[whoops, forgot to say "beware gmail reply-to", sorry :) does anyone know if there's a reliable fix for that yet?]
On 5/25/05, Steve Holdoway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think it's probably the fact that you did it at an installfest, where > all those 'what do I do here' questions are instantly answered by people > who've been there before, and answered so quickly that you've now > forgotten you ever asked them. That's probably true, the people there were very helpful. But I did do a stage 1 install on a P166 laptop, so I definitely didn't get through all of the installation on the day (indeed it took me another week ;-) > I'm not knocking the end result - I see what Gentoo are trying to > achieve, and thoroughly support it. What I don't like are all the > irrelevant obstacles that don't teach anything except how to keep your > temper better. Well I'd been using linux for quite a few years before I installed Gentoo, but it still taught me (and I'm sure most others too) quite a lot. Especially about Gentoo in particular. Other systems are more easily installed, but you never quite know how everything works, and they sometimes behave most strangely. The thing I like about Gentoo is it feels a lot more "transparent" - once you've installed it, you know where everything is, what it's for, and what behaviour you can expect from it. Time spent installing the system is time spent getting to know the system :-) > I also accept that the point Nick made on the original thread about my > experience maybe getting in the way of the instructions could well be > valid and I'm asking questions and worrying about things the authors may > be taking for granted. Probably true... a lot of the instructions are more "newbie oriented", and perhaps sometimes a bit sparse on heavy details for that reason. But I think they're more than adequate.... > For the build in question, I ended up with a completely unbootable > system which I couldn't fix. I could see the errors, but couldn't not > build an initrd that would work, either with initrd or manually. Aha. I never bother with initrd's (I just compile in specifically what I want, remove everything else, and don't bother with modules or initrds :) , so I haven't come across that issue. I did once try using 'genkernel', which resulted in a bloated pile of garbage that took 10 minutes to boot, with lots of errors. There's still certainly a lot of room for improvement... > But, like you say, everyone has a different take on it. I'd like to hear > from anyone who 's tried http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ lately and > can compare and contrast. As would I :-) LFS sounds interesting, but I've never heard from anyone who's tried it... Sorry for the long reply. Cheers, Gareth
