I'm on old fart who's been working in the computing and data communications fields since 1965, so in general terms I'm hardly a Newbie. But even though I've been using Gentoo Linux at home for several years I really AM a Newbie in the Linux area.

I chose & installed Gentoo with a view to using it to learn my way around Linux, but I've been too damned busy to do so. Earlier this year I decided to do a re-install of Gentoo since I'd had absolutely no success at getting my Sound & USB support operational since upgrading to the 2.6 Kernel. I had hoped that the install process would be easier than it was in 2003, but unfortunately not.

The 2006.0 X-based LiveCD installer simply wouldn't work on my hardware. I struggled with it for a while, then because I needed the system operational quickly I ended up installing KDE UBUNTU instead. That never worked properly, and their queer root setup drove me nuts. For example, it refused to allow me to set up a driver for my LPR printer. Yes, I've been around a while and I know that given time I could have figured out what was going on and got it operational. But spare time is one thing I simply don't have.

By Christmas I'd had enough of KUBUNTU so I thought I'd give Gentoo 2006.1 a try. I hoped they'd fixed their installer issues but no, I had exactly the same problem again. But this time I had more time so I did a "gentoo nox" start instead and went back to the command line mode. The install script screwed up due to space issues but I overcame that by deciding to do a minimal install and add the big things I need (OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird etc) later. That got me through the basic install process OK, but not correctly. I've been unable to get the new system to boot up. VFS is unable to mount my root partition (SDA3 - ReiserFS).

I've checked all the obvious things without any luck so far. Yes I have ReiserFS support integrated into the Kernel rather than as a module, etc, etc. When I built this system some years back I made the mistake of installing a pair of the then very new SATA hard drives in it! It seems that SATA support is still as much trouble now as it was back then. I'll get there eventually, but it's neither easy nor intuitive!

The other problem I have is that I haven't yet found an easy way to get files/screen dumps/etc off this system onto my still-working Windoze XP box. Maybe there's an FTP server I can run under the Gentoo LiveCD environment, I haven't checked yet. Anyway I currently can't easily document any issues I have to report them.

The reason I started with Gentoo originally was that I was looking for something I could use to keep me busy in retirement, and thought I'd like to contribute to the project. But now I've bought a rural property in a beautiful location that is going to keep VERY busy. That's the main reason I now have no time! I spend most weekends there, and the small amount of spare time I would have during the week is spent getting ready for the next weekend! But I'm having a ball!

Welcome!

G-day Don, and welcome. You do give yourself a task, don't you. Never had any luck with Ubuntu myself, nor Gentoo for that matter, nor SuSe. Have used Caldera, Redhat, Slackzip, PuppyLinux(love that one) and several other distro's. Have come to regard Mandriva very highly. Still using 2006, too many hiccups with 2007 at the moment, for my liking. Have even intsalled Mandriva 2006 to my Acer laptop in server mode, just for the fun of it. Yep, I got me a portable server, Linux is just such a lot of fun. Am a retired Marine Engineer myself, live in rural SA, and even still have one machine on Winslows, for gaming, I love a race simulator called Live for speed, and as yet there is no Linux port for it, so I still need MS for one application, BUGGER.

Regards and best wishes,

Shorty943.

registered Linux user 437639.