Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo for me?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 11:10:50 -0600
John <irgunii@×××××.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, February 26, 2012 09:50 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> >
>
>   <snip>
>
> > Assuming you have a handy Linux LiveCD (any distro) it's better to
> > download the stage3 as these are built daily and of all the
> > available methods, it's the most recent. But beware that you will
> > still need to download almost all the source code all over again
> > with the first update, and this is somewhere around 2G if you use
> > KDE or Gnome.
> >
>
>   Aha! So the stage 3 tarball's I'm seeing at
> http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/x86/autobuilds/current-stage3/
> won't be the same as what the 12.0 DVD will have, correct? The stage
> tarballs are just the barest minimum stuff, with only a few window
> managers and no DE's, correct?

Yes, that's pretty much it. It's not a problem having only the basics
in the tarball as with the first major update you will download all the
source code for the bits you don't have yet. And those are the same
bits that will probably be updated anyway.

>   So, what I basically was right about at first, the only *real*
> problem I'll have with trying to run a Gentoo system is my dial-up
> (presuming I can get along just fine with command line stuff and
> whatever). Still...if I absolutely *must* do an update of some kind
> of huge MB download thing, can I not just go to the gentoo sources
> webpage, download whatever it was I needed (being on someone's fast
> pipe of course), put that on a CD or DVD, take it back home and have
> the update app install it from said CD or DVD? If this is possible,
> then I just might have this thing licked!

There's some tricks you can use. Portage can display the URLs of code
it will want to download, so you can take that list and feed
it into a downloader. Like so:

emerge -pvuNDf world

-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com