The Linux Experiment

Well it’s been a couple of months now since the start of Experiment 2.0 and I’ve had plenty of time to learn about Gentoo, see its strengths and… sit waiting through its weaknesses. I don’t think Gentoo is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, in fact, compared to some other distributions out there, Gentoo doesn’t look bad at all.

Now that the experiment is approaching its end I figured it would be a good time to do a quick post about my experiences running Gentoo as a day-to-day desktop machine.

Strengths

Gentoo is exactly what you want it to be, nothing more. Sure there are special meta-packages that make it easy to install things such as the KDE desktop, but the real key is that you don’t need to install anything that you don’t want to. As a result Gentoo is fast. My startup time is about 10-20 seconds and, if I had the inclination to do so, could be trimmed down even further through optimization.

Packages are also compiled with your own set of custom options and flags so you get exactly what you need, optimized for your exact hardware. Being a more advanced (see expert) oriented distribution it will also teach you quite a bit about Linux and software configuration as a whole.

Weaknesses

Sadly Gentoo is not without its faults. As mentioned above Gentoo can be whatever you want it to be. The major problem with this strength in practice is that the average desktop user just wants a desktop that works. When it takes days of configuration and compilation just to get the most basic of programs installed it can be a major deterrent to the vast majority of users.

Speaking of compiling programs, I find this aspect of Gentoo interesting from a theoretical perspective but I honestly have a hard time believing that it makes enough of a difference to make it worth sitting through the hours days of compiling it takes just to get some things installed. Its so bad that I actually haven’t bothered to re-sync and update my whole system in over 50 days for fear that it would take forever to re-compile and re-install all of the updated programs and libraries.

Worse yet even when I do have programs installed they don’t always play nicely with one another. Gentoo offers a package manager, portage, but it still fails at some dependency resolution – often times making you choose between uninstalling previous programs just to install the new one or to not install the new one at all. Another example of things being more complicated than they should be is my system sound. Even though I have pulseaudio installed and configured my system refuses to play audio from more than one program at a time. These are just a few examples of problems I wouldn’t have to deal with on another distribution.

-Sigh-

Well, it’s been interesting but I will not be sticking with Gentoo once this experiment is over. There are just too many little things that make this more of an educational experience than a real day-to-day desktop. While I certainly have learned a lot during this version of the experiment, at the end of the day I’d rather things just work right the first time.

We live in an old house, which has the unfortunate side-effect of lacking a wired network of any kind. All of our machines connect to a wireless network, and my desktop is no exception. I’ve got an old WUSB54GC wireless stick that was manufactured some time in 2007. In computer years, this is way old hardware. But with a bit of work, I managed to get it working with my Gentoo install.

This bitch is old... but it works

I started out by installing the NetworkManager applet with a tutorial on the Gentoo Wiki. This was a straightforward process, and after a restart, the applet icon appeared in the top right corner of my screen. If you left-click on the icon, it drops down a menu that lists your wireless interfaces. Under the Wireless Networks heading, it said that it was missing the firmware necessary to talk to my hardware.

The next step was to look around the net and figure out the firmware/kernel module combination that supports this stick. I found my answer over at the SerialMonkey project, which is run by a group that took on maintenance of older Ralink firmware after the company of the same name dropped support. According to the SerialMonkey hardware guide, my stick (or at least a very similar stick called the WUSB54GR) works with the rt73usb kernel module and related firmware.

This known, there are two methods of proceeding. Those running older kernels may need to manually compile the necessary packages using instructions similar to these, from the Arch Linux project. For more modern kernels, the Gentoo project provides a Wiki entry detailing the necessary steps.

After following the steps in the Gentoo Wiki entry, I restarted my system, and now have full wireless support. Genius!

So my base Gentoo installation came with Gnome 2.3, which while solid, lacks a lot of the prettiness of Gnome’s latest 3.2 release. I thought that I might like to enjoy some of that beauty, so I attempted to upgrade. Because Gnome 3.2 isn’t in the main portage tree yet, I found a tutorial that purported to walk me through the upgrade process using an overlay, which is kind of like a testing branch that you can merge into the main portage tree in order to get unsupported software.

