How hard was it for you to set up Gentoo?

Promit · Guru Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 344

I'm wondering just how much trouble you guys all had to go through to get Gentoo up and running. I had nearly no problems, except for configuring things like X and such. If you did have any extensive or interesting

problems, please describe them!

matthead · n00b Joined: 04 Dec 2002 Posts: 63

I think if you know your way around Linux enough to compile a kernel, installing Gentoo is easy as pie. Waiting for everything to compile is pretty tedious, but that's all.

The only problems I remember running into was LVM - the startup scripts didn't handle vgscan && vgchange -a y right, as I recall. I fixed it then and forgot what I did. It may even be fixed in newer versions of baseconfig, or whichever package contains the boot scripts.

jstead1 · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 3:00 am Post subject:

It was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
I credit the very concise installation docs on the gentoo web site.
The only tricky part was the kernel config.
I had never even looked at it before.
I saw that long list of options and thought to myself, self, your into it deep now.
But I went through the list pretty methodically, figured out what I needed at bare minimum and what I left out, I compiled in later or compiled as modules.
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nsahoo · l33t Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 618

is it only me or to any one else five bars of the poll look as if some one is showing the middle finger ..

nvm .. it's probably because of the MGD.

shash · Apprentice Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 220 Location: India

I accidentally unmerged portage first time around, but got it right the next time!

Beyond that, I had no trouble at all.

gaz · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Oct 2002 Posts: 126

very easy due to the excellent installation documents available

its very rewarding getting to the stage of not even having to look at any documents to do an install

zez · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 6:19 am Post subject:

I had zero problems on my desktop. My notebook on the other hand had a few issues with the Gentoo 1.2 install CD, but I found my way around it (with some help from the Gentoo Forums).

Lews_Therin · l33t Joined: 03 Oct 2003 Posts: 657 Location: Banned

First time with any Linux distro, so it was "damned near impossible". Realizing the .isos weren't just different for optimization reasons, then messing up the partition table because I wasn't used to cylinders...making a 500mb /boot dir and a 25mb swap file. 3 xconfigs(or whatever), until I realized I hade to use ATI's special config program...getting KDE to properly run mozilla. Then I booted into windowz for a game, and 2k tried to "extend and embrace" into my newly made install. Decided that the drives were unformatted, so it did me a favor and reformatted them as NTFS. Googled to fix that...went back to the LiveCD CLI, remerged more stuff, then realized I hadn't chrooted...chrooted, comp died. Booted just fine, went back...tried to emerge xfree and it gave me a bunch of errors because my cmos battery was dead and eveything was for 2003 and I was installing packages in (supposedly) 1980. Fixed that, installed, and got it working.

Damned near impossible :roll:

Athas · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 7:16 am Post subject:

I had compiled kernels and stuff like that while I was using Debian, so the configuration wasn't very hard (cept' for the CFLAGS where I more or less just copied every damn CFLAG I could find

).

I'd say it was fairly painless here.

No, wait...

Actually it was very painful, because I was forced to use Windows while it installed :cry:

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kraylus · l33t Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 648 Location: ft.worth.tx

viperlin · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 1319 Location: UK

easy

apart from i had never compiled a kernel before and didn't know what i'd done wrong, i'd left it set to Pentium4 on an Athlon. :-)

other than that i RTFM'ed and it's fine, just people are too lazy to RTFM most of the time (chris if you know me and your reading this it means you mainly).

Astaroth33 · n00b Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 36

The first time was relatively painless (once I got over the initial learning curve), but I somehow managed to toast the system with a reverse dependency problem. So I'm now running on a stage 1 "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"" setup, where I've had a few minor difficulties, but nothing unsolvable.

frocksii · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Nov 2003 Posts: 91

first time on my laptop was quite painfull because non of the liveCD's wanted to boot.
Installed gentoo from a livin' SuSE.

Then did gentoo stage 1 on a p200 MMX. It took a lot of time, but apart from that everything went fine.

Then gentoo on a brand new Athlon XP 2800+. Problems with KT400 on kernel 2.4.22, just installed kernel 2.6 and everything goes great.

So i think it's all not that hard, you only have to keep on going and use your mf brain.

frocksii

Xiol · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 209 Location: UK

Painless, thanks to the Gentoo Documentation.

Though I voted for "Basic config problems..." because of a slightly small issue I had that involved GRUB, my stupidity, and the boot sectors of my WinXP drive...

