Finally Linux gets something first

... and it's something we didn't build. We get lots of things first but we usually build them. We never get proprietary software first. At best we get proprietary software the same day. Generally we get it months later. However, today linux takes another giant step towards being the dominant next OS, we are the first to receive 64-bit flash from adobe. Windows isn't getting it, Mac OS X isn't getting it, we are.

The Motherboard I want doesn't exist

My Desktop is dieing and needs to be replaced. So I'm working on researching the parts I'd need to replace it. As any good IT person knows, the motherboard is the most important decision to make when building a computer. Theirs a good chance that someone reading this will cry out I'm wrong.

The reason the Motherboard is the most important decision is it dictates the potential of the whole computer. For example the motherboard on my existing system has an AGP video card slot, I can't buy one of the latest and greatest video cards because it doesn't support it. Motheboard dictates everything from the power supply you buy to video card, ram and processor, and more.

So why is it I can't find a motherboard that I want? well... I have pretty complex requirements.

First, it has to work on Linux. That actually isn't that difficult but it does require a little research making sure all components are supported under Linux, and they have to be supported well, I don't want half-assed support that's going to take me a week to get working. I also have several seemingly incompatible hardware requirements.

I want a dual socket motherboard that supports recent quad core processors, ideally processors that have on chip virtualization features.

My next requirement is that I wanted an onboard graphics chipset that is supported by linux with open source drivers. The best choice for this is the intel line of chipsets. The latest being the Intel GMA 4500 HD. Now I have a problem, I can't find a SINGLE board that is Dual Socket and has onboard intel video (actually I think I did find one but the processor support was capped at like p4 or something). So why is it I can't get a system like this? Intel makes all these parts and yet they don't have an offering.

The last thing I want is onboard raid 0/1/10 that will work with my linux system without too much finagling. Advice has been given to me that I should ignore that and just use linux's raid (or buy a true hw raid card).

I also have some requirements for pci* slots but they are less strict, 1+ 16x pcie (for a future video card), 1+ 4x pcie or 1+ pci-x (for hw raid card in the future), 1+ pci (depends on onboard sound... I have a good audigy card that will work for me if the onboard isn't better than it).

So it seems I'll have to sacrifice some requirements. Chances are I'll do some heavy video card research so I can dump the intel video requirement.

accept input from stdin

if possible emerge-ng should be able to accept input from .

e.g. cat packagelist | emergeng

thus far neither portage nore pkgcore have this capability.

minimum permissions and privilegdges

I like security... which means I should be able to run portage as portage (user) and have the umask be 077, or perhaps 027. Unfortunately the last time I checked portage could handle these restrictive permissions (I forget if it was these exactly) except for one set... java. In a perfect ebuild world all ebuilds would be able to be installed under a very restrictive umask.

Should regen2 ever come to fruition this should be fixed.

pkgcore the victor

pkgcore is my pick for the next portage and codebase for emerge-ng. I admit I haven't let paludis have a chance (yet).

Why haven't I let paludis have it's chance?

The reasons are quite simple. Everytime I have tried paludis prior to this it has required extra configuration (meaning it doesn't work out of the box). I believe this was fixed recently. However,

paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.
paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.
* Done cleaning write cache for ebuild format repositories
paludis@1208029212: [WARNING] Use of Portage configuration files will lead to sub-optimal performance and loss of functionality. Full support for Portage configuration formats is not guaranteed; issues should be reported via trac. You are strongly encouraged to migrate to a Paludis configuration.

This is the end of a paludis --sync. Annoying. Paludis also has it's alpha releases marked as ~arch, this is a no, no. I also found the people in #paludis on irc to be rude and unhelpful. I was annoyed at the time (so being rude myself) as gentoo kde-svn overlay was going to require paludis which means I was going to be forced to use it. Regardless I've never been met with lot's of friendliness or help in #paludis. They are an RTFM crowd. I have been told to use paludis several times without even asking about it (as if it is the solution to all problems). So is pkgcore better? I can't say without a doubt that it is.

Why is pkgcore the victor?

For starter's it's only the victor for me. paludis is a more mature product at this point and has a stronger following of fanatic's/zealot's.

1.) pkgcore it more similar to portage.

pkgcore was originally intended to be portage 3. This leads to a large amount of similarities and backwards compatibility.

