Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] I'm up, at long last!
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:05:20
Message-Id: 20110417152245.GA4280@acm.acm
1 Hi, Gentoo.
2
3 After a few weeks of effort, I've just gone live with my very own Gentoo
4 system. :-)
5
6 The last stage was copying most of my files over from my old box, which
7 involved a significant degree of screwing the disk drives.
8
9 It is such a relief to say goodbye to my ancient Debian system, which no
10 longer had a functioning package system. Also, my ten year old hardware
11 was feeling ever more underpowered as time went by.
12
13 Installing and configuring Gentoo was significantly easier than Debian,
14 even though it took about the same amount of time. The approach "insert
15 the DVD, press the button, and everything will work OK" is fine, until
16 something _doesn't_ work OK; then you've got several hours (or days) of
17 tedious searching for the answer. By contrast, with Gentoo's 41 pages
18 of detailed instructions, you really can't go far wrong. And at the end
19 of it, there's further detailed documentation to get X and window
20 manager etc. set up.
21
22 I think there's really only two ways to install Linux: you either go the
23 Ubuntu route, where everything's done for you and you accept somebody
24 else's defaults, or you go with Gentoo, where you do everything
25 yourself. I think anything in the middle, like Debian, just leads to
26 confusion and uncertainty. I don't know where Fedora and SuSE fit into
27 all this.
28
29 Anyhow, I'm now up and running, with some installation and config still
30 to do: things like how to get British English and German keyboard
31 layouts in XFCE, how to make it's terminal have a black background and
32 things like that. I also need to find a decent PDF viewer, and a decent
33 jpeg viewer.
34
35 So, thanks for all the help, everybody!
36
37 --
38 Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] I'm up, at long last! James Wall <wallservices@×××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] I'm up, at long last! Mark Shields <laebshade@×××××.com>
[gentoo-user] Re: I'm up, at long last! Harry Putnam <reader@×××××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] I'm up, at long last! Kfir Lavi <lavi.kfir@×××××.com>