[NBLUG/talk] Gentoo

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Wed Aug 16 11:31:45 PDT 2006


Well, I now have Gentoo working.

I never could get the installer to work. It would always die while
trying to emerge something; sometimes it would die while emerging the
kernel, sometimes it would get past that and die while emerging
something else. I finally gave up and installed everything manually
per the instructions.

Whew. For starters, this is the first time I've compiled a kernel
myself THAT ACTUALLY WORKS! I've built kernels before, but I always
screwed up some option badly enough that within ten minutes I was
rebooting back to my distribution's stock kernel. This is cool. :-)

The first kernel I built refused to launch eth0, which obviously put a
damper on emerging the X server. I rebooted the Gentoo live CD and
used gconf to build a "default" kernel. I was able to boot that and
get X up. Encouraged, I reread the documentation and managed to get a
working kernel on my own (I'm still not sure what I did wrong on the
first one). Otherwise, installation was as uneventful as you could
expect from a Gentoo manual install. :-P

Gentoo is definitely a lot closer to "the bleeding edge" than even
Debian testing or unstable. I found packages to pull in and build E17
straight from CVS. How could I resist? :-)

Obviously, there are some downsides to being on the bleeding edge. For
whatever reason, my X server randomly (intervals anywhere from twenty
seconds to ten minutes) stops listening to mouse and keyboard input.
If I switch to another console and back again (ctrl+alt+F1 then
ctrl+alt+F7) X behaves normally again. For a while. :-P I expect
Enlightenment to be flaky if it's straight from CVS, but this isn't an
Enlightenment problem--I see it under FVWM, too.

In some ways, Gentoo feels like the reverse of Slackware. You're
largely on your own during the initial install, but once you're up and
running you have a decent set of tools to maintain the system.
Slackware is easy to install, but man it's a PITA to maintain. :-P By
now, I couldn't recomment Slackware to anyone unless they really enjoy
tinkering for the sake of tinkering, or if they're stuck with hardware
that simply won't run any other distro. (If some Slackware
nuts^H^H^H^Hfans want to enlighten me more on it, let me know.)

At any rate, Gentoo is neat, but I still like Debian. :-) I really
can't see the point of spending hours recompiling just for a 10% speed
increase, and I don't need to set custom build flags on every package
on my system. If I really need to recompile one or two programs,
Debian has source packages that work just fine.

William



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