Gentoo question

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locutus24

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 13, 2004
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As of now im working on building a comp for gentoo specifically, P2 8gb HD and about 240mb ram. How long can i expect to spend doing a stage 1 install, cause after a couple of months on mdk my entusiasm for linux began to wear off. MDK is to good for day to day work, i feel its time to get uber dirty with linux and learn how it truly works. Q
 
Bootstrap took just over 24 hours in my PII-300 laptop. It has a 5400RPM 16MB cache HDD, and 192MB Ram. After bootstrap I pushed the work over to my main machine with distcc. X takes forever!!
 
Don't do a stage 1 install, especially on a machine like that, here is a thread from one of the devs about problems with a stage 1, and here is a thread detailing what is probably the "best" way to install gentoo (with NTPL support :cool: ).

But, you seem to have a misconception about gentoo as well. Watching text scroll in a term does not make you a linux guru, or teach you "how it truly works." There are plenty of easier ways to go about it, most involve a binary distribution set. Gentoo will give you a lot more control over what exactly is installed with regards to portage, but on a laptop like that I would go with debian or ubuntu. Ubuntu isnt exactly the best for learning since you are pretty insulated from the command line, unless you want to use it.
 
What Gentoo teaches you is how to read and follow directions. :p (Not flaming, I use it myself, but seriously, the install does not instantly make you Linux awesome, though you do get some decent exposure to the command line and the experience of building your own kernel).

And stage 1 on that P2 will take a while, especially once you get to applications (as has been mentioned, X/X.org is insane to build on older CPUs, as is KDE or Gnome if you use those). I won't stop you from trying, though. Gentoo is fun and all, of course. However, if you had some machines to do distcc with, it's a *slightly* different story, but only slightly.
 
I went from nothing to full system from stage one in under 6 hours iirc. On a dual athlon mp @ 2Ghz w/ 1.5 Gb of ram. your milage WILL vary though. Last time i installed gentoo was a couple months ago and i just 'emerge -uDv world' to keep it up to date so my numbers are probably off by a little bit.

IMO the best way to really learn *nix is not to set up boxes but to do something with those machines you set up, and to do it all from the command line. After a while you start feeling like mice just slow you down.

If you want a good OS for teaching you *nix, install FreeBSD (its a real unix!).
 
Well im doing a debian net-inst instead, gentoo will be for in the summer when i have some uber freetime with nothing to do. So 6-24hrs for the install lol this will be funny, maybe instead i will do linux from scratch, that sounds like a nice distro.
 
Gentoo 2000.5 is released, as announced on DistroWatch.

/Thanking my decision to only install *BSD/Linux/Solaris from re-writable discs now. :D
 
Rw's are overated i just go full on cd-r, i wasted about 20disc to this date from that but w/e im keeping all of them as a testament of my failures and my successes. I think for now debian is good enough, gentoo will come later on although i am intruiged by portage cause apt is nice, but is portage all its built up to
 
Well, an RW gives you 1000 burns before becoming an RO, so the value proposition is better than burning coasters. Plus, my five RWs sitting around take up a lot less space than my 100 disc spindles...

Also, when I do my Fedora Core re-jiggered masters, it's nice to test on two RWs and burn four (two copies each) gold masters on RO media once you are satisfied that the media checks work. Speed isn't an issue on RW vs RO because I burn all gold masters at 4x due to incompatibilities with older drives (on the replicated masters) when you exceed 4x due to bit elongation.
 
What kind of RWs do you use and have you actually burned 1000 times onto one? I had some Memorex (CMC A+ I believe) and they lasted maybe 5 times tops for rewriting.
 
I am using Memorex High Speed CD-RWs (12x/700MB/80MIN) that I picked up for dirt cheap at Wal-Mart. I haven't hit the 1000 (theoretical) limit of the CD-RWs yet, though I have been using them since October of last year to make beta CDs for in-house review. I'm definately in the 200 to 300 burn range on these discs.

I'm sorry that my old eyes can't seem to make out the number on the inner ring. It's just a slightly different texture than what's surrounding it. :(
 
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