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Hi, Gentoo. |
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After a few weeks of effort, I've just gone live with my very own Gentoo |
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system. :-) |
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The last stage was copying most of my files over from my old box, which |
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involved a significant degree of screwing the disk drives. |
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|
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It is such a relief to say goodbye to my ancient Debian system, which no |
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longer had a functioning package system. Also, my ten year old hardware |
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was feeling ever more underpowered as time went by. |
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|
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Installing and configuring Gentoo was significantly easier than Debian, |
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even though it took about the same amount of time. The approach "insert |
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the DVD, press the button, and everything will work OK" is fine, until |
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something _doesn't_ work OK; then you've got several hours (or days) of |
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tedious searching for the answer. By contrast, with Gentoo's 41 pages |
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of detailed instructions, you really can't go far wrong. And at the end |
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of it, there's further detailed documentation to get X and window |
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manager etc. set up. |
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|
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I think there's really only two ways to install Linux: you either go the |
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Ubuntu route, where everything's done for you and you accept somebody |
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else's defaults, or you go with Gentoo, where you do everything |
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yourself. I think anything in the middle, like Debian, just leads to |
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confusion and uncertainty. I don't know where Fedora and SuSE fit into |
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all this. |
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|
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Anyhow, I'm now up and running, with some installation and config still |
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to do: things like how to get British English and German keyboard |
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layouts in XFCE, how to make it's terminal have a black background and |
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things like that. I also need to find a decent PDF viewer, and a decent |
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jpeg viewer. |
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So, thanks for all the help, everybody! |
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|
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-- |
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Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). |