Introduction
At the end of the year that had just passed, I completed seven years of, good and bad, experiences with linux. The first contact occurred with Conectiva Linux, a national (Brazilian) distribution, which was one of their first versions, 3.0, if I´m not mistaken. Fascinated with this new world, new interfaces and new software, I started to use Slackware, and used it for about 6 years, but because of the lack of time and Patrick´s taste, i´ve decided, after building a good knowledge with Slack, to change the distribution that I use at home.
Discovering new worlds
(no flames!)
Like all problems that we face, I started lookking for a new solution. In this case, I began to try some other distributions, looking for something… more easier to keep. First I tried Debian, I couldn´t make it… I kind of felt a bit bothered using Debian system. I Couldn´t use it for long time, but the way that apt works was really impressive to me, it´s simply, easy and fast. Second try, Ubuntu, but… ubuntu is ubuntu, all that stuff of “general as possible” really bugs me, the “every day” softwares were… slow… it really piss me off. Finally following lot of indications I tried Gentoo, after a long time compiling everything, the reward: wowww what a great performance! Everything is fast on gentoo (you get used to it really fast), but, besides that, the maintenance of the system is virtually impossible, all compilations gives you lot of performance, but just to test a new software, not that I will really use it, sometimes it takes 30 minutes or more, to compile all libraries, and dependencies. If you wanna fell it, try to compile all Haskell stuff!.
The more I tried to keep my system up-to date, the more it looks impossible to do. Every day there are new updates, and some of then lock the “world upgrade” of my system. Part of it is my fault, I didn´t expand much time to find solutions for broken updates. So finally, I tried to find another solution, I was looking for the speed of gentoo (If you use it one time you will never find other distribution that is faster) and, why not, the speed of aptitude, meaning the agility of installing software.
And from there comes the idea of Genbuntu! That is a base system, compiled, generated by gentoo and emerge, while the software that are less used, or do not need a good speed of execution are executed in ubuntu inside gentoo. For sure there are many other ways of doing this, but I chose using this way: Using what I learnt in gentoo installation, I installed Ubuntu and used chroot to bring to Gentoo the Ubuntu softwares.
Hand´s On
In the first try, I simply called:
chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash
The intention was to get a bash logged on my Ubuntu partition. It worked. It was exactly that what I needed, but lot of things weren´t working right. After some research (I mean google) I “wrote” a small bash script that gives me a functional console of ubuntu inside the Gentoo system. Done that I could run any console program from Ubuntu on Gentoo.
mount -t proc none /mnt/ubuntu/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ubuntu/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/ubuntu/sys
mount -o bind /tmp /mnt/ubuntu/tmp
chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash
Fine, With the base system (/dev /proc /sys and /tmp) replicated on both root mount points ( “/” and “/mnt/ubuntu”) I could run any Ubuntu console software into Gentoo, but what about showing the graphical softwares that uses xorg? Every time I tried to run one of these softwares, I got a
** CRITICAL **: Unable to open display
So using xhost and mounting /dev/pts I allowed that local Ubuntu softwares were exhibited in my own Gentoo xorg server, so finally I could run a console mostly functional from Ubuntu on Gentto and run, from it, synaptic, gimp, <choose your software here>.
#!/bin/bash
mount -t proc none /mnt/ubuntu/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ubuntu/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/ubuntu/sys
mount -o bind /tmp /mnt/ubuntu/tmp
mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/ubuntu/dev/pts
cp /home/fcpn/.Xauthority /mnt/ubuntu/root/
cp /home/fcpn/.Xauthority /mnt/ubuntu/home/fcpn/
xhost +local:root
chroot /mnt/ubuntu /bin/bash
xhost -local:root
The only inconvenient is that I needed to execute everything on ubuntu as root. But for now on, it is limited only by creativity. With chroot, it is possible to run directly any software, for example chroot /mnt/ubuntu xmms. Besides that you can use any other distribution for the non essential softwares as a way that can lead to, maybe, a create a Gentora (Gentoo + Fedora), or Genware (Gentoo + Slackware), or you can just spend your time creating funny names for hybrid distributions = P
Below are some screenshots of using my hybrid system:
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