How hard was it for you to set up Gentoo?

GlennM · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:24 am Post subject:

Easy, fun, and interesting. I downloaded a poked around with, oh, maybe a half-dozen Linux distros when I was picking one, and I actually tried Gentoo out of desperation. All the other distro's had weird problems that I couldn't fix, because I'm very much not a Linux guru. Surprisingly, Gentoo was easy to install (if you have a brain and follow instructions) and worked perfectly the first time. A very good experience, and it's been nothing but smooth sailing since then. It's also cool because every single piece of hardware is supported and working perfectly, even better than Windows.

srlinuxx · l33t Joined: 22 Nov 2003 Posts: 627

Not hard, but looonng.

That should have been one of the options.

QPegasus · n00b Joined: 27 Sep 2003 Posts: 42

Long, but fairly painless. (aside from mirror I used being tortoise slow that night....)

Bit disappointed - I'd heard such great things about the Gentoo install, and how you had to be a genius to get it installed. :lol:

radr · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 5:49 am Post subject: install was not terrible

well..

my first install 1.1 was a major pain in the.. only dialup to work with and only connected @ 14.4 (ouch)
it was the time that killed me.. the docs kicked butt

2nd and a few later installs
hooked up with cable
stage3 painless and not so long of a wait.. very much better

current install:
stage1 ~x86
didnt need docs this time
plus faster cable & wife now runs gentoo

isnt *nix grand
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Diezel · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 6:19 am Post subject:

I have to say not easy but not hard either. I started with 1.2 and the only distro I had been using back then was Slackware. So I had some experience with conf files and using the terminal. Still like to test Slack from time to time, it's still one of my favourite distros but I'm stuck on Gentoo for life now.
Gentoo might be a little hard for someone new to linux to install but after that you can't find anything easier to maintain. Portage makes installing and uninstalling programs so damn easy.
A few friends of mine have actually started using linux with Gentoo, altough I've helped with the install. After that it's a smooth road with portage.
Portage is the reason why I could recomend Gentoo to any newb as long as someone can take the time and help them with the install.

My opinion,

Diezel
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jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

I was supprised just how easy it was to install Gentoo. I suppose coming from Debian helped but the installation instruments are top notch which helps I feel.

Jon

gixer · Posted: Tue Dec 30, 2003 1:55 am Post subject:

I have tried most of the major distro's out there, and I have to say that I like Gentoo the best, in fact, I have converted my server from RedHat TO Gentoo, and am going to convert my G4 from Yellow Dog Linux to Gentoo as soon as I have a free moment.

Gentoo is, as with a lot of things, a double-edged sword. It's powerful, and FLEXABLE, at the expense of being overwhelming at times. Being a programmer/developer, I'm not easily spun, but I have had my moments with Gentoo. HOWEVER, it forces you to LEARN and UNDERSTAND your OS.

I use Gentoo on a daily basis, in fact it is installed on my laptop as my ONLY os, (I have vmware running xp for working with clients) I have yet to be 'screwed' because I am running Linux, much to the dismay of my fellow co-workers/clients who 'don't like' linux simply because they don't understand it.

So, I give a 'HELL YA', and a very big 'Thank you' to all the developers out there making this an awesome distro, and I hope to join that development effort very soon. I also want to thank all the USERS, who post on this board their problems ALONG WITH their solutions, all offered attitude free and very graciously, YOU are the people that MAKE Linux such an awsome OS, we are all like family, we help each other for little more than just being able to say, 'I DON'T use wintel'. God bless you all, you are the reason why I STUCK with Linux even when the issues were overwhelming. I have worked through them all, and have a VERY functional laptop, in fact , the only thing that is NOT functioning is multiple sound sources ( Quake3 + mp3 player, etc), but I can live without an MP3 player while in quake

, and I just managed to break my backlight turning off when the lid is shut, oh well

I'll stop now, just my 2 cents
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Ztryfe · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2003 11:20 pm Post subject: Piece of cake

pretty easy but i had some problems with GRP and a lot of chmod.......

ok ok i compiled like 5 times my kernel just to find that i forgot something .......but its ok now.....

