[Sussex] About Gentoo..

[John D.]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 10:07, Dominic Humphries wrote:
<snip>

>  I'm quite tempted by Gentoo. Which, funnily enough, seems to be quite popular on 
> SLUG, too..


> Does the "emerge" thing really work as well as they say it does?

As one of the least (one of?, probably just THE least) technically able
people on the list, I'd say give it a go, as has already been mentioned
by Geoff and Steve Williams, I found portage and the emerge "thing"
worked excellently.

> Does it cause any issues if you install something manually rather than 
> using "emerge package"?

Can't say, as I was never brave enough to try!

> Kernel 2.6 or 2.4? (I haven't switched to 2.6 yet as I keep hearing 
> complaints about it breaking things)

Definitely 2.6 I've previously had gentoo working with both a 2.4 and
2.6 kernel, the 2.6 was better - considerably!


> Anything else you think I might want to know before I start..?

Last time I had gentoo working, I managed to screw it up badly, but only
because I forgot to print off the advice that Geoff posted for me and
not paying enough attention.

What went wrong? Well, if and when you install it, one of the things you
get when you do an "emerge" is a little report that tell's you that xxx
config files are in need of updating. The whole system worked fine, but
in my impatience, I updated the config files, and yes I managed to type
the wrong number at the end of the command and it auto updated about 40
files which buggered my x server, I lost all my gui(s) and got myself in
a total stew!

Erm, as for actually installing gentoo, well I went for a "stage 3
install + GRP" which is supposed to be the fastest way of getting it up
and running. 

The problem that I experienced, was that when thing's didn't go
completely as per the install guide/hand book, I was lost. Which meant
instead of installing KDE as a binary pre-compiled package from the
second disc, I ended up having to "emerge kde" - bad move, well I say
bad move, but not really, it's just that it took about 15 hour's to
download and compile (the download(s) didn't take too long but the
compile took forever - even with a 2 gig cpu and 768 meg's of ram etc
etc). The actual install of the main system (i.e. the first disc) only
took about 90 minutes and that was having to read the install guide
section by section.

Once it's installed it's brilliant. Just install it with a little
caution! (and maybe the "common sense" that I seem to lack :-P)

regards

John D

p.s. Oh and my might want to have a knoppix cd ready, just in case you
make a cock up!