Okay, tried Slackware, and didn't get too many places with it. So i'm gonna go with Gentoo, and see how that goes. But, maybe i'm blind, I can't find the download link! =D Can someone post that for me? e.e Also, I have a fourty gig hard drive, and I left Six thousand megabites in a Windows partition. Couple things I can still do with it, so left it there for now, in the background. Any suggestions on partition size? For root, home, swap, boot... Very much appreciated!

There's a link right at the top of the Gentoo homepage that says, "Get Gentoo!". Not sure about partition sizes, someone else can advise you on that. Usually I just have / and swap, / taking up most of the drive. It's definitely up to you though.

If you click "Get Gentoo!" at the top of the Gentoo home page, it'll bring you here:
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

which has links to download the install CD you need. As for partition sizes, the general rule for swap is RAM x 2, though I personally find that to be a bit antiquated. On my desktop, I've got 1024 MB of ram and I made my swap partition to be only 128 MB as I have never once seen my machine use swap and don't intend on wasting lots of space for something I don't need. I don't do anything hugely memory-intensive on my machine, however, so your mileage may vary.

As for the other partitions, I always make just / and /var partitions (putting /var on its own partition helps reduce fragmentation, or more correctly helps contain it to one partition as data in /var tends to change often) to keep it simple on myself, but I imagine the partitioning schemes and reasons behind using them are quite numerous. That said, it probably makes best sense to make your root partition fairly big as it'll house the bulk of your system as well as making your /home partition fairly large if you intend on storing lots of files in your home directory. /boot doesn't need to be too big, unless you plan on having multiple kernels installed. I keep a running kernel and a backup and my /boot partition is 50 MB which is plenty.

I'm sure others can give you their suggestions on partitioning and you might want to search these forums and Google for partitioning schemes. Think about what you intend to use your machine for and choose the one that best fits in with that intended useage. Also, you might want to take a look at Gentoo's excellent documentation, specifically the Gentoo Linux Handbook's section on preparing the disks:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=1&chap=4

Hope that helps!

What problem are you trying to solve???? Gentoo is not exactly the most user-friendly distro, so if you had trouble with Slackware, then you may be in for more grief.
Have you tried any of the "entry-level" free distros?--eg Fedora, Ubuntu

Uhh, no, forget about Gentoo. You don't want to go through thiss hell of an installation. Believe me. It is stable and fast though. I'm not sure what have you got against Slack? And, one more thing. I guarantee, you will be so angry at portage after a few months, you will switch. Really.

Nah, Portage is one of the best things about Gentoo. emerge <package>. Easy, resolves dependancies. What's not to like? Granted, unless you run ~x86 it is not bleeding edge. But you can have bleeding edge or you can have stable. Me, I choose stable.

As far as installation - follow the handbook to the letter and you shouldn't have problems. Give it a try, nothing to loose.

You must be joking!! Some people have lives, you know. We cannot wait 3 hrs on a 1.1 GHZ proc just to get Firefox!!
Well, apt also resolves deps, and it resolves them fast. Slack has virtually no deps. RPM systems suck.

Really, Gentoo has been the best thing that has ever happened to my Linux education... I don't know why people say its hard.. many people on linuxquestions.org did originally to me and that put me away from it for a long time....don't say it..try it, its not hard, just more steps then a SuSE or redhat install. I regret not trying it earlier.. plus you cant beat the community. Gentoo has some of the best wikis and documentation and often I link gentoo wikis to my other suse and fedora friends because most stuff is relevant. I Originally tried it for kicks but soon saw how awesome my system preformed and a higher lvl of appreciation you have for how things work. I'm not starting a holy distro war because it is important to choice a distro that best suits YOUR needs, not mine or John Smith's down the road. Check it out you will most likely love it.. I think everyone should try it for a few months them selves regardless of what distro they 'always' use.


and with documentation follow it to the point.. help your self before asking questions about the installation process. As for partitions as talked about earler its up to you.. I normaly do this (my current setup)

/dev/sda1 boot ext2 64M (you could do less but even with a few kernels in /boot its hardly filled up
/dev/sda2 swap roughly dubble your ram (old wise tall personaly) I set mine to 1024M the same as my ram.. im not doing 2048
/dev/sda3 / ext3 rest of hdd and this would hold the rest of your linux file system and directorys

or of course you can mk partitions with fdisk for any root directory you want then just mount and put in /etc/fstab

I joke not! Portage is one of the best things (imo) about Gentoo. The other is the community as mentioned above.

If you absolutly, positively have to have it right now, just install the binary builds. That's what I did with OpenOffice. Of course if you do that you lose some optimisation.

Apt is also a great way to go. Slack does have deps, you just have to resolve them yourself. I agree with RPMs - had nothing but problems with them.

Somebody above mentioned Gentoo is not user-friendly. Maybe it's not very newbie-friendly. I certainly find it most user-friendly distro I ever had. With Gentoo I've achieved most with least effort. I'm talking about system optimization, efectiveness and usability here.

Yeah, it gives a chance to learn a whole lot. But portage is SOOO ANNOYING!!! I have no time for compilation. Ihave no time to live. Because of gentoo , I had no time to sleep. Good for educating N00bz but bad for real use.

You don't have to sit there and watch screens of C compilation scroll by.