February, 17 2003

I installed Gentoo Linux over the weekend. Actually, I started on Thursday evening and finished Sunday evening. Installing Gentoo takes a long time.

Gentoo is a source based distribution. This means that you compile everything you run. I started by booting a 40Mb CD image, and following the installation guide set up networking and proceeded to down load and compile everything - kernel, libraries, compiler, logging daemon, X, gnome, alsa, evolution, galeon, open office, eclipse everything.

Did I mention that this takes a long time? Many steps take several hours, the longest was OpenOffice, which kept my computer busy for the afternoon - 4 hours at least. Plan on watching a lot of telly, doing housework, surfing the net using Lynx, even (if you are desperate) go outside into the sunshine.

The result is impressive. Galeon starts up in 6 seconds the first time. After it has been loaded once, I can shut it down and have it up in less than a second. w00t indeed.

A few niggles:

• Eclipse hangs every time a progress dialog is displayed. Very annoying. Must track this down.
• GDM (The Gnome login manager) comes down hard on a reboot or shutdown. This just looks a bit peculiar, but is no problem really.
• I'm not sure where security patches are coming from. More of a worry than a problem.

So far, I give Gentoo 8 out of 10, on the provisio that Eclipse can be made to work. If all goes well, I'll be uninstalling Redhat in a week or two.