Brandon: How to install Gentoo Linux in less than a week.

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So, I decide I want to throw linux back on my computer now that I have all this extra space. So, I download my old favorite distro, Mandrake. Mandrake is nice and all, but it has some problems, mainly, it uses it's own configuration utilites to configure most of the system, and I just happen to prefer the standard utilites.

So I download Gentoo, the ultimate in customizable distros. Gentoo is cool mainly because of the fact that each and every package is compiled on your machine for your architecture. That is fine and all, except when you have to compile your entire OS, from the ground up, it can take some time. Like, a day, or a week, or a month. Who knows. I've been installing it since this morning, and it's compiling in the background as I speak.

Here are some tips for those of you brave enough to try and brew your own linux install using Gentoo.

• Read all the docs before you start. Look over the linux fdisk manual and the GRUB bootloader manual as well.
  
• Compile in support for your root filesystem, don't make it a loadable module.
  
• X11 and Xorg X servers do not like SSE extensions, Take them out of your USE paramaters or it will crash, and crash often during compile
  
• Segfaults happen, just start the emerge again and it hopefully will make it past it.
  
• Compiles take time. KDE has like 71 or some ungodly number of dependencies. Prepare to wait and wait and wait.
  
  I'm typing this using the links webbrowser in directFB mode, it's rather nice.
  
  Mood: Compiling
  Music: Stargate SG1 Theme
  
  
  

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