Gentoo Experience
 

How was your Gentoo Experience. Any tips on installing would be great.

have you actually tried installing it yet? as long as you read the step by step guide you should be fine.

It takes a long time! If you follow the online documentation exactly, then everything turns out great. If you accidentaly skip somehting and try to go back, things can get a little cooky. Once you have everything, gentoo is incredible. It's so easy to keep the system up to date and to install programs. Thier forums are just soso, I htink you can get more relavent help here if somehting goes wrong. The only thing that's happened that i hvaen't figured out yet is why num lock and caps lock kill the mouse in X. Still searching for that one. Highly recommended though.

I would recommend that you know for sure which modules you will need (sound, pcmcia, network cards, etc) . I made a mistake of entering a wrong ethernet card module (I chose the default while compiling the kernel) and now no connectivity :(

But, as I just installed last night, I'm not too worried yet :D

I agree that if you follow the instructions step by step, it should work great (barring user errors :rolleyes: )

finally, success!
 

I had a little trouble getting my kernel to compile. I have yet to get back into menuconfig to find the troublesome module that I disabled, should have written it down.

The error I was getting was to the effect of;

net/network.o(.text+0x53597) In function 'match':
: undefined reference to 'ip_conntrack_get'

There was a couple more similar to this, but with 'init' instead of 'match'. The module was under the Netfilter options I believe (will post more accurately soon). It had something to do with connection tracking (hence '*_conntrack_*').

Aside from this, I am still working on getting X running more smoothly (fluxbox with USB trackball mouse). The trackball gave me some headaches, but is working now. Now I need to up my resolution to get a reasonable desktop.

Currently emerging "kde-base/kdebase" to have an alternate desktop.

This is fun!!!

I think I will go compile a couple more kernels and hand them out to friends! I mean when was the last time anyone saw an operating system fully up and running with X-windows and coming in just under 41MB of RAM used. And I have not even begun to tweak yet.

have fun for the next couple of days while kde compiles. Once you have kde though, you're 41MB is out the window. THen there's openoffice, gimp, evolution, xcdroast, grip, and anything else that gentoo will do that you want. Gentoo rocks!

yeah, I kicked off this build about 5:30 tonight, it is now 12:30 am and still going. I am going to bed, see if it is done in the morn.

well, after 12 hours, kde is finally installed. Great, whoopidee doo.

The X resolution is CRAP! (disclaimer, this has nothing to do with kde)

I have never had this much trouble getting my screen resolution up over 320x240.

Why in the name of all that is sacred does this thing tell me that 1024x768 & 1280x1024 are invalid resolutions?

Redhat thinks they are just peachy.

</rant>
By the way, this is a 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 PCI card with 16MB video ram. XFree86 4.3.0, using xdm & fluxbox. Just in case any1 has any ideas. I tried with kde 3.1.0 and still had problems with display size.

Back to happy-hacking my XF86Config file, eventually I will get this lousy thing.

Hopefully I won't offer my PC as a burnt sacrifice to the gods before then!

heres the clip from my Screen section;

Folks:

How easy is it to do a dual boot with Gentoo? I've been hearing good things about it, and Red Hat seems to have issues with my desktop...

Thanks,

--Erich

jdc2048--

Do you have your horizontal and vertical refresh rate stuff set properly? I know that if those are wrong, things are crap. Just a suggestion.

Tso--
Dual booting with gentoo is just the same as dual booting with any other distro. Just tell lilo or grub where to boot. I prefer grub...it makes sense to me unlike lilo.

It may well be the vert/hor refresh, thing, although, XFree86 -config finds my monitor for me. Of course this whole plug-n-pray thing is just gravy anyway. Nothing like doing it the hard way!

Come to think of it, there is nothing in my XF86Config about the vert/hor refresh rates??? aaackk, back to the drawing board.

busbarn,

Okay, I have a hard time getting a feel for installing distros in general, because I have only installed Mandrake and Red Hat. Red Hat 8.0 in particular was really easy to ask it to make it dual boot during the install, and I wasn't sure that was a universal thing.

Thanks,

--Erich

I'll stick with Slack; I don't like the apt-get.

tso,
I don't know where your level of experience is, but Gentoo is no easy undertaking. And I would never attempt this on a dial-up either. I would venture to guess that gentoo is about 1 step above LFS in terms of building from scratch.

Yeah - right! apt-get gentoo :D :D :D
Actually you can do that with debian.

Setup is easy - just follow the documentatition step by step.You'll have to setup the bootloader yourself and there isn't exactly a lot about this in the doc's.