Linux OS

[technodolt]

Alex Y. wrote:

historical packaging policies of Debian Ruby which splits the core
into separate packages for the interpreter, irb, rdoc, and so on,
which is confusing. If I remember correctly, there was talk a short
while ago of providing a meta-package which would pull all of these
together in a single ‘apt-get install ruby-full’ (or something) to
minimise irritation.

I tend to ignore that and use checkinstall, myself.

Isn’t the RPM world the same, in terms of how the whole Ruby package set
is distributed? For example, if you install a Rails RPM it will pull in
only the packages it needs. On Gentoo, though, when you install Rails,
you can specify a USE flag for each database you want and it will pull
those in as well. On my system everything is enabled so I get

dev-ruby/rails-1.2.1 USE=“doc fastcgi mysql postgres sqlite sqlite3”

It pulls in fastcgi and all its dependencies, mysql, postgres, sqlite(2)
and sqlite3. Assuming I didn’t have Ruby and Rake installed already it
would bring them in as well.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

Tim X wrote:

clients. Alternatively, they have their free system, which you run from their
don’t/can’t manage/configure etc, because you only have the minimal set of pa
packages necessary to do whatever it is you want to do.

I took a brief look at rPath and “Conary” a couple of months ago. You
have to do a fair amount of detailed construction work unless one of
their existing packages meets your needs exactly. With Gentoo/Portage,
it’s a lot simpler. The nice thing about rPath for open source
projects is that they will host them for you – you don’t have to find
someone willing to host, say, a 3 GB virtual machine (compressed – a
Gentoo “lamp stack” is more like 6 GB uncompressed.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

Alex Y. [email protected] writes:

Isn’t the RPM world the same, in terms of how the whole Ruby package set

–

As someone who recently installed ruby and rails on a Debian system
(Debian
Etch), I don’t believe there are any “issues”, even with the packaging
system.
I simply used aptitude, selected the ruby version I wanted and aptitude
pulled
in all the necessary dependencies and provided “Suggested/Recommended”
sections which contained additional ruby packages which were not
essential but
were either recommended (i.e. you probably should install these, but you
don’t
have to) or suggested (i.e. these are not needed, but many users find
them
useful).

With respect to the OPs original questions. I think that the rpath
appliance
solution is a very interesting way to go if you just want to experiment.
Essentially, you use a virtual machine configuration based on either
vmware or
zen and then you get/build an “appliance” using rpath’s appliance
builder (see
http://www.rpath.com). The appliance builder is a very simple way of
creating a
minimal Linux distribution that meets your needs and which is run as
either a
vmware or zen “image”. One of the nice things with rpath is that they
have two
levels of operation. You can purchase their appliance builder and create
specific images, which you can then release/sell as you want. This
solution is
mainly for vendors who want to provide a simple consistent installation
for
clients. Alternatively, they have their free system, which you run from
their
site to build an image. With the free system, the only restriction is
that you
make the image you build available to others. For example, the last time
I
looked, they had both a zen and a vmware based LAMP image. If you wanted
to
play around with linux using apache, mysql and perl, you could just
grab this
image and put it on your system - very quick and very simple.

I think this would be a great way to experiment with ruby on Linux as
you just
have a minimal Linux distro that is an image which you can load/unload
as you
need. You don’t have to worry about maintaining lots of irrelevant
packages or
the potential security issues you can have with a full linux distro
which you
don’t/can’t manage/configure etc, because you only have the minimal set
of pa
packages necessary to do whatever it is you want to do.

We are starting to use this approach for managing all our servers within
our
data centre. It makes administration a lot easier because each of these
images
are like separate “sandboxes”, so you don’t get the horriffic dependency
issues
you can get with a single server supporting multiple vendor applications
(ie.e.
Oracle requiring version X of Java or Perl, a CMS wanting version X+1,
another
app wanting version x+2 etc.

From an experimental perspective, this approach is really convenient as
you
don’t need to uninstall a system running (lets say Windows 2k) to make
available hardware to install a full Linux distro. Instead, you use
vmware on
your w2k system and configure it to allow a virtual linux image, which
is where
you might install an rpath Linux ruby image. When your not experimenting
with
ruby on Linux, you just unload the image and have all your resources
(minus
disk space for the image) available again.

I would recommend a system with at least 2Gb of memory for this
approach.
However, given that 2Gb systems are more common, this isn’t too much to
ask.
You can do it with 1Gb, but you will notice a drop in performance. If
its just
for experimentation, this probably isn’t too much of an issue.

