Forum Moderators: bakedjake
I've found out that I can get gentoo preinstalled also. Gentoo is supported by Win4Lin, and it seems like lots of people like it. I can get the computer with Open Office and Mozilla preinstalled too. I need to be able to use this computer and do productive stuff with it right away, so I wanted to have linux and some software preinstalled - and don't mind paying a little more for it. I can learn more about linux and gentoo specifically, later, as I have the time.
I've heard Gentoo isn't for beginners though, but maybe that is mostly because it isn't easy to install.
Any thoughts!
Debian is also nice as most things come with reasonable default configuration and it has a nice curses based (that's text dialogs) config for new packages. It also has the best packaging system I've used so far, nice dependencies with things broken into smaller packages so you can install just what you need. You get pretty smooth upgrades too.
PS. You should have posted a reply to your post instead of a new thread.
After Gentoo is installed it is very easy to use. If I want to install something like openoffice, I just drop down to the command line and type emerge openoffice. Very simple.
I installed Gentoo on a spare hard drive and kept my windows installation intact on another drive just in case I couldn't get by. So far I haven't booted into windows once in the three months I have had Gentoo installed.
So I would say if Gentoo is installed for you, then yes go ahead and get it.
I've asked pretty much the same question at gentoo.org, and got some good feedback there.
I just read through the 'Working with Gentoo' documentation and I understand the basic 'emerge name-of-software' part, although that document goes into so much detail, its a bit overwhelming - I really don't need to know all of that to get started.
What I don't understand are some of the really basic things I didn't see explained in documentation. Maybe they would be really obvious once I have it in front of me though.
1 - Does the command line interface/window/box automatically pop up when you start up your computer? Or do I have to do something to get it there?
2 - And how do you install software from a cd, like Win4Lin for example, do you still use emerge?
I was going to do a dual boot thing at first, but I don't see the point now. I still have my old computer I can use if I get stuck with something until I can figure it out in linux.
1) If a company is installing Gentoo for you, I'm going to assume they are going to have the system boot into a window manager of some sort. Once inside a window manager there will be an icon somewhere that will bring up a terminal window just like cliking on Command Prompt in Windows XP.
2) I'm not familiar with win4lin, but I'm sure there will be a readme file on the CD with pretty detailed instructions on how to install it. Also, I just checked Gentoo's site and win4lin 5.1 is in the portage tree so you could emerge win4lin.
Again I'm new at this too
I think that helps, someone else new to this might understand what I'm asking better than someone more experienced!
If a company is installing Gentoo for you, I'm going to assume they are going to have the system boot into a window manager of some sort. Once inside a window manager there will be an icon somewhere that will bring up a terminal window just like cliking on Command Prompt in Windows XP.
By window manager - do you mean something like KDE or Gnome, or something else entirely? Like GRUB or Lilo?
Also, I just checked Gentoo's site and win4lin 5.1 is in the portage tree so you could emerge win4lin.
Really? Win4Lin isn't free, so how can they do that?
I didn't look too closely at the license for Win4Lin, but if you go to Gentoo's site and click on Online Package Database on the right and then search for Win4lin, it is the 3rd package that comes up.
