Mailing List Archive

---------- quoting patrick.marquetecken@pandora.be ----------
> Can this lsit give me some good arguments for switching from Red Hat to
> Gentoo. Our company has several "smal" Linux servers based on Red Had,
> After seeing this configurating i have replaced one box with Gentoo, but
> i need some good arguments now for replace all the others.
>
> I have tried: security, beter performance, smaller configuration, better
> configaration per program true /etc/make.conf ...

What exactly are you searching for?
Btw. I like you subject line ;)

--
Homer: There couldn't be heaven if there weren't a hell.

Bart: Who's in there?

Homer: Oh, uh ... Hitler's dog. And that dog Nixon had, whassisname, um,
Chester ...

Lisa: Checkers.

Homer: Yeah! One of the Lassies is in there, too. The mean one -- the
one that mauled Jimmy.

Dog of Death

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Op 14-sep-04 om 16:49 heeft Matthias F. Brandstetter het volgende
geschreven:

> ---------- quoting patrick.marquetecken@pandora.be ----------
>> Can this lsit give me some good arguments for switching from Red Hat
>> to
>> Gentoo. Our company has several "smal" Linux servers based on Red Had,
>> After seeing this configurating i have replaced one box with Gentoo,
>> but
>> i need some good arguments now for replace all the others.
>>
>> I have tried: security, beter performance, smaller configuration,
>> better
>> configaration per program true /etc/make.conf ...
>
> What exactly are you searching for?
> Btw. I like you subject line ;)
>
thank you

Now to be honest, watching this list, i have seen that people here can
say great things, and becasue i are not so good with words, i a'm
hoping for some "hard" arguments for using Gentoo instead of another
distribution (not one thats going the M$ way)

Patrick


> --
> Homer: There couldn't be heaven if there weren't a hell.
>
> Bart: Who's in there?
>
> Homer: Oh, uh ... Hitler's dog. And that dog Nixon had, whassisname,
> um,
> Chester ...
>
> Lisa: Checkers.
>
> Homer: Yeah! One of the Lassies is in there, too. The mean one -- the
> one that mauled Jimmy.
>
> Dog of Death
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
>


--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

>
> Now to be honest, watching this list, i have seen that people here can
> say great things, and becasue i are not so good with words, i a'm
> hoping for some "hard" arguments for using Gentoo instead of another
> distribution (not one thats going the M$ way)
>
> Patrick
>

I'm not one of those people. But I'll throw out a few things -

- Gentoo won't break your entire system during an upgrade.
- Gentoo provides the ability to support older applications
as well as current via slotting. With Red Hat, either all
the apps have to be either backported, ported forward, or
a seperate server running a special version of the OS is
necessary.
- Gentoo follows the FHS (filesystem Hierarchy Standard) much
closer than Red Hat, which allows developers to create
apps that are portable without vendor lock-in.
- Red Hat's installer allows all packages to be installed, regardless
of duplicate functionality, overwriting of config files, and
simple incompatibility.
- Red Hat is for installations where you want to be told how to do
the job, what tool to use to do the job with (regardless of
suitability), and configured the way that someone else thinks
is best for you with no regard to your needs.
- Red Hat selectively upgrades applications regardless of bug
fixes and only applies security patches to secondary applications.
(eg - they still ship mutt 1.4.1 while everyone else is shipping
1.56i.)
- Stable is not equivlant to old software. Stable is well tested software.
- Increased security is the ability to build everything with "-fstack-protector"
in the CFLAGS section of /etc/make.conf. What were all those applications
and kernels built with in Red Hat?

Bob

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Bob Sanders (rsanders@engr.sgi.com) scribbled:
> - Increased security is the ability to build everything with "-fstack-protector"
> in the CFLAGS section of /etc/make.conf. What were all those applications
> and kernels built with in Red Hat?

gcc 2.96 :)

Are there any special coding preps to use -fstack-protector? what are
it's drawbacks? That's a new one to me.

Cooper.

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Bob Sanders wrote:

>
> I'm not one of those people. But I'll throw out a few things -
>
> - Gentoo won't break your entire system during an upgrade.

Clearly you haven't been trying hard enough, then.

:-)

Ric

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Jason Cooper (gentoo@lakedaemon.net) scribbled:
> Bob Sanders (rsanders@engr.sgi.com) scribbled:
> > - Increased security is the ability to build everything with "-fstack-protector"
> > in the CFLAGS section of /etc/make.conf. What were all those applications
> > and kernels built with in Red Hat?
>
> gcc 2.96 :)
>
> Are there any special coding preps to use -fstack-protector? what are
> it's drawbacks? That's a new one to me.

Okay, hate to reply to myself, but a decent google search yielded, of
course, gentoo docs on the subject:

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/propolice.xml

Cooper.

