[gentoo-dev] Installation and URIs

[Lauri Pesonen]

Hi guys,

I just finished my first Gentoo Linux installation. Here's a couple of 
points that came to mind during the installation:

1. bootstrap.sh should honour the GENTOO_MIRRORS setting in 
/etc/make.conf. I have a cable modem and my cable provider does not have 
very good connections to the USA (In in Finland myself). The connection is 
even more lousy during the evenings when I tried to do my install. The 
result was that the transfer rate was somewhere around 5KBps and 
downloading all the stuff required for the bootstrap was a pain. I 
eventually let the box run through the night working on the bootstrap. So 
it would have been nice if I could have used cfx5.tgv.net instead of 
www.ibiblio.org since the french server could provide me with 500KBps. 

2. emerge seems to handle configured URIs wrong when downloading a number 
of packets for one installation. I was installing XFree. First emerge 
downloaded XF410-src1.tgz (or something similar) from cfx5.tgv.net. After 
that it tried to download XF410-src2.tgz, but it used the next URI in the 
list (sourceforge.net) rather than cfx5.tgv.net. So I interrupted it and 
ran emerge again. Again emerge started with cfx5, but after the first 
tarball it moved to another URI again. The same happened with all the 
other tarballs as well. Sorry fot not looking into the source and figuring 
out a fix, but I'm not so fluent with python.

Otherwise I've been really impressed with Gentoo Linux! Keep up the good 
work!

BR, Lauri Pesonen