Let me tell you, I was excited about Gentoo Linux until this afternoon. That's just about when I started my reinstall of a Stage 1 install with a Stage 3 install that really wasn't any quicker. Perhaps that's my problem: I wanted the installation done somewhat quickly.
The background of this is that I have moved from 'nix to 'nix, looking for that which I feel comfortably up-to-date with at any given point in time. I want to be able to tell the computer, "Download expat!" and have it do all the patches, etc. for me. That's why I loved FreeBSD, and now why I am interested in Gentoo. Prior to the former and latter, RedHat graced my machines. Well, I use the word 'grace' loosely since my 9.0 installation wouldn't for the life of it work with SSLeay.
So back to the problem at hand, Gentoo is being a bear to install on my system -- and I've even RTFM! And followed it, seemingly step by step. Of course, I think I know what the problem is. I'm using software RAID 1 (mirroring) across two identical drives, the same partitions that I had with the RedHat install. There's a Boot + the Root on one disk, and Swap plus the Root mirror on the other. HDA1, HDA3 and HDA2 respectively. Having only ever heard of ReiserFS, I thought, "What the heck!" and selected that for the format of the Root partition. Boot is ext2 and Swap is, um, (linux) swap. So, bring on the troubles.
First off, it took me a moment or two to realize that I needed to manually select the gentoo doataraid from the LiveCD to even get the thing to a prompt. I figured that out on my own, thank you very much. Then, there was a problem with the DMA on the drives... I never did figure that one out. I assume the RAID/ReiserFS had something to do with it. That was the beginning of my troubles.
Next, after making it nearly up to making the kernal (from a Stage 1 install) I made the mistake of more'ing a binary which somehow changed the font mapping of the screen. Now the whole things was garbled. I switched over to another (not as pretty :) shell, logged in as root and chroot'ed, etc. into what I thought was the same shell settings as before but things didn't ever really work out after that. I'm sure I forgot something.
So, I started over. This time with Stage 3 which seemed to take just as long. Yet somehow I ended up screwing that install up too -- I installed things into the LiveCD directories instead of the Root and Boot partitions. I guess. Grub couldn't find the kernal I waited forever (on a 800Mhz PIII) to make... which was frustrating.
I guess I am used to my Mac where things 'just work', or my RedHat installation where things were pretty straight forward. Heck, Slackware wasn't that hard back in the day -- as I recall. But perhaps that isn't what Gentoo is targetting. It seems that the Gentoo project is targetting those folks who want to tinker and set every little bit and byte on the system to get the highest possible bang for their hardware buck. The reality check here is that I'm not one of those people (anymore). I just want it to work, work well, and at a speed that won't make me pull my hair out. As a reference, I'm writing this on a 500Mhz G3 iBook, which is plenty speedy for most everything I do. Of course, my Gentoo install needs to run MySQL queries quickly, and all the web jazz, but at least you know where I'm coming from.
All that being said, I've just run across this article talking about the Gentoo "Reference Platform" so perhaps I just wasn't starting in the right place. Next week I'll try again and see if my needs are met with what I think will be a great distribution for me.
