Handbook Talk:Parts/Installation/Stage

Update time server URL

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This discussion is done.

Why not use the same (non-governmental) time server as in the ntp article?--Charles17 (talk) 06:28, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Your question could be asked another way around as well: why isn't the NTP article using the time server defined in the handbook? :P I'm not sure why the original author used the US gov's national time server. Perhaps one reason I can think of is reliability.

It is important to have an accurate system time in order to update the system and keep it secure. I'm not opposed to changing the server mentioned in the Handbook to pool.ntp.org as long as it's reliable. Is there a specific advantage you can think of as to why it would be better to use pool.ntp.org? Perhaps even better, I checked /etc/ntp.conf locally and found a few Gentoo specific time servers:

0.gentoo.pool.ntp.org

1.gentoo.pool.ntp.org

2.gentoo.pool.ntp.org

3.gentoo.pool.ntp.org

I'm not sure how reliable these servers are, but they also could perhaps be used in the Handbook and the NTP article as well since they seem to be tailored just for us. All this being said, I'd like some other Gentoo peoples to weigh in on this change before changing this long standing part of the Handbook. Kind regards, --Maffblaster (talk) 17:12, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

After a discussion in the #gentoo-dev (webchat) and #gentoo-infra (webchat) channels on Freenode, I discovered upstream documentation states ntpdate is on its way out. Who knows when it will be removed from the package, but that's the plan at some point in the future. I'm convinced will be safest (for now) to use the ntpd command passing the -q -g options. As far as I can see, ntpd does not support passing an arbatrary server on the command-line, which is all right for our case since it will reference the ${N}.gentoo.pool.ntp.org servers listed above (which should be in etc/ntp.conf on the official Gentoo install media). --Maffblaster (talk) 20:00, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

ntpd works on official Gentoo installation media (Minimal and Admin ISOs for amd64), but not on SystemRescueCD. I'm guessing it is intentionally removed because the daemon is not deemed necessary for the live environment. I'm unwilling to test anything outside those scopes. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 20:38, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

I've concluded that we'll be switching to ntpd -q -g in the handbook instead of using ntpdate since it's been over a month since this discussion was first opened and we've gotten no objections. ntpd -q -g is supported by all Gentoo live media. --Maffblaster (talk) 19:40, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Typo

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This discussion is done as of November 18, 2016.

(...) the j for Decompress with bzip2, thep for Preserve permissions and (...)

There is a missing space before the p, which is especially visible when using a text browser like links.

--FabianP (talk) 08:37, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Fixed! Thank you! --Maffblaster (talk) 18:13, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Add --numeric-owner to stage3 extraction

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This discussion is done as of Feb 23, 2017.

Installation alternatives for installing from other distro LiveUSB pass --numeric-owner to the tar command for the stage3 extraction, in case the other distro has different UID/GID in its /etc/passwd or /etc/groups for something in the tarball. We should just tell to always use it, to minimize the difference and it gives extra safety for gentoo install mediums too, and doesn't hurt.

--Leio (talk) 02:35, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip and I agree, we could add the --numeric-owner to the stage3 extraction. It should protect those running the installation steps from non-official media. Right now it is very possible that UID/GUIs could get screwed up in the chroot destination. I'll test in a VM and if all goes well I'll add the option to the tar command and close this discussion. --Maffblaster (talk) 03:30, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

Tests succeeded! Making adjustment. --Maffblaster (talk) 23:58, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Emphasize the stage tarball location more

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This discussion is done as of October 31, 2021.

If an upcoming user is using an alternative install via some other distributions LiveUSB (gives nicer browser, etc), then all this talk of command line browser links/lynx is shadowing what matters - where the stage tarball actually is. The releases/$ARCH/autobuilds/ subdir is mentioned without any emphasis below many blocks of commands about some ugly text mode browsers and proxies, that it doesn't get noticed nicely where to actually browse. Alternatively (or even better) there could be some direct links somehow, e.g geoip supported DNS round robin link directly to the architectures autobuilds folder or something. Or just direct links to each arch "stage3 tarballs" in the mirrors list.

