Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
alternative operating system to you and introduce new concepts of how an operating system can work. After all Plan 9
is classed as a research operating system. What you should take away from Plan 9 is not how featureless Abaco is, for
example, but how Plan 9 considers everything as a file and grid computing concepts.
Gentoo
Lastly I will show you how to get Gentoo up and running on the Raspberry Pi. Gentoo is my personal favorite
distribution of Linux.
A History of Gentoo
Gentoo Linux (originally known as Enoch Linux) was created by Daniel Robbins and a small group of developers
around 1999. His goal was simple: to create a Linux distribution with no precompiled binaries and tuned to the
hardware that it's running on. This goal struck a huge roadblock when developers behind Enoch found out that the
GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has issues building itself from the source correctly. The Enoch development team
found solutions to resolve the issues. Not only did this allow the GCC to build correctly, but those contributions
optimized the GCC's ability to compile binary files.
At this point Enoch was renamed as Gentoo. The name Gentoo was selected because a gentoo is the fastest swimming
penguin. Gentoo at this point lacked a crucial item. It had no package management system. For a period of time Daniel
Robbins halted Gentoo and switched to FreeBSD as his operating system. It was during this time that he was inspired by
FreeBSD's package management system. From this Gentoo gained its own package management system called portage.
The fact that Gentoo is free of binary components and has a package tree that consists of just source code makes
it an ideal operating system to port to other architectures. There are very few machine types that are not supported
by Gentoo; if the Linux kernel has support, then there will be a Gentoo installation possible as long as you have a lot
of spare time. Gentoo has its shortcomings: for a start the installation process is long and involved compared to other
main Linux distributions.
Gentoo Considerations
Gentoo is a little different from most of the more popular Linux distributions. There is no installer for Gentoo although there
is a live CD. If you wanted to, you could even install Gentoo from your currently running Linux operating system. When you
install Gentoo, everything is done by hand and via the command line. There are no wizards and there are no GUI tools. I did
tell you that I was quite fond of the command line. Don't be too put off by that; Gentoo has a very useful install time guide
that they call the handbook to help you out. The handbook will be your new friend during a Gentoo install.
The next difference about Gentoo, compared to Fedora, is that there is no distribution version. Gentoo is a
meta-distribution. A meta-distribution is a distribution that continues to update forever. You install new kernels
and new versions of LibreOffice as they come down from the upstream providers, whereas Fedora takes a known
working set of packages from the upstream provider and assigns them to a distribution version number. You would
have a hard time installing the latest LibreOffice on Fedora Core 11 via
yum
if you tried to today. In contrast, with a
meta-distribution you can do this no matter the age of the original install, although you may need to update a lot of
packages to get there. The benefit of a meta-distribution is that you can always update to the latest version and bring
any age of the original install up to date. The downside is that you end up with a very mixed package version that has
not been as thoroughly tested as a Fedora release package at a set version.
Gentoo also has another difference in the way it handles its packages. Most of the popular distributions of Linux
use a binary package format to distribute packages. You may have come across this with packages ending in
.rpm
or
.deb
. Gentoo's system of distributing packages is called portage. Gentoo's developers were inspired by the FreeBSD ports
collection where only the source code and a small file on how to build that source code is distributed to the end user.
This is known as source distribution, unlike Fedora, which is a binary distribution. Gentoo's portage system is made of a
set of files called ebuilds and the necessary patches are created by the Gentoo community. Ebuild files are read by a tool
called emerge. This tool has a similar function as
yum
or
apt-get
. Take a look at Listing 11-1 to see a sample ebuild file.
