In Part I, I discussed the idea of installing a Gentoo partition on my machine. For the uninitiated, Gentoo is a Linux distribution with a source-based package management system: Applications are compiled to your native machine architecture and, fundamentally, Gentoo is designed to be completely customized… from the kernel up.
This intrigued me. I didn’t want (or need) a general desktop distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora. I wanted something a little more raw. Something with a bit more power.
But days before I ever set eyes on my very first custom-compiled kernel, I had to prep my iMac with a Bootcamped partition.
This is a straightforward operation. The engineers at Apple have created a very elegant solution to the dual booting problem. Prepping the drive with a 32 GB partition was simple, straight and to the point. Today I regret such a small partition. In a few weeks, I’ll expand it to 120+ GB or more.
Once I had the partition ready, I burned a copy of the Gentoo LiveCD to a DVD and rebooted. Bootcamp booted straight into the DVD and this is where my first issue cropped up.
Let me backup. I make this whole process sound miserable and boring. In fact, aside from several frustrations spawned mostly by my own over-enthusiasm to play with my new toy, installing such a raw distribution ended up being a perfectly wonderful learning experience. With every moment of frustration encountered, I learned more and more.
Back to the boot process: My initial boot failed. The boot screen continuously froze, requiring further reboots until I figured out how to turn off the branded boot image and see the details of the boot process. The issue turned out to be my keyboard, which I had to replace with a new Logitech.
Finally, after several hours of rebooting, retrying and swearing, I was sitting in front of a KDE desktop. Much to my surprise I couldn’t locate an installer as you might find on other distributions… And this misunderstanding was purely of my own creation as I didn’t fully read (or comprehend) the bountiful documentation provided on the Gentoo site. Indeed, this was my first eye-opening discovery of the Gentoo philosophy: Options.
Gentoo has so many options it can be bewildering. So where do you begin?
The best place to begin is with the Gentoo Handbook. A word to the wise: Read carefully and completely. Don’t skim.
For my particular system, I began with the x86 Handbook. It’s effectively a step-by-step guide to configuring and installing Gentoo for the most common cases, and it worked well for me.
It wasn’t until I got to step 11 (Configuring the bootloader) that I truly ran into some hairy issues. For a while I was unable to boot back into my OS X partition. I had to reinstall several times and reboot, reboot, reboot until everything was just so. I’ll discuss the bootloader and partitions in the next article in the series. By the time I rebooted for the upteenth time, I was done and about ready to go with Ubuntu.
Let me just say, I’m glad I didn’t.
What I have is not only a perfectly stable, usable system… but it’s mine. It’s exactly how I want it… and it works. Fast!
In the next article in this series, I’ll discuss the issues I encountered with the bootloader Grub, compiling a customer kernel and more. Looking forward a little further to Part IV, I’ll write about my experience with working with the Portage package system, installing KDE and getting my dev tools configured.
Until then, have you installed Gentoo? What about other source-base distributions? Please share your experience in the comment box below!
