Thu 17th Aug, 2006 - Gentoo..LFS…Gentoo…FreeBSD
A few months ago I met this guy at a convention, a guru of Linux and all that is open-source. I asked him what his favorite distro was, he replied with “Gentoo.” He told me Gentoo was the way to configure your system by your standards. I thought, Gentoo, maybe I should give it a chance. Here it is, 5 days, and I still haven’t been able to install it in my old Aptiva. Here’s the thing: When you install Gentoo you do it from the ground up. I’m talking, compiling most of the stuff in the distro including the kernel, all from the command line. The cool thing is you get to choose everything, you make Gentoo into whatever you want it to be, the bad thing is deciding what to choose and what works with your system. On the positive side, I’ve compiled my own kernel, I’ve seen the dark side of the command line and it’s not as difficult as you might think. Now I understand what goes into a Linux system and understand a whole lot of everything (also have a whole lot of questions about a lot of other stuff.) So my first try at Gentoo failed (I think it was some bad kernel compilation choices.) At this point I was reading on the net and found about LFS (Linux From Scratch), twice as complicated as installing Gentoo. So I gave it a try, the harder it is, the more you can learn… and learn I did, that my hard drive was failing and that’s why in the middle of my LFS install I got this screen:
OHHHH NOOOO!!!
So at this time I had to start over with a new drive and I decided to give Gentoo another try (it has a much better installation guide than LFS), once again I fucked it up and it wouldn’t boot. Again, I try to get it working and it seems that my hardware needs some config parameter which I don’t know, or maybe it just doesn’t like Gentoo. I was tired and pissed and wasn’t learning much, so I go for the FreeBSD install. Before that I was using PC-BSD, which uses a very simple graphical install, in other words, a pussy install method. FreeBSD uses a utility which let’s you configure most of the system without making you go psycho to see whether you forgot to add a dot-slash or not. It’s not as hardcore as LFS, but hey, BSD works, and this installation taught me a lot if not more than the Gentoo or LFS version. I’ve read that people can go about installing LFS 4 or 5 times before they get right. Maybe I’ll give it a chance, next year, or the year after that.
Graphical install, that’s for pussys, the pic above is from Gentoo’s terminal.
Now that’s a mascot, the BSD Daemon, long live the daemon!!!!