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

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 08:41:41 -0600
John <irgunii@×××××.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, February 26, 2012 07:36 Dale wrote:
> > Alan McKinnon wrote:
> >
> >  I'm the resident old fart around here
> >
> >
> >
> > I beg your pardon.  ;-)
> >
> > Dale
> >
> > :-)  :-)
>
>   Heh, if I can find someone close by that has a fast connection, I
> bet *I'll* be the new resident old fart at 50 years of age just this
> last Monday the 20th.
>
>   I figure if I can find a fast connection, I can get what I need
> downloaded and burned onto a dvd. I'll just 'update' things one or
> two at a time so that it's easy on my dial-up connection. If I
> really, really need to update something like a kernel or something
> else that's huge for a dial-up download, I'll just find that fast
> connection again and put it on a cd or dvd (I *can) 'update' (emerge?
> still trying to get all the nomenclature down) from a cd or dvd,
> right?) and do it that way.
>
>   A question about the stage 3 tarball thing...if I download that
> instead of the iso (which is for 486 and up, whereas the tarball is
> 686 and better), how do I burn it (the tarball) as an iso onto a dvd
> so I can install Gentoo? Also, Distrowatch.com says that Gentoo has
> the latest in 'packages' as Feb 26, yet when I downloaded the tarball
> of CONTENTS, it shows mostly things (gcc, glibc, kernel, etc) that
> are used in the January release of Gentoo 12.0, not what Distrowatch
> has in their list of up-to-date lib's and such for the 26th of Feb.
> Where do I find the 'package' that Distrowatch seems to have found
> with almost everything being the latest and greatest?

gentoo is vastly different from almost every other distro out there.

It's a funny quirk of computers that you have to have a working OS
already running on the computer to install an OS. There's nothing magic
about an install, basically some software asks you a bunch of
questions, then copies a bunch of files to disk and writes appropriate
config files. When you reboot, the software that went on the disk just
happens to be correct so that the whole system will reboot and start
properly.

So how do you get this first running OS on the go so that it can do the
install? Well, it's on the install CD or flash drive. SuSE gives you a
customized SuSE on the CD that does things appropriately to install
SuSE.

This is where Gentoo is different. You don't have to use Gentoo to
install Gentoo, in fact you can use anything as long as it can connect
to the internet and write to the disk. There is a Gentoo install CD
available (updated infrequently) but I usually use Ubuntu (I just happen
to have a handy Ubuntu memory stick).

DistroWatch always quotes today as the most up to date version, because
there's always at least one package updated today. The date of the
install CD is whenever it was built (sometimes this gets to be 6 months
old). This is why Gentoo does not really have version numbers - the
"version" you have is whatever software you have running right now.

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.

It gets really painful really quick doing all that on dialup. Omit one
package from the list and you might not be able to complete a full
update.

None of this is unusual, the maintainer of Ubuntu and SuSE do all these
steps when they build their packages. They just shield you from the
hard bits and give you the final product nicely package. Gentoo gives
you the tools you need to do all that yourself, the key thing is "do it
yourself" - there is no way to "not do it yourself"

You should chat to Dale and listen closely. He's the guy who was most
recently forced to use dialup routinely, he can tell you what it's like.


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