Forum Moderators: bakedjake
Anyone have any luck with this? Maybe I've just got a slow machine... :P
After two evenings of compiling a basic system, however, it's kinda wearing thin.
If you stick it out, could you tell us about how it runs?
The system: An AMD Athlon 850 w/512M RAM, a GeForce2 MX video card w/64M Ram, a 56X cd-rom, a 30G hard drive and a 40G hard drive (gotta store them MP3s somewhere, aye?)
The install: I chose the absolute minimal install disk. It's a 16Meg install CD. This is known as the "Stage1" installation disk.
I decide to start early. So, as noon rolls about I grudgingly get out of bed. After a healthy "pick-me-up" breakfast of yogurt and Sprite I plop in front of my computer, power it on, and insert my CD. My day has begun.
The previous day I had printed out the installation documents: my guide to the rest of the day. You get prompted to hit <enter> a number of times, each time I diligently do exactly as I'm told, eventually winding up at a root prompt. During this procession of <enter>s you will be given a list of detected hardware. I write them down, which is a good thing 'cause the next step is to load the modules that support them.
For me, that doesn't take long, because I don't have a lot in this computer. I only wind up loading a module for my network card. I note from the instructions that it's a bit more involved if you have SCSI or PCMCIA devices.
Next you configure your network (considering that most of the installation is pulling stuff over the network, that's rather important!) If you are using DHCP that's simple. Figures, 'cause I'm not. I've set up my home network to use static IPs. However, the instructions are pretty good on this, and soon I've got my network up using the ifconfig and route applications. You also have to edit /etc/resolv.conf to add domain and name server info.
Which brings me to a minor annoyance. There is no vi. As far as I can tell all there is is a pico look-alike called nano. I guess that's fine, except if you don't remember to give it the -w tag, and then edit a long line, it breaks it. Anyway, just my gripe, mostly associated with my poor memory in remembering applications flags.
Total time invested thus far: roughly a half hour. And now it's time to partition drives. This is my least favorite part of setting up a new system, and on a home box I get around it by only making very basic partitions: /boot / and /home. I'd get a bit more granular for a production web server, but this is just a box under my desk at home.
After this you intialize your swap space and filesystems, then you create a number of directories corresponding to the mount points of your partitions and mount the installation CD, finally untaring the file that corresponds to the Stage of your installation CD (whew, nice run-on sentence, aye?)
Next, the instructions have you set up a chrooted environment. You're just about ready to start the installation process. The first step is to use the emerge program to sync with the installation server.
And........it fails. It can't find the server. I switch to my other computer and go to the Gentoo web site. Apparently I have an older version of the install. I'll need to edit /etc/make.conf and update the SYNC variable to point to the correct server and directory. After that change it works perfectly.
I'm up to about an hour and a half now. After the sync, you need to edit make.conf again, search through the section on processors, and uncomment the lines that pertain to your processor type.
And thus begins one of the longest processes of the Gentoo installation. This is the bootstrapping process, and according to the installation docs can take up to two hours. After editing the make.conf file, you switch directories, and run bootstrap.sh. This sets up the applications and development tools required to setup the remainder of the system.
This gives me an excellent opportunity to run outside and mow the lawn. I crank up the mower and within seconds it's spewing noxious grey smoke, shooting oil, and making a rather frightening grinding sound. My neighbor starts frantically gesturing and shouting things I can't hear over the still running mower. I wind up borrowing my mothers ancient rotary push mower. Note to self: these things suck.
After an hour I head back in, and it's still doing it's bootstrappy thing. After another 40 minutes it completes.
Next, you use emerge to start the setup of your system. emerge system starts the download of the files you need and builds a basic system. Again this takes some time. On my machine not quite an hour and a half. The site suggest playing with your PS2. Not having one, I choose to watch Steve Martin in "The Man With Two Brains" thus avoiding further chores.
Afterwards, the instructions guide you through setting up your timezone and system logger. And then, finally, it takes you through reconfiguring your kernel...where I make a really stupid mistake. I forget to add USB support. This will haunt me later. Generally, if you don't make goofy mistakes like that, recompiling a kernel is no problem. The compile goes fine, and doesn't take much time at all.
Having not noticed my mistake yet, I continue on. I set up a cron package, set up hostname, edit fstab to reflect my partitions, setup and initalize the GRUB boot loader, and finalize the network setup, all according to the install manual.
And then I boot up. And everything seems fine. I have a working basic Gentoo installation. Only I want more. More More! I have to have a windowing system. I like Fluxbox, and there happens to be a Portage (Portage and Emerge are Gentoos packaging manager...portage ensures you have the latest, emerge does the install) for fluxbox. I think fluxbox, being a nice lean, system will be a quick install. HA! Two hours later, I have a window system installed.
Except.... when I try to start it, it complains about not having a mouse. My USB mouse is not recognized. I recompile the Kernel with USB support...still no mouse. I edit XF86Config and add the info for my mouse. Still no mouse. I read the Gentoo forums and get info for USB mice and keyboards, none of which works. I smack my head against the monitor, and that doesn't work.
I do the manly thing to do. I give up and go for a drive. I pick up some dinner (it's something like 11pm by now, after spending HOURS on that stupid stupid mouse...) and drive past some people jogging. It's the Midnight Sun Fun Run runners. The title is inaccurate. Running is not fun, it's a means of escaping something. And none of these people look like their enjoying anything. I take a big bite out of my Bacon Double Cheeseburger and wash it down with a King Size Sprite. I drive past a dozen or so joggers, who, no doubt, will live much longer then I will.
On my way home, I cut through the K-Mart parking lot (it's a shortcut...really....) and notice some tourists from Alabama filming something. It's 11:30pm and their filming the sun setting. Dang, another mystery blown away.... No midnight sun in Fairbanks Alaska, the hills are too tall.
Back home, I decide to avoid a problem by driving around it. I remove the USB mouse and install a normal one. After editing XF86Config again to reflect the new mouse, everything works.
Final step: install Apache. I find the apache portage and emerge it. It takes about 15 minutes and I now have accomplished all my goals. I spend the next couple of hours emerging other applications, setting up some users, and hitting the web server from outside to test speed and such. Everything is working great.
Conclusions
If you've made it this far I'm impressed. This wound up pretty long.
My final thoughts: Once set up everything seems to work very quickly, which is hardly suprising considering it is compiled for my specific set up. Since setting it up I've added a web browser, which took a while... and compiled some things without emerge. Things seem to work very well.
Does that mean it will stay on my computer. No. I'm far to impatient for this distro. While I think this would be great for setting up servers so that you get exactly what you want, with no extranious services and applications (and then using something like Ghost, so you never have to do it again...) it just takes to long to get a working system. In the end, to get a VERY basic setup (system + Apache + Fluxbox) I spent about 10 hours (minus some time for my stupid mouse.) I could have installed RedHat, removed extra services, and locked down the server serveral times in that amount of time. Of course it wouldn't be as quick, since it's more generic, but I could at least recompile the kernel to help that a bit.
Wow, 10 hours on a relatively powerful machine (Athlon 850 w/512M RAM)-- that's really a long time.
It's really weird that Fluxbox took so long to compile. I've compiled it a couple of times on a lot less of a computer running Madrake and it only took under 10 minutes. Side -- the latest FB is especially nice with a mouse wheel and sloppy window grouping.
Does the portage system work like apt-get in the sense that it takes care of all the dependencies? Say if you installed Sylpheed would it automatically download and compile GTK+ for you?
This will give you a list of all the dependencies that will be installed along with the main package. In the case of Fluxbox, this also included the basic X system, which is why it took so long, I s'pect.
