Gentoo Linux 2004.2: What You See Is What You Get

editingwhiz writes "Jem Matzan has a cogent analysis of the new Gentoo Linux 2004.2 on Linux.com: "Gentoo Linux is the BSD of GNU/Linux distributions; it's elegant and customizable and you know exactly what you're getting when you install it. No mystery programs, no packages that you have to deinstall because you'll never use, no clutter, and everything is customized to your needs. If you do it right, Gentoo is also faster than your average GNU/Linux distro because everything can be compiled with higher compiler optimizations." (Linux.com is part of the OSTG network.)" Jem also has some criticism of the current version of Gentoo's AMD64 version.

Comments

WYSIWYG

[alatesystems]

What you see and what you get is a bash prompt on the cd boot. It is worse than slackware on the install, unless you get that new-fangled(yes I know red hat uses it and has forever) Anaconda working, but who does that anyway?

Gentoo is great though because you can send a friend a cd and have him pop it in and forward port 22 and do /etc/init.d/sshd start; passwd and then you can remote in and install linux for them, or in my case, on a colo that had a bad hard drive.

I like gentoo, but to set it up right takes quite a while and a lot of patience.

Chris

Re:WYSIWYG

[ComputerSlicer23]

Anaconda can be run from the command line.

Start by fetching a couple of files off of the RedHat boot disk. From the images directory, you'll want to grab the boot floppy you need (depends on if you plan on doing a network or cdrom based install).

In my example, I grabbed bootdisk.img, and I put it in tmp. You'll also need RedHat/base/stage2.img also.

cd /tmp ;
mkdir bootdisk
mount -o loop bootdisk.img /tmp/bootdisk
cp /tmp/bootdisk/initrd.img /tmp/initrd.img.gz
gunzip initrd.img.gz
mkdir initrd
mount -o loop initrd.img /tmp/initrd
mkdir stage2
mount -o loop stage2.img /tmp/stage2
mkdir install-root
( cd initrd ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd /tmp/install-root ; tar xf - )
( cd stage2 ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd /tmp/install-root ; tar xf - )
mount -t proc none /tmp/install-root/proc
chroot /tmp/install-root/ /usr/bin/anaconda --method http://pub.whitebox.mirror/whitebox/3.0/en/os/i386 --text

That starts the installer running, and is attempting to do a network install from whatever website you replace "pub.whitebox.mirror" with (you probably have to adjust the rest of the URL, but it's the path I use on my local whitebox mirror).

The installer starts to run at that point. I had to run it from the console, and I was intentionally in run level 3 rather then 5 (I should have gone to single user mode, but I was lazy). I get a nice curses application at this point. It got all the way to the part where it wanted me to repartition my disk. I have no free partitions to actually attempt an install. However, I'm fairly sure I could have finished the install (if I couldn't the heavy lifting was pretty much done with, it would have been a series of small problems to overcome).

It's a bit of pain, and there's probably an easier way to do it, but that's how I figured out how to run the installer in less then 30 minutes after reading your message. (I remember reading on the WhiteBox lists that it should be possible to just start a remote install via an SSH session, but I've never actually seen the procedure written up). I figured it couldn't be that hard. Anaconda is nothing more then a python script that runs. It needs a bit of runtime support, but nothing special.

Kirby