[gentoo-user] [OT] Six non-Gentoo installs

[Grant Edwards]

In order to do some software testing (having mostly to do with
different init systems), I installed 6 distros yesterday and this
morning (I already had both 32 and 64 bit Gentoo/Openrc systems
installed).  These were all on a single 1TB drive with a bunch of
100GB partitions that contain a Windows system and eight Linux
systems.  [There's a "master" installation of Grub legacy that
chainloads any one of the 9 OS partitions.]

My 6 latest installs were:

   Xubuntu 12.04
   Xubuntu 13.10
   Xubuntu 14.04
   CentOS   5.11
   CentOS   6.5
   CentOS   7.0

CentOS 5.11 was the only downloaded ISO that wouldn't boot directly
from a USB flash drive and required that a CD be burned.

The first five were all quick and uneventful and took a total of maybe
3-4 hours (including downloading the ISO images).  At each step of the
installs it was obvious what to do.  They all allowed me to use the
existing partitioning table and install both OS and bootloader into an
existing partition.  They all recognized both Ethernet adapters, and
all booted fine when "chainloaded" by my master copy of Grub legacy.

CentOS 7.0, however, was a mess.

It took three attempts and almost an entire day of work.

My first attempt was to use the "minimal" ISO image so that I would
have the option of burning a CD if needed (I can't burn DVDs at the
moment).  That was a mistake.  It was too minimal, and I couldn't get
the network working to the point where I could configure repositories
and install other stuff. Since the CentOS 7 ISO images all boot from
USB flash drive anyway, staying under the 700MB CD size limit was moot
anyway.

Next I tried the net install ISO.  I'm guessing I could have burned
the DVD image to USB drive, but all I want is a minimal desktop
system, so I figured why wait for a download of 3.5GB of stuff I don't
care about.

It still didn't recognize the NVidia Ethernet controller on my
5-year-old motherboard. After some cable swapping and futzing around,
I got the netinstall going using the Realtek NIC.

Maybe I just got unlucky and picked a slow mirror site, but once I got
the install going, it ran for over 3 hours when installing a vanilla
Gnome desktop system.  Compare that with a 15 minute download time for
a 700MB Xubuntu CD and then a 15 minute install.

CentOS 7 refused to install the bootloader in a partition: your only
choices are MBR or nothing.  When I manually installed grub legacy it
failed because I had stupidly allowed CentOS to use ext4, and the
build of Grub I had laying around didn't grok ext4.

So I re-do the whole net install again using ext3 instead.

Now, after manually installing Grub legacy in the CentOS 7 partition,
it boots up.

The next problem is that the Gnome Shell is burning 100% of the CPU
time, and a terminal window can't even keep up with my typing.  Forget
that: I can do what I want via ssh, so just disable X11.

CentOS still doesn't recognize the NVidia motherboard Ethernet
controller.  After Google finds me a pages full of links to other
people complaining about the exact same thing, I find out RedHat
decided that the NVidia forcedeth driver wasn't widely used enough to
deserve inclusion on an ISO image that was already 360+ MB.  Thanks
for that, RedHat.  So it takes another 45 minutes of faffing around
finding a third party src.rpm file for the forcedeth module and
installing it.  [It was either that or build a kernel and initrd.]

After about 7 hours I got a usable CentOS 7 system running (as long as
I don't try to use the Gnome desktop).

I'm more convinced than ever that Gentoo is the way to go for my
"real" systems...

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I feel partially
                                  at               hydrogenated!
                              gmail.com