Finally, I installed Gentoo which was done over 3 nights! It was actually more fun than it was frustrating, in fact it wasn't really frustrating at all if you do the installation in increments. I'm sure that it could be done in under 1 night if I wasn't new to this and actually tried to understand what I was doing.I used the Gentoo Minimalist CD (57 MB I believe)instead of the full LiveCD installation. I would definitely recommend this to people who have at least a couple months worth of Linux knowledge, as you would be using command line the whole installation. I guess you could install it with no previous linux knowledge as the handbook is VERY VERY detailed and tells you what to do but trust me you will have some problems along the way of the installation mainly because of hardware drivers/modules that you need. A very great feature of Gentoo is the portage tree. I'm not going to type all of the portage information here but I will give you a link.. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1 Just as a heads up here are some of the problems I encountered on the way through that were eventually fixed: Linksys WRT54G(RT2500 chipset); had no problems while using the minimalist cd, but wouldn't work after installation. Turns out I needed to grab the drivers from portage while on the CD and install wireless tools from the CD. ATI Radeon x1600 graphics card: But I was expecting this as just about every distro has a problem with ATI Radeons. Just had to enable a few things from the kernel and recompile. http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ATI_Drivers .. Follow that if you are going to compile your kernel on your own so you don't have to do it later on. Installing Gnome: Make sure your portage tree is updated before trying to install gnome as you will get a "Masked package error" if you don't. Uhmm and you might want to do something for a few hours as gnome takes ALONG time to compile with portage (Think it was 3 or 4 hours to compile). Make sure you set your USE flags before installing as it will take considerably less time and you won't get bloated kde software installed along with gnome. That's pretty much it. Most of the things I've said that you can't understand is ALL explained in the handbook. Believe me, a few days ago I didn't understand anything that am I writing now. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml Of course use the handbook that is your processor's architecture. If you have any questions you can post them here and I might be able to answer. Ah yes...
If you manage to break it (which you almost certainly will ) next time maybe consider using the GRP packages... Maybe not the same level optimisation with the use flags, but skips having to do that initial compilation for everything such as Gnome, KDE and OpenOffice and could have you a running system in no time. Or (perhaps even better as far as I'm concerned) have a look at Arch Linux. A lot of ex-Gentoo users have found their way to this distro, myself included. Uses packages by default, but also has an ebuild like system for building from source (PKGBUILDs), and is a very minimalist distro just like Gentoo, with a rolling release system too. 32 and 64 bit versions, very fast and a knowledgeable, friendly community. I don't think I've ever seen anyone flamed on there, whenever someone declares they're leaving to try another distro it tends to elicit a "you'll be back... " response rather than something nasty, and more often than not they do return.
