While I was at work, I used there laser printers to print that 100+ page manual.. (did it in like 3 minutes too, I was like wow) anyways... After reading through the manual it seems tempting at the least. Any personal opinions and/or experiences? With my hardware listed below would I even see a performance increase? Or is this mainly to beef up older hardware? I want to move on from mandrake, and I dunno if this is a good way to learn, or maybe another distro? Any time you could take to give your opinion, would be appriciated. I find most on here speak from experience, rarely from hear say.

I see mainly slackware and gentoo as the ultimate distro, but maybe Im wrong. I do want to drop the bloat, and I dont even use mandrakes gui's anymore anyway. Sounds silly, but less problems and more reliable to use the command line.

Thanks in advance.

I'm pretty confident that your machine would be supported entirely by the latest version of Gentoo.

I just installed Gentoo a couple weeks ago and am loving it. I had to install a few times to get it all correctly, but if you follow that manual its not bad at all. Portage is great and the Gentoo community is very helpful.

I learned quite a bit by installing Gentoo as well. I am not sure that I really buy into the fact that compiling your own software on your machine makes it run considerably faster, but my Gentoo system is the fastest I've used. I credit the lack of bloat for that, that and the fact that you can compile binaries for your processor, unlike other distributions that build everything to work on 386s. It is possible to compile your own software on these distros though... I think Gentoo just makes it easier.

Anyway, I'd say, give it a go if you've got the manual printed out and a little time on your hands... I don't think I'll be giving up Gentoo for quite awhile...

Thanks. Gentoo it is. Im already stuck because my wifi isnt supported on the live cd. But Ill either roll her down to my AP, or install from mandrake. But after joining the community, and reading through, I went ahead and made a plethora of benches with and without overclock. So Ill see if there is much to be happy about. Even if there par, I dont care. I like the fact everything is compiled for my machine, and no extra crap I dont want. Wish me luck. Again, thank you for your reply.

Which live cd are you using to install? I used 2004.0 a couple weeks ago, but 2004.1 was released just a few days ago...

I find it much easier to install from an existing distribution you might want to try that instead of the live cd.

Its the 2004.1 I think. But I must admit, Im impressed with the livecd, very cool indeed. I agree with sh1ft, I think Ill just move mandy to a traffic drive, reformat my main, install gentoo, wipe my mandy, the reformat it to a single partition traffic drive, reinstall grub and there I go... God isnt linux great:?

You can also use knoppix to start the install

I switched from RedHat to Gentoo about 8 months ago. It started off as curiousity but it quickly turned into love. Their is no doubt that it is much harder to use and absolutely much harder to install. The two things I love most about Gentoo are the portage system and the Gentoo Forums. Pretty much any problem you have can be found in the Gentoo forums. They have the best support for their distro. Portage just rocks. Its like apt-get on steriods. So many packages too!

I'm also not convinced that compiling from source creates faster binaries but I can tell you that it definetly creates more stable binaries. Many of the rpms installed on RedHat would install find and then segfault or simply not run sometimes. That just doesn't happen in Gentoo.

You will enjoy it if you go that way.

you can still install 2004.1 using the 2004.0 cd. just instead of extracting the stages and portage snapshots from CD, just download them off the net if the live CD can configure ur network.

How would I use Knoppix to boot and then install Gentoo? Sorry I'm so noob! I know how to boot Knoppix, and I know how to make all of my drives writable under Knoppix. What would I do next?

There should be a little section in the handbook about it, it was in the old one. If not do a search on the gentoo install forum, i've seen it mentioned there several times. All it is is that you have to enter the mount proc command slightly different.

It shouldn't be that much different than installing from a Gentoo LiveCD. You can boot into Knoppix, setup one of your partitions or create a new one for your Gentoo system, copy your tarball over, and go from there...

Maybe I'm forgetting something, but thats how I think one would go about this.

I printed up the Handbook a few days ago, and it seems a bit overwhelming to me... I guess because of all of the choices. I'm fairly competent on the computer, but if I do the Gentoo install with all of the choices possible, does it always recommend something (in case I don't know what to do?) Or can I skip things?

The main part of the installation handbook only tells how to set up a minimal system. There is an optional section at the end that walks you through installing X/KDE from binary packages (GRP).

There aren't really "default" choices to fall back on during the installation, because there is no installer that asks you any questions, since you do it all yourself from the command line.

I installed about a month ago, and just make sure you follow the documentation. Its really top notch stuff and didn't confuse me at all. I tried to rush the first time I installed, and messed a couple things up, but once I just made sure to follow each step, it worked great.

I'd recommend doing a Stage3 install if its your first try, its shorter so there are less chances to screw things up You can also use binary packages to install big apps like X, KDE, and Gnome.

Actually, I've finally ended up deciding to go ahead and start my attempts at Linux directly with Gentoo, and I'd like to dual boot it with XP. I'm going to grab the handbook, but I'd like to hear from people with experience on the best way to go about doin gthis.


Sorrodos, I wanted to PM you and ask some questions, but I can't seem to (it says I don't have permission?!) so I'll go ahead and ask on here (they're open to everyone though):

1) Should I have XP installed first, or does it matter?
2) Is there any good partition software that I can use to alter currently existing partitions? I have my entire drive dedicated to XP (120GB wd hdd) and I want to make it so that hda1 is XP, hda2 is Swap, and hda3 is Gentoo (at least, that's what I've been led to believe works) and I wanted to leave some space for an hda4 for maybe slackware
3) Should I do a stage3 just because I'm new, or should I go ahead and do the full stage1 install since I'm wanting to learn linux, specifically gentoo. Plus, it would get rid of alot of fluff right?

Thanks for any replies.