How hard was it for you to set up Gentoo?

VirtuaSpy · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2004 Posts: 38 Location: Houston, TX

booting on and off with Redhat, Mandrake, and Slackware a few years back and wasn't too impressed because all I needed was game playing, chatting, email, and surfing. For me, Win95 to WinME have meant a flatten and reinstall every couple of months, and I hated it. Since XP came out, I had it running on this 1800+XP for a good two years, then, about 2 months ago, XP decided to bork hardcore on me and froze randomly many, many times a day. I tried everything to fix it including changing memory, buying a enermax powersupply, formatting and resintalling, and I STILL have that freezing. I installed SuSE 9.0 and had a pretty good freeze-free system (so it obviously isn't my hardware causing the locks in XP) running for a month, then curiosity finally overcame me and here I am installing Gentoo in the other terminal.

So far, so good; I think I'll be sticking it out with gentoo. Thanks for the great forum, I've been reading it for the past 5 hours and here's to hoping I get a good install the first time!

Aonoa · Guru Joined: 23 May 2002 Posts: 589

My first shot at gentoo was the 1.1a release, at which time I was and still am learning about Linux.. for me it was not hard, but it was time-consuming going through the doc's and doing things step-by-step. I rather enjoyed going back to the command line since I'm fond of my good old DOS days. Now I've done the installation process so many times I almost know it by heart, sigh.. not that I've screwed it up a lot..

I've helped some friends too, honest! it has been and still is an awesome learning experience, as well as this forum is. Thank you, everyone.

dreas · Guru Joined: 06 Aug 2003 Posts: 359 Location: Germany

Well, the hardest part has been kernel config, but some fellow on #gentoo.de was nice and offered his help.

Besides that, it's been easy enough, even for the noob I've been/I am.

frekiR · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2003 Posts: 42 Location: Sweden

Well, it got easier after a few times, the first time was the hardest of course but now it goes smooth

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BWoso · Posted: Mon Mar 01, 2004 7:13 am Post subject:

I still don't have everything how I want it, I can't sync my Palm, my sound doesn't work perfect, I don't have direct rendering working, that's all I can think of for now, but hey, it gives me something to do when I'm bored.
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muhr · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 28

I tried to install Gentoo on two machines so far. On the first one it never worked with either stage 1, 2 , 3 or GRP. When I tried the other, it quiet worked like a charm. SO WHAT THE HELL?!?
Then I took the RAM of the second one and put it into the first one. Now this one is emerging system right now. I only encountered the groff compile bug which I could resolve with help of this forum

, so far.
So all the problems came from this faulty RAM, which even MEMTEST didn't recognize.

Frodg · l33t Joined: 11 Feb 2004 Posts: 761

It was not really the install that was a problem - relatively easy to get the base system up and running.

Getting all the peripherals to work is something else....

Basic system - 1 to 2 hrs
All the rest - 2 weeks and still not quite there - USB issues....
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tgourley · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 3 Location: Centerton, AR

The hard part for me was convincing the wife to let me take down the linux box for a few days, fdisk the hard drive, and compile everything from scratch. Now that she's seen the goodness of Gentoo as compared to our aging Mandrake install, I'm off the hook.

Although she rolled her eyes when I mentioned "emerge sync; emerge -Du world" to get up to Gentoo 2004.0 standards.

I didn't really have a problem installing the system. I even got it running on the first try. My problem was getting DRI support with my Radeon 9000 to work properly. But after a few kernel recompiles, a few trips through fglrxconfig, and a few tweaks to XF86Config-4, I'm all set and ready to go.

Now if I can just convince my boss to let me get rid of WinXP at work...
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Deebster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 126

The only problem I had was failing to notice the multiple notes in the install doc about editing /etc/fstab

The sense of settling doom when the first reboot came up with "can't find /dev/BOOT", or whatever it says... Luckily a housemate is a long time nix user and helps out with these occasional failures of my brain.

pandaxiongmao · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 478 Location: USA

Stage 3 + Genkernel are painless...
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ishunnedmypants · Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2004 9:55 pm Post subject:

The first time I tried Gentoo was when I had just gotten my Bondi Blue iMac. SuSE, YellowDog, and Mandrake didn't work, so I thought Gentoo would. I started from stage 3, and compiled a kernel for the first time.

After everything was ready, I thought Gentoo was just like the other distros. I tried to start X, realized it wasn't there (I had no clue about portage) and scrapped Gentoo. It took forever, and I didn't even know it worked.

If you wanna hear a good story, I'll tell you how I put Debian on this same iMac. It involves the Debian CD, Gentoo CD, some pvc pipe, a kiwi, and about 12 kernel compiles.

P.S.
I used Gentoo for about a year before I ever read anything in the forums. It probably would have helped me learn much more.

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ishunnedmypants · Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2004 10:05 pm Post subject:

As for my x86 machine, it was fsck'n impossible. I didn't know at the time that my memory was corrupted, so everytime I tried Gentoo, I would get Segmentation faults. Nothing worked, not windows, not RedHat, not SuSE, not Debian, not Windows. That was the period in my computer's life when I wanted to kick it in the balls often, even if I had to draw them onto it.

After I discovered the memory problem, I bought a brand spankin' new stick of 512 DDR, I tried the Gentoo install again, from stage 1, with success. I had gone through a botched one so many times by then, I knew it quite well, and was painless. Now I heart Gentoo. :-)

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