--Leio (talk) 02:35, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

I'll add something to fix this up. There are links to current tarballs on the www.g.o downloads page. I'll link to the #other-arches ID. --Maffblaster (talk) 21:24, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

The links under #other-arches doesn't include the "regular" Stage 3 listed above that section under "Stage Archives" (unless I'm not reading things right). This could be confusing to users who want the default Stage 3. - dcljr (talk) 03:30, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Hmm...Looks like you're correct. Good catch! It turns out to be harder than I want to link our readers to all the stage choices in a single, easy to navigate location using a modern web browser. My intent here is to modernize the Handbook and help our readers avoid mirror navigation. Perhaps I'll rework the website's download page to make the 'advanced' downloads spot include the normal stage3 listed in the section above. What do you think about that? Could you open a bug on our Bugzilla describing this dilemma and link it here? --Maffblaster (talk) 18:14, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Adding a normal Stage 3 to the "advanced" choices seems like the easiest solution — although maybe "advanced" isn't really the right label for that list. As for the bug report, I only do those if I absolutely have to (hate the user interface). If I'm going to do it, it'll have to wait a few days, as I am busy with other things at the moment. - dcljr (talk) 07:16, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Works for me. There are quite a few changes I'd like to make to www.g.o around this weekend or sooner, so I can wait a few days... Can we close this discussion now? I'm getting close to closing out all the open Handbook discussions. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 07:24, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

I have not done anything further about this. Why don't we just link to https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/ with no "#other-arches" anchor? If the downloads page ever gets changed, we can change how we link to it (if necessary). - dcljr (talk) 22:18, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

In recent times the [other-arches anchor] now includes a full listing of stage tarballs with easy to identify delineations between OpenRC and systemd tarballs. This was mainly the work of Andreas K. Hüttel (dilfridge) , which we really appreciate. I think this discussion can be properly closed since the downloads are easy to find. --Maffblaster (talk) 05:00, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

Graphical browsers can download files from a link

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This discussion is done as of December 30, 2017.

Why recommend pasting the URL of a tarball into a wget command? All graphical browsers should be able to download a file directly from a link (using, e.g., Save link as and then specifying the destination directory). I think nowadays all of them will even save it in the right format. [wink] - dcljr (talk) 03:17, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Mainly because it eliminates permissions complications. Readers should already have a root terminal open to the correct location. It's much simpler to have readers copy/paste and allow wget to do the download in the existing root terminal. As a side note - most live graphical environments that I'm aware of do not start the web browser as the root user. /mnt/gentoo is owned by root. Chromium, which I mention, even refuses to run as root. Firefox can run as root, but I'd rather not have the reader open second terminal, gain root privileges, then start Firefox (or another browser) or run extra chown/cp commands. We'll just work with what we have already available in the simplest, most convenient way for me as the author and them as the readers. --Maffblaster (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Probably should mention some of this in the article, then. If we're going to talk about using graphical browsers at all, we should warn about some of the possible pitfalls. - dcljr (talk) 22:08, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

I think mentioning it is an unnecessary rabbit trail. Readers using alternative installation media is there prerogative; we can't cover every possible case. Handbook needs to purvey only the what is necessary or important for the reader to know to get Gentoo installed. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 18:08, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

So, we're going to leave the handbook mentioning using a graphical browser to copy a link URL, but not warn users of any problems they may have downloading the link target itself, which most users would probably be tempted to do in that situation. That doesn't sound like good documentation to me. If you don't want to go into problems using graphical browsers, it's probably best to not mention them at all. - dcljr (talk) 05:06, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

For clarity, there is not as much risk for insecurity when graphical browsers are not running as the root user. If the reader follows the instructions as they are written, then everything works. That being said, a small notice does not hurt and isn't much work. IF you really think something could be added please reply with a sentence or some text that you'd like to see included in the graphical browsers section for me to review and then we can discuss further. We have guidelines for improvement suggestions. --Maffblaster (talk) 19:59, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

You know, nevermind. I really just don't want to deal with you anymore. - dcljr (talk) 00:29, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Nowiki on URLs

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This discussion is done as of April 25, 2017.

Please add <nowiki> tags to the URLs in the lynx and export commands in the Command-line browsers section, as was done in this edit for the links commands, so the little (potentially confusing) "external link" icons will be suppressed. - dcljr (talk) 03:23, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Done. Somehow I overlooked those links when I made the first change. :) --Maffblaster (talk) 17:58, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection

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This discussion is done as of May 15, 2017.

Small note. GCC is already GNU.
The CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS variables define the optimization flags for the GNU GCC C and C++ compilers respectively. --Cronolio (talk) 16:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Removed redundant reference to GNU. It just says "GCC" now. Thanks! --Maffblaster (talk) 17:23, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Tarballs compressed via xz now

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This discussion is done as of 2018-11-07.