Tim

[technodolt]

I have a project on RubyForge that I would like to give away. It’s
called “vgrails”, which stands for Virtual Gentoo Rails. As the name
implies, it is a set of bash scripts for building a virtual Gentoo Rails
server. When fully assembled, you have a VMware Virtual machine, Gentoo
Linux, a full LAMP stack (plus Perl and Python, which are in the Gentoo
base), Rails and all its dependencies, plus SQLite (both 2 and 3) and
PostgreSQL.

I will probably take one last shot at it over the weekend – add RSpec
and strip out some of the things like R and the literate programming
tools that I wouldn’t be caught dead without. Once I get it cleaned up,
if I don’t hear anything from someone wanting to take it over, I’ll
probably just ask RubyForge management to archive it and free up the
disk space. It isn’t very big – there’s really nothing to it but a
bunch of bash scripts and config files. But I don’t have the time to
maintain it nor do I have a personal use for it.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

So, here’s what I’ve gathered so far (yes I’m still reading all the
replies
to this post):

Given that I am willing to spend the time learning Gentoo’s
functionality,
it’s probably the best to play with.

I think that’s what I’m aiming at.

What I intend to do in the long run is to take the results of what I
learn
here and use them as a full machine, as opposed to a VM.

So, given that I find out exactly what I need and works best for me
personally in this VM, I will then use that as a basis for how to build
production servers.

If I understand what I’ve read correctly, Gentoo would be good for that,
yes?

[technodolt]

On 2/9/07, Luke I. [email protected] wrote:

So, given that I find out exactly what I need and works best for me
personally in this VM, I will then use that as a basis for how to build
production servers.

If I understand what I’ve read correctly, Gentoo would be good for that,
yes?

Most definitely! My Gentoo story goes in the other direction - our
sysadmin is using it for our servers, and then for our desktops, and I
liked it so much that I installed it on my machine at home too.

martin

[technodolt]

On 2/9/07, Martin DeMello [email protected] wrote:

Most definitely! My Gentoo story goes in the other direction - our
sysadmin is using it for our servers, and then for our desktops, and I
liked it so much that I installed it on my machine at home too.

martin

I agree. I started out using Gentoo on VMWare on a laptop, and now have
many
installations including another laptop and a server. I enjoy using it
far
more than any other distro. Administration, installation/upgrading of
new
packages is extremely easy and you’ll rarely find something that it
doesn’t
have. No more manually pulling source and all dependencies. No more
trying
to find someone that has compiled in your particular feature, just
configure
what you want and emerge it. It just works.

There is a little more setup at the very beginning, but after that
everything is very straight forward and easy to maintain. Plus you end
up
with everything tailored to your exact needs. A wonderful distro!

It is also nice to have only what you want installed both from a memory
and
performance footprint but also for general security as well. And if you
really want additional security features, they have a full range of
hardening features for the sources.

Enjoy!

[technodolt]

i

On 2/10/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

a good bit of time. KDE? Forget it.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

Egads. Compiling KDE does take a very long time. One thing that seems to
help is having the ‘kdeenablefinal’ USE flag in your /etc/make.conf

When I emerged KDE, I did it before I went to sleep. That’s just not
something ya wanna wait around for.

–
Samantha

http://www.babygeek.org/

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

[technodolt]

“M. Edward (Ed) Borasky” [email protected] wrote/schrieb
[email protected]:

As you state, Ubuntu is a desktop OS

There’s also a server flavour of Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/server.

Thomas

[technodolt]

Luke I. wrote:

What I intend to do in the long run is to take the results of what I
learn
here and use them as a full machine, as opposed to a VM.

So, given that I find out exactly what I need and works best for me
personally in this VM, I will then use that as a basis for how to build
production servers.

If I understand what I’ve read correctly, Gentoo would be good for that,
yes?

well … a lot depends on the host for the VM. I find Gentoo virtual
machines, at least with Workstation or Server, take forever squared to
do all the compiles. I’ve got a 1.3 GHz Athlon Tbird with a GB of RAM. I
can give the Gentoo VM 256 meg and it still takes over 24 hours to
compile everything at -O2, including Ruby, the kernel, X windows and one
of the lighter desktops like GNUstep/Windowmaker. Don’t even think
about compiling OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird or Firefox – install the
binaries. Apache goes pretty quickly, but PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL take
a good bit of time. KDE? Forget it.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

Samantha wrote:

Egads. Compiling KDE does take a very long time. One thing that
seems to
help is having the ‘kdeenablefinal’ USE flag in your /etc/make.conf

When I emerged KDE, I did it before I went to sleep. That’s just not
something ya wanna wait around for.
The issue isn’t so much KDE or Gentoo’s need to recompile most
everything. It’s the ghastly performance of VMware on jobs with a lot of
processor, memory and disk usage, which is what gcc is. One thing that
will make a big difference is that you absolutely positively must
pre-allocate your virtual disks. It’s pretty much unusable if you don’t.