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I voted Neither Easy not Difficult because:

There were a number of issues that would have completely put me off had I not already had some experience with Mandrake. As I was using a new partition and Mandy was on the other one, I was able to copy some config files and adapt them, XF86Config in particular!

Issues:

Repeated error messages until I put i810 sound module into hotplug/blacklist.

nVidia-kernel driver for graphics did not work. I had to use the official Gentoo file that I had earlier downloaded from nvidia for Mandrake.

Konqueror did not resolve HTML because build on CD-2 did not include libpcre -- got help from this site using Mandrake.

Found that Genkernel did not find USB printer, USB driver and did not load "ip_tables" and related necessary modules for firewall.

Had to get help (here) so that root could run programs on normal user desktop from a terminal window.

Had to learn to compile kernel PDQ!

Had to learn a few lessons about the way LILO works (ie if you put an identically-named kernel in an identically-named partition, unless it's the exact same kernel you have to re-run the setup for LILO).

The list is not exhaustive...

Looking back they were all easy problems to solve, but without a combination of RTFM, browsing this site and asking a few questions and getting help from people here, I would not have Gentoo up and running now. Had I not had some experience on Mandrake I would not have got started.

However I'm glad I did. Everything is so much faster (Open Office up from a reboot in 15sec, or restarted in 5sec) and programs which ran poorly (Kino, Audacity) or barely at all (Cinelerra) under Mandrake working as they should under Gentoo.

I am still too nervous to get rid of my Mandrake partition just yet, though!
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canislupus · n00b Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 8 Location: London

Well, all of my problems were down to my own crealess mistakes, but there was nothing in the install process that I haven't done many, many times before, so I would say that the install process is quite unforgiving.

For example, my BIOS wouldn't boot from the install DVD I had, which meant that when I fsck'd the kernel config, I was left with an unbootable system which I had to rescue using Knoppix. Of course, I should have installed the kernel from the install disc, so that I was guaranteed at least one good kernel to boot from, but I didn't think of it.

That wasn't the only time I needed Knoppix to rescue it either...

Having said all that, I didn't at any stage get the horrible sinking feeling I've sometimes had during installs of other distros, and the effort was worth it - I absolutely LOVE Gentoo.

Apreche · Guru Joined: 18 Sep 2003 Posts: 506 Location: Beacon, NY

it wasn't actually that difficult. All I had to do was read the instructions really slowly and carefully and do exactly as they said. The problem was more that it was time consuming. Took overnight at least, even on my fast box. I'm going to do it one more time when 2.6 final comes out and the official 2.6 livecd comes with it. Then I'll never ever do it again.

rihteri · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 1:59 pm Post subject:

I voted "completely painless", but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like some automation with the basic tasks. Installs take too much time.
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X · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 2:31 pm Post subject:

It went like clock work for me.

One thing that I think would be nice is to use screen to split the terminal into two horizontal sections. On the top section default to links opened to the local gentoo installation docs, and the bottom region a regular terminal. IMHO this would be nice to do by default, and it would make things easier for new users I think.

jaska · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 2:31 pm Post subject:

It's not had, just waiting for everything to compile is the killer.

X · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 2:31 pm Post subject:

It went like clock work for me.

One thing that I think would be nice is to use screen to split the terminal into two horizontal sections. On the top section default to links opened to the local gentoo installation docs, and the bottom region a regular terminal. IMHO this would be nice to do by default, and it would make things easier for new users I think.

jaska · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 2:31 pm Post subject:

It's not hard, just waiting for everything to compile is the killer.

ed0n · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 3:09 pm Post subject:

Easy.

Just read the install guide and you'll install it

supernovus · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:23 pm Post subject:

For me it was utterly painless. Of course the fact that I'd been using LFS for a couple of years and was very used to compiling from source, and configuring the kernel probably helped.

Gentoo is easy as Pi.
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supreme_geek_overlord · Posted: Mon Nov 24, 2003 5:25 pm Post subject:

I'm not sure what to say. The docs are wonderfully detailed (compared to many other distros', but could use a few clarifications here and there), not to mention there are a whole lot of them, and the setup process is definitely not as hard as it is made out to be by plenty of competetors. I did have problems with genkernel, however, and had to eventually recompile the whole thing. Then, of course, is X (which, I know, is not technically a part of Gentoo), which I am still having trouble with (any help me [url="https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=107136&highlight="]here[/url]. I had a few other problems with LILO and stuff, but overall it was smooth but rough. Perhaps I'll vote for 'not easy or hard'...
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