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

[John]

On Sunday, February 26, 2012 11:44 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 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

  Okay, great. Thanks to everyone who's been trying to help me out here. Now to work on 
finding someone with a fast connection and see what kind of damage I can do!