To wrap up this series, I’ll discuss why installing Gentoo was completely worth the steep learning curve and why I’ve found operating system bliss.

Once I sorted out every issue with Grub and rEFIt, I found myself sitting in front of a typical Bash prompt. I didn’t really know where to start, but I knew I needed to setup my installation. The beauty of Gentoo is that it’s YOUR setup: Once again it’s an operating system of options. You can install whatever you need. Or not install anything. And once you install it, you configure it accord to your needs. It’s entirely up to you.

Speaking from the perspective of a seasoned Windows/OS X/Ubuntu user, I’ve haven’t quite experienced the beauty offered by a wholly customizable system since my old MS DOS days back in the… 80s, when I used to fiddle with boot options and write autoexec files to play particular games (remember that?!).

Gentoo is exceedingly powerful, and it’s power shines through in its fine-tuned package system, Portage. I prefer Portage over apt and yum, now that I’m accustomed to it. Like everything with Gentoo, there’s a learning curve and Portage is no exception. Mastering the ubiquitous USE flags, for example, is key to setting up an efficient, uncluttered system.

Similarly, because it begins life as a very basic system, configuring a custom kernel (and making sure it works) isn’t necessarily trivial but highly recommended. You will also need to write several configuration files in order for the system to work the way a typical Linux distro might work, but for the power user this just might be bliss (it certainly was for me).

Yes, after nearly pulling my hair out with frustration over frustration at the install process, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Gentoo, overall, happens to be one of the most polished Linux distributions that I’ve used. I now prefer it over Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE. It’s truly the operating system for a computing power user, and offers unparalleled customization.

For me, it’s almost the perfect operating system. I look forward to further customizations, frustrations and power!

In previous posts I’ve made no secret of my love for git. It’s a simple, elegant and fast revision control system that works just as well for a single developer as it does with a team of distributed developers.

Primarily I operate across three different machines: A Gentoo Linux partition, my primary OS X partition and my Eee PC running Moblin Linux. Here’s where distributed revision control systems really help, and where git in particular truly shines.

First of all, each machine has its own local repository, each repository with different branches (I create branches as I see fit, but they follow a common naming theme). I “sync” everything between machines through my account at GitHub, however I could just as easily use any one of my machines or servers as the primary git repository. I enjoy GitHub’s feature list, however, and the monthly rate is reasonable.

First, having my source on multiple machines distributed geographically gives me real peace of mind. I’ve already flirted with losing my two primary partitions recently (a scary enough though), but I wouldn’t lose my source unless something truly catastrophic happened and both GitHub and my laptop died at exactly the same instance as my partitions.

I don’t think this will happen. Ever.

Second, git hub works well for what I do. A typical session might look something like this:

$ git pull
$ git checkout -b v0.1.6
-- write a little code, compile, test, get frustrated...
$ git add .
$ git commit -a -m "A few changes."
$ git checkout master
$ git merge v0.1.6
$ git push


I’m likely leaving a few details, don’t take the above snippet as gosphel… it’s just an example.

Finally, git offers me the ability to scale vertically. It’s already fast and stable (well, it has proven so for me). I don’t have any reservations about adding additional team members to any project I have stored in a git repository.

If it works for the Linux kernel, it works for me.

Do you use git in your personal or professional projects as a lone developer? Have any wisdom to share? If so, please leave it below!

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.

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!

Background: I run Moblin on my EeePC now: It’s efficient and I love it. Indeed, Linux is an operating system I’ve admired for a long time but never really had the desire to utilize as my primary desktop replacement. For a netbook, Moblin is king, and Linux works great as a server (obviously, it’s what we’re running here). And over the last couple of years it has matured tremendously.

So on this particularly beautiful Friday evening when everything felt technically in order, I decide to Bootcamp my iMac and install Gentoo.

A mighty battle ensued…

I’ll go into detail over the next couple of posts, but effectively the installation went something like this:

1. Confusion
   How exactly do I do this without losing any of my existing data? Could the Gentoo directions be any more confusing? Where the crap do I begin?!
2. Frustration
   Oh my God I don’t want to repeat these steps another time. Let’s blow away the partition AGAIN.
3. Rage
   WHAT?! Where’s my data?!
4. Horror
   WHERE’S MY DATA?!!
5. Bliss
   Oh there’s my data, there’s Gentoo… this is beautiful..

(This is the CFRHB!! method of operating system installations)

Once I ‘got it,’ I can’t imagine using any other distribution. Gentoo, once it’s humming along, is a straight up masterpiece of software engineering. The Portage package management system is fantastic: Powerful. This is exactly what I’ve been seeking in an OS as my primary development box.