Installing Gentoo as a learning experience

abombss · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2002 Posts: 12 Location: Chicago, IL

This thread seems like a great place to add in my two cents. I would venture to say I am a total linux newbie. Before installing gentoo I had never compiled a kernel before nor have I ever used or configured X.

I personally thought the install of gentoo went smooth my first time, but like other comments, be prepared to do it more than once. My system is up and running after about 3 installs. I am still learning and tweaking. The biggest problem for me is trying to get my ATI AIW 8500 working, if you have choice go NVidia as I hear it is way easier to configure.

All in all gentoo rocks, I have learned more about Linux in my 2 months working with Gentoo than I did for the year that I had apache running on my RH box.

I find gentoo very stable, well documented, and easy to use, as well as up to date. The ebuilds offer some of the best up to date packages out of any other distro. And gentoo is not bloated like many of the other distros. You can totally compile, build, and customize your own distro very easily.

Keep up the good work all, as I get more familiar with LInux I would love to be able to contribute some of the great programmig that takes place in the community.

peace,

abombss

slais-sysweb · Apprentice Joined: 14 Jun 2002 Posts: 221 Location: London

The Gentoo documentation is a model of clarity, so play close attention. I would advise printing out a hard copy of the install guide, the USE flad guide and the portage manuals before you start (unless you have a second machine on line to refer to the web during the install.) The web pages for packages themselves are also very useful, particularly the Grub manual.
Another good idea is to write down what you do, as you do it, then if it goes wrong you can review the causes and get it right next time. This is particularly so with the kernel compile. As others have said, make menuconfig takes a long time if you take the troble to consider the help page on each option. Making a record of your choices and why will make the next kernel far easier. (even if your first kernel is ok - it probably will work - you are sure to need to recompile once you get to know it better.
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djc
sysweb SLAIS UCL

Dogbert · Guest

Hi, I just got the Gentoo CD in the mail and I'm going to try installing it.
A few questions first:

1. How long will each step take (divided by 100Mhz CPU power) ?
2. Are my specs problematic for Gentoo ?

Specs:
Mother board: Asus A7V333 (VIA KT333)
CPU: Athlon 1800+ (slightly overclocked)
MEM: 1GB Transcend 333Mhz DDR
HDD: Primary (Master) - Maxtor 80GB (Win2k, NTFS)
Secondary (Slave) - IBM 20GB unpartitioned, unformatted (intended for Gentoo)
Graphic: Matrox G400 DH 32MB
Sound: Currently using onboard sound (C-Media 8738), switching to Hercules Game theater XP (Cirrus Logic CS4630) in a few days.
2 NICS: 3com 905b (pptp adsl), intel pro 10/100 (lan)
CD-R (master): Plextor (PX-W401240A)
DVD (Slave): Asus (E-616)

Tinlong · n00b Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 11

I'll add my 2 cents here...

I'm quite new (in linux world about 9 months), and I've tried Redhat (the first one, start from 7.2. 7.3 is actually pretty nice, only if not having so many annoying little bugs...), Mandrake (I HATE IT! even though it's meant to be easier to use and configure, for some reason I just don't like it... maybe because it mimic Windows too much?), Debian (well I tried the potato one, 2.2r6, so of course it's terribly out of date

), and Slackware (I actually love it... don't know why), before I tried out Gentoo and got hooked onto it. Gentoo's strength is the ease of use/configure (I love rc-scripts), portage (great!), clear structure (though a little non-standard), and the best: clear documentation and nice community (I hate that some forums are just full of bashing and anger/hatred-spreading). I'll use Gentoo to make an EJB server for my brother, and keep another machine using Slackware to mess around.

Well, other distros have something good, too. Redhat has the widest user base, so there're many documentations aimed for Redhat, making things easier. IMO, Redhat also has the best automatic XF86Config-4 configuration, which I have backup and use in other linux boxes (The best is it detects monitor modes very accurate). Mandrake and Debian should be good, but I just don't like it. Slackware, while it lacks of software package management (a big con for novice users), has quite a few things extremely good: simple yet effective distro (not as bloat as Redhat and Mandrake), following BSD filesystem, simple startup scripts management (in fact, quite similar to the one used in Gentoo, except it's not virtual runlevels, and not having automatic scripts to manage it). Plus the last but best: it has IMO the best preconfigured kernels. When I install Gentoo, I don't even border to choose kernel options; I just copy the .config from Slack and use it to eliminate all drivers except the one I use, correct the CPU type, plus some other things mentioned in Gentoo's installation guide and security guide.

Other than this forum, I also look at http://www.linuxnewbie.org/forum quite often; in fact, I think it's the nicest forum except Gentoo's forum; though you'll see a lot of bashing around, they still treat newcomers fairly nice. And there're rumors that one of a Slackware veteran is a hot chick. :lol:

To Dogbert:

Your spec looks fine for me, even though I'm not familiar with Athlon XP (some in linuxnewbie.org said compiling kernel under Athlon XP may give problems, but I'm not sure).

Talking about compile time, it will surely take shorter than mine. I use PII 400 w/ 256MB ram (though 128M of which is only 66 MHz while the others are 100MHz) and 10GB UDMA2 harddrive, it took me about 3 hrs for stage 1, 6 hrs for stage 2 (with X), and 1 hr for kernel compilation. (KDE took me 12 hrs to compile, though......) So enjoy your installation, I'd say it's not hard, if you follow the guide right and understand what you're doing.

That's my 2 cents.

insomniac · Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 12:03 pm Post subject:

Guest · Guest

im a slackware freak, but i want to try gentoo...should i wait for the GCC 3.1 or just get current? thanks!

IdBuRnS · n00b Joined: 01 Aug 2002 Posts: 19

Jester_n00b · Guest

I'm basically a n00b, too. I've run Red Hat for about a year, and I'm still basically a novice with Linux in general. I've never compiled a kernel, and I only know some basic shell commands. Unfortunately, I'm one of the network support people in a totally Windoze company.

ANYWAY, my question is this: Some of you keep saying that Debian is way out of date....what about the latest release, version 3.0??? Isn't that a lot more up-to-date??? :?:

Thanks.