Gentoo Linux - First Impressions

Gentoo Linux is a distribution that puts the system together one piece at a time. Every package is built from scratch, if you choose, you can also use pre-built binaries. If you want to make a really tight custom system, for an appliance or server, this would be the distribution to use. This is not a system for beginners, unless you want a lesson in Linux. I chose to check out Gentoo because I was loosing touch with my old favorite Slackware.

Today was the first day I've used this distro, I was impressed from the first boot of my LiveCD. If I was going to make a Linux distribution (which I was thinking about before seeing this) I would want it to be like this. This distribution is not for newbies, not at all. One must know about partitioning, building, configuring, which libraries are necessary, what hardware is present, etc. Gentoo makes a GNU/Linux system that is built specifically for the hardware it has and the software it expects to run.

Firstly I must say that this went smooth for me but I've been geeking with comptuers for about 20 years and Linux for at least eight. You should be very familar with your hardware and if it's supported by Linux. I used an Intel Mainboard and Processor, Western Digital IDE drive (30Gb), 1G RAM. I had network support as well, the adapter was the Intel PRO100+ supported by the e100 driver.

Download and burn a copy of the lastest LiveCD Universal, as this time its 2004.2. Boot this CD, you'll have an option to select a kernel, see Gentoo documentation for details. Take a look at lspci and lsmod to see what modules and such are loaded and what hardware is detected. If Gentoo found everything you're in luck otherwise you'll need to load the drivers now.

Partition your hard disks as you see fit. After mounting to /mnt/gentoo and mounting my other partitions to /mnt/gentoo/boot and /mnt/gentoo/tmp extract one of the stage files into /mnt/gentoo

I chose to go from stage one, I wanted to see everything happen. This takes some time, first you must bootstrap the compiler, then install the system. Each package for the system is compiled in turn, packages are managed by the Portage system. After that a simple command of emerge system will install the whole base system.

To complete this much of the installation took about nine hours on the reference computer. Now we're at stage two.

Stage two took a really long time to complete as well, but the end result is a tight system. All types of unnecessary libs and extra stuff have been removed and my necessary programs operate as expected.

One small downer is that packages I expected to be installed on a base system like gentoolkit, logrotate, mirrorselect, pciutils and whois where not installed in the Gentoo base system. Any missing packages are easy enough to search for with emerge -s and install with emerge [package name]. No real headache at all.

Gentoo has an easy to use set of init scripts as well. A nifty tool called rc-update and rc-status exist to start and check on daemons.

This install took a while but the end result is a solid, tuned system. Creating a database server, email server, web server or whatever server from this point as easy as installing the necessary packages and telling them to start by default. Is Gentoo ready for the average end user? Not as much as Debian. This installation type and building from scratch methodology however is a really powerful tool. For system builders or developers looking for a solid base platform this is the way to go.

exit(0);

Document Change Log

• 17 Oct 2004 - Initial Draft

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