Gentoo does its way

Since I have been trying Gentoo, I have learned that it is definitely a bit more tedious and detailed to accomplish many things as compared to FreeBSD.  There isn't much automation in a default install and at the moment I am not sure what automation could be added.  Gentoo just does things differently, and you may need a crib sheet to know what to use or how to do something, until it becomes second nature.  It can be learned but there may be many bumps or hiccups along the way, correcting misunderstood methods and finally getting success.

For FreeBSD there is a bootable image which guides you through the entire process from preparing the storage medium (hard drives) all the way to installing and configuring the base system, and adding users.  A reboot into a fresh install drops you to a shell login prompt and then you need to setup your GUI.  Some flavors of FreeBSD such as long defunct PC-BSD and present Ghost BSD will finish by installing your desired GUI or a default GUI.  There is also sysutils/desktop-installer in ports which can be very helpful to automate a number of GUI installations.

If you have to setup a FreeBSD desktop, you can use a desktop installer and choose one of those it supports, or you can work from the basic level.  When you install a GUI for FreeBSD, you first need to get X windows with its assorted support mechanisms (including xterm), and then you choose a GUI like FVWM and maybe a login session manager such as SLiM.  After that is accomplished, you can continue to use pkg or the FreeBSD ports system to install further software.  The hierarchy of the ports system allows for easy discovery of software one may wish to add to their system.  There is plenty of associated documentation that is available online or installed, even as part of the base system, so that many questions can be answered easily.  One can fairly quickly and simply get a FreeBSD system up and running as desired with all the software of interest assuming it is already in ports or a pkg exists.

Gentoo does have documentation, it does have a handbook and wiki and forums.  What it does not seem to have, at least from a default basic install is automation or scripting all set-up to be used.  There is no poudriere, there is no ports tree with its hierarchy and predefined make files that easily facilitate the process.  Gentoo does have a build system, it does have packages.  Installing a fresh system is a long process, every step and detail the user must type and carry out.  There is great flexibility in this but some things may take using or trying to know if those are the best choices to make, the best configuration to use.  There are things that act like helpers, which complete tasks in a similar fashion as sysrc on FreeBSD can set variables for rc.conf, but aside from those it is a long journey with small step after small step process.  Gentoo has its niche, it has its advocates and fans, and it may aid me with porting things to FreeBSD, but if compared to Ubuntu, or as FreeBSD -release compared to -current, it is just a bit more difficult to handle and possibly not really for the novice.

This has though been the most time I have spent trying to use and understand any specific Linux distro and I believe the experience has been useful.  I am certainly not going to erase the long fought work of getting a usable Gentoo in Virtualbox, but instead move it to a faster machine to learn more.  My preference is to use FreeBSD, I have been using it sporadically since before 2000 as v2.2.6 and almost constantly since about 2008 beginning with PC-BSD 8.x which I eventually abandoned (due mostly to my tinkering) for FreeBSD 9.x and FreeBSD stable-9.  I eventually decided to work on porting things to FreeBSD in an unofficial capacity, which is where understanding Linux will be useful.  Gentoo in a virtual box might help me with that.

Involved with Gentoo

Since I have been stymied in my attempts to get gaming going on FreeBSD for myself, I decided to attempt another tactic.  After some effort I was able to get VirtualBox installed and setup to function properly, and it took a number of attempts to get the Gentoo iso to startup within it.  I chose Gentoo due to a remembered mention of it being somewhat like FreeBSD, maybe I was remembering something else but I went with Gentoo.  My plan was to see if I could get some stuff to work in the virtual environment which had failed me on FreeBSD.

The Gentoo install is involved.  We may hear complaints from those who try to install FreeBSD or any other BSD as it not being easy or is complicated, or that updating things later is difficult.  I would doubt most of those people have used Gentoo or have gone through all the details necessary to install it.  Luckily for me there is a guy in Kentucky who regularly (annually or so) records a step by step install video for Gentoo. He says that things change from time to time and he likes to keep an updated walkthrough for those who would need it.

I followed his video, pausing and rewatching in order to be sure I got the steps correct as I worked to setup Gentoo in virtualbox.  He tells of some settings that he might not use himself but that others may, and I chose to use some of those.  When it came to setting up the EFI partition and installing the needed files, it did not work.  It took me three iterations through the whole process to this point, restarting from a fresh install each time, to discover what I did wrong.  There was a path or file or directory name that I mistyped each of those previous times.  How I noticed that I made this mistake I am unsure, except that perhaps the emphasis on a third attempt made me look closer.  I made it past this and it felt like I would finally finish.

I was able to reach nearly the last steps when grub is setup for the last reboot.  This is the moment I had difficulty again.  What went wrong I may need to revisit, watching the video again to be sure.  I corrected whatever it was, and succeeded to get grub working, I thought.  Yes it would reboot and grub did function, but the trouble now was that when I went through the second video to install a GUI, I had made some mistakes with SLiM and FVWM3.  How I was trying to execute slim and direct it to start fvwm3 was inaccurate.  I solved this mistake but then discovered that due to the entire Gentoo install being rather bare bones, I was again stopped because although fvwm did load up, I had no way that I knew how to continue.

I had to install xterm, and I tried to solve a script issue that uses python.  Gentoo has a lot of things compile on your system with the emerge commands.  Getting most of what I needed built (and installed) took nearly a day to complete.  I still did it, using FreeBSD as the host, virtualbox provided with as much ram (22G) as I could and as many processor cores (5) as I was able.  The host was still mostly responsive but Gentoo inside virtualbox worked at a snails pace in comparison.

I hoped that if I could install Lutris, and get that to function, I would learn what I am missing with my unofficial port of it, the same for any other port like the ryzom client, or wine functionality, or steam.  Each install took forever which somewhat dampened my expectations, and then when I believed I had done everything for Lutris and the ryzom client to function, there were still unsatisfied dependencies or misconfigured things.  My hopeful panacea for Gentoo in virtualbox to help me solve problems became barely different than attempting directly from FreeBSD.

I still have a lot to learn about how to install a linux thing for Gentoo and how to find and discover dependencies, and where to look for documentation, and which documentation might be most accurate.  I have not yet abandoned it as both a challenge to learn more about and as a possible route to discovering how to make things function properly on FreeBSD.  The amount of non-automated detail that goes into doing things on Gentoo is mostly okay, I do tedious tasks on FreeBSD also, but a little more automation and speed would definitely not hurt, especially speed.  Waiting a day to verify success, to try something is a bit depressing.

I recently bought and assembled a new pc, about a month after I had my virtualbox experience above.  One massively beefier than my present Phenom IIx6, it is a Ryzen 3 and ram jumps from 32 gigabytes up to 128.  When I transfer the virtualbox machine to the new hardware (I have very little intent to go through THAT process again), perhaps the build and install process with emerge will not be so onerous.  Maybe at some future date I can write about how my understanding of Gentoo helped me succeed with something like dbeaver or lutris.