I have dabbled in linux with several different distros and still consider myself a newbie. I have heard a lot of talk about gentoo's speed, stability, and package management, as well as its incredibly long installs. I've tried ubuntu, mandrake, debian, fedora, and suse, but didn't find a winner. I really want to try this distro but am somewhat timid due to my inexperience with linux. Am I making a mistake or just a big deal out of nothing?

the first distro i installed was gentoo, although i don't recommend it as your first. it took the better part of 3 days without sleep to get it to run properly. a stage 3 installation isn't hard at all, and the handbook walks you through step-by-step.

if nothing else, you'll learn a lot. i'd give it a shot.

thanks, I think I will. Never hurts to learn...

You can do it and it is worth it,it takes me 1 good day with a p4 and 2 days with a p3 to get everything installed printing samba and I use fluxbox or openbox + alot of gnome stuff nautilus etc,plus mc xmms gimp and a bunch more.Print out the handbook and the quick install checklist guide and hang around the forum,installing gentoo to see what others forget to do.Just follow the handbook and print out your important files like xorg.conf your net stuff etc.You can boot up the live cd and practice,just don't format and make a file-system until you are ready.Alsa have a knoppix cd handy so if you need to ask a Question you can.Once it is installed you can keep it as up to date as you want.I use to update once a week at the beginning but now I do it every few months.I have had this system for over a year and it is very current plus its has not seen a reboot for over 6 months,very stable.I use the p3 to play around with because I get bored.

Gentoo isn't anywhere near as hard as it's made out to be, certainly give it a go but if you don't manage I'd suggest giving Arch Linux a shot, shameless promotion for my distro of choice I know but it's fantastic and it converted me from the great Gentoo so it can't be that bad

thanks guys, I'm installing as we speak so cross your fingers.

I've installed gentoo three times now, and every time I reboot after installing the grub loader i get this error:

My root and home partitions are formatted with reiserfs, why do I get this error?

I don't suppose this place has a gentoo forum, cause I can't seem to find it.
Am I really that much of an idiot?

You may want to have a look at your /etc/fstab (as lined out in the installation handbook). Your system thinks you have an XFS partition - one is defined in the default example /etc/fstab. You need to edit this file in order to reflect your own partitioning scheme.


Håkan

I changed my root and home partitions in the fstab from xfs to reiserfs and I still get this error, I dont have any xfs partitionsin my table or defined in fstab...

If you are installing Gentoo, hopefully you have found the handbook. You should also similarly have found the forums.
Gentoo has a tremendous community - here
Time there will be well spent. The search engine is a bit rudimentary, but is usable.

As for your problems, those are not grub messages. Do you have the requisite filesystem types included in your kernel ???.

Both of the things I thought of at first have been mentioned, here's the checklist I'd follow if I were receiving that error:

Check /etc/fstab to ensure the entry for / was absolutely correct, correct device, correct FS, correct options values, correct mount point, correct dump and fsck.

Then I'd move onto kernel support for that filesystem.

Then I'd dig deeper, I'd fdisk the device and ensure that the partition id's were set correctly for the filesystem I put on there.

You can also use the Gentoo CD to boot up, mount the partitions:
mount /dev/hdx /mnt/gentoo
And then:
mount
To see what filesystem it found when mounting them, just a backup to ensure it's not an error in the formatting of the filesystem.

Cool

If it's any help, my fstab looks like this->


/etc/fstab: static file system information.
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.14 2003/10/13 20:03:38 azarah Exp $
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs defaults,ro 0 3
/dev/hda2 /boot ext3 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hda5 / reiserfs noatime 0 1
/dev/hda6 /home reiserfs noatime,user,exec 0 2
/dev/hda7 /mnt/fat32 vfat user,rw,exec,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
/dev/hda3 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,user 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0


And that was done using the handbook with a stage 3 + GRP install. The only downside was that when I got my disc's, I left it for a week or two and "they'd" released a later version, so when I did the "emerge --update --deep world", it took damn near 48 hours to get the updates and compile them!

You should notice, that to get the system running I only actually needed to have the entries for hda2, 3, 5 and 5 "sorted" (plus the one for proc, I don't know whether I need the one for /dev/shm so I left it there)!


Oh and having installed in this way, I can genuinely say that it's best to follow the installation docs as religiously as you can. there's a few small and relatively insignificant things you can do wrong and cause you a huge amount of anger/frustration/head scratching/etc etc.

The look at the gentoo forums (linked in an earlier post).

regards

John

Maybe we'd better see that grub.conf, and the command(s) you used to install grub

This is what my /mnt/gentoo/etc/fstab looks like:

this is my /boot/grub/grub.conf file:

and both of the reiserfs partitions mount fine and I made sure to install the reiserfs support packages.
Whats wrong?