[tlug] First impressions of Gentoo

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

I downloaded the Gentoo installation CD for AMD64 (sorry, no torrents
here, used HTTP), and installed to my new dual-core Opteron system
(after going through a lot of pain because the Tyan/nVidia/Phoenix
BIOS needs a bit of fscking over ... didn't like my old CD, and won't
boot from USB or Firewire at all; finally ended up acquiring a new CD
drive).

The 2.6.14 kernel and initrd set of moduels is pretty impressive; got
all the hardware that I know about on this box, including all the
nVidia nForce junk.  Haven't tried the USB/Firewire drive yet, but the
on-board gigabit ethernet got picked up right off, as well as the SATA
drives.  As a livecd it leaves a bit to be desired; it seems a lot
like the netbsd install system.  It's not really a way to test-drive
Gentoo (although I guess the point is that until you've done an
emerge, you're not really doing Gentoo).

Some of the stuff in the manual is potentially confusing (and some I
thought it was just plain wrong for my system ;-).  Eg the description
of setting up grub says that paths are supposed to be relative to the
grub device, but the ones they show aren't, not for the example
system.  Only later do they explain that there's a symlink hacked into
the /boot directory.  Nothing really horrible, but definitely this
isn't for n00bs.

The emerges I've tried so far seem to be working well (although it was
a little shocking to ask for links---a text-mode browser---and get all
of xorg pulled in!)

All-in-all, it's pretty impressive; it's been a while since I tried
installing a system that's more or less at the leading edge (Debian
sid doesn't really count), so I'm as much impressed with Linux 2.6 as
I am with Gentoo, I suppose.


-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.