Install Gentoo

I’ve stalled on this. I like the level of documentation, the variety of software, support, and all that (and the cow). But everything was so basic and vanilla at first—I shuddered at the sight of so barebones a desktop, and read on to remedy that. Then, I made some infinitesmal changes (cflags, IIRC), and went to recompile only those relevant programs. And watched portage recompile my entire system. Which took forever. On my workhorse laptop.

So, maybe I shot myself in the foot by installing a source distro on my primary laptop, but I don’t appreciate having to recompile every single program each time I make a little change (usually to fix something I just broke). That would become more of an issue with every additional program installed, and frankly, I’m a software freak. It’s one of the advantages I saw in Gentoo—the massive software repo. And I’d hoped to learn more about compiling source. New thing learned: Source takes a looooong time.

Anyway, I still have Gentoo installed, but haven’t touched it in many months. It’ll probably get wiped for more space on the hard drive.

I’ll say it upfront…Gentoo is not for the beginner. And that’s the way it should be; let’s explain.

Started in Slackware 12 or 13 years ago then moved to Debian 9 years ago. My biggest complaint was the difficulty of optimizing the system for maximum performance on specific hardware without breaking the package system. Dependency problems all over the place.

Gentoo let me do what I’ve always wanted to do: tweak the packages. The emerge program let me compile stuff using my own options on my own specific hardware…all while keep track of dependencies for me and following up with updates. I don’t want things to be dumbed down and resources wasted on making it look pretty.

Beginners to mid-level people: give Ubuntu a try. It’s an offshoot of Debian and, surprisingly, worked better than WinXP with ease of installation, drivers, etc…everything was autodetected while WinXP needed driver disks.

i’ve been using gentoo for quite some time. i’ve installed it maybe too many times, since the 2004 iso days. still learning some greater things, yada yada.

ask if you have a question or which not. i’ve probably encountered it a few times over.

I have Mandriva, but some of you may know it’s a kind of a pain in the neck sometimes. I need a system that is more flexible.

I’m on the verge of giving this goal up, just because of the hassle. Gentoo is a serious pain to setup correctly.

The firewall system, iptables won’t even run from the command line. I’ve tried recompiling the kernel, using this guide to iptables, with no success:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Iptables_for_newbies

I’ve setup a file share in samba, so I can easily move files around. However, when I access the Linux fileshare using my Windows XP machine, it totally crashes Explorer. NICE. Here are the guides I’ve used with no success:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Setup_Samba
http://www.brennan.id.au/18-Samba.html

I do need a web server and have the extra machine, but I simply don’t have the time to waste on playing with it right now.

I’m going to post all the issues I had getting stuff working, in case others run into the same thing.

Problem #1: mysterious disappearing applications. First off, as soon as I got my filesystem setup off the Gentoo install CD, I rebooted… only to find that networking didn’t work. I had run emerge dhcpcd but that software would disappear when the system was restarted. It fixed it when I booted off the install CD again, and then ran:

emerge -u baselayout

emerge—update—deep—newuse world

etc-update

After I rebooted, I had networking.

Problem #2: rails server failed to start. I tried installing rails from a rubygem (emerge rubygems && gem install rails—include-dependencies) which ran successfully. I could run command rails but the server wouldn’t start-up because of some gem errors. I think this is because the version of “gem” installed by portage is not compatible with the rails gem it downloaded. At any rate, this did give me a working rails install:
emerge rails

Now, on to the positives. Here is an awesome guide for configuring sshd:
http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/03/26/1423232&tid=129

And a great site for setting up mysql:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/MySQL/Install

Next steps will be getting subversion (source code manager) setup, along with samba (file shares). I also really want to use iptables (firewall) rules, but have to go back and recompile the kernel because it wasn’t turned on by default.

I went through all the install steps and now have Gentoo booting off my computer’s hard drive (rather than the setup CD). Here is a great guide to installing Gentoo.

I downloaded a 55 MB ISO image, burned it to a CDR, and booted off it. I then set my root password and started up sshd, so I could securely connect to my linux box using Putty on my Windows box. Saves time because I don’t have to switch keyboards, and I can cut+paste commands from the guide into my linux shell. So, I reset my partitions and formatted the hard drive remotely. This is very slick. I compiled the kernel myself, which always feels like a huge accomplishment.

Next step will be to get a DHCP client setup, because sshd won’t start without it. Then I need to install: mysql, subversion, apache, mongrel, ruby, and rails. I also want to figure out syslog-ng, vixie-cron, and iptables on top of that.

I just have a need for installing Gentoo Linux right now. I ran this OS a year or two ago on a spare system and really liked it. Everything is compiled from source code, making the performance spectacular.

I went to Ubuntu Linux for awhile on that machine, which is an awesome “desktop” OS, meaning that I could use it for office tasks (word docs/excel files) or email or surfing the web. Very Windows-like and easy to use right out of the box. The Ubuntu software installer and system updater I actually prefer to the corresponding feature in Windows XP. However, Firefox and programming apps are a bit too heavy for this old computer, AND I happen to need a webserver right now… so time to blow this guy away.

1. Gentoo Linux
2. openssh – remotely connect from Windows using Putty, so no need for a window manager like gnome or KDE… or a spare keyboard/mouse/monitor
3. mysql – the only open source database daemon I’m familiar with
4. subversion – source code manager I’ve been running lately to backup all my documents
5. apache – never installed this… but it’s way past due
6. mongrel – ruby on rails app server, which I’ve never used
7. ruby – my favorite programming language of the moment
8. rails – gem install rails—include-dependencies

On my new job I have a gnetoo on a Inetl P4 3.0 Ghz HT machine and I am loving it

After about 2 years of searching, I can say Gentoo is the perfect distro for me. I like learning about configuration through text files rather than some GUIs, and the portage systems is fantastic. Also, the support is phenomenal (gentoo-wiki.com).