Smörgåsbord

For some years now I have been adminning seth.leper.phil.uu.nl; a Solaris zone (virtual private server) acting as a web server for various student organizations and nonprofits. Over time it has become messy. There’s the Solaris environment, arid and archaic. There’s your usual webserver stack, more powerful GNU replacements for the Solaris utilities, and FOSS stuff all semimaintained on read-only NFS, mostly outdated and outside of my control. And there’s my own ghetto-style compiled tree with various stuff that makes the system useful (GNU screen, some Apache DSOs, etc). Just getting PHP with mundane extensions to compile is an intense respiratory exercise because of all the sighing, moaning and cursing involved. PHP’s build system is terrible in that it makes so many assumptions on where to find its deps that for anything out of the ordinary (no write access to places such as /usr, deprecated versions of libs installed in /usr/(local/)lib but preferred libs installed elsewhere), it requires guns-drawn cowboypatching of the configure script. Not to mention the nasty street fights between /usr/ccs/bin/ld and an outdated GNU ld.
So over the years this system has become like the bastard part of multizygotic interspecial Siamese triplets bred by a hippie commune in its entirety and whatever livestock they may have been keeping. Madness.
I was in heavy need of a sound and modern compiler toolchain, and a way to keep my software up to date and isolated from the streetfights. So how about some package management? Some sort of metadistribution? Not just any – I need headers to compile random stuff against, and it should not make any assumptions about where I’m going to install this metadistro, as there are read-only NFS mounts all over the place. And there should be no dicking around with LD_PRELOAD or chroots. That rules out most (all?) precompiled Solaris metadistros.
Now what? Well, there’s always Gentoo, which has kept me company since the 1.2-release of yore. Its flexibility and tinker-friendlyness is what makes this my favourite Linux distribution. But it’s not just Linux. The Gentoo-Alt Prefix project does exactly what I need. It installs a compiler toolchain and features over 2000 ported ebuilds. Huzza!
It took some ad-hoc patching and fiddling beyond the bootstrapping instructions but Netcraft confirms it: I have now migrated to a shiny new and comfy webserver stack. I am in love with it so much that I’ve GIMPed and Inkscaped together a nice badge to go with it. Gentoo logo guidelines make me state that although you see a Gentoo G, that does not mean there’s any official connection with the Gentoo Foundation.

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