Installing Gentoo as we speak

[cronos]

Just wanted to let everyone know that I am installing the latest Gentoo on my Sparc Ultra 10. I decided to spend the few days and start from stage 1. I've only installed Gentoo once before, and it was on this same machine a few weeks ago. There's a story about this, and since I have some time to kill, I might as well share it

Before I start I want to let everyone know I use linux to host my web sites, but I only know basic line commands and haven't touched a window manager in about 3 years. You can call me a noob pretty much...

It all started a few weeks ago when a buddy of mine gave me a Sparc he aquired from his work when they were laying people off a few years back. He knew I wanted to run a shoutcast server on a dedicated machine to start a radio station. My first thought was to run linux on the machine instead of solaris, seeming I have never touched solaris in my life, and that there were a couple of programs I could use for linux (shoutcast, icecast, muse). I did a little research and found out that the most up to date version was Gentoo, so I downloaded the ISO and started the install. It took about 3 days (and me reading the docs over and over again trying to understand what I'm inputting). After getting it installed, since I had no idea how to run a window manager or anything, I started to freak out. Don't ask me why, but for some reason in a flurry I installed SuSE right after installing Gentoo because a friend said it would be "much better than crappy ol' Gentoo". He also said it had a GUI for the install, which I thought was pretty cool. So I downloaded the CD's and installed over Gentoo, without even bothering to look for docs on how to get into the window managers.

SuSE booted up fine, very easy to install. I thought my worries were over. WRONG. Seems shoutcast needs newer version of glib, gtk, and about 20 other files. After installing them, I started getting more errors - when I was doing ./configure for a couple of the packages, it couldn't find some of the libs I just installed. Now I start to get upset... I have a buddy look at the box and gets it to where Muse is installed. When I run Muse, I get a seg fault. Now I'm completely pissed off, and stumped. All these problems are happening, and I don't have a clue as to how to fix it. So what do I do? Look into more options.

I find out that shoutcast server is for Solaris. Awesome! So I install Solaris, no sweat, yet I still have no idea what I'm doing. There's a problem with a few things, but after a few hours I find some docs and figure it out. Shoutcast server is up and running! Only problem though - it looks like I need another computer, either linux or win32 based to run the dj side of the application. On top of that, I hate the look and feel of Solaris, I know none of the commands, don't want to learn the OS, and am about to go postal. So what do I do? Give Gentoo another shot.

So here I am, three weeks later, back to where I started from. I forget how long the first part takes, but I know it's longer than 6 hours, and I am not staying up for that. Let's hope I am satisfied with installing Gentoo. I have a feeling I am based on reading some of your posts.

Well, that's about it for this post. Thanks for reading. I'm going to make one more post before I go to bed. Good night everyone

cronos
www.djunderground.com
the online community for electronic djs and producers

[vtaoe]

In the short time I've had my Ultra 5 setup, I've installed Solaris, Debian, and Gentoo, and I think I speak for most of us when I say that I've found Gentoo to be not only more flexible, more powerful, but also (and somewhat surprisingly) more user-friendly as well.

The community here is great, and the docs are outstanding (ignore my several open docs bugs for the time being--it's just tweaking really--the fact that I'm typing this on my Sparc now must mean they're pretty good!). It was damn near trivial to get XFree and KDE up and running after the base installation. (Just see a couple of the recent threads for things to try when (not if) your keyboard is all jacked up in X. It'll give you something to do while XFree is compiling.)