A couple weeks ago I acquired a oldish HP Desktop. By default I slapped old trusty Mandrake10 on it, just to see what it had. With no hurry, I poked around at new distros and came upon Gentoo at the fine advice of another forum member.
I started with minimal boot system on 6GB partition, and basically set emerge to work. I checked back occasionally to issue new orders and see what's up.
The system just kept churning away like low gear in an army truck, compiling it's own body, like DNA recombining maybe. All the base system infrastructure libs and stuff. Xorg and Window manager, then media player and file manager. It just kept going with nary a hiccup.
Just today it finished compiling Firefox. Years ago I managed to get Mozilla-1.6 to compile after much difficulty. It had a decent wysiwyg HTML editor. Since then I have never been able to get a full-blown web browser to compile. At the mercy of precompiled binaries for a decade or so.
Everything has been done through ssh. I finally pulled the screen & keyboard out from under the table where it lives. There it is: Firefox running, looking at right here at LQ.
The whole emerge process I basically guessed at some packages and it just worked. The was some twiddling with Python to get FF to go, and a couple other odd messages where I felt like I should RTFM or something, but otherwise it was easier than I can even believe. Brand new OS fetched entirely from imaginary ether sparkles and compiled on borderline legacy hardware with plenty of miles left in it.
There's no way I can thank all the people who made this possible, so maybe just a big general Thank You to everyone who makes LQ happen and all the unsung heroes who have helped create what I think is the greatest achievement of humankind - Linux.
Any old dummies can pile rocks into pyramids.