2.) pkgcore devs are really friendly. Sometimes patience is a virtue getting an answer on #pkgcore but most of the times I get one. This allowed me to quickly learn what I could and could not (yet) do with pkgcore, including finding a bug within a week.

3.) pkgcore just works. I installed pkgcore and with a quick look at the site was quickly able to start doing work with it.

4.) pkgcore installs faster. I think it took like an hour to build paludis on this machine (maybe more) pkgcore took 2 minutes tops.

5.) pkgcore uses C. For the parts of portage that were really slow they re-wrote them in C using cpython. using both python and c leads to faster development and speed where needed.

How do I use pkgcore
real quick

pmaint sync

this is the biggest adaption from portage, imho and I'm not sure why it's not --sync or pmerge --sync (in some ways it's more similar to portage 2.0 syntax). This will not only sync your main gentoo tree but any repositories you've intalled with layman. as of yet you still have to install them via layman, but this may change in the future.

pmerge packagename

I told you this was easy. Most of the options I use work. The biggest that doesn't is --verbose, this seems to be default now (with --ask) so an option is no longer needed. updating world

pmerge -auDs world

an -s is now needed to work with things like system and world. It's for package set. My one complaint here is the --newuse doesn't currently work with sets. This is a bug and will be fixed in the future.

Is anything wrong with pkgcore in your eyes?

well aside from the plethora of missing features (they'll get done, it's just a time thing). Documentation... I usually learn stuff by reading web documentation (or books) until I'm comfortable enough reading man pages. The web documentation for pkgcore needs a lot of work. I may actually volunteer to help with this. I haven't decided yet, and it depends partially on if they want to answer all my questions as I write the docs.

It'd be nice if at some point pmerge could become emerge etc... (meaning reprise it's roll as portage 3).

for more information on pkgcore go to pkgcore.org

.iso's are a waste of time

That's right all of releng's work on making a pretty iso is a waste of time. Gentoo doesn't need them. You can install Gentoo off of any livecd, or not, my last install was nothing but chroot until I thought had everything set, then I removed the other distro, moved gentoo and attempted a boot. It didn't work, but that was probably because I had forgotten SATA requires SCSI in the kernel.

releng should focus on getting us up to date tarballs more often, especially when gcc, or glibc have been updated (as the 2 biggest pita's in system). Other than that we should have them use the Sabayon, System Rescue Cd, or other distro's based on Gentoo (we could point them to knoppix or dsl for all it matters) to install from. Instead our tarball's are out of date because releng must develop a new cd/dvd.

People will think less of Gentoo if we don't offer a CD.

So? Gentoo is and has always been for power users. I don't want the n00buntu user's here before they are ready. If they are judging us based on a cd they won't be using daily what does that say about them? first and foremost we should be satisfying the needs of our current users.

That being said we should still update iso's once a year maybe once every 2 years, because users will need cd's to install from. This should be very low on the list, because as I said there are other livecd distro's that can do this job and let releng get back on track.

Graphical Package Manager

Anyone that knows how I work in linux, knows that I"m comfortable with the cli, and prefer it to a gui. I know that not everyone is or should have to be. Sometimes a gui can make management easier. Even a die hard cli person like me realizes that. However, you should never have to do things the gui way, they are just front ends. emerge-ng needs to support having a gui even if the development of such a project is not directly part of the emerge-ng project.

Why not Sabayon?

I'm going to be short and sweet on this. The last time I checked, Sabayon made you run ~arch, upgrading would break your system, and it was all about bleeding edge gui's. Sabayon is good for the last. But stay away from it if you want/need stability, or gentoo upgrades.

More than 3 levels of stable

Currently Gentoo has arch, ~arch, and ~M ( - if not available ).

One of the main things people want are security patches only updates. I tend to agree with this, although they should be between arch and ~arch, maybe +arch. Technically a security patch can break things which is why they shouldn't be considered stable.

Regen2 should also have strict rules about what's what. Alpha products should always be ~M, beta's and rc's should be ~arch. The wouldn't be listed as those upstream if they were stable, and if upstream says they are stable then tell upstream to move them to stable.

We should add an unmaintained level akin to ~M, perhaps ~U, this is so just because the current maintainer doesn't want it in the tree, it doesn't go completely away (in the event someone wants to pick it up and fix it).

we should have some way of setting up the vcs packages by arch.

versioned /etc

regen2 should support an /etc that's under version control. something like etckeeper could/should work. Or we could just build our own tool for use with an existing vcs.