In Part I, I discussed the idea of installing a Gentoo partition on my machine. Part II delved into the why and how of starting out, including my initial frustrations of installing Gentoo on a fresh Bootcamp partition.
Now I’m going to talk about the RH portion of the CFRHB method of installing an operating system: RAGE and HORROR!
This all started when I began the steps for installing Grub.
On my initial installation, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I initially lost my boot partition, which I easily recovered. I then lost the fresh Gentoo installation I had just spent two days installing and configuring… which again, I easily recovered. These steps didn’t do much to increase my own confidence that I was on the right path to a “perfect” Linux distribution.
Grub is extremely straightforward to install. WHY I had so many issues, I’ll never know, but a little hubris and a little impatience go a long way to a lot of frustration.
My partitions are setup as such:
\dev\sda1 OSX partition
\dev\sda2 Linux boot partition
\dev\sda3 Linux root partition
\dev\sda4 swap
I continuously flubbed the installation of Grub, swapping \dev\sda2 with \dev\sda on more than on occasion, or mis-configuring paths to the kernel on the root partition. This was ridiculous, until I finally wizened up and starting testing Grub before rebooting.
This sounds like a comedy of errors, and it was. I’m such a n00b sometimes.
If I could pass along any wisdom at all to anyone else installing Gentoo, it’s this: Have a lot of patience and read everything in the documentation. Carefully plan your deployment from start to finish, and don’t make the mistake I made, which was to believe Gentoo would be a relatively quick installation.
I could have easily avoided every issue I ran into with just a little more patience and a little more planning. Ultimately, the entire installation was a fantastic learning experience, one that I won’t forget. It was also positive: After losing an Ubuntu server on our cloud installation, I successfully deployed a Gentoo replacement in just a couple of hours. I’ll talk about the server failure in an upcoming post.
Eventually everything turned out for the best. I ended up with multiple boot load options through rEFIt and Grub.
rEFIt was THE perfect solution and highly recommended to anyone planning on n-booting their Mac.
I finally ended up inside my very first Gentoo installation. Here’s where the Bliss began, which I’ll discuss in Part IV.
