With all the good things I keep hearing about gentoo, I'm going to have to try it... I've heard that the install can be rough though...

Is it graphical? I'm going to have to do a dual boot as well will this be hard or is it as easy as say red hat 9.0 or suse 9.0?

I was looking for some subjective infromation but that's ok also... thx

my installation experience... well i didn't really enjoy it but when it was over I felt very good. I learned quite a lot beeing a n00b and had to retry a couple of times before getting it right.

What bothered me was that I had to wait about 4 days to log in. the installation just takes too long if you're trying to setup a desktop environment.

The gentoo install is no different from other installs.Reading is needed and if the hardware is supported you are fine.If the hardware isn't supported you are in trouble and have to swing over to the gentoo forums and do a search (it's a good idea to do that before the install and search for your hardware to see if there are any known issues).

Is it really *that* much better a distro than the others? Or is that just hype?

I wouldn't say it is BETTER than other distros. I was using Mandrake for a long time then switched over to Gentoo. I like gentoo because you have alot more control over your install. I have also found that it run faster because you can compile the whole system from scratch. I can take a long time to compile from scratch. It took about 2 days on my p4 2.4 machine and about 1 day on my AMD64 3400+. You should completely read the install docs before you install. You can learn alot about linux installing Gentoo.

To answer your question about graphical install the answer is no. It is all done from command line.

Bill

Hehe, sorry.

Gentoo install isn't the easiest thing, but you do learn a lot. Also, the Gentoo forums is a great place to get help if you run into problems.

Gentoo's portage system is excellent as well, for staying up to date, and having a system that was built for your hardware.

Besides Gentoo, I've used Mandrake, and as someone who's always curious, Gentoo suits me much better than Mandrake.

edited

I guess that I don't want to sound like an ogre, but I think that gentoo is a little hyped. I have tried almost every distro out there including gentoo. I found that all systems are equivalent given the proper amount of time tweaking and adjusting the settings. People talk about "bloat" in distros - so don't install everything. People talk about systems running faster when compiled from scratch - while marginally true, it hardly makes a difference. One guarantee that does come from self-compiled systems is stability. It is not uncommon to install a pre-compiled binary and get segfaults, errors, and crashes. Yet when you build the system yourself you are guaranteed that it will be its most stable otherwise it would not compile! So the moral of the story? Gentoo is great and is for the hardcore. You want to be hardcore; then do it otherwise there is little to be gained by going with another distro. I personally run a Gentoo system and a SuSE system. Both are great.

My 2 cents - I was interested in giving Gentoo a try a few months back, and really liked what the Gentoo site said about its philosophy, etc, but after spending pretty much an entire weekend trying to do a stage 2 installation, I threw in the towel. It was very, very time consuming, and even on a reasonably powerful machine (P4, 512Mg RAM, 80G drive, blah blah blah) things just took forever, and eventually I decided that it just wasn't worth it. Some people may say "Quitter!" but during my Linux adventures, at one point or another I've installed Slack, Redhat, Fedora, Knoppix, and Mandrake, and I kind of think that I mostly know what's going on and how to do it. With Gentoo it pretty much was a series of "Sheesh! Now what?" type of situations during the installation, at least for me. Obviously other people are big fans of Gentoo but I considered it to be a waste of time with no payoff. Please understand I'm not trying to be critical or discouraging here, but that's my honest feedback.

YMMV however, and naturally I wish you better success than I had with it. Good luck with the project. -- J.W.

Well... I don't want to do this command line based install that take forever just for the sake of being 1337 or whatever... If it really is that much better than I'll put in time... I'll be compling on a dual athlon rig, so I'm sure that would cut down on the time and all but I'm sure it will still take a few days.

What about this compling process makes things go so much smoother?

I don't know if smoother is the correct word. Like I said before, it is more stable. When you compile something on your machine you are guaranteed that it will work on that machine because it was able to compile. Meaning that it linked into the correct libraries, you have all of the pre-reqs etc. That is a very basic explanation, but it suffices. All smoothness that people talk about is the placebo effect, it is most likely imagined - since the idea of one interface being smoother than another is rather subjective.

Gentoo is kind of (elite - I refuse to use the jargon ) but what it offers above other distros is the fact that it is "always" up to date. You don't have new versions to contend with and all updates are available via portage. But the big question that you must ask yourself is how valuable is this, and is it worth the time to install it? You will learn a lot about linux with the Gentoo install, that is one of the perks, but it could take days to fully compile everything.

*Ponders about the time , Gentoo would need to compile on 486SX25 with 16MB....*
You think it'd be finished before christmas?
Provided , there's no power-outage , that is.....

Before Christmas? HA HA HA HA. Would be a nice present.