HEy, i want to set up a Gentoo box, but i have no idea where to start. i have been to the Gentoo site, and read a lot of stuff there, but i am still confusied.
i have a little bit of tim on mandrake 8.2, but thats abotu it. what stage install should i do?, any other tips anyone may have??
If you’re new, I would do a stage 3. I personally don’t use gentoo, but a few of my friends do. A better place to post a question regarding linux would be www.justlinux.com
Yes, defininetly start with stage three. I’m not that bad a in a Linux environment, and I found the install from stage one to be difficult. Also, after the install, there were many errors every time I booted up. And finally, installing from stage one takes hours, even on a brand-new top of the line machine. (Trust me, it was a long wait for my computer… :))
But, there is a newer version out, so maybe things will go better for you. 
I use gentoo on the desktop and on the server. It’s application management system is just awesome.
As long as you can follow directions, and don’t need your computer for 2 days, you can do a stage 1. I would recomend either a Stage 1 or Stage 3, Stage 2 really doesn’t do much for performance.
I’d recomend you either print out or have a seperate computer avaliable to view the instructions. It’s imperative that you have the instructions while doing the install.
FYI: I did a Stage 1 install on a dual Athlon MP 1600, it took over a day to compile everything.
EDIT: If you do do a stage 1 install, don’t get too agressive with the compiler flags. Or you will experience odd errors, or it just plain won’t work.
Ok the machine i want to put it on is a P1 @200/233 with 192 meg of ram, 2ish gig HDD, and soem other crap. my next queston is i saw read about universal Live Cd, but i cant seem to find it on any FTPs, and i see the stage ones for the i686 and the x86’s are only like 15 or 20 megish, is that right for size?
Stage 1 downloads the source and complies it all. You have to have a working eth0 connection to do a stage 1.
so all i have to do is download the stage 1, and burn it to a cd, and it ~should ~ boot. i see that almost all the files at like tar.bz2 is this a normal format for can be burn like a reg .iso or do i need some special software?
It will boot to a prompt and you have to give it install commands and everything (I think). You won’t be able to do anything other than install.
But don’t take my word for it.
As for burning, I have no idea.
- You need an install CD, also called the live CD (.iso)
- A data CD with a stage (.tar.bz2) on it
In Gentoo- a stage is a collection of programs that have been pre-compiled. The higher the stage, the more pre-compiled programs you get. The larger the file size of the stage tar ball.
A .tar.bz2 file is usually a group of files that have been archived using the tar utlily. Then, it is run through the bz2 compression algorithm.
I’d definitely go with a stage 3 on a pentium I. Starting from stage 1 would probably take up to a week to bootstrap on a machine that slow, with not much of a performance gain compiling. I’d also recommend against a heavy window manager, if you intend to install X. Modern versions of KDE and Gnome would probably border unusable in terms of performance on that sort of machine.
I run gentoo on my laptop and one of my desktops. It’s a great distribution, the application management is great (I’d argue easier than RPMs in many cases), the performance is great, and the documentation is wonderful. The best place to start is the Gentoo x86 Installation Handbook, and the stages are avaliable on any of the mirrors, but here’s a quick link.
Good luck and happy Gentoo-ing!
You may need a bigger harddrive as well. Since Gentoo compiles everything from scratch, you need a pretty decent sized harddrive to hold temporary compilation files. For instance, OpenOffice.org (which will take a year to compile on that machine) will use over 2 or 3 GB alone during compilation (from my own experience).
Another few things you might want to look into on a computer that slow are DistCC and CCache. DistCC is a Distributed Computing Client, it basically takes other Linux (or Windows running various Linux emulators) machines and uses them to help compile faster. It’s not too hard to setup, I believe there’s a good document on Gentoo’s site, if not just check their forums out, they’re one of the best Linux forums I’ve seen (http://forums.gentoo.org). Look around for Lisa there, she’s the developer incharge of DistCC.
As for CCache, it’ll take compiles and save them, so if you’re compiling the same program over again, it’ll go faster. It won’t work well with that small of a harddrive, but if you can find a bigger harddrive it can’t necessarily hurt to have.
All in all, Gentoo is a very good disto, it’s taught me almost all that I know about Linux. If you can, definitely run a Stage 1 installation, because it’ll help you to make some connections about how everything works, if you don’t already know.
I must say, it’s kind of interesting to see how many people use Linux, even more specifically Gentoo, in FIRST. I guess we might be changing the world in more than one way?
letting the P1 box sit there for a week or two isnt a problem, becasue this box has been sitting uner my stairs for a few weeks,and has no other use.
i D/led the Univerisal live CD for x86, and now im going to get the stage 1 file, should i burn it as a .tar.bz2 or do i need to do somethign special to it first?
Burn it to a data CD, as a .tar.bz2
I tried gentoo a few times, and I have to say that it has the dishonor of being the only linux distribution that I tried where something “broke” without me doing anything.
I set up gentoo from stage 2 on my laptop, and got everything working as I wanted. I used it a few times with no problems (it was installed along side my normal distribution, debian). Then, I didn’t touch it for a few months. Then, when I booted into gentoo again, my wireless didn’t work. The module no longer wanted to load into the kernel and I had to recompile it.
I’m sure Gentoo is good for a lot of people, just not for me.
Just to add to that, the point of having fewer pre-compiled files is the size, but more importantly, you get to compile them optimized specifically for your machine. 
Yeah, and be careful with the flags. The install I did used as many optimizations as I could figure out, but I ended up with errors.
Well, the problem was letting it sit for a few months ;-). Gentoo is one of those bleeding edge distros, everything changes so often, recompiling a new kernel isn’t a huge deal. Or at least for me.
S far so good, I am up to copying over the portage tree. What i am wondering is did i miss a step or is the manual missing a step? When I came to: tar -xvjf /mnt/cdrom/snapshots/portage-20031011.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr ; it gave me some error msg. I dont know if i did the right thing, but I : mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr : and now it seems to be unzipping everything alright, but should i have like mounted it or something?
weel i got pas that part for now, i hope. but now a few mins later, i am upto where i have to open nano to edit the make.conf fiel, execpt i dont have one, and there isnt ever a /mnt/gentoo/etc folder. How have i gone so wrong?
</edit>Spelling
It sounds like you may not have extracted your stage tarball to the right place… It has to be extracted to /mnt/gentoo (After that is mounted, of course); the easiest way of doing this is to copy it to /mnt/gentoo, cd to that directory, and then untar it…
Don’t forget the gentoo forums, http://forums.gentoo.org, are a great resource of knowledge for just about everything…