by Jonathan » Mon Aug 11, 2003 3:36 pm
I've gone over to the dark side. I'm installing Gentoo, the first Linux distribution whose Time To Install isn't measured in hours or minutes but days, on Amber's 350 MHz Dell. This article is intended as both a mini review of Gentoo and chronicle of the installation process.
Why Gentoo?
I believe I first installed Debian in early '99 (Martin?). I've used Debian exclusively at home since and used Red Hat and SuSe at work and school respectively. Debian's a great distro and I recommend it to everyone. They keep working on the installer and eventually they'll get it right. Debian's package management tools, apt-get and dpkg, are excellent. Over time, however, I have grown dissatisfied with Debian. The advent of the testing version of Debian alleviated this somewhat, but not altogether.
My desire to use exim 4 for SpamAssassin was the final breaking point. The current stable package for exim was, at the time, exim 3. In fact, so was the current testing package. However, exim 4 had been out for months and was routinely used by every other distro. Users desperately seeking the functionality of 4 had even rolled their own .debs and mailed them to the package maintainer, to no avail.
This is not an isolated case. I upgraded my machine from potato to woody when I tried to install the latest version of FreeCiv, because the library version of FreeCiv required something different from what was in stable at the time.
Gentoo is a source-based distro, which means you as user have the option to compile your whole system from source. Needless to say, this takes a few days, depending on the speed of your machine and the amount of software you want to install. If you've ever confused the hell out of apt-get, wanted some feature that could be only installed at compile time, or are desperate to know exactly what commands you type to install Linux, Gentoo might be for you, too.
The Gentoo Installer
There is none, not as such. Gentoo, like Debian, is generally installed from a small bootstrap system which downloads and installs the real system from the Internet. Unlike Debian, Gentoo has no installer program which prompts you to configure things. Gentoo presents the user with a root prompt and says, "Good luck." If the idea of installing your OS by hand doesn't sit well with you, don't install Gentoo.
I, fortunately, have 2.5 more computers than the one being wiped and installed. Otherwise, I'd be in serious trouble already, as I ran out of printer paper before I finished printing the installation instructions. Last night I bootstrapped my system from a stage1 tarball. This morning I told it to emerge world. Tonight or tomorrow I'll compile my kernel.
I used the Gentoo basic LiveCD. It autodetected all my hardware and net connection. I picked ReiserFS because I wanted a journaling file system and the install instructions recommended ReiserFS over ext3. With my longtime familiarity with the crappy Debian install process, I can tell what the install instructions are telling me to do. The old Debian boot-floppies was nothing more than a prompt to run all the commands Gentoo wants you to run. (I haven't tried the new debian-installer.)
So far, so good.