Installing Gentoo
I'm currently installing Gentoo Linux 2005.0 onto the 500MHz that recently crashed. So far I have been through Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 10.0-10.2, and Ubuntu 5.04. I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try. Unlike most other distros, which prepare downloads in pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo does everything from source. For a stage 1 install of the operating system, you first run a live cd, then use the compiler on the live cd to compile the gcc compiler. Quite literally everything on the computer has been compiled by the end user (for a stage 1 install). It is not terribly difficult, as scripts do most of the work for you, and there is a step-by-step handbook available online. I read the first couple pages in the book yesterday, and started the install process this morning. It took me from 8:30 to 11:00 to step through the initial set up phase (that includes about an hour of downloading stages and portage info). I basically read the manual off my Pentium 4 while doing the install on my Pentium 3. At around 11:30 I started my stage 1 compilation, and when they say it takes a long time, they mean it. On my Pentium 3 500MHz with 256MB of RAM, it wasn't until 2:00 that I got a compilation error. Turned out that there was a "bootstrap comparison failure" with the file gcse.o from the gcc package. Googling didn't turn up much, and most of the solutions out there were to do a make clean and then try again. So I changed my compilation options from the very aggressive -O3 optimization scheme to the relatively aggressive -O2, and set it back to work. It is now 5 hours later, and I'm still waiting for it to finish. I've always wondered what it would be like to have an entire operating system compiled specifically for my architecture. No longer will I be using i386 binaries, but instead will have -march=pentium3 -msse -mmmx -mfpmath=sse specifically for my Katmai CPU. It will be exciting. I think I will also try out Fluxbox as my window manager, though I'm whimping out and keeping the GTK and QT libraries around. I hope I can get past stage 2 before I have to go to bed, as stage 3 will probably take a day or two to compile through. Windows XP doesn't seem like such a long install process in comparison!
3 comments:
The stage 1 compile finished successfully shortly after the post. At around 9:00 the stage 2 compile failed, and I restarted it without changing anything. It will be interesting to see if it makes it through on the second try.
Installing Gentoo was pretty fun for me, also a stage 1 on my Pentium 4 M laptop @ 2.4 GHz... time-wise, it took about a week but only because of KDE and OOo... I've dumped KDE in the meantime [but I hang on to some of the base libs for other apps] in favour of XFCE and I use OOo from binaries [same with Eclipse as a matter of fact].
The downside of Gentoo is having to wait a bit for packages to enter the safe tree but that's only if you need a stable distro and cannot afford the ocassional risk of installing stuff outside of portage.
The upsides are numerous... I've had my install for about a year now and I honestly cannot find a reason to switch distros anymore... By the way the handbook is on the LiveCD too, as well as the very useful irssi IRC client... since I only had my laptop at time of install, it was pretty darn useful to keep me entertained [honestly, how much BOFH can one read in links2? =)] also irssi is great for getting support on irc.freenote.net #gentoo [but I suppose you know that already =)]
cheers and... enjoy the distro!
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