gentoo 2004 mumblings - good ole bleeding edge

[Collins Richey]

Tune out now all you gentoo haters - you have been warned!

Ever subject to boredom and looking for something to do, I set out a
couple of weeks back on some experimentation with gentoo.

1. I beta tested the 2004 gentoo offerings and reported some bugs. 
There were precious few.

2, I decided to bring at least one machine up to current bleeding edge. 
I reinstalled one machine (and after that a second) from the  current
2004 tarballs and enabled the testing option which opens up packages
that have not been declared stable.  I'm using 2.6 kernels, so I enabled
the nptl option for glibc and began a full reinstall to bring everything
up to latest testing release.  That's about 2 days worth of compiles
spread over a week per machine.

The net results are a seemingly quite stable desktop system and no blood
in sight anywhere.  Along the way I encountered half a dozen packages
that needed a little tinkering (all had been reported as bugs, and most
all had fixes or workarounds already posted).  2.6 is new enough that
not all of the incompatibilities become apparent until enough people
work with them.

I'm impressed.  By using only the latest testing versions of packages,
I've avoided a lot of earlier problems (people have had a hell of a
time with kde and qt, for example), and I've actually encountered fewer
errors than I did using only stable packages. So, I'm now a believer in
"bleeding edge," at least gentoo style.

For the record, the two machines are

	P4 2.4Gz with 256MB (32M for video card)
	SIS onboard video, sound, and nic

	AthlonXP 1800+ with 512M
	nvidia nforce2
	onboard NIC, VIA chipset
	SoundBlaster PCI16
	
My current base is

	kernel 2.6.3-r1 (gentoo has added a patch to alleviate "swap happiness"
	in the released kernel
	glibc-2.3.3_pre20040207 compiled with nptl
	gcc-3.3.3
	kde-3.2.0
	qt-3.3.0-r1
	gnome-2.4.2_p1 (some compontents are at 2.4.0)
	xfree-4.3.0-r (won't get past this level until the xfree licensing
	snafu is resolved)
	xfce-4.0.3.1 (some components still at 4.3.0)
	firefox-0.8
	sylpheed-0.9.9claws
	lib-compat-1.3 (nothing bleeding edge here, but you need it if
	you expect some firefox plugins to work)
	udev-0.18 (the still-experimental replacement for devfs; there's good
	info at gentoo, if you want to tinker with this)
	gimp-2.0_rc3 (still names itself gimp-1.3)
	
Looking at this list after the fact, maybe this really isn't bleeding
edge after all.  Gentoo does a good job of releasing for test only those
things that have a good chance of working.

The key to this working so well, IMO, is that glibc with nptl was
installed first, and thus I've missed out on some of the subtle
incompatibilities that plague upgrades like this.

I haven't done a great deal with kde or gnome, but they work ok.  I do
need kde for my daughter, so now that I have it I can move this system
image into production.

I still need to tinker with sane and my kodak camera.

Enjoy,


-- 
Collins Richey - Denver area
gentoo testing 2.6.3-r1 nptl udev