I finally got around to installing Gentoo on the second hard drive in my PC today. Note the verb tense — installing — rather than installed — because two and half hours later it is still installing. There are two selling points for Gentoo. One, the initial download is small. Even if you download the whole LiveCD installer, it’s still only 400MB. Two, the newly installed system will be completely customized for your machine.

It is this second feature that makes the install so lengthy. Once you’ve put the basic system on your machine, you tweak a make.conf file to indicate things like your CPU architecture, speed, RAM, etc. Gentoo uses a system (“portage”) that is similiar to the BSD Ports system, which allows you to download the latest and greatest versions of various applications. The difference is that the Gentoo package management, unlike RedHat or Debian doesn’t just download a package and install it. The Portage system will check out your make.conf file, and compile every package with tweaks for you system. So…unlike when you install Redhat and it just dumps a bunch of precompiled binaries on your machine, Gentoo compiles each and every package (including your basic GNU tools–things like ‘ls’ and whatnot) to be customized for your system. Crazy.

In Seb news, he had a big yesterday….first church, then a trip to the Posted on 26 May 2003