[CLUE-Tech] Recent Gentoo install experiences?

[Collins Richey]

On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 19:43:55 -0600 Ken MacFerrin <lists at macferrin.com> wrote:
> Matthew Porter wrote:
> > ... we've decided to give Gentoo a try.

> 
> I use gentoo for all my desktop machines and would agree with most the 
> previous feedback.  My thoughts:
> 

[ lots of good comments snipped ]
> 
> 5. Be thoughtful and research your partition setups.  Neither reiserfs 
> or ext3 allow for an "easy" repartition and filesystem resize.  I 
> personally prefer to run LVM2. http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/lvm2.xml

LVM2 is a great idea, but do you want that complexity now? As far as sizing
goes, give yourself 8-14G in the/ partition. If you plan on a lot of database
or apache files, split out/var to its own partition. And of course put /home on
its own partition. I have an ungodly amount of software in my / partition, and
I'm only up to 7.5G.

> 
> 6. If an emerge process fails repeatedly on the same package during a 
> list of package installs it can often be fixed by emerging the 
> non-failing packages separately and then going back and installing the 
> troubled package.  It seems on occasion that emerge gets the order of 
> dependencies confused on installs.
> 

I've never encountered that problem. One thing that helps is to do emerge -f ...
to fetch all the packages you need first. Occasionally there will be a problem
with the source mirror for a particular package.

> 7. Use "Stage 2".  Stage 1 is nifty but doesn't add any value that you 
> can't go back and configure after you have a working system.
> 

I agree 100%. If you are in a real hurry you could use Stage 3 and pre-compiled
packages, but I don't have any direct experience with that.

P.S. It's great to encounter so many people who use and [ love | tolerate ]
gentoo. Three years ago, I got nothing but flack every time I brought up the
topic. It's not RedHat, so who needs it seemed to be the opinion.

-- 
 /\/\
( CR ) Collins Richey
 \/\/     Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, 
             the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight 
	     to tell the difference.