[lug] linux Distro install woes (was: mandriva 10.2 limited edition 2005)

[Michael Belanger]

On Wed, August 31, 2005 3:18 pm, Lee Woodworth said:
> Michael Belanger wrote:
>> Debian is good -- once you do get it installed and working.  I have yet
>> to
>> successfully get a running gentoo install -- and I really wanted it to
>> work.
> What didn't work for you? I have six systems with gentoo (AMD64, Athlon
> XP,
> PIII, Celeron). It does take a long time to recompile everything from
> stage 1
> on slow machines (24 hours+ on a PIII 1.1Ghz laptop), and you do need to
> get
> grub installed right. Other than that it it isn't a lot harder than other
> distros.

I think I got lost in the install instructions, they are pretty thorough,
but there are a lot of steps.  I tend to be less of a details person so I
really wanted less steps to get a basic install up and running.  After an
hour of going through the process, I had to stop and do other things
(jobs!  They just get in the way of things sometimes).

Six Systems!  How long does it (did it) take to gain the Gentoo mindset? 
How much time does it take you to do a fresh install of gentoo now?

I have to rebuild my home system soon.. If I choose to try it again, is
gentoo good for desktop users... non-technical ones? ( I am the only
person that can navigate the inards of linux there)

>> So, sigh, I had to go back to Fedora and their brief lifecycles and
>> their
>> vanilla i386 builds.  argh.
> I think I saw i686 binary rpms for a few  packages with FC. I once
> did a manual tar ball upgrade for SSL on a RH system. Using correct CPU
> flags, the openssl test through put for the tar ball install was 100%
> higher
> than the i386 RPM. It is probably worth it to find 686/x84_64 packages.

This is really the big reason to use gentoo yes?  To get the optimization?

regards,

-Michael