Hey people, I don't really get how I install gentoo, I can't get the livecd to boot, and it looks like installing from a minimal cd would be hard, I'm trying to make a dual-boot of gentoo with my windows xp, I've read the manual and it looks like it will take a lot of work to install it, is there any easier way of installing gentoo other than the minimal install/livecd?

I tried gentoo some months ago, and that was the only way of installing, it's a step by step procedure, and that's funny, it's some kind of 'do it yourself'. In that way you can build a very customized system.

have fun

If you search any easy way, you can install another distro, like Ubuntu.
This way install Gentoo

Hmm, I'll just try using the minimal cd, do you know how I can get my 1 gb flash drive working to transfer the stage3 tarball?
Also thanks for the suggestion of ubuntu, but that is really slow, and crashed half way through the installation and trashed my disk

The flash drive should work out-of-the-box. You just need to mount it, for example, after the chroot step (you'll know what that means once you read the handbook), you could do something like:

Of course, use whatever your drive is instead of "sda1", you can see a listing of the available drives using "fdisk -l".

since ubuntu was slow and crashed seems to me you need a lighter distro. puppy, vectorlinux, tinyme, and few others out there are easy to install and work better then ubuntu. Debian with a base install with lxde desktop, or slackware are good for a system with low resources. gentoo also works, but after the base system is installed have to compile to get a gui x desktop which can take a while on a slow system.

Hey colorpurple, I tried ubuntu and got it working once, but I got bored with it not supporting my hardware fully, so I just installed xp again. In a later version, 7.10 I tried to install it again, it crashed through the installation and killed my disk, I rebooted and tried again, but ubuntu wouldn't stop complaining about the disk was damaged and wouldnt even boot the cd, So I'll just install Gentoo which should be OK for this.
Also thanks i92guboj, I'll try that

Looks like it will take a LOT of work, a lot more than i expected, I think i'll just give up on gentoo for now until i can be bothered with all those steps

I've installed Gentoo ... the only complaint I have about it is that it takes so long, but it's not really a weakness, it's just that everything is compiled. It takes much longer to download and compile* everything than it does to go through the installation steps.

*EDIT
I wrote download and install, but it doesn't take longer to download and install it than it does to install it.

Installing Gentoo is something :P but once you have a working Gentoo box, it's pretty hard to change to something else after that :P

The first mistake you made was to choose Linux. It will force you to become much more knowledgeable about computers and operating systems. I partitioned my XP's Hard drive with Gentoo 2004 or thereabouts and it was stable. Then got impatient since 2008.0 was published on LinuxFormat coverdisc and trashed the disc through the GUI install. Had to re-install the XP.

No matter, I now have an Acer Aspire with Linpus Linux but will install Gentoo by hand. That way I can use the 8GB for the OS and programs with data stored on an external hard drive. Now I just have to find out how to make an ISO image of the installed Gentoo for a recovery disc - if that is possible. Should be, it's Linux!