Review: Gentoo PPC Linux

About a week ago, someone asked me about how good the PPC port of Gentoo was. It was the first time I ever heard of a PPC port of Gentoo, so I was pretty surprised to hear about it. In a well kept effort, 2 PPC developers, Bryon Roche and Pieter Van den Abeele, have ported the grounds of the Gentoo Linux distribution to the PPC platform. Since the announcement of Gentoo Linux for PPC on TuxPPC and PenguinPPC, there has been a real rush to the new distribution and it looks like Gentoo is definately gaining ground with the more experienced PPC Linux users.

Indeed, Gentoo Linux is rather unique on the PPC platform. You don't get any nifty Install CDs with hundreds of prebuilt software packages. No, Gentoo is a distribution that is mostly built from scratch. They provide you with a boot CD and a very basic set of precompiled packages, just enough to go start building your Gentoo distribution using their great building system called Portage. So why go through that pain? The answer is simple, you get a fully working Linux system built to your needs and preferences. Unlike other distributions, Gentoo only installs what you tell it to and not hundreds and hundreds of programs you will never need. The result is a small and fast, fully customizable PPC distribution.

On the other hand, you'll have to understand that Gentoo by far is not a "newbie" friendly distribution. While the instructions for installation that are provided are mostly accurate and easy to follow, you still have to know what you are doing or the experience will necessarily fail. For instance during the install process, you will have to compile your own kernel that's fit to your hardware. Also, there is no nifty graphical installer that will setup your hardware, no luxury. It's a minimalist distribution, with a very nice build system.

Of course, I launched myself into the adventure as well, and quickly hushed to the Gentoo PPC port site and downloaded the install ISO. Back then, no PPC install guide was available yet. However, in the meantime, David Chamberlain has provided the community with a small step by step guide which will certainly be useful to many.

After a quick download of about 30 MB, I burned the CD and booted it up. You will eventually land in a minimal command line interface. The important step then is to get networking going, as the sources needed to compile the packages are all downloaded from the Net. The only way to make it working is over a network, as there is no software provided to have it install via a modem (too slow anyway) or to directly connect it to a DSL modem.

Once you have a connection to the outside, it's time to setup your disk partitions (manually of course), format them, mount the root file system and put basic build tools on it (they come precompiled with the ISO). You will then chroot into your "build system" and the adventure can begin.

Compiling a basic system that's normally bootable will take several hours to one or two days, depending on your processor speed, as each package has to be compiled from scratch. That's where Portage comes in. Portage is an ingenious build system based on Python that will take care of building all the software needed. Driven through the "emerge" command, Portage keeps track of what software has been installed, of new available updates, dependencies and of course the whole package build process.

Portage combines the power of a self compiled software with the ease of use of Debian's apt-get. For instance, once you have your basic system up, configured a few things like keyboard map, timezone, etc., you may think "ok, this is all nice, but I want KDE3, how the heck am I going to get that compiled correctly with all that's needed?". No problem! Portage is there to do it for you.

Portage is driven through a set of build files called EBuilds. Doing a simple "emerge rsync" will update all the ebuilds and make sure only the latest and greatest gets installed. Next, we want KDE up and running (no matter how), no trouble, just type "emerge kde" and you're set! One single build command will take care of everything needed to get KDE installed. It will automatically compile and install XFree, libraries and tools needed by XFree, KDE and everything needed by KDE. Once you get used to emerge, you can't live without it.

The result of a complete hardware specific compile does also show it's power. KDE3 and Mozilla behave a lot more snappier on my Gentoo install than on any other PPC distribution I have tried so far. While CPU and hardware optimization might not make as much of a difference than it makes on x86 hardware, already the fact that Gentoo only installs the minimum of software needed frees up a lot of memory and CPU power and thus adds to a faster overall system.

While there have been some problems with EBuilds that are done for x86, the Gentoo PPC team has been quick at fixing these up for PPC. These included latest XFree (4.2.99), KDE3 and Mozilla which initially did not build at all or not correctly using emerge. Next to fixes on the x86 side, the PPC team also provides EBuilds for some popular PPC packages such as yaboot (necessarily) or pmud. The advantage is that you always get very recent versions of packages installed and are not stuck with older versions put on your distribution CDs. Besides, emerge also lets you build older version of software if necessary. Gentoo is also rather easy to keep up to date. A simple "emerge --update system" will keep system level packages updated (like binutils, portage, glibc, etc.) while an "emerge --update world" will update all of the installed packages to their latest versions. These are commands you should mostly use for the night, because rebuilding large packages can take many hours.

Anyway, after a week of "emerge" power on my iBook, I have a fully working distribution, tailored to my very personal needs and which will now be relatively easy to keep updated permanently. No more waiting for new distribution releases, the latest packages will always be available through Portage. Thus Gentoo has won over my heart and already has replaced my SuSE 7.3 install.

However, as I said before, don't be mistaken. Gentoo is certainly not suitable to new users. It requires a fair bit of Linux knowledge and a lot of patience to get installed and configured, even if Portage helps you out a lot. Most users will still be suited best with a binary distribution such as SuSE, Mandrake, Yellow Dog or Debian.

For those who don't fear the command line and numerous config files, I can only heartly recommend Gentoo PPC. Developer support for Gentoo is pretty tight too. You have several mailing lists available and you can also get live support from the #gentooppc chat channel on irc.openprojects.net
Finally, TuxPPC does also provide the usual community support via its forums, chat and staff.