Gentoo = speed demon
(of course you already knew that....)
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BitJam · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:27 am Post subject:

I had a hard time because I had an easy install on an ext2 partition but when I tried to install on a Reiser partition things kept breaking mysteriously. It took me a while to track it down to a cooling problem.

vificunero · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2004 3:33 pm Post subject:

It has been easy: gentoo has a very good installation guide (quite impossible to fall) and a great forum community. I wait the gentoo book just to read it and print and have it all the time I need.

KingPunk · Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 10:11 pm Post subject:

oh gah, where to begin..

i wanted to setup gentoo, because i got tired of the ole windows junk flowing around.
i've dittled with redhat, mandrake, and debian. but i never really learnt anything from any
of those distros, besides how to click or select "next"

i wanted to learn more, and so i went in a search for the hardest distro i could get my hands on, that wouldn't kill me. you also must unserstand, everything i know, i've taught myself..
so i saw no point in trying to stop something that works oh so well.
so, i began digging up info on how to setup gentoo, i printed all the docs on my highschool's lazer printer..( mmm.. taste the freeness of that

) and off i went, determined as hell to do this.
the documentaion was great, but VERY overwhelming. its just so much damned paper, that you think you'll never get through it.
i began my setup, and i loved how flashy it looked from the getgo. the nice G, what a catch.
i began doing everything that the instructions said, not really understanding what they meant.. just doing them, step by step.. until i learnt the process, and what it did.
it took me 3 days (and about 30 tries) to get up to where grub, the kernel, and the shell loaded right. menuconfig was a good tool, but it was still hella confusing for most part..
but after getting errors such as cannot mount / partition and junk, i'd just redo it.
nonetheless, i began to become a frequent flyer in #gentoo lots. :>
(of course, always asking stuff, via my other box. (windowsxp))
But, after 4 days of trying to get it going, i finally got kde going the way i wanted..
and i love how easy it is, (yes, i thought i'd never say it, but gentoo is easy.)
portage is the shiznit! thats for sure.

So, to make a long story short.. it was hard, and tedious, but that was only due to my lack of experience in the gentoo world. and now, i think it should be law that gentoo be run on every box available

im a diehard gentoo fan.. go gentoo w00t!

ps. and now, i've been trying to strong-arm my friends into using gentoo.. so far, so good :twisted:

~KingPunk
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Redspy · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 7 Location: LA

I've recently installed Gentoo on a desktop and laptop. Thanks to the excellent documentation and searching through these forums things went fairly smoothly. My first successful install took three attempts but during those attempts I learned alot. The only pain is waiting for X and Gnome to compile.

Mister Bill · Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 4:46 am Post subject:

Well, I'm still installing after two and a half weeks.

Checking up on stuff on my other computer caused me to skip a few steps here and there the first few times, and when I almost got it just right I got a fantastic kernel panic on boot.

Hopefully this time I'll get it right (not using ReiserFS this time around, knowing more about how to compile the kernel, etc. etc.). I'm tired of using Winblows 98.
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Paydon · n00b Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 4

Actually, "impossible" so far since I still don't have it working. My experience with Gentoo has not been plesant.

I've been a Linux *user* for years but as an applications programmer and I'll admit I don't know much about Linux configuration. Even so I've done RedHat and Mandrake installs more times than I can count have had great success recompiling the kernel in the past to do something like adding in a driver for a specific NIC or turning on SMP support. But Gentoo is killing me!

To begin with, my on board NIC (3Com 3c2000) wasn't supported by the LiveCD so I had to add a PCI NIC to get started. Had that been the extend of it, I'd have been happy as hell! But no... 'emerge sync' stalled on me twice for reasons unknown. Both times it would just stop responding and no amount of cursing or pounding on the keyboard seemed to make it move forward or return me to a command prompt

