10-Day Gentoo Installation Agony

lisah writes, "The Linux distribution Gentoo has a hard-core following, and with good reason. Gentoo is known for its configurability and choices. It's not known, however, for its easy installation. NewsForge's Joe Barr outlined his painful installation experience with Gentoo in an article that explains why, after 10 days, he finally gave up and went with Debian Etch. From the article: '[B]ack in the day, Gentoo users first had to rip the source code from the bone with their teeth before compiling and installing it, but now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it... I exaggerated the ease of installing Gentoo.' And: 'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'" Slashdot and NewsForge are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

Follow the Directions!

[lefticus]

I've installed Gentoo several times now and have never had a problem when I FOLLOW the DIRECTIONS. I've known two other people, one professional Linux developer who could not get it installed because he refused to follow the directions step by step and another, the VP of marketing at my company, who installed it easily after following the directions.

It's really not complicated, just tedious.

Re:Follow the Directions!

[Eideewt]

Gentoo has the best documentation in the Linux world too. I refer to it even when configuring other distros.

Re:I'm a former gentoo user

[Otter]

The worst was when I went away, came back to a LOT of updates. Those updates (during the end of my time on gentoo) started to break things unfortunately.

I just posted a similar set of complaints, but you've touched on one I'd forgotten. The Portage system still works well *if* you're a Gentoo obsessive and emerge sync; emerge -uD world at least once a week. If you get behind, and need to update Portage, layouts, gcc, X and the kernel all at once, you start running into all sorts of really nasty collisions and breakages.

Re:10-Day Installation Agony?

[Darby]

I've been using Gentoo for what I guess about 100 days now, and except for me totally screwing something up early on (I think it was the X server) and having to reinstall the entire thing, I've had a good experience with it.

Something you might want to do. Once you get your base system (plus X, KDE/Gnome/whatever) installed, do a stage 4 backup.
Basically, just make a tarball out of your partitions.

If you have to reinstall, just boot off the CD, mount your partitions, chroot, copy the image over and untar it.
Reboot, and you're good to go. Saves a lot of hassle with reinstalls.

Quick, cheap and dirty, but it works well.

Re:Exactly!

[vandon]

From TFA:

You will hear, see, and read "RTFM" dozens of times before you're done

I've been using Gentoo for 2 years now and the only RTFM I've gotten was a 'Read the forums, man'. One quick search on forums.gentoo.org, and the answer was in the second post, spelled out step-by-step. Every problem I've had on any of my Gentoo boxes has been answered on the forums. 95% of the time the answer is already there and you just have to post the error string into the search box.

Either this guy doesn't know Linux as well as he thought, or this story is just trollbait.

Re:10 days

[Curtman]

But seriously, Joe Barr: 1. Did not RTFM 2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.

Joe Barr doesn't write serious reviews. He writes flamebait so that other sites will link to his articles. Anyone else remember the MPlayer uproar? The one that got him a mention in their documentation?

Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.