Trying Gentoo Tips wanted.....

[washe]

Ok after some time playing with mandrake I want to try another distro, Im currently downloading the two isos for Gentoo Linux, it a totally different distro than mandrake, anyone has tips or pointers that will be usefull during install.

[nukes]

Firstly, just download the netinstall disk. It will want you to download the packages etc anyway, esp if you're building from stage1 (like I did)
portage is quite nice, but sometimes it upgrades you to broken packages etc i.e. alpha releases etc. Be wary about just doing emerge world and getting on with it.
Also, if you're installing software that has a lot of packages, or some of the deps take a while to build, use emerge -f first just to get all the tarballs so you can save your phone bill. Its probably worth building binary packages for some stuff that takes a long time to compile, so you could just re-install them rather than have to recompile.
As to installation. Make sure you know how to use the command line and nano. Know exactly what's in your system and be ok with editing everything by hand. You will need to make your own kernel, boot manager config, XF86Config and pretty much everything else from scratch. Make sure you are capable of this before you start. If you read the installation instructions, you will see that you get a few choices that no other distros offer (ie ALSA/OSS choice of logger, display manager) research these beforehand. Also, research carefully your filesystem. I'd use reiser (or possibly ext3) during my last install though I chose XFS and I don't like it. It isn't supported in the vanilla (stock) 2.4.x kernels and I've found it to be slower than reiser/ext3. Just my £0.02

[SpookyEddy]

Print the installation guide. Gentoo is not difficult and has some good documentation, if this is your first installation then a hard copy of the instructions will save you much grief. Yeah I know its kind of obvious but plenty of people don't bother

Regards

ed

[nukes]

Yeah, I wouldn't try it without the instructions in front of you. Some stuff needs to be edited at certain points and not before, and you need to set up the chroot correctly. Also, set a password on the livecd so you can log in on other VCs. Saves more hassle as you can read the man pages as you work.

[washe]

hey nukes any links where i can read about the filesystems, I know that for Mdk it uses journalise filesystem..

And whats nano?

[nukes]

nano is a text editor similar to BSD's pico (pretty much a clone) which gentoo uses as default rather than forcing you to use vi.
http://www.nano-editor.org/
TBH as to filesystems I'd just use ReiserFS. There are comparisons here:
http://www.as220.org/jb/linux/
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/lin...08.3/0477.html
http://oregonstate.edu/~kveton/fs/
I was referring more to the logger and system setup that you should read up on.
Syslogng:
http://www.balabit.com/products/syslog_ng/
Metalog:
http://metalog.sourceforge.net/
There's a few others. Read through the install docs and decide what you're going to do before you begin. Make notes, do whatever, just so it doesn't go pear shaped half way through. Good luck

[washe]

Well Well after reading, the installation and some more info, for the first install of gentoo, what will the average user recommend a stage 1 install or a stage 3 install?

[nukes]

I built from Stage1. It means the base system is optomised to your settings as well. For example, in my make.conf I have:

CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O2 -fPIC -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -ffast-math -fforce-mem -fforce-addr -foptimize-register-move"

And I then prelink everything. I also have the SSE, 3dnow and MMX useflags set.
Everything on my system is compiled like this (apart from the kernel). With Stage3 you start a bit later on, after compiling GCC and the base system (init, glibc, binutils portage etc), pretty much ready to start adding programs. It takes a bit of time off the install. If I were to reinstall, I'd probably do it from stage1 again.
I haven't done stage3 before, I think I should add, but it looks as though it would make a few bits easier. You may want to make a kernel beforehand just so you don't have to do it there and then, don't build anything as modules, just compile everything you need in, then you can redo it later if you want, once the system is up and running.

[washe]

ok going to try Stage 1, if the i dont get a hold on it.... ill try stage 3...

[nukes]

Good luck