[CLUE-Tech] Gentoo installs (was Re: odd mouse problems with gentoo)

[Evan Widger]

stage 1 with the gentoo 2004 livecd from 1/28/04 (or so). i'm not sure 
what the tarball was, i think it was 1.4. it took about 6 hours of 
actual compiling and downloading (256/256 dsl) but that was spread out 
over 2 days with that nasty 'work' stuff in between. it's an athlon 
tbird 1.1ghz with 256mb ram and about 7gb of my 40gb disk given to 
gentoo. i'm using whatever stable/testing packages necesary to make 
things work. i don't think i've had to use a testing one but my laptop 
(also gentoo, more in a minute) had to when the stable one didn't work. 
for the moment i'm running 2.4.24 kernel because one of the major things 
i wanted to be able to do was play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on 
linux, and i've heard the nvidia drivers don't play as nicely with 2.6 yet.

however, this is not my first gentoo install, my laptop was about 2 or 3 
months ago. i also did a stage 1 on it but chose the 2.0.6-pre9 kernel 
because i had heard it was faster and better power management for 
laptops, etc. that took the better part of a weekend, including getting 
X up and running (mmmm fluxbox) and all that jazz. i never did get the 
sound working but it's an ess 18xx chip and alsa and the kernel drivers 
seem to be arguing back and forth about who's job it is to use such a 
piece of crap sound chip. or something.

all in all i'm very happy with gentoo. being a freebsd user makes me 
really like the whole portage thing, but having better compatability 
with stuff for linux (freebsd's linux compatability is good just not 
perfect) makes life easier. ultimately i think i just have the most fun 
when i'm installing and getting things set up, once it's in i don't care 
as much what i'm using.

wheeeeeee :)

-Evan

Collins Richey wrote:
<snippety do da>
> Not that it matters, but which stage approach did you use and did you
> use the older 1.4 tarballs or the newest 2004 tarballs?  Did you
> install using a LiveCD or from an existing distro?  How long did it take
> you to reach a usable desktop and using what CPU? Did you have any
> problems with the documentation?  Any other thoughts about the
> installation?  Are you sticking with x86 (i.e. stable), or are you
> planning to use~x86 (i.e. testing) packages?  Are you running a 2.4 or
> 2.6 kernel?
> 
> Thanks,
>