difficult install / instablilities? and unoptimized bootCD

bmichaelsen · Last edited by bmichaelsen on Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:42 am; edited 1 time in total

Hi!

I was trying to install a new gentoo on my brothers machine (He did his 4th WinXP reinstall this year, wanted some help - and i talked him into sparing some 2GB for linux.) Great. I installed a stage 3 tarball - worked fine. Did the partitioning (root - reiserfs, boot - ext2, no swap - he has 768MB RAM). Fought a little with the kernel to get him to see the Promise RAID controller. Emerged X - took ages, but worked. But then I failed to emerge kde - always failed to compile kdelibs. I took various steps to work around the errors (upgrade gcc to 3.2.2, executed this fix_lib_links_something-script in sys-devel/gcc/files, manually ln -s'ed missing libs), but still the emerge failed. I even killed all CFLAGS - but no succesful compile. I started a run of memtest - no errors in the first 15 minutes - and slowed the FSB from 133 Mhz to 100 MHz (so the Athlon 1200 MHz ran at 900 Mhz) - but still the compile failed. Sometimes the emerge aborted with a seg fault. Later I saw that even lynx seg faulted on exit - so I dicided the system is pretty messed up - and gave up. BTW I started Saturday ... and my brother set a time limit this morning - he didn't want to sacrify his machine to unsuccesful compiles ...
So 2 hours before he came back from university I started a ftp-install of SuSE 8.1 and finished it with kde and openoffice before he was back. I know this is not comparable, but it still leads me to the following question:

If the install didn't fail for hardware reasons (which i don't believe, see above): Are packages unmasked too soon? (gcc 3.2.2 ???)

Is it possible to generate a unoptimized boot-CD of gentoo with packages comparable to knoppix-linux? With emerge/portage packages could be optimized/updated afterwards. Or even updated bit by bit whenever a newer ebuild is available. The CD wouldn't have to be updated with every new rc-release, I think, but would be attractive to newbies to linux ....
I'm just thinking about the hype the knoppix-CD generated (at least here in Germany).

Hoping for many opinions and comments,
Greetz, Björn

P.S.: I still like gentoo - but was frustated a little bit with this expirience - and I don't think my brother will be happy if i advert gentoo to him someday.
P.P.S.: Gnome failed too - at GTK 2.2. But, though being frustrated, i was able to emerge fluxbox - but its not the optimum for some guy used to M$ windoofs.

bmichaelsen · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:36 am Post subject:

BTW I post this in Chat since I don't need any support for the install anymore - see story above.

Greetz, Björn

JayBee · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:42 am Post subject:

Yes there is - the GRP Packages provide a compiled (and not hugely optomised) collection of packages - X, KDE, GNOME, Mozilla are the major ones. These (plus a stage 3 tarball) can be installed in approx 30 mins (depending on net connection speed). All that is then required is to compile your kernel (or copy the live-cd one if your lazy), emerge a logger, cron daemon and any other required tools, and reboot. The system can then be updated by modifying your USE and CFLAGS, and running:

dol-sen · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 4:34 pm Post subject:

My experience seems to think that 2gig isn't enough for large compiles like kde. my var partition is 3 gigs and goes from about 25% full to 70% full during large emerges. You may have been running out of disk space.

Brian

jufoa · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2003 7:18 pm Post subject:

yep, you have to have at least 2,5Gigs free for large compiles... that is just to way it is...