I've decided to chronicle my experiences on building Gentoo Linux on my centrino notebook. Gentoo is a powerful linux distribution. It lets you build the entire system from scratch. almost every single app you'd want, built on source with your own flavour. Thus no two system will be exactly the same and gives you the flexibility to do what you want with it.
There are of course some discussions--- how good, performance wise is tweaking a system? though we won't go to that in this series because it is immaterial i think. The power of Gentoo's portage system is to let you build the system you'll need and want. no more googling (don't you love the sound of that word?) for packages. ok thats not entirely true, there will be loads of googling and quick trips to gentoo's package page to search for the right package or a simple ls on /usr/portage will get you loads of available packages. think of it as building your own car while the other distros have already packaged a working vehicle for you.
to execute, on the commandline, it will be a simple matter to evoke: emerge
you can also do: emerge --search
as with apt (if you're a debian user), you can simply just fetch packages before deciding to install.
if you want to determine what exactly will portage install on your system this will do: emerge --pretend
you could tweak your system on your /etc by editing the file make.conf where you can set your compile settings, c flags and use desc and others.
when i started building on my centrino-based notebook, i decided to go and install vlos 1.2. why not go through with generic gentoo? well i figured to save time in building from scratch X and gnome. My amd64 machine of course was built from gentoo. everything from partitioning gnome was built from sources. and its a great piece of software.
but at 1.5ghz and only 256MB RAM, i figured it would take forever to compile the entire system. well i was wrong, it still took me forever to get the ball rolling. Vlos failed to run gnome properly, dropping me to plain vanila X, even the window manager wasn't working properly. so, i executed: emerged --deep gnome-light so that i can get a gui to work, this after all is a desktop machine.
when i got gnome-light to work properly on Vlos' kernel, i downloaded new kernel sources: emerge gentoo-sources so i can get 2.6.14-gentoo-r1 (i've downloaded r2 now but haven't installed it). i had to go through all the trouble of fetching the module init tools which apparently wasn't included with the vlos stuff before i could boot properly on the gentoo-sources.
so now i have kernel running just the packages i want. my style is to rarely build modules, prefering to have the things i need on my kernel. after all i know exactly what this machine has and its capabilities. some people prefer to load modules. me, i like everything loaded already.
rebooting and getting basic stuff to work done, i was still experiencing problems with gnome background. i would have to execute the gnome-backgrounds-settings app every time i log into gnome. pardon my inexperience with gnome's settings. years of being spoiled running redhat/suse/debian/ubuntu--- one takes forgranted that all these things just work. but that was one of the reasons why i wanted gentoo--- learn inside out how a linux machine works properly.
getting basic stuff to work was all right--- gaim is enabled as well as firefox (i got two versions--- the emerged firefox from the portage tree and the rc2 on my home directory, its the latter i use.) stuff like open office (vlos installed oo1.4, i think that was) i decided to unmerge and get oo2 sources. it took a good chunk of 15 hours (including download of packages) to build and install. thats an experience i'd rather not have.
java and eclipse, i got both the portage tree and the 1.5 sdk from sun and installed eclipse from the tarballs of eclipse's site.
another reason why this was because of some personal and work projects--- i needed a mobile linux system to compliment my linux setups at home and in the office. this was the answer.
there is still a good deal of stuff to build--- ffmpeg, darwin streaming server and many more stuff to do as well as to build full gnome, and of course centrino wifi stuff and other networking essentials.
it takes forever just to get a setup to be exactly what one wants and loads of time and effort and equal amounts of headache but its well worth it in the end. thats the power of gentoo, at least for me.
There are of course some discussions--- how good, performance wise is tweaking a system? though we won't go to that in this series because it is immaterial i think. The power of Gentoo's portage system is to let you build the system you'll need and want. no more googling (don't you love the sound of that word?) for packages. ok thats not entirely true, there will be loads of googling and quick trips to gentoo's package page to search for the right package or a simple ls on /usr/portage will get you loads of available packages. think of it as building your own car while the other distros have already packaged a working vehicle for you.
to execute, on the commandline, it will be a simple matter to evoke: emerge
you can also do: emerge --search
as with apt (if you're a debian user), you can simply just fetch packages before deciding to install.
if you want to determine what exactly will portage install on your system this will do: emerge --pretend
you could tweak your system on your /etc by editing the file make.conf where you can set your compile settings, c flags and use desc and others.
when i started building on my centrino-based notebook, i decided to go and install vlos 1.2. why not go through with generic gentoo? well i figured to save time in building from scratch X and gnome. My amd64 machine of course was built from gentoo. everything from partitioning gnome was built from sources. and its a great piece of software.
but at 1.5ghz and only 256MB RAM, i figured it would take forever to compile the entire system. well i was wrong, it still took me forever to get the ball rolling. Vlos failed to run gnome properly, dropping me to plain vanila X, even the window manager wasn't working properly. so, i executed: emerged --deep gnome-light so that i can get a gui to work, this after all is a desktop machine.
when i got gnome-light to work properly on Vlos' kernel, i downloaded new kernel sources: emerge gentoo-sources so i can get 2.6.14-gentoo-r1 (i've downloaded r2 now but haven't installed it). i had to go through all the trouble of fetching the module init tools which apparently wasn't included with the vlos stuff before i could boot properly on the gentoo-sources.
so now i have kernel running just the packages i want. my style is to rarely build modules, prefering to have the things i need on my kernel. after all i know exactly what this machine has and its capabilities. some people prefer to load modules. me, i like everything loaded already.
rebooting and getting basic stuff to work done, i was still experiencing problems with gnome background. i would have to execute the gnome-backgrounds-settings app every time i log into gnome. pardon my inexperience with gnome's settings. years of being spoiled running redhat/suse/debian/ubuntu--- one takes forgranted that all these things just work. but that was one of the reasons why i wanted gentoo--- learn inside out how a linux machine works properly.
getting basic stuff to work was all right--- gaim is enabled as well as firefox (i got two versions--- the emerged firefox from the portage tree and the rc2 on my home directory, its the latter i use.) stuff like open office (vlos installed oo1.4, i think that was) i decided to unmerge and get oo2 sources. it took a good chunk of 15 hours (including download of packages) to build and install. thats an experience i'd rather not have.
java and eclipse, i got both the portage tree and the 1.5 sdk from sun and installed eclipse from the tarballs of eclipse's site.
another reason why this was because of some personal and work projects--- i needed a mobile linux system to compliment my linux setups at home and in the office. this was the answer.
there is still a good deal of stuff to build--- ffmpeg, darwin streaming server and many more stuff to do as well as to build full gnome, and of course centrino wifi stuff and other networking essentials.
it takes forever just to get a setup to be exactly what one wants and loads of time and effort and equal amounts of headache but its well worth it in the end. thats the power of gentoo, at least for me.
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