Then 'emerge system' had problems as well. Once it hit an FTP site, did a "Logging in as anonymous..." and locked up tighter than a bull's ass in fly season.. giving me another opportunity to cycle the power and restart from scratch. Then it couldn't find 'coreutils' to save its life but offered no explanation why. It appeared to be trying one mirror site after another but just couldn't find it. Someone finally suggested removing the GENTOO_MIRRORS="" line from make.conf, which I did, and that magically fixed the problem! OK, back to the races. Then I spent hours with 'make menuconfig' trying to figure out why adding support for the 3c2000 LAN chip kept issuing a "3c2000.o: unresolved symbol __udivdi3" error when doing a 'make modules_install'. I never did figure that out but someone suggested using the sk98lin driver instead. That one is even worse with 5 unresolved symbols. I finally gave up and decided I'll just have to disable it and be happy with my PCI NIC. Then came GRUB. I did an 'emerge -k grub' and then followed the instructions in the install document to the letter. My /etc/fstab is correct and my grub.conf is pointing to the appropriate places as far as I can tell (at least it's pointing to the places shown in the install document and since their partitioning example exactly matches my real system...). Finally I shutdown the system as per instructions, carefully unmounting everything before issuing the 'reboot' command but the system won't boot! Instead I get the message "GRUB Loading stage1.5Read Error". A search of the forums didn't turn up anything to explain what this might imply and a google search only turned up 3 hits -- a web forum thread that basically read like this...

"I'm getting this GRUB error. Anyone know what it is?"

"Nope"

"Bummer"

<sigh>

Flop · Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 4:17 am Post subject:

I had to read many topics here to learn how to set X, DMA etc.

In one week, I restart the installation from the beginning at least 4 times. Once, I made the mistake of typing ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge kde. All the dependancy were unstable... So the emerge -u system crash, and I the system was broken. No way to repare, even with LiveCD.

Thank god I'm patient... And all my problems are ok. But I couldn't have done this without this forum. They were always someone that had the same problem before me.

I'm pretty proud of the newby in me now that my computer start within 32sec.

NecroticFlower · n00b Joined: 30 Jan 2004 Posts: 31 Location: Atlanta

setting up gentoo the very first time (and each time after) has been amazingly easy following along with the documentation that's provided online.

the only thing that caused me to restart from scratch was i wanted to give stage1 a go (which was no harder then stage3 by the way) and i wanted to change some CFLAGS and use XFS. im content with my choices now and am about to do yet another build of Gentoo on a different computer (my last windows box).

Gentoo is teh good stuff.
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mem7 · Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2004 7:28 am Post subject:

I had a lot of problems the first time I set up a Gentoo box. Hardware detection, X configuration, etc. But it didn't bother me much because it was a good learning experience on setting up a Linux system in general.
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WaterSoul · Apprentice Joined: 31 Jan 2004 Posts: 158

for me, it was "Damned near impossible"

it tooks three weeks, and nearly everytime I got all thoses wierds and rare ebuild errors, and I think that in 3 weeks I caught almost every bug that happened to be the recent updates...

Well, it's not really recent, since it's 3 weeks from now, but this is what i think is upsetting me the most : the portage tree keep changing over and over again, if I try to emerge something like Gnome in the morning, an ebuild is breacking the roof, I go to the forum/buglist and it says it's solved, I emerge sync and what's going on ? The whole damn system wanna compile again because there was like a 0.0.0.0.0.1 version change in gcc ^^

Now I'm under windows and I'll try gentoo again tomorrow, because I hate WindowsXP and because I love gnome (I hate kde too, btw, that's what I love frmo gentoo, the choice since most distrib have kde by default). I wanted to restart from scratch again because I messed with some configs and again some gcc wierd errors and everything, this time I'll check for bad blocks too, because I think I got some now. And I swear god all I did was emerge xscreensavers, oh well :lol:

I think gentoo is two things for me:
1) Choice to decide how you'll build, and how much time you'll wait, and what you'll get
2) Luck because you can end with a wrong ebuild or a good one, that's a matter of luck for me :roll:

VeryWeary · n00b Joined: 12 Aug 2003 Posts: 50

The first time I did a stage 2, I had limited experience, compiled everything, and it took about 38 hours straight (I was awake for all of it). It wasn't a terrible experience it just took a really long time because I didn't know what I was doing. I managed to get a working system though. Then, my Gentoo install belw up on me, so I tired again and after a few weeks, another installation fell apart on me due to my lack of understanding. Each time, I'd go back to Windows for a couple weeks, or try some other Linux distro. I'd keep coming back to Gentoo though, starting from scratch each time, on a couple different computers. I can now do a Stage 2 with everything I neeed in about 12-15 hours, and my system is very reliable. Everything works, all my hardware, and I'm very very happy with it. I've pretty much ditched Windows.

