Chris Johnston

We have Success. I have successfully installed Gentoo onto my computer. Well, actually I have just enough installed that I am able to boot into a working Linux environment and do a few shell commands. That is all, really.

As for the bootstrapping process, I have no idea how long that took. By the time I went to sleep yesterday night, it had been running for about 3.5 hours. When I woke up this morning it had finished. So I can not make a really good comment on bootstrapping times.

The next step after bootstrapping the computer is to install the base programs onto the computer. After that, you need to compile and install the kernel. On my first attempt to install the base programs, the install, or emerge as it is really called, died due to an unfound program. The installer could not find Perl-5.8.0 and I could not get past this point. So, a quick search of the Gentoo forums supplied several different solutions. However, only one of them actually worked.

If you are trying this install over the next few days, make sure you add some mirrors to the make.conf file. Otherwise it will fail at the some point.

Once again, I have no idea how long the emerge-system took as I started in the morning and then went to school. By the time I returned home, it was done. So it is somewhere less then 9 hours or so.

The final step is to download/compile/install the kernel. This was actually very painless. I simply followed the instructions, once again, as supplied on the Gentoo website and everything went amazingly smoothly. The kernel only took about an hour or two to compile.

The final final step is to install a bootloader and a few more utilities and programs in order to get everything working. Once again, I picked the default as stated by the install manual — Grub — and everything worked without event. I was able to reboot into a working Linux install.

The next challenge is to setup a desktop environment. I am currently emerging XFree. This has been going on for about the last 4 hours and I would not be surprised if it is still going tomorrow when I get up, but I will let everyone know. Once XFree is installed and configured, the next challenge is to download Gnome and get it working.

Everything was going great with Gentoo until I tried to install support for my USB mouse. In order to get everything working, you have to load some modules into the kernel. However, the instructions for this part are very short and no where as indepth as for the general installation.

It took me three attempts at compliling the kernel in order to get everything correct. However, the end result is that I know have both X and my USB mouse install, configured and running. In order to get X working with my very old monitor, I used the XF86COnfig file from the SUSE install I had on the computer. This provided all the right info in terms of modelines, device drivers, refresh rates, etc.

Tip: If you are going to try and install Gentoo, use knoppix to configure X and then save the resulting XF86Config file for future reference. This will save you a lot of time and frustration. Especially, if you have old or uncommon hardware.

Now I am installing Gnome. And the waiting continues…

I have decided to take the plunge and install Gentoo and see what all the hype is about. I have a small computer onto which the install is going. Here are the specs:
IBM PC300PL
450MHz Pentium III Processor
192 Megs SDRAM
6 Gig hard drive
2 meg video and some kinda soundcard

Gentoo can be installed using one of three stages. These stages relate directly to how much you need to compile and, therefore, how long the install is going to take. I have decided to start from stage 1. This means that I am going to have to install and compile absolutely everything. Therefore, this is going to take a fair bit of time. As such, I will be posting about the install process over the next few days.

First Impressions
The first thing that I have to say about Gentoo is that they have the best documentation of any distro. The install guide is basically foolproof. As a friend of mine said, “if you read, you can install Gentoo”. The installation manual is that detailed. I have been nervous of installing Gentoo for quite a while (the fact that I did not have a computer to install it on not withstanding). However, reading through the install manual changed all that. Everything is spelled out in perfect detail. And the hyperlinks throughout the pages are perfectly placed.

As of this writing I am still trying to get the computer bootstrapped. Currently I am downloading, or syncing, the Portage tree. This thing must be huge because I am on a highspeed connection and it is still going. I think it has been about 20 minutes so far and no end in sight. This does have an upside in that it means that there should no shortage of applications to install.

As soon as I have gone through the bootstrap process I will post an update to say how it went.

So far so good though.

Gentoo

This article outlines some of the issues facing Eclipse as it breaks away from IBM and goes it alone.

“Eclipse, an increasingly influential open-source development tools project, will kick off its first programmer conference next week amid strong industry momentum and lingering questions regarding its future direction.”

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If you were thinking about installing Slackware onto your computer, but were afraid of the install process, then check this install guide out. It contains lots of screen shots and explanations of every stage in the install.

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Another review of SUSE. Not quite sure why all these reviews are popping up now, but hey, it is an excellent distro. If you have not given SUSE a try and are looking for a new linux distro, I strongly suggest giving it a try.

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This is a nice little review of SUSE.