A Penguin in the Orchard

Successful Smile

I’ve got a working install of Gentoo. I finished and booted to a console about a half-hour ago. You can tell by the time between the first post and this one that it wasn’t an easy path, and it’s still not completely finished. Xfree86 is loading now with Gnome to follow shortly after.

I had two sizeable problems to overcome. The first was the ‘net connection. I’m not sure if my router is flaking out or if there were some serious outages tonight. I’d get halfway through a package download and the net connection would be gone. I started the stage 2 install process at least a half-dozen times. When the connection was good, it was very good - upwards of 250 Kbps. That’s very strong from my Mediacom connection these days. Complicating the connection problem was that Gentoo downloads a package then installs it, rather than downloading everything that’s needed in a single shot. The emerge system clearly knows what it needs when it starts - it could just as easily get everything, then install everything.

The second problem was grub. I had more trouble configuring grub than I’ve ever had with lilo. Call me a purist - I much prefer lilo. I did finally get grub working and, as I’ve said, was able to boot to a console.

XFree and Gnome, and I’m outta here.