mondauge · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 11:30 am Post subject:

Hi,

for me it was quite easy. I had some minor compile issues during "emerge system" which were easily solvable with the gentoo forums. My first kernel choice (mm-sources) didn't boot, so I rebooted the CD, chrooted into my gentoo and went for a normal 2.6.* kernel.. Emerging the rest of the apps to create a desktop system was also easy and again, any issues could easily be solved.
I was but a bit frustrated that I forgot to backup some configs from my first gentoo system (like smb.conf, ~/.vimrc...)

mondauge

Lucho[FLCL] · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:10 pm Post subject:

When I started, I said "Oh, I'll go crazy, I'll get thousands of compile errors"...but I have had Gentoo for 4 months and I didn't get a single compile error!!!

I'm very happy with it. The key for a painless install is to stick with the howto and to know what you're doing (for example, when you configure the fstab - and it isn't THAT hard).

Epyon · l33t Joined: 11 Sep 2003 Posts: 754 Location: NJ, USA

Installing was relatively painless. I had a problem booting because I messed up the grub configuration but after that it was ok.
I then killed the install about a month later by allowing etc-update to update everything it wanted to.
I fixed that problem most of the way but got annoying and decided to reinstall again because I forgot to set the cflags in the previous install.
Four months later and I'm still on the second install. Most things work fine. My biggest unresolved issue is that the gnome sound recorder segfaults when I press record.

zigmund555 · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 58

Paydon,

I had the same problem with the 3c2000 drivers. Gentoo developers, and other distro developers as well.. please add the 3c2000 drivers to your install CDs. It's a driver for a fairly common gigabit onboard LAN chip that comes with the Asus and Abit boards that were popular ~6 months - 1 yr ago.

The sk98lin driver will also work but I couldn't load it from the live CD.

I had to install slackware and get that running, then download the 3c2000 driver, put it on my USB flash drive, reboot Gentoo, install it and then configure net. This process took me a few hours.

After that installing Gentoo was pretty easy, just follow the docs. Emerging took a while, but not nearly as long as everyone said. I have a 2.6 Ghz P4 and it didn't take _that_ long.

thegreatape · n00b Joined: 01 Dec 2003 Posts: 31

The hardest part was actually finding time to do the install. I'm a college student, and only own one computer. I couldn't have it down for a day or two while the system bootstraps and compiles itself. So, I waited til Thanksgiving break last year and borrowed my girlfriend's PowerBook so I could read the docs while everything compiled.

Other than that, the only problem was of my own making: I emerged portage before I everything else was compiled, and borked the whole thing. I went back and did it right, and it's been groovy since.

mr_cheez

I got Gentoo working on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 7500) after a couple of tries. The biggest problem was actually self-inflicted -- i chose to make the boot partition a Reiserfs partition, and the defaultl kernel has Reiserfs as a module, so it wouldn't boot.

I booted off the LiveCD again and skipped to the chroot part of the instructions, mounted everything and started monkeying with the kernel params and genkernel'ing to get Reiserfs included in the image.

The other thing that drove me a little crazy, and also was my fault was the fact that i managed to drop all the partitions on the disk before my first try at installing Gentoo, so after i got everything repartitioned and ready to install, i didn't have a /dev/hda? for the suspend-to-disk feature for my laptop. i fixed that by just re-cycling my /tmp filesystem into a suspend-to-disk partition. (Change the partition type from x'83' to 'xa0' and run "lphdisk" to format the partition).

Lastly, i really havent analyzed this, but i'm betting there are parts of this that can be automated. Gentoo isn't likely to be accepted by the denizens of the "Windows World" (tm) without improvement in this area.

emerge is cool and beats rpm to death as far as ease of use and an awesome community. The Gentoo community is second to none. everyone who sees the "fresh-ebuilds" list goes nuts!

Gentoo rocks!
--bobp
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