ignore fink's stupid warnings.

If it turns out that Gentoo/MacOS does install to a stupid non-standard directory, I'm going to be very unhappy.

Re:emerge karmawhore

[Matheus Villela]

Here is a pratical view for what you said:

root@emulacao matheus # USE="kerberos samba -berkdb" emerge -av openldap

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild N ] app-crypt/mit-krb5-1.3.3-r1 -krb4 -static 6,210 kB
[ebuild R ] net-nds/openldap-2.1.26 -berkdb +crypt -debug +gdbm -ipv6 +kerberos -odbc +perl +readline +samba -sasl -slp +ssl +tcpd 0 kB

Total size of downloads: 6,210 kB

Do you want me to merge these packages? [Yes/No]

And here my global USE flags:

USE="X 3dnow sse mmx 3dnowext alsa opengl sdl jpeg png avi mpeg gnome gtk2 -java -hardened -kde -qt -arts mysql php -pie -static"

Gentoo is great, of course isn't always perfect, an example is with the xorg/xfree, whem xorg come out the portage was crazy, many apps was looking to xfree instead virtual/x11 to resolve dependencies, but in a few weeks everything becomes ok.

I use Gentoo for time_i_use_linux - 1 month
time_i_use_linux = 1 year

And i can't see nothing in other distro that i don't have in my gentoo, portage is fantastic :)

Re:emerge karmawhore

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to see things like gaim - plugin based. No need of "USE flags". If you need to recompile to personalize your software, well, that software is crap, it should allow you to be configured at runtime not at compile time.

Partially working for solaris too

[Stonent1]

Portaris, Portage on Solaris [gentoo.org]

Just something I've toyed around with. The major stumbling block is that the developers need to add the ability for portage to recognize other oses. Mine isn't really a complete project, more of a log of stuff I've done. Others have followed and managed to get things like KDE to fully install in solaris using portage.

Re:emerge karmawhore

[Woody77]

What made me leave red-hat was actually the pain and suffering involved with installing source-code provided drivers for my printer (hp inkjet). It required a newer version of Ghostscript than I could get via an rpm.

And the source version of Ghostscript installed to a different place than RedHat had deemed was appropriate. And uninstalling the binary version either broke everything, or didn't work, depending on how I went about doing it.

Eventually, I hacked away at it long enough to get it to work.

Gentoo uses the source's own ./configure and install scripts. Things go where the developers meant them to go, which means that if I need to get a different version, or patch things on my own, I can do that with a minimum of pain.

Initial install from Stage1 is slow, and a PITA, granted. But I spend less time in front of the computer than I did with an install of RedHat where I attempted to choose what I wanted installed. Downloading over a slow connection is rough, but my computer doesn't need to sleep or go to work, so it really doesn't bother me. For home use, I don't mind a 6-hour compile time, I'm not baby-sitting it through it. It just does it.

But once I've got the system installed, maintainance is cake, especially for security patches.

Another nice benefit is that Redhat was bumping revs at an insane speed, and rpms for RH9 wouldn't work with RH7. Not a problem with portage. With portage, it's what packages I have installed, not which version of the OS. And I can upgrade the whole box to the latest sources with a single command.

And no, my CFLAGS only fit on one line.

Re:how's its hygiene?

[Anonymous Coward]

a big pain? I'd like to introduce you to a tool called 'ln -s'. perhaps you've heard of it?

Re:Cool

[Anubis350]

I run debian (xebian) on mine, but there is a gentoo (gentoox) distro out. check out xbox-linux.org, you might find it pretty cool