Installing Gentoo, Sep 11, 2004

As I said in the #102 Mailbag, I've been wanting to try Gentoo. I hesitated to install it because I knew it would take three days since you have to compile your own software, and I assumed I would have lots of compilation errors to troubleshoot. But four of my friends have been running it at their workplaces and say they rarely get compilation errors -- mirable dictu. Three of them are solidly convinced for Gentoo; the other is a little tired of having to wait for a package to compile. But everyone says you just run "emerge PACKAGE" in a shell window and leave it alone, and 90% of the time you end up with a flawlessly installed package. No mess, no fuss, just pure impact. The way Unix was meant to be. This article describes my experience installing Gentoo, some things I learned along the way, and describes the Gentoo features I found the most interesting.