Gentoo Setup


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I have allready installed RH9 & Mandrake 9 but i heard much of Gentoo. I'd like to install and to play with it. It's all new for me. So i wanna know where i can get it and how does it install. Is it smooth like the distros i mentioned :cool:

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I think the smoothness of installation depends on how exotic your hardware is, but of it works well with other distros it should be OK. I have tried it on 2 machines, an old P3 that worked absolutely perfectly (after 3 days compiling) and an nforce system that had loads of new hardware (i.e. brand new gfx card and WiFi), that totally refused to work well with Gentoo (or the majority of distros), in the case of the latter system the number of errors and problems was phenomenal, incuding regular freezes and kernel panics - as well as abysmal performance (no twinbank support without loads of instability and X crashed about half a dozen times a day), and I tried twice with exactly the same results each time, although even SUSE 9 refused to work well on this system, just Fedora worked without a flaw (although Windows XP worked much better).

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there is no standard size for the install of gentoo, because everybody installs different things on their system. you choose exactly what you want to install. the base system for a really minimal installation is pretty small though - a few hundred megs. but when you install X and something like KDe or GNOME along with a few programs, that can go up to a gig or above.

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but how big are iso's? 150mb? but u need 2 live cd's to run it ?

i would like to have 1 or more full iso's, is that possible and where to find it ?

Edited by Radix
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Take a look at the install guide that rezza posted above, or the full install guide which is even more complete. It answers all the questions you've posted above =)

Basically, the difference between different types of installations:

Stage 1: (use the basic iso - 90mb - i would not recommend this if you are not on broadband/have a slow computer) you build your *entire* system (including compilers, etc) from scratch

Stage 2: (use the basic iso - 90mb, unless you want the installation to go as fast as possible, in which case use cd1, saving you a few megs download during install but adding a few megs prior to install) - builds most of the system from scratch, using a precompiled gcc, glibc, binutils.

Stage 3: use the basic iso or cd1 - gives you a working command prompt - you just need to install stuff such as kde/gnome.

Stage 3+GRP: this is the *only* reason you'll need the 2 LiveCD set - contains everything you need to get a basic desktop up and running with little or no compiling (although I believe one of the Open Office builds on one of the live cds was buggy - it probably has been fixed by now)

Take a look here for more info on which cds to choose.

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As a benchmark, it takes me around 20hrs (give or take) with this processor and amount of ram (starting from Stage 1):

-Pentium 4 2.4Ghz

-1.5GB PC2100 DDR SDRAM

EDIT: Gentoo is really easy to install if you follow the instructions guide line-for-line. When you build your kernel I suggest taking as long as possible and checking it over and over want 'cuz you don't want to recompile it again (at least I don't). Once you go Gentoo, you'll never touch another Linux distro again. :yes: Note: gentoo-dev-sources is kernel 2.6.1 and it's really stable so I suggest going with that (stable for me at least).

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Note: gentoo-dev-sources is kernel 2.6.1 and it's really stable so I suggest going with that (stable for me at least).

Personally I'd choose the mm-sources over the gentoo-dev-sources, because andrew morton's set has always been fantastic for me. And the Completely Fair Queueing works wonders for a super responsive system.

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also after you are done installing the base system you can look into the HOWTO I posted in the howto section on distributed compiling. It helps alot when you want to compile large packages.

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Personally I'd choose the mm-sources over the gentoo-dev-sources, because andrew morton's set has always been fantastic for me. And the Completely Fair Queueing works wonders for a super responsive system.

I'm not as brave or adventurous you are so I usually stick with the basic things. :p

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Newer kernel, nice progress bars, nifty graphics, funky framebuffer images.

basically, nothing thats really gonna make a difference to your final installation, but they're nice to have anyway. (also it was good to see progress bars and framebuffer images in action, because i never use that eye-candy fluff on my final system ;) )

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Gee 20hours to install a distro ("compile"). I'm getting a new AMD system when I have enough money. I have only used Gentoox Linux on the Xbox (gentoox.shallax.com). It just looks to complicated for the PC. Though I would love to try it. I guess when I get my new syetem I will have two hard drives (a 120GB and 40GB). I wouldn't want to parition the 120GB one incase it f*cks up the primary OS (windows). It just looks hard though I guess if you build it your self towards your system spec (selecting your CPU etc in the kernel) it would be fast. I've used emerge portage on Gentoox, I know what you mean by compile times lol but it's good and looks very interesting. I will definatly give it a go one day. Just looks VERY hard lol.

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