[clue-tech] Installfest

[Collins Richey]

On 8/31/06, Michael S. Farnsworth <mfarns at comcast.net> wrote:

> Special thanks to Collins for getting me out of not one but two hung
> installations on the same hard drive and to Hanni for the wireless
> instruction.

Like everyone else in CLUEland, I'm only too happy to help out.

>
> In fact, after Collins' excellent tutorial on paritioning, etc., I was
> emboldened to add an Ubuntu partition to my SUSE 10.0 system and to try
> SUSE 10.1 again on another set of partitions. It seems that 10.1 may
> not be as user-friendly to laptops as SUSE has been. After repeated
> attemps, the install keeps hanging. And as Hanni discovered in the
> hardware db, the 10.1 kernel now has issues with the ADM8211 wireless
> chipset. Not sure how that comes about, but 10.1 seems to require
> ndiswrapper while 10.0 handles it fine.
>
> So in response to more than one suggestion, I think I'm going to replace
> 10.1 with Gentoo as my third distro. Here's a question for those who
> advocate it...I read in a recent review that most Gentoo users do a lot
> of linux tinkering with it but few people use it as their daily
> workhorse distro. Any truth to that one? If there are some challenges
> to it, so much the better, I guess.
>

Sounds like you've been bitten by the Linux bug, Mike. There is no
cure - just a lifetime of learning opportunities ahead. Actually there
many users who run Gentoo as their daily workhorse, and there are even
alot who run Gentoo servers.. If you decide to put up Gentoo, I would
recommend that you skip the LiveCD (it may work, but I've heard a lot
of broken installation stories) and put up a basic installation from a
Stage3 tarball. Do a little reading in the Gentoo documentation ahead
of time to get the flavor. Be prepared for lengthy compiles. Depending
on your cpu speed and memory, you will need a couple of days to getup
and running with KDE GNOME. XFCE will give you a quicker desktop
environment.

There are a number of Gentoo users on the CLUE list, but you may want
to check out the Gentoo forum as well. The gentoo-user list is pretty
high volume but friendly if you do your homework before posting.

One of my good friends Yuko put up Gentoo as his very first Linux
attempt, so it can be done, and you will learn a lot.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.