Since the tutorial that I linked above is pretty self-explanatory, I won’t repeat the steps here. There’s also the little fact that the tutorial didn’t work worth a damn…

Problem 1: Masked Packages

#required by dev-libs/folks-9999, 
required by gnome-base/gnome-shell-3.2.1-r1, 
required by gnome-base/gdm-3.2.1.1-r1[gnome-shell], 
required by gnome-base/gnome-2.32.1-r1, 
required by @selected, 
required by @world (argument)
>=dev-libs/libgee-0.6.2.1:0 introspection
#required by gnome-extra/sushi-0.2.1, 
required by gnome-base/nautilus-3.2.1[previewer], 
required by app-cdr/brasero-3.2.0-r1[nautilus], 
required by media-sound/sound-juicer-2.99.0_pre20111001, 
required by gnome-base/gnome-2.32.1-r1, 
required by @selected, 
required by @world (argument)
>=media-libs/clutter-gtk-1.0.4 introspection

This one is pretty simple to fix: you can add the lines >=dev-libs/libgee-0.6.2.1:0 introspection and >=media-libs/clutter-gtk-1.0.4 introspection to the file /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords, or you can run emerge -avuDN world –autounmask-write to get around these autounmask behaviour issues

Problem 2: Permissions

--------------------------- ACCESS VIOLATION SUMMARY ---------------------------
LOG FILE "/var/log/sandbox/sandbox-3222.log"

VERSION 1.0
FORMAT: F - Function called
FORMAT: S - Access Status
FORMAT: P - Path as passed to function
FORMAT: A - Absolute Path (not canonical)
FORMAT: R - Canonical Path
FORMAT: C - Command Line

F: mkdir
S: deny
P: /root/.local/share/webkit
A: /root/.local/share/webkit
R: /root/.local/share/webkit
C: ./epiphany --introspect-dump=
/var/tmp/portage/www-client/epiphany-3.0.4/temp/tmp-introspectSfeqBO/functions.txt,
/var/tmp/portage/www-client/epiphany-3.0.4/temp/tmp-introspectSfeqBO/dump.xml
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This one totally confused me. If I’m reading it correctly, the install script lacks the permissions necessary to write to the path /root.local/share/webkit/. The odd part of this is that the script is running as the root user, so this simple shouldn’t happen. I was able to give it the permissions that it needed by running chmod 777 /root/.local/share/webkit/, but I had to start the install process all over again, and it just failed with a similar error the first time that it attempted to write a file to that directory. What the fuck?

At 10pm at night, I couldn’t be bothered to find a fix for this… I used the tutorial’s instructions to roll back the changes, and I’ll try again later if I’m feeling motivated. In the mean time, if you know how to fix this process, I’d love to hear about it.

So I’m a big Dropbox user. I primarily use it to keep my personal info synchronized between my machines (don’t worry, I encrypt my stuff before dumping it into Dropbox, I’m not dumb), but it’s also handy for quickly sharing files with others.

Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn’t exist in the Gentoo portage tree.

To get started, head over to the Dropbox website and download the source tar.bzip file for your platform. Unzip it to your desktop, open a root terminal and cd into the resulting directory. Before you can actually install Dropbox, you’ll need to satisfy a few dependencies.

First, make sure that you’ve got python by typing emerge python into the aforementioned root terminal. Next, install docutils by typing emerge docutils in that same terminal. Now you should be able to install the dropbox stub by typing ./configure && make && make install.

At this point, Dropbox will have installed a stub of an application on your machine. You should be able to find it under Applications > Internet > Dropbox. When you launch this application, Dropbox will attempt to automatically download and install the binary portion of the application.

Optional: Verifying Binary Signatures

When dropbox downloads binary files, it verifies their legitimacy by calculating a digital signature and comparing it to a known value. In order for it to perform this task, you’ll need to have the pygpgme library installed on your system. Note that this is not the same as the python-gpgme library. They are different, and Dropbox requires the former. Like most Python libraries, pygpgme is a wrapper around a c-based library, in this case, GPGME. As such, the installation takes two steps. First, run emerge gpgme in your root terminal.

