Does anyone use Gentoo ? i am trying to use it but i cant figre out how to do it ? what is the best way to install gentoo ? there seem to be so many ways! i tryied using the LiveCD but i tryied using "2004.2 minimal" but it wouldn boot so i tried "2004.1 universal" and it wouldn auto detect my network settings, found eth0 when booting but when i tried "ifconfig" my eth0 connection wasnt there. so im downloading the "2004.2 universal LiveCD" to hope it has the drivers for my NIC (it is built in to the mainboard)

does anyone know of a better way to install gentoo? also what are the stages all about ?

Well unless you want to update and download everything needed during install i would go with the 2004.2.universal disc.

Boot it up and follow the handbook installation guide form the gentoo.org website. or print it out first...

There are instructions on how to get your network configured during the installation process there.. works fine.. trust me.. i installed gentoo numerous time, both from behind firewalls, nats ect without a problem Actually learned alot.

However if you are using linux for the first time perhaps gentoo isnt really the way you want to go ? I mean it's no graphical install, you edit and setup everything by hand... though they have what i would call the best forums for help ever

ok, first thats that was a help. i am a linux user, im running a FreeBSD server and currently Fedora2 which im not impressed with. i used to use only redhat9 my server then i switched my windows b0x to fedora2 and its poor. the main thing that annoys me is that when using the gui and browsing through files every time you double click on a file to open it, it opens in a new window and it is REALLY annoying other than that its pretty much ok i guess but nothing special so the browsing thing anoys me. i have heard many good things about gentoo so i wanted to try it (i also want to try slackware) but im not sure how to install gentoo i kind of want to download everything fresh of the inet so i get all the latest things well i only really want Gnome 2.8, it looks really good! just for the record i prefer Gnome 2.4 to 2.6.
im going to use the universal disc i have nearly downloaded it so when i get it i will install

im looking forward to it, i love learning how to do more on linux because so many things confuse the hell out of me so as i pick new things up other things make more sense

slackware was good, bsd based, but with slackware 9 they removed a lot of good stuff, then in 10 they added a lot of bad and the istro I leanred with and spent 5 years with was dead to me (R.I.P. Slackware) so I switched to gentoo. I have always hated the redhat/fedora stuff, and suse and mandrake seemed to me liek they were just following redhats downhill lead. Debian sparked my interest for a little while, but it was to big and had to much, just way overblown, but liek a baloon, plenty of surface area not a lot of substance. Gentoo however I have come to love unconditionally.

to use gentoo you need to knwo what you want. the live cd' will bood you to a workign linux environment, then you manually create the partitions and filesystems you want, it is nto done for you, that is the philosophy of gentoo, nothing done for you to ensure it is done how you want. after the partitions are made you mount them to /mnt/gentoo/whatever. you then extract one of 3 stage tarballs, stage 3 will extract a working basic linux system, don't expect to much from it, plus it will be optimised only for 686 or something liek that, nothing specific toyour hardware (pointless with gentoo) stage 2 is where you extract the basic required files for a linux system and some development binaries (gcc, glibc, etc) then you must install everything else manually. stage 1 does not even have gcc or glibc, you need to bootstrap it from nothing.

why:

with stage one you compile every single library and program specificly to your hardware and optimization flags, it might take a while to compile (using distcc to spread compiling across my main system (p4 2.2 1gb ram) and my 2 slave systems (1ghz athlon and 1ghz pIII) it took 2 days to finish (though it was more like 16 hours because a lot fo it was sitting there waiting for me to issue a command)

with stage 2 the basic stuff is there, you can get it optimised for 686, pentium4, or athlon. then you install the rest.

with stage three a lot fo the most commot system stuff is in there for you, but there is no optimization.

once you have the tarball extracted you chroot into the setup
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

at which point you are kinda inside the new installation

from there you can install what you need, with a stage 1 you run a bootstrap script they provide and wait a few hours then go on to stage 2 work

in stage 2 you type emerge system
emerge is the gentoo way to download and install software, it will download the sources compiel them and install them, as well it takes care of dependancies
after emerge system is done (a few hours) go to stage 3 stuff

in stage 3 you do the finish up work, you install a logger and a bootloader.

then you reboot and you have a minimal working gentoo setup.

say you want x-windows you type emerge xorg-x11 or emerge xfree that will instal xwindows and all it's dependancies.

then you want gnome or kde type emerge gnome or emerge kde

you want mozilla
emerge mozilla

I think you get the point, it will install what you want and only what you want, and it will install it to your specifications and optimizations. in the end you will have a perfect distro small as can be, fast as can be, everything you need to top it off.

wow, i couldnt have hoped to talk to someone with more knowlage than you. i think i will be using the stage 2, stage 1 sounds a bit to compex for me but stage3 to common.

gentoo does sound really good, im looking forward to trying it out. ive got about an hour to wait till i can install

stage 1 is 2 extra commands, the rest is automatic.

oh also it will download the packages as you need them, it does not have them on the cd

Ok, I have a question now, I always TAR the stage2-i686 tarball but I always bootstrap the system, and then afterwards, I always emerge system. Is that hurting me by any chance? I have two desktops and one laptop running gentoo and I have always done it that way. All of them are running a 2.6 kernel. Let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

FnkDrSpok

Thats ok to use a different stage and still bootstrap but with stage1 it just include everything for the bootstrap process and is smaller. I don't use the live cd to install instead I use SystemRescueCD which is based on gentoo the difference is you have to download stages but links is compiled with graphics so you can surf the web while system installs also you can use qtparted instead mkfs & fdisk but the best part is you can use reiser4.

FnkDrSpok:
I do not see how it would hurt anything, except maybe wasting time downloading th elarger tarball only to override almost all of it :-P

exodist: i have just run the "emerge system" command (im following the gentoo.org instaliation manual) right after that command it says

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ap=6#doc_chap4
(right at the bottom of the page!)

so i click on the "Configure File Protection " i think i can figure out what the rest of that page is talking about just the file protection, im not sure what to files to protect.

you did not type the command exactly as specified witht he single quotes: ' ' the pipe | and all the other stuff, but do not worry abut it mirrorselect is not necessary and doesn't always work right

basically with emerge you can upgrade all the packages when new versions come out by typing emerge sync and emerge -u world. but new software usually comes with new config files. a lot fo systems will just overright your custom config files with the new ones screwing you over, gentoo will copy the new ones to a temporary location, then you run etc-update and it will give you a list and you can choose which to install and which not to install. this way you can keep your custom configs.

i have figured out the emerge error i was missing a " in the make.conf file. so the only dir i really need to protect is /etc/ or anywhere i edit config files fight ? and am i right in thinking that i dont need to worry about protecting dir's until i start "settling in" to my system and start getting everything personalised ?

i dont think mirrorselect worked right, i get this error

but i dont know what mirrors to select myself, or even where to get the list of mirrors from.

I have never specified any protected dirs or anything, this is the first I have heard of them.... (I only skimmed the guide :-)) as for mirrorselect do not do it, it is not important.