I like Gentoo Linux, but sometimes I find it’s not really applicable for some of what I’m using it for.  Like my main server.  This machine is one of the two machines at my place that just HAVE to work (the firewall/phone server is the other), and there’s been a few instances recently where Gentoo has let me down a bit…

First a bit of history: this machine is a dual-processor Opteron system, and as far as free (as-in beer) Linux distros Gentoo was about the only one that had a x64_64 port available at the time.  Over time it’s grown to have a lot of stuff on it (applications, not just the data), so changing to a different distro will be FAR from trivial.  I know that Gentoo isn’t really a server distro, but this install has a lot of momentum behind it now…

Where was I?  That’s right: VNC.  Something else I really like is VNC.  I had a neat setup on my box that worked like a terminal server: you connect using your VNC client, get a login window from X, do some work, then log out when you’re done.  No having to set up a permanently-running X desktop for every user that might want to connect!  This was set up and working really well, until I just went to use it (after having not used it for a while) and found it broken.  Seems that some other change I’d made since last using it caused the Xvnc process to start segfaulting.  Rebuilding it made no difference.

This led me on a wild ride through Google searches, fora and mailing list archives (with a detour throug the LKML, which I’ll meniton later) to discover that in current versions TightVNC doesn’t play well on 64-bit distributions and that it’s been a known problem for months with no real end in sight.  On someone’s recommendation I removed TightVNC and switched to the RealVNC package, and things started working again (once I fixed a different problem in KDM caused by Gentoo’s configuration file management).

I’m finding more and more that I have less and less time to frig around with this stuff.  I need this kit to JUST WORK, and a bleeding edge distro like Gentoo isn’t helping me.  Perhaps I need to change to using the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP), which is a pre-built-binary version of Gentoo.  But with the GRP, much of the advantage of Gentoo (custom-built packages, flexibility) is lost.

I guess I’ve been wanting to have my cake and eat it too — I want nicely-tuned custom-built packages, but I want stability and proven integration as well!  I’m going to have to give something up, and I think that stability is going to win.

I’m attracted to CentOS, the respin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  I guess I could have a play with that on some other kit and see how it goes…

Tags: gentoo, problem, update