Second, you’ll need to install the pygpgme wrapper. It can be found on the project’s homepage at Launchpad. Unpack the tar.bzip, cd into the resulting directory, and run python setup.py build && python setup.py install from a root terminal. If the installation fails with an error message like

fatal error: gpgme.h: No such file or directory

then check the location of your gpgme.h file. It should have been included with the emerge gpgme command, but pygpgme expects it to live in /usr/include/. On my system, it was living in  /usr/include/gpgme/. I solved this problem by running cp /usr/include/gpgme/gpgme.h /user/include/. The only catch is that if you upgrade GPGME, you’ll need to remember that you copied the header file in order to make the python wrapper work. Once the file is copied, you should be able to run the setup script above.

Finally, run Dropbox and check to ensure that the warning message about binary signatures has gone away. You should now be good to go!

Edit: After I had figured all of this crap out, I realized that Dropbox actually is available in the Gentoo tree, but it’s called gnome-extra/nautilus-dropbox. You should be able to skip all of these steps and install Dropbox with the command emerge nautilus-dropbox, although I haven’t tried it myself.

I wrote a simple script that you can download here that makes it easy to update your Gentoo system. It first re-syncs your portage tree so that you are pointing to the newest source files. Then it performs a deep update including build dependencies on all packages that have new versions or could be rebuilt because you have modified your USE flags. It also upgrades any build dependencies and tools. Finally it removes unused dependencies and attempts to fix any broken packages that now have new dependencies.

#!/bin/bash
emerge –sync
emerge –update –deep –with-bdeps=y –newuse –ask world
emerge –depclean
revdep-rebuild

I also found this excellent website that makes it very easy to search for Gentoo packages and see what use flags you can apply to them.

Tonight, I finally got X11 working on my Gentoo machine. For those who are following along, on Tuesday night I managed to get my machine up to a command line. The next logical step is a graphical window manager.

I’ve chosen to give Gnome3 a spin, but before I can dive into all of it’s shiny UI-goodness, I need an X11 server installed on my machine. Because I have an nVidia graphics card in my machine, and I’ve had great luck with Ubuntu’s proprietary nVidia drivers in the past, I decided to skip over the open-source Nouveau drivers this time around. I started out the installation by following Gentoo’s nVidia guide, supplementing with info pulled from the nVidia entry on the Gentoo Wiki.

Although X is supposed to configure your system automagically, it couldn’t find my screens or devices on my first run of startx. I looked about the internet for a bit, and found out that you can force X to automatically configure itself. Simply run Xorg -configure and copy the file that it creates into your Xorg config directory (you can find it in the log file, mine is at /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/).

In my case, these automagical settings still needed a bit of tweaking. I noticed in the log file (again, mine is at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, your mileage may vary) that X was failing to load GLX, which is essentially for 3D acceleration. In my case, GLX was installed, but it NVIDIA’s version wasn’t being loaded. Once again, the Gentoo Wiki came through for me, instructing me to run eselect opengl set nvidia. This worked like a charm.

Finally, I had to install twm and xterm so that I could see X working. That was a quick and painless process. Now on to Gnome!

Graphics Drivers

Continuing where I left off in my previous posts I now had a somewhat working desktop but a few things still had to be done. For one I am running this on my laptop and while the open source radeon drivers are actually pretty decent they’re just not quite good enough when it comes to power management. Thankfully the Linux closed source drivers are up to the job.

After reading through these two sites I was able to install the closed source drivers and get full control over my graphics card. To be perfectly honest I’m not exactly sure what steps got me to this point but I do know it was a mixture of the two sites.

Wireless Networking

After careful consideration I had come to the conclusion thought I had bricked my wireless. Worse yet after following the guide here (even the parts specific to KDE) I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. Thankfully I stumbled upon this guide which instructed me to install networking components for KDE. Apparently once I had installed this package all was good.

