So after all this time sneaking around gentoo i finally got the guts to go ahead and install it. so i did. there was a little problem in the beginning with the installation. which i can’t remember right now. but i was able to fix/work around it by editing some config file. and after wards everything went ok. i was following the official gentoo installation guide. i did a stage3 install. so i didn’t have to compile the compiler and the tool chain. but still it took a LOT of time
the most annoying thing about gentoo is compiling everything lol this is really funny(and ironic to me) because after all this is why gentoo is gentoo. its a source based distro so i have to compile almost everything that i am going to use. compiling takes a lot of time(and some hard disk space too, i ran out of disk space after about one week from the installation. but i think this is kinda obvious because i had a / partition of ~5GBs). and in turn it gives you ultra fast/ultra optimized/less memory hungry binaries. which is simply cool! but i really wish i had a fast possessor
there are many ways to speed up the compilation, like distributed compilation… etc etc… but i never went in to any of those as this was my first gentoo installation. i wanted to keep it simple and inline with the official guide so i won’t mess things out too much.
i did the installing in about 3 or 4 days. no! it weren’t taking all that time to compile stuff. but i was working and i didn’t have sshd on ma lap(which resides at ma house btw
). so i put something to compile and leave for work and come back and continue… so sometimes there were some stupid errors(like failed name resolution!!!) that stops the whole emerge process.
there is a HUGE plus for you if you ever choose to go on with gentoo, that is the documentation/support etc etc is excellent! you can almost find a how to or some guide for every major thing that you would want to do to your system. ex installing VLC player…
oh btw i had a major screw up with setting my CHOST variable in make.conf. for some wired reason i had i486 in the place where i expected to see i686(the arch for my installation, this is decided when you download the stage tar ball…). i just changed the CHOST
hehe and this is something that i shouldn’t do. the guide has explicitly told not to change it, because if i needed change it that means i have downloaded a wrong stage tar ball… but anyways it worked for me… so far. there is a lil problem with my compiler, its also i486 so sometimes some packages complain about it not been i686. so i downloaded a gcc tar ball(of the arch i686) and extracted it. and now i have two gcc’s…
and so far this new gcc seems to work fine. it is the same version as the existing one other than the fact that it’s arch is different.
my lap starts up like lightning
and the apps seems to be much faster than a normal distro installation. but the most noticeable is the booting time. its really fast
apart from the speed, the other major advantage of using gentoo is that it makes you learn about your linux system. i have learned a plenty of things about the system’s bare bones thanks to gentoo.
its a cool system, but the only problem is that it take a lot of time to compile…
apart from that all the other stuff about the system is pretty nice
(oh! i should also not that gentoo have a reputation of been buggy, insecure, and google makes me feel that this is true.. ex:- if you search for some gentoo package, there are some bug reports/security holes/exploits! turning up almost all the time!)
i think i will be using this for some time atleast, after all i have compiled so much! lol i just can’t let it all go to waste. now that i have compile and sort of build my system, the most time taking annoying task would be to update… the system.
if you haven’t given gentoo a try, and if you have enough time, i suggest that you do give it a try, its work it!