Newbie giving up on gentoo (for now...)

[sas13]

I'm a newb to linux in general, have been using it for the last year or so.

I've tried mandrake and ubuntu, and now that I have a new 64bit laptop I decided to try gentoo.

In the process of doing a level 3 install learned more about linux in a few days than I did in months with the other distros, the documentation and community support here are really great.

the reason I've decided to go back to ubuntu is because of my own inexperience -

for one, being curious and uninformed, I'm usually installing and removing packages all the time just to see what they are, and what the difference between different programs is. Even i can appreciate how great portage is, but it just takes too long if you're playing around and not simply maintaining a system.


the other reason is something really, really stupid I did, that was completely my fault, but made me realise I'm not ready for a distro that allows and requires a lot of user involvement-
while trying to clean out a certain directory, I ended up deleting my entire /etc/ directory by mistake. Yeah, I know, I know.

and this could (and probably would) have happened to me in any distro, but the point is that I'm at a stage where I need to experiment and make mistakes (how else do you learn, right?)

but doing a partial or complete reinstallation of ubuntu takes a couple of hours, versus a few days on gentoo, and that's just more time than I have to spare right now.

in other distros it's usualy quick enough to just remove or reinstal whatever is causing the problem (or the whole OS for that matter), whereas with gentoo you actually fix whatever is wrong - this is obviously much better, but, honestly it just takes me too long to learn the proper solution and fix it - like I said I'm a newb.

so I definately will return to gentoo once I feel I have a better understanding of linux in general and of what I want out of it. I think that gentoo is the true way to go - you really build your own system as you need it, which is as it should be.

but for now... it's so long and thanks for all the fish

[loki99]

I also started with gentoo as my first "24/7" linux OS, after trying Suse, RH and Mandrake for a short time. The way I handled the exact same problem was to backup my root directory.

You can simply use tar to zip and copy your root partition (my data is on a seperate partition! ) and copy it back when ever something goes wrong. You just have to make sure that your backups are quite up-to-date and then you can experiment with whatever you want.

Because copying the image back is much faster than installing any OS!

No matter which way you take, good luck to you and I hope we will see you around sometime later.

[tornamodo]

but doing a partial or complete reinstallation of ubuntu is a couple of hours, verses a few days on gentoo, and that's just more time than I have to spare right now.

well, it depends. on a normal x86 pc you can use the jackass project (Docs as .torrent)
with this a complete gentoo installation is a matter of hours (the x-server is the only big thing)

on a amd64 it takes a bit - thats true. but usually if it's working once, it keeps running ...

btw., if you continuosly save your configuration (just make a directory /backups and copy all important files there when you changed something which works : ) you can experiment as much with everything you find!

for example you could copy your whole directory /etc to the backup-directory. it's only around 20M.

cp -pvr /etc /backup/

you could also think about two linux running...
one ubuntu for quick installs of new progs, and one gentoo box which is getting the most out of your system with everything you really like

[antiflag1980]

I spent all yesterday installing kubuntu and packages on a pc for my brother alongside a windows reinstall for him and I've gotta say I was very impressed with it, it almost makes me wanna switch, but I'd miss so many things about gentoo. I wish we had some of the tools available in ubuntu and I wish I was skilled enough to get my desktop setup with all the stuff in ubuntu. I thought it was sweet how well hotplug and hal and all those things work together when not set up by me! I was plugging in memory sticks and putting in cds just to see them show up on the desktop without any interaction from me, no kernel recompile, no editing fstab, nothing, everything just works. I know you can do all the same stuff in gentoo, but everything was just so easy, I forgot what that was like. It was also a little jealous about giving him OpenOffice2.0 and all the packages that I don't have, bleh. It is definitely the distro of choice for noobs or well anybody who isn't interested in constant editing of config files and manual everything, of couse I am interested in that so whatever. End of rambling; return 0;

[thomateverte]

From my own experience (4 years of Gentoo):
- do a first install with all the basic services you need at first. for me it's: browse, read mail, manage photos, be able to open/save office documents, be able to use the DVD burner and a memory stick, be able to print.
- when you have a system that allows you to do the mimum, do a backup (i like the "stage4" and i still use the first version of it with just a tar command). burn a CD with that, burn a knoppix CD also (or whatever liveCD you like/works best with your hardware), and print your own small guide with all the steps and commands necessary to restore the stage4 backup on an empty/broken harddrive.
- it's best to try at least once the recovery steps that you just printed with your backup CD. if that works fine, ie you're able to browse/read your mail..., then you can start having fun.

after if you don't want any downtime, you can try qemu, VMWare (if you're ready to spend money), or have two computers (if you can afford it).

I'm putting a lot of hope in the coming virtualization technologies that wil come next year in the CPUs (Pacifica and Vanderpool), I even have a dream of one computer running Gentoo, Mac OSX and Windows at the same time, should be possible no ? Then I could synchronise my PDA and mobile phone in OS X (seems to be very easy, I haven't managed to make it correctly work in linux of windows for now), launch an emerge at the same time (like test the new initng) and while the emerge is finishing, play some new game that just came out and runs only on windows (like 99% of them).
Maybe next year...

[Wietze]

Just install ubuntu, but keep a seperate partition,
then do a chroot and install gentoo from ubuntu