iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Linux. Stop reading now if that means nothing to you.

I’ve had enough with Gentoo Linux. I started running Linux at home with Red Hat 9 – often refered to as the Windows ME of Linux (by me). Just as I was getting into compiling my own code I installed an OS that has a wonky C library. So I went to the polar opposite – from the Enterprise penguin, in his tux, to the hacker penguin, Gentoo, the one dressed almost all in black.

Gentoo borrows from BSD’s ports and has a simple interface to install software and update files and uses my favourite open source tool, rsync, to pull it all together. Plus it takes all that open source software, optimizes it for your system and complies it. Installing software is simple, it takes time, but the ease of use and optimization is worth it. The problem is that Gentoo developers keep releasing buggy code.

My current problem is Apache2 (the open source web server that runs most web sites) keeps segment faulting (accessing memory it shouldn’t) when I try to run a certain PHP & Python script, I get the following error: [Fri Jan 20 00:55:20 2006] [notice] child pid 30373 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened with my Gentoo installation. Previously deleting the ebuilds, re-syncing the portage tree, de-tuning the optimization had fixed other similar problems. This time nothing fixed it.

So I’m done with Gentoo, I’m working on updating my 600Gig server shortly. Red Hat has got their act together again with the Fedora project – and they’ve put version 9 far behind them.

It’s time to go back to Red Hat and their new Fedora Core. Thanks for the memories Gentoo developers and community, I wish you the best of luck, but I don’t have the time to chase down bugs like this.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 01:18 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.