Fred's Random Thoughts Frederic Jean's Weblog

Installing Gentoo

I have been an Red Hat/Fedora user for a long time. Red Hat Linux was my first succesful Linux experience, I am very familiar with the product, and it was working just fine for me.

That is until I tried to install Fedora Core 2 on my system. First, Anaconda wouldn't go past detecting the monitor. I then thought I would be clever and attempt to install it through apt-get. The end result was an unusable machine.

I was always curious about Gentoo, so I gave it a try. The whole process went very well. I got a stage 3 install done, connected to the internet and emerged the Gnome desktop. After 3 days of automated downloading and compilation, some X.org configuration, and a bit of head banging, I finally had a running desktop. I thought that having OpenOffice.org would be a good thing, so I emerged it. It only took 2 days before it was done.

I am slowly discovering that although Gentoo might not be the distro for me. It just takes too long to get everything I need downloaded, compiled and installed. Of course, I could go the way of binary packages and save some time, but that would go against the Gentoo spirit.

I've therefore decided that I would give Solaris x86 yet another try. I downloaded an internal build, burned the CDs and will take some time over the next few days to do the installation. Worst case scenario, I'll end up having to find something else to install there.