Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.

[annon]

I've already had to reinstall Ubuntu twice due to my own screw-ups. Last time, it was because I fucked up my partitions, so I backed up anything really important (which took forever), loaded up a partitioner from the boot screen (which also took forever) and then deleted all of the partitions. After that, the computer went to the boot menu just fine, so I reinstalled Ubuntu.

I'm sure there was a less painful way to fix it, but since I had recently lost everything, anything on the hard drive was easily replaceable.

[Bobbias]

Well, my linux experience pretty much consists of reinstalling 20 times, and still not getting things to work right, lol.

[Spectere]

I've pretty much been able to work out every issue I had, and every issue I've had with Gentoo was mostly my own fault.

There have been a few occasions where an update to a package broke binary compatibility.  Gentoo's revdep-rebuild utility is generally good enough to do the job, but I did run into one case where two packages changed their ABI in one update and I was stuck in a sort of dependency hell.  There are two choices at that point: work it out by manually (using the list of packages given to you by portage) or take the brute-force method ("emerge world", then leave your computer overnight so it can rebuild everything).  I took the latter and the system was working perfectly by the next day with no need to reinstall the system.

That's one nice thing about the installation approach that Gentoo uses.  One time I wound up hosing my system's includes during an LFS install, probably due to a type.  No problem, "emerge gcc" fixed everything.  One time I wound up uninstalling a dependency to something.  No problem, "emerge -o package" pulls down any dependencies for that package that aren't on the system.

I love the fucking shit out of portage; it's by far the best package management system I've ever used.

Edit: Another way of fool-proofing a Linux install is to have it start in text mode.  I use ATI's Linux drivers on my laptop and, to put it bluntly, they haven't exactly been known for their reliability (though, oddly enough, they appear to be more stable than their Windows drivers now...).  If I ever wind up updating ati-drivers to a version that just doesn't like my laptop, all I have to do is reboot, mask the package, and pull the last working version.

Did I mention that I love portage?

[Bobbias]

Well, the package manager that was installed in my MyBook is ipkg, and I'd never heard about it before, but it's actually a pretty decent system. It's lightweight, and all that, but it works well.

[MortifiedocAlot]

People who can't take constructive criticism. I know a guy that owns a CS:S server and has grenades set up to do triple damage in triple the radius. So anyone who is on the offensive and moving towards a choke point would have a huge advantage compared to the person sitting there trying to guard a bomb site/hostage, which is what I told him. He told me it was more realistic and that there was tons of other servers without the mod, then he muted everyone.

Also people who think realism in EVERY game is a good thing. Garbage makes most games unbalanced.

[Spectere]

Portage is based on Python and it has everything but the kitchen sink (though I hear they're working on adding that to 2.2).  In all srsness, it does a great job at...pretty much everything, and has a rich set of tools to help you get information about the packages.  Plus, as I said before, it's fairly easy to bring your system back to life if you screw it up.

If worst comes to worst (i.e. you kill python, completely destroy the toolchain to the point where it can't do an initial compile on gcc, etc) you should be able to pull the utilities from a stage1 install, but it's never come to that for me.

[Ulti]

I wish I knew enough about linux not to be completely lost at every single discussion you guys have about it :s

[Bobbias]

Well, ipkg is pretty robust, despite being a lightweight solution. It can do quite a bit.

I don't know how it stacks up against portage, since I've never used portage, but I have found ipkg to be better than the other package manager I used before, (which one it was, I've forgotten).

Here's a wiki entry about it: http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Ipkg. I find it kinda funny, but because of the architecture of the MyBook, they use the NSLU2 package repository.

[Spectere]

It's missing some features that Portage provides, mainly in terms of unfucking the system.  That said, such a thing is far more important in a source distribution rather than a binary one, so it's all good.  One fairly large feature that I'm not seeing is a way to calculate reverse dependencies to get rid of unwanted dependencies.  For something targeting embedded systems with minimal storage space this seems a bit odd to me.

[Bobbias]

Good point. However, I'd think that most people running embedded systems probably know exactly what they want on there, and won't be dealing with unnecessary packages in the first place. Most default installs for embedded systems are going to be really barebones, and so you're not likely going to get into a situation where you have unwanted packages. It's still a possibility, but not nearly as common as on a desktop or other more dynamic systems. But yes, it would still be a useful feature for those times where you are dealing with unwanted packages, and limited space (thank god I can use all the space on the MyBook in the linux; I'd hate to be limited space-wise on that thing, lol).

[MortifiedocAlot]

Holy fuck I want to kick the guy from Buck Cherry in the throat until his head explodes.

[Ulti]

Holy fuck I want to kick the guy from Buck Cherry in the throat until his head explodes.

I'd help hold him down. I hate that band with a passion.

[Bobbias]

Jesus fucking christ. I get up at 1 PM, get on the computer for a while. Have a bath at 2:30 till 3:30. My brother gets on the computer. I let him on till 11, knowing that I'll be able to get on form 11:00 till whenever I want to go to bed, leaving me with, maybe 4 more hours on the computer. What happens? 11 rolls around and my mom tells me she wants the fucking computer because she's gonna do laundry and can't be going up and down the stairs all the time. So what do I get? Nothing. I get a fucking hour and a half on the computer all day.

Thanks for fucking nothing.

[flaffl]

Jesus fucking christ. I get up at 1 PM, get on the computer for a while. Have a bath at 2:30 till 3:30. My brother gets on the computer. I let him on till 11, knowing that I'll be able to get on form 11:00 till whenever I want to go to bed, leaving me with, maybe 4 more hours on the computer. What happens? 11 rolls around and my mom tells me she wants the fucking computer because she's gonna do laundry and can't be going up and down the stairs all the time. So what do I get? Nothing. I get a fucking hour and a half on the computer all day.

Thanks for fucking nothing.

rofl go play ps2 then

[Bobbias]

I would, but my brother lent out GH2 and the fucking memory card (we never needed a second one, so it's the only one we have.) So PS2 is pretty much useless for me.