The command uses a wrong parameter because of the brace expansion (see "tar not work porperly"). I have also done this remark on the AMD64 talk page. --Feng (talk) 13:42, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

This has been updated. Thanks --Grknight (talk) 14:31, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

I haven't tested, but thanks for fixing, Brian Evans (Grknight) ! --Maffblaster (talk) 17:34, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Minor typo

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This discussion is done as of November 7, 2018.

There is a remaining comma in the CMD box of T:34. --Shinmili (talk) 14:39, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks for noticing. --Grknight (talk) 14:32, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Extracting XZ-compressed stage3 tarball

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This discussion is done as of October 31, 2021.

I think we should replace the following command:

root #tar xpvf stage3-*.tar.bz2 --xattrs-include='*.*' --numeric-owner

With this one:

root #tar xpvf stage3-*.tar.?(bz2|xz) --xattrs-include='*.*' --numeric-owner

Highlight desktop-stage3 tarballs

Talk status

This discussion is done as of 2024-01-05.

The Handbook currently doesn't show the benefit of using desktop stage3 tarballs which can save a user multiple hours on install by already including packages such as llvm and rust.

Purposed Change After Handbook:Parts/Installation/Stage#systemd

Tip
On supported architectures, it is recommended that users wishing to setup a desktop system use stage3-desktop for their preferred init system. This stage3 includes packages such as sys-devel/llvm and dev-lang/rust-bin while also being pre-compiled with a number of basic USEFLAGS which a desktop system requires. This can greatly improve install time.

Immolo (talk) 07:05, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Tip
The Gentoo release engineering team provides 'desktop' stage3 images for selected architectures. Users intending to install a system that includes a desktop environment should consider using a suitable desktop stage; they are both configured with suitable USE flags out-of-the box and include a number of packages like Rust and LLVM that can help bootstrap a system quickly.

My quick rephrase either is suitable

-Kangie (talk) 07:20, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Added in Special:Diff/1272743, thanks!

Xarvatium (talk) 02:27, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Remove first person writing

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This discussion is done as of 2024-05-11.

The handbook is using the word "we" in the CFLAGS section "We will not explain all possible optimization options. To understand them all, read the GNU Online Manual(s) or the gcc info page (info gcc). The make.conf.example file itself also contains lots of examples and information; don't forget to read it too." In interest of setting a good example this should follow the guidelines of not using first person writing.

Recommended change:

The Handbook will not explain all possible optimization options. To understand them all, read the GNU Online Manual(s) or the gcc info page (info gcc). The make.conf.example file itself also contains lots of examples and information; don't forget to read it too. Immolo (talk) 12:56, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Fixed in Special:Diff/1298129/1298131, thanks!

--csfore (talk) 18:07, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

MAKEOPTS recommendation inconsistent with MAKEOPTS wiki page

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This discussion is done as of 2024-05-11.

MAKEOPTS are recommended as -j4 and -l4, which is inconsistent with the MAKEOPTS wiki page which recommends setting -j8 -l9 (-l higher than -j). MihailMihov (talk) 21:25, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree. To quote from that page:

Since the load average is a damped value, it is sensible to set the load-average limitation slightly above the number of available CPUs.

Proposed changes to section MAKEOPTS - Please make edits here until a final revision is agreed upon.

MAKEOPTS="-j4 -l5"

— Waldo Lemmer 04:38, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Fixed in Special:Diff/1290677/1298129, thanks!

--csfore (talk) 18:03, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

RUSTFLAGS

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This discussion is still ongoing as of 2024-08-17.

Show uses how to correctly enable RUSTFLAGS in Gentoo.

Proposed changes - Please make edits here until a final revision is agreed upon.

RUSTFLAGS

Many programs are now written in Rust which has its own way of optimising. By default Rust optimizes to level 3 on all release builds unless a project changes it so this should be left as is. A full optimization list (known as codegen) that can be passed to the rust compiler is available at https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/codegen-options/index.html.

The most useful optimization would be to tell Rust to compile for your CPU using the following example:

FILE /etc/portage/make.confRUSTFLAGS Example

RUSTFLAGS="${RUSTFLAGS} -C target-cpu=native"

To get a list of supported CPUs in Rust run:

root #rustc -C target-cpu=help

This will show what the default and also which CPU will be selected with native.

Note
The above command only works on desktop stage3 tarballs or after emerging dev-lang/rust-bin or dev-lang/rust.

Immolo (talk) 11:36, 17 August 2024 (UTC)