Flash

Flash was actually incredibly easy to install. All I had to do was enter the following command in a root terminal and then restart Firefox.

emerge adobe-flash

Java

Another big install was the official Oracle Java JRE and JDK. To install just the JRE run the command dev-java/sun-jre-bin. If you want the JDK as well then run the command dev-java/sun-jdk. The only weird part about this was that this package is now considered restricted. To work around it simply download the bin file from Oracle and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles before running the command.

More to Come

There is still plenty more to do, like install LibreOffice and figure out why my computer currently can’t play audio CDs. I am however thankful that at this point I am at least a bit better off than some other fellow Linux Experiment participants.

My Desktop So Far

The high CPU load was because I had just finished compiling a bunch of stuff

Just a quick note tonight – I finally managed to get a bootable Gentoo system installed!

After my last post, things were looking pretty grim. Instead of continuing to perpetuate the recompile/reboot cycle, I decided to start fresh, in hopes that I had simply missed a step the first time around. With this in mind, I started back at page one of the Gentoo Handbook and worked my way through the entire thing.

When it came time to compile my kernel, I opted for a slightly less error-prone method, and started off by installing Genkernel, a tool that automates some of the kernel creation steps. When running it however, I was sure to pass the –menuconfig parameter, which gave me full control over what modules were included in the final product.

Next, I followed the kernel tutorials in the Gentoo Handbook and on the Gentoo Wiki Asus P5Q-E page. This ensured that I included every component that was necessary for my system.

Once I rebooted the machine, a login prompt came up the first time. Great success indeed!

One little gotcha that’s important to note at this step. On my first login, I didn’t have any network access. Two things that might help:

1. Open up /etc/conf.d/net in nano and add a line like config_eth0=”dhcp” for each network interface in your machine, where eth0 is the name of the interface. This tells the machine to use DHCP when initializing the device. On most home networks, this will get you an IP address.
2. Make sure that any required modules are loaded. I have two network interfaces. One uses the sky2 module, and the other uses skge. You can check to ensure that these are loaded with the command lsmod | grep sky2 where sky2 is the name of the module that you’re looking for. If it isn’t loaded, run modprobe sky2 to get it up and running. Note that you may need to recompile your kernel with support for the module in question if you missed it first time ’round.

Tomorrow, I’ll compile an X11 server, and hopefully get started on the GNOME desktop environment. Christ there’s still a lot to do…

So like Tyler, I’ve decided to run Gentoo. Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

My experience thus far can be summed up with a single word: frustrating. I spent my first day working through the (excellent) Gentoo Handbook. Like Jake, I found it handy to have run lshw on my system prior to installing Gentoo. This provided me with a list of my hardware that I could refer back to during the installation process, and saved me a few headaches.

At first, my live-cd environment lacked a network connection. My machine has two network interfaces in it. One uses the sky2 kernel module, while the other uses skge. I ran:

modprobe skge
net-setup eth1
[follow on-screen instructions]
ping google.com

and was successful.

On that first day of dicking about, I managed to get all the way to Chapter 10: Configuring the Bootloader. It was at this point, in subchapter 10.d, that I was instructed to reboot the system, as though it would be a relaxing, daisy-scented walk in the park. Not so.

Apparently, the kernel that I’ve managed to compile does not recognize the SATA interface on my motherboard. When I attempt to boot, GRUB hands control off to the kernel, which goes looking for my root partition on /dev/sda3. It then dies with a message like

Kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,3)

This error message is the bane of my existence.

After a great deal of head-vs-desk action, approximately 37 kernel compilations, and a great deal of googling, I managed to find a Gentoo wiki entry that instructs users of my chipset on how to compile their very own working kernel. Tonight, I intend to follow it, in hopes that I can get the system to boot some time soon.

At this rate, I’ll be lucky to have a working desktop by the end of the experiment.

Yeah… apparently the ability to restart or shutdown your system using a normal user account from within KDE SC is not something that is installed by default. In order to accomplish this you need to compile and install the kde-misc/kshutdown package using the following command from a root terminal:

emerge kde-misc/kshutdown

I also had to create a new file called /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords in order for this to work. Inside that file just put the following text

kde-misc/kshutdown-2.0