[PLUG] Rat off a Sinking Ship?

[alan]

On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Timothy Grant wrote:

> > Gentoo is quite cool, but not for beginners.  (I built it on my laptop.
> > That was a learning experience!)  The dependancy build system is quite
> > nice.  Not to be installed on a 486 though...  (Not unless you have a few
> > weeks for the install.)
> 
> My first install took a while and it was on my ThinkPad 570E. It went pretty 
> well, but some of the details took a while.
> 
> I just put it on my ThinkPad R31, and have had much more difficulty, not so 
> much with Gentoo, as with Linux on this machine. It's been *very* 
> educational.
> 
> Small footprint, fast programmes, you know exactly what's on your box when 
> your done.

The instructions for Gentoo assume that you have a cd-rom and a network 
card available at the same time.  It took some hacking to get around that.  
(Bootstrapping a network by hand is something I have not has to do since 
the Linux 1.0 days.)

It took about 2 weeks to get what I wanted installed on my little Vaio 
celeron 333.  It would have been better if I would have had the 40 gig 
drive in it at the time. (The current disk is faster.  The compiles took 
longer than they should due to a slow drive.)

One of these days I will build another Gentoo machine. For people who want 
to learn how things work under the hood, it is a good distro to go with.