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:47:44 -0700 Bob Sanders <rsanders@engr.sgi.com>
wrote:
| - Gentoo follows the FHS (filesystem Hierarchy Standard) much
| closer than Red Hat, which allows developers to create
| apps that are portable without vendor lock-in.

RedHat's FHS compliance is even wrose than ours? Wow.

| - Red Hat's installer allows all packages to be installed,
| regardless
| of duplicate functionality, overwriting of config files, and
| simple incompatibility.

So does ebuild.sh, if you ask it nicely enough :)

Some other advantages for Gentoo:

- Better range of supported architectures.

- Better support for various screwy archs (*cough* MIPS *cough*) which
need zillions of different ABIs.

- Ability to build for the actual CPU to be used, rather than a lowest
common denominator. On x86 this doesn't mean much, but on sparc we get a
huuuuuuuuge performance boost by being able to build for ultrasparc
rather than v7.

- Low dependency bloat (if you set your USE flags up that way).

- Not being forced to use the vendor's or upstream's choice of 'default'
(or, more likely, 'random') ./configure settings that change every time
you try to upgrade a package.

--
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm

> Bob Sanders (rsanders@engr.sgi.com) scribbled:
> > - Increased security is the ability to build everything with "-fstack-protector"
> > in the CFLAGS section of /etc/make.conf. What were all those applications
> > and kernels built with in Red Hat?
>
> gcc 2.96 :)
>
> Are there any special coding preps to use -fstack-protector? what are
> it's drawbacks? That's a new one to me.
>

I won't say my testing is exhaustive. I found a reference to it
on a Gentoo doc I can't seem to find, but it was dated 2002, so
it's not completely new. But what I've built on and run to date -

Office system - 1P Athlon-XP nforce2 mobo
Laptop - IBM X31, errors on Xorg-X11 6.7 (swtched to XiG's AccelX)
Lab systems - 4P SGI1450 PIII Xeon (Gentoo internal mirror),
VIA CE based console server, 2P AMD64 tftp server,
2P AMD64 test system.
Home - 2P Athlon MP, 1P Athlon.

So the only errors that might be related to the -fstack-protector
flag has occured only with Xorg on a laptop. Even Open Office 1.1
built fine with the flag set, though I don't use Open Office, nor
KDE, nor Gnome. I do use apps from those suites.

Bob

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

> >
> > - Gentoo won't break your entire system during an upgrade.
>
> Clearly you haven't been trying hard enough, then.
>

Let's just say that it's taken 1.1 weeks to get a 2.6 kernel
configured that will boot on the IBM X31 I'm typing this
on.

But it's still better than some other upgrades I've done
on Red Hat, SuSE, ManDrake, and Win2K (SP4 kernel paniced
in the HAL layer after that upgrade).

Bob

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 patrick.marquetecken@pandora.be wrote:

> Can this lsit give me some good arguments for switching from Red Hat to Gentoo.
> Our company has several "smal" Linux servers based on Red Had, After seeing this configurating i have replaced one box with Gentoo, but i need some good arguments now for replace all the others.
>
> I have tried: security, beter performance, smaller configuration, better configaration per program true /etc/make.conf ...

Long term maintenance is just so much easier with Gentoo but you also get
tremendous flexibility to not only install only what you need but also
enable whatever features you need on a package-by-package basis.

Also, not descending into binary dependency hell when doing upgrades or
installing new software helps manage stress levels ;-)


--
Aj. (who gave up trying to migrate a client's site from RH8 to RH9 and
installed Gentoo instead ;-)

Sys. Admin / Developer

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Thank you all for the answers, but how to i encounter the "paid
support" from Red Hat ?

Patrick


Op 15-sep-04 om 00:19 heeft Ajai Khattri het volgende geschreven:

> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 patrick.marquetecken@pandora.be wrote:
>
>> Can this lsit give me some good arguments for switching from Red Hat
>> to Gentoo.
>> Our company has several "smal" Linux servers based on Red Had, After
>> seeing this configurating i have replaced one box with Gentoo, but i
>> need some good arguments now for replace all the others.
>>
>> I have tried: security, beter performance, smaller configuration,
>> better configaration per program true /etc/make.conf ...
>
> Long term maintenance is just so much easier with Gentoo but you also
> get
> tremendous flexibility to not only install only what you need but also
> enable whatever features you need on a package-by-package basis.
>
> Also, not descending into binary dependency hell when doing upgrades or
> installing new software helps manage stress levels ;-)
>
>
> --
> Aj. (who gave up trying to migrate a client's site from RH8 to RH9 and
> installed Gentoo instead ;-)
>
> Sys. Admin / Developer
>
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>
>


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