[StALUG] trying out Gentoo

[Rory Beaton]

Hi Garry,

I'm not too familiar with Gentoo but my impressions of it were that it looks
great for building a minimalist or highly customised system tailored to a
specific application but a lot of effort for a standard box. If I wanted
something minimalist, I'm not sure I'd want to install the entire toolchain
necessary to build Gentoo. And I suppose I've never recovered from waiting
upwards of 10 hours for X to build on a DEC 3000 running NetBSD...

I'm a confirmed SuSE and/or ubuntu/debian advocate these days - ubuntu's Long
Term Support (LTS) model is better than anything else on offer at the price
(free) and their server build is fairly compact. SuSE's Yast2 is a nice tool
and the console version is great for remote admin but debian's apt-get is just
a dream come true!

Virtualbox does have some issues and my best advice would be to get the latest
build directly from Sun/Oracle. I've failed to get Win7 to install and have had
problems getting various CAD/modelling apps installed on XP in Vbox on my ubuntu
workstation.

rb


Quoting garryg <gargul1969 at gmail.com>:

> Hey Rory,
>
> well, attempting to install gentoo for the first time was fairly hardcore
> for a gui user. just spent the last week getting my head round logical
> volume management! afraid to say failed gentoo instalment twice. got as far
> as installing the stage 3 tarball but things went downhill rapidly once
> portage came into the equation. there were a few other probs during earlier
> stages but not sure if it's cos was doing it in virtualbox or not (you did
> say to bare that in mind if things went wrong and i was looking for help).
> no matter, i'll have another crack it once i figure out dual booting and
> then find out if was virtualbox, my inexperience or a combination of both -
> i know which one my money's going on though!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Garry
>


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