When I was in the development stage, I had a separate virtual disk for
“ccache”, another one for “/usr/portage/packages” and a third for
“/usr/portage/distfiles”. That way, I had binary packages and didn’t
have to do any more compiles than necessary. It also keeps “/usr” from
getting too big. Once the machine is “staged”, I just unmount those
disks, turn off the compiler caching and the automatic binary package
building.

Still, I gave up on it – it was just a lot of waiting around relative
to Gentoo on a real machine. Here in Portland you can pick up perfectly
good refurbished P3s with a decent hard drive and enough RAM to run a
Debian or Gentoo or Fedora desktop for less than some of the restaurants
around here charge for a small steak dinner. There’s little need to
devote part of a machine to a “learning server” using VMware when you
can get something real. As far as I’m concerned, VMware Workstation or
the free VMware Server have only one practical use case – as a way of
running a small Linux workstation inside a Windows workstation. (Or
vice versa if you work in a Linux shop but need occasional Windows).

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

On 2/10/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

something ya wanna wait around for.
getting too big. Once the machine is “staged”, I just unmount those
the free VMware Server have only one practical use case – as a way of
running a small Linux workstation inside a Windows workstation. (Or
vice versa if you work in a Linux shop but need occasional Windows).

I have two systems setup. One is a P3 500 with 768MB of RAM, that runs
dual
boot with ZenWalk Linux and Windows XP. Honestly, the most use that
system
gets is when I’m gaming and want to be able to surf the web, IM, etc.
My
other system (that I’m on now) is a Gentoo box that also does the dual
boot
thing with Windows XP. I can’t get myself to take the plunge and wipe
off
Windows, even though I only boot up into it about once every few weeks.
I
play EverQuest, and I found myself playing less and less the more I used
Linux. I got hooked up with Cedega and once I went from an ATI video
card
to an Nvidia, I was able to play EQ in Linux, quite nicely. So, I boot
into
Windows less and less.

I just feel like I have a lot more at my fingertips with using Linux
than I
do with Windows. Since I’m getting more and more into learning to
program,
Linux seems to be a much more natural environment. Also, I like having
the
‘power’ of the command line, which I do have to some extent in Windows,
but
not as much as I do in Linux.

As far as KDE and compiling go, I can’t imagine how it would run on a
VMWare
environment. It’s slow enough to compile when you’ve got a 2.93Mhz box
and
1GB of RAM… I tried Gentoo at my last job on one of my toybox P3’s
and it
proved to be too slow for my lack of patience. I had ArchLinux at
work,
and that’s why I chose Zenwalk at home for my smaller box… Zenwalk
seems
to have a lot of dev tools prepackaged.

Ah, I <3 Open Source.

G’nite!

–
Samantha

http://www.babygeek.org/

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

[technodolt]

“Martin DeMello” [email protected] writes:

sysadmin is using it for our servers, and then for our desktops, and I
liked it so much that I installed it on my machine at home too.

martin

I have to state up-front that I’ve never used gentoo, so take the
following in
the context of questions (I guess I’m sort of playing devils advocate)
rather
than the basis for a religious war or flame bait.

Many people I’ve talked to that use gentoo think its a great distro.
However,
I’ve also been told by quite a few that it is not the best choice for
someone
who is not familiar with the GNU Linux/Unix way of doing things (i.e.
someone
who has only been exposed to Windows). All of those I’ve spoken to have
come
from either other GNU Linux distros to gentoo or are from a Unix
background.
From personal eexperience introducing windows users to GNU Linux, I know
that
one of the most alien concepts they have trouble with is building from
sources,
dealing with makefiles etc. Therefore, I wonder if gentoo is really the
best
way to start compared to distros like Ubuntu, Debian or even Red Hat?
There are
a lot of quite subtle issues which anyone with some epxerience on Linux
tends
to be across, but for the uninitiated, they can be very confusing.

The other point that is important to consider is what else your likely
to want
to do in the future with the Linux distro. For example, if you think you
may
want to install some commercial packages, then you also need to consider
what
distros the vendors support. Most vendors support Red hat (which isn’t
my
favorite distro BTW), but I don’t know of any that support gentoo.

