Gentoo...
 

How hard is it to install?

Say I went and got myself a printout of the manual, and followed to step by step, is it really gonna be that hard? :confused:

Not really, it does take a little bit longer than other distros which has a properly installer and precompiled binaries, but the installation guide is very easy to follow.

That depends on your level of experience and whether or not the compatability gods are on your side. If you do the stage3 install with genkernel it shouldn't be that bad ... if it works (it's not the best). If you do a stage2 you're in for a lot of fun/aggrevation.

Personally I wouldn't do it on a computer that you are absolutely dependant upon becuase it's the only one you have access to or have files on, do it on a second computer, because when you are playing around with linux, you cannot count on things to work.

It WILL be time consuming I can guarantee you that.

I guess the best advice I can give is to read the manual and see what you can understand.

You wont need to print the manual out - it's on the installation Cd and you can read it on one terminal and install on the other one plus you also can use links to read the online manual if you got networking going and check with the forums if things go wrong.Printing the whole thing is just a waste of time and ink.
The install is fairly easy if you don't got exotic hardware - I do it all the time ;-)

Hi,

install is pretty easy, just following instructions. If you want to save time, you can always use stage 3 + precompiled packages. It should take you about hour to get Gentoo with X + KDE + OpenOffice.org running on "modern" hardware.

Hmm, i never go with precompiled packages, except for stage3 install optimized for my hardware, as its all the same stuff anyways, installed with the same flags i want, not to mention that in a month of updates it will all be recompiled anyways.

My best result is about 2.5 hours with custom kernel config and compilation, starting from stage3 and going forward. Of course that's only for the system. KDE compilation takes a LONG, LONG time, expect at least 10 hours from start to end, even on the best hardware. But again we are talking about compilations.

To answer your question if its easy to install Gentoo: Yes it is VERY easy to install gentoo and the only thing that might give you pause is kernel compilation. To install: go to www.gentoo.org, print out the latest version of gentoo handbook document (be prepared, that thing is 100 pages, even if most of it is stuffing), read it and follow the instructions LINE BY LINE, even if it sais to skip to the next part, still at least read through that section. A good example of something that can be easily skipped: hotplug installation, which i find essential for any install, but its only mentioned in genkernel chapter.