Gentoo attempt

After ubuntu failed to upgrade, I tried to install debian and then ubuntu but failed. Now it is time to try Gentoo, this is my first attempt ever with Gentoo. I downloaded the 20090813 daily installer of Gentoo, as suggested on their page. Booting made a command prompt appear.

No emacs, but vi. This does not start good.

There are some messages. Check /etc/kernels/kernels-config-* for kernel configuration.
A suggestion to type "links http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml".

That starts a textbased browser. I can navigate with up and down arrow and enter. I get to the Gentoo AMD64 Handbook.

Lets skip step 1 to 4, I already have disks. And go to 5 installing the gentoo installation files.

It tells me to check the computer date using the date command. But where is the command prompt? Through esc>File os shell I can open it. I type date and it looks ok. Then exit to get back to "links". Now they want us to surf to a gentoo mirror and download a stage3 tarball. Using a textbased browser. Is this a rite of passage for nerds? Haha: I pass.

Now I find out how to navigate "links". Ctrl-N and P to scroll. Easy and nice. That was my first guess but I managed to press caps-lock instead of control.

tar unpacking instructions:
tar xvjpf stage3-*.tar.bz2
Apparently the 5 letters are very important. And five chunks is actually the upper limit of what a human can hold in his short-term memory. An average human, I needed to go back and forth some times. I suddently remembered that I could switch to a prompt by ctrl-alt-f1 and go back with ctrl-alt-f3, that makes everything easier.

Ok, now I should download a portage snapshot. Done.
Then,
tar xvjf /mnt/gentoo/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr

With capital C, no trailing slash on usr

But I seem to be getting no space left on the device. And this is/should be on the ramdisk? I can remove the stage3 tar I guess. I try that. It doesn't help.

Ok, it seems I shouldn't be on the ramdisk.
I should mount my old drive on /mnt/gentoo. And my boot disc on mnt/gentoo/boot

fdisk -l shows my old LVM partitions. Some googling and I found this info:
. By now I have been listeing to Louie Louie covers since ubuntu failed. I think I like Thee Headcoats version of Louie Louie best.

To mount LVM i do:
vgchange -a y
lvscan

It shows the lvm disk, so I can mount it. First i mv /mnt/gentoo /mnt/prev
Then mount /dev/vg1/root /mnt/gentoo

It starts a xfs recovery and won't mount. However I saw no disk problems when I booted up ubuntu some hours ago. Anyway I need to do a dangerous xfs_repair -L /dev/vg1/root it seems. I have now listened to 29 versions of Louie Louie and have not come very far at all I think. Time for sleep after the great Iggy and the Stooges version. So far I think Gentoo is the Iggy Pop of linux distros. Thin and hard.


Then they want me to edit build options. This is what I pick from skimming through the manual.
march=x86_64 need to see if it is called that?
-O2 for default optimization
-pipe to speed up compilation

There should be a file in /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf.example, but there isn't so I won't select the march option. No there was a file, but elsewhere.
I add the option MAKEOPTS="-j3" because I have a dual-core.

Now time to install.
cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
emerge --sync --quiet

Change locale to en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 by editing /etc/locale.gen
then run locale-gen

My god this never ends. I skip select timezone.
emerge gentoo-sources

It is late, I don't want to manually configure the kernel. Instead genkernel.
emerge genkernel
genkernell all

Oops it seems I forgot to mount a drive on boot/
I do that, ctrl-c genkernel all, then run genkernel all again
But I am not sure it worked.
Anyway now I am going to sleep.

good morning. It seems it worked, there are some files in (chrooted) /boot

Now they want more editing. I am getting tired of the nano editor, I want emacs or a clone. But it seems that some guys at Gentoo refuses to add it, despite the emacs team volunteering to trim it down to a small size. This has been wanted since 2005 and emacs is one of the two big editors, consider this blog-post bad publicity for Gentoo if you want another argument to add emacs to the minimal-cd.

Ok, now you can edit a file and specify modules for the system. But I don't know what I should have, and there are no defaults suggested in the documentation. So I skip that right now. Maybe the modules are added dynamically later anyway?

Ok time to edit the /etc/fstab.
Shit, Gentoo has overwritten it with a default. My old setup with LVM and things is gone. I can't be the only one trying to do a reinstall over an old disc, so it wouldn't be too much to ask that the installer makes a backup copy of the old fstab. That is feature request.

Now this is too much to me. I scroll down to see the options, there are a lot of steps left. I haven't even started to configure X-Windows. I don't enjoy messing with Linux, I like programming. I give up. I might make another attempt if Fedora also fails, but that is the next alternative now.