Finally, I think one of the most important things to consider when
selecting a
first GNU Linux distro is to consider what others local to your area may
be
using. Find out if there is a Linux users group etc. This will make it
easier
to get help should you run into problems.

When starting a first go at GNU Linux and wanting to just get a basic
exposure,
I think it is best to go with the easiest and most straight-forward
system to
install and configure. Currently, I would suspect this may be Ubuntu
(based on
all the feedback/press I’ve seen). Initially, issues of performance and
long
term maintenance are less important to the novice than ease of
installation and
configuration.

Again, this is not to say that gentoo isn’t a good distribution. In
fact, its
one I hope to try out when I can spare some hardware. However, for a
beginner,
I think it may be more difficult than necessary and as it has a smaller
user
base than other more popular distros, the new user may find it harder to
find
help.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Tim

[technodolt]

Thomas H. [email protected] writes:

“M. Edward (Ed) Borasky” [email protected] wrote/schrieb [email protected]:

As you state, Ubuntu is a desktop OS

There’s also a server flavour of Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/server.

Thomas

I also think that if the OP just want to experiment with a GNU Linux
system, in
either a server or desktop configuration, either Ubuntu or Ubuntu server
will
do fine. Same goes with Debian or RedHat. Typically, the differences
between a
desktop specific distro and a server distro are irrelevant for
experimentation
and learning purposes. Most of the server oriented distros only differ
fromt he
desktop ones by having less desktop oriented add-ons (often they are
included,
but you have to select them manually), with the desktop distros, its the
reverse, most of the key server stuff is there, its just not installed
by
default. Some packages may be slightly different, such as being compiled
with
options to support a server configuration (i.e. maybe set to use more
file
descriptors or with more restrictive but secure options to incrase
system
security etc).

If all you really want is a linux box that has a web server, ruby,
rails, a
database and associated ruby packages, then any modern desktop distro
will be
fine. there is no need to worry about desktop vs server until you decide
to get
serious about developing server based apps in ruby and even then, you
probably
don’t have to be too concerned until you get tot he UAT and production
stages.

regards,

Tim

[technodolt]

On 2/10/07, Tim X [email protected] wrote:

I have to state up-front that I’ve never used gentoo, so take the
following in
the context of questions (I guess I’m sort of playing devils advocate)
rather
than the basis for a religious war or flame bait.

Will do.

Many people I’ve talked to that use gentoo think its a great distro.

that
one of the most alien concepts they have trouble with is building from
sources,
dealing with makefiles etc. Therefore, I wonder if gentoo is really the
best
way to start compared to distros like Ubuntu, Debian or even Red Hat?
There are
a lot of quite subtle issues which anyone with some epxerience on Linux
tends
to be across, but for the uninitiated, they can be very confusing.

Okay, Gentoo is more complicated than Mandrake, Fedora/RH, etc., in some
ways. My Linux background starts out back when I got my first domain
and
hosted with a friend of mine. The account had shell access and I used
to
hang out in Pine to check my email when I was at work. When I’d go
visit my
friend in Austin who owned the hosting company and worked from home, I’d
sit
behind her and watch what she was doing and pick up on some things and
ask
questions. I eventually dual booted into RedHat (before Fedora) and
would
do stuff here and there, mainly from a user perspective. Believe it or
not,
building from sources really isn’t that complicated. In Gentoo, you
also
have a package management system known as emerge… if I want to install
Ruby on my system, for example, I’ll click on my little Terminal icon,
type
su to log in as root, enter the root password, and then type ‘emerge
–ask
–verbose ruby’ (you can type this as emerge -av ruby in shorthand).
It’ll
then query the source server and tell me what it needs to install,
including
any dependencies. If I type ‘y’ to install, it’ll start installing.
Sometimes you do get some errors, and that’s where Google comes into
play.
(probably more info than you wanted.) As for building from source,
normally
you just download the tar.gz file, get in as root at a console, and type
tar
xfv source_file_name and it’ll create the directories… it’s usually
as
simple as going into the necessary directory and typing a few commands.

As for which distro to start out with, I probably would’ve thrown my
hands
up in desperation if I started out with Gentoo. I used Mandrake for a
few
months, felt I wasn’t learning anything, then went to Fedora for quite a
while, and while I was learning some, I didn’t feel that I was learning
as
much as I wanted to, that and the fact that the last release I installed
didn’t work nicely with my ATI card and I got sick of messing with it,
and
in an impulsive moment, started my Gentoo experience. Now, mind you,
the
first month or so of my Gentoo move, I rebuilt my system about 4 or 5
times,
because I screwed things up. LOL. But, I haven’t needed to do that
since,
and even though I’ve screwed things up, I’ve been able to fix the things
that went nutty.

