philcrissman.com

Interesting experience using the Gentoo Live CD the other night. The executive summary is that it didn’t work.

The slightly longer version, is that it didn’t work, then it seemed to be working, and then it didn’t work.

That might not make sense; perhaps I should go on.

The framebuffer (read opening graphics if “framebuffer” is meaningless to you) was impressive; very slick and professional. Everything loaded nice and proper, and then came the tell-tale click in the monitor as it began to start X (the GUI, again, if “X” doesn’t mean much to you).

And then nothing.

This is where having set up Gentoo manually many times came in handy; having set up X.org numerous times, I assumed (correctly, it turned out) that something was wrong in the default xorg.conf. I switched to a tty, edited xorg, and saw that not only did it have some pretty squirrely settings for the monitor horizontal and vertical refresh rates, but the video cards driver was set to “vesa” — I reset the monitor settings, and the vid card driver to “nv”, saved the file, and tried again to go to X. Aha! Working. Hurdle number one, down.

Now to try the graphical installer.

Those in the hardcore Gentoo community who were upset at the coming graphical installer, worried that it would “dumb down” the Gentoo install… well, they don’t need to worry. It is fully as complex as the normal install — in fact, it pretty much is the normal install, just with a GUI. As they say themselves on one of the first screens, the Gentoo installer is not meant to make installing Gentoo easier — it’s meant to make it faster.

Oh, and it’s beta. We should mention that it’s beta. (ie, it might not even work. Comforting.)

I took a lot of screenshots, but I won’t show them all, so the page is quicker to load… Here’s the desktop:

Gentoo Live CD Desktop (Click to view)

Here’s the installer, first screen:

I’ll spare you a screen-by-screen of the rest of the install, but it’s pretty straight-forward from there: just take the Gentoo Handbook and wrap it in a GUI, and that’s what you get.

The problem is, when everything was all said and done, after it went and installed everything… the bootloader, inexplicably, failed to install properly.

So, the next morning (it is still Gentoo, after all — did you expect to install it in an hour?), I found my computer unbootable, because the original bootloader had been blown away, and replaced with… nothing.

My handy Arch Linux 0.7.1 CD came to my rescue again… a 20 minute install later, and I had a working Linux and GRUB setup, and could log into XP or the vanilla Arch setup.

So, now what? I decided to do something completely different. I just installed Novell SuSE 10.0 this evening — but I’ll save that for another post.