Another release that is supposed to be more '‘user friendly’ is Sabayon.
It’s based on Gentoo and has a lot of cool features preinstalled.

http://www.sabayonlinux.org They have a Live CD or DVD download, and
you
can install off the DVD/CD, as well. Tons of packages are included.
Most
everything someone new would probably need.

In short, my advice to a newbie with no Linux/Unix experience
whatsoever, is
to go with a distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, or possibly Sabayon,
use
it for a few months, and then when you feel daring, make the plunge to
Gentoo if you so desire.

Again, I apologize for my verbosity.

–
Samantha

http://www.babygeek.org/

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

[technodolt]

desktop ones by having less desktop oriented add-ons (often they are
a

Tim

–
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

While this is somewhat accurate, I do have enough experience with
Linux/Unix
in general that hacking at Gentoo is okay with me. I finally (after 6
initial failed attempts) got a build done late Saturday/early Sunday.
That
was on my home machine. Today I’m going to mess around with it some
more.
The only part that I’m having any real trouble with is customizing the
kernel before the build. Everything else is pretty much straightforward
unix/linux stuff that you do on any server to get things done. If
anyone
has references to a guide or something (not the default Gentoo
installation
guide) on what to do while configuring the kernel, I’d appreciate the
help.

Thanks for everyone’s help, it’s greatly appreciated.

The vgrails thing sounds interesting, you can send me an email off-list
if
you want.

technodolt :: at :: gmail :: dot :: com

Again, thanks to you all.

[technodolt]

On 11 Feb 2007, at 03:50, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

you work in a Linux shop but need occasional Windows).
With current-generation hardware VMWare Server is pretty useable. I
have a Core 2 6300 mini-ATX desktop with 1GB of RAM and Windows XP
that I use mainly for gaming (currently Neverwinter Nights 2 but I
have no difficulty running four FreeBSD appliances in the background,
providing my consultancy clients with their own development sandboxes
and a NAS. I’ve been thinking of tweaking things further by
increasing the RAM as the Windows desktop lags a bit when switching
tasks, and possibly RAIDing the HDD.

Of course all the real work gets done on my Mac…

Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason

[technodolt]

Luke I. wrote:

The only part that I’m having any real trouble with is customizing the
kernel before the build. Everything else is pretty much straightforward
unix/linux stuff that you do on any server to get things done. If anyone
has references to a guide or something (not the default Gentoo
installation
guide) on what to do while configuring the kernel, I’d appreciate the
help.
For most servers or desktops or workstations, you shouldn’t have to
customize the kernel. Read through the manual on using “genkernel”. The
exact steps vary from release to release, but essentially all you have
to do is “emerge genkernel” and do a “genkernel all” to get started.
There may be another step to get a default configuration, but unless
you’re doing something special like building a router, you shouldn’t
have to change the default kernel to get on the air.

Once you get the machine up and running and have done an “emerge
–sync”, then you’ll want to customize your kernel. But just to get it
booted up, the defaults should work.

–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.

[technodolt]

One final followup question:

Someone suggested to me that I look into FreeBSD as an alternative to
the Linux based systems.

Anyone have any experience with FreeBSD that could mention pros/cons?

Thanks.

[technodolt]

On 2/12/07, Luke I. [email protected] wrote:

kernel before the build. Everything else is pretty much straightforward

technodolt :: at :: gmail :: dot :: com

Again, thanks to you all.

Woohoo! Long live Gentoo. If you need any help, you can email me
offlist. Of course, I am not like the Linux Guru of All or anything,
but
I’m more than happy to help or point you in a right direction.

As for customizing the kernel, I go about it the ‘easy’ way and use
genkernel:

genkernel --menuconfig --bootloader=grub all (make sure the symlink
use tag is in your /etc/make.conf)

I go through the menu options and if there’s something I know I don’t
need, I take it out (ie a lot of the laptop stuff). I select my
proper processor, etc.
Also, what I used for certain things like DRM, depended on which video
card I was using. I run the unstable architecture, so I have new
sources that I can upgrade
to, I’m just choosing not to as things are working nicely and I’m busy
focusing on rubyish stuff.

–
Samantha

http://www.babygeek.org/

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson