The story of Gentoo...
Gather 'round, children, and let me weave you a story...
I've been wanting Linux on my newly freed up 3rd hard drive for a while, now. Finally my drives were happy, my BIOS settings were coping with my video card, and life seemed good.
But, what distribution shall be placed upon the free hard drive? I wanted the install to go smoothly, and frankly just wanted anything besides Windows on the thing. Apparently Eli's roommate somehow got a ton of CDs for this distribution called Ubuntu. I hadn't heard of them before, and their disc on the desk in front of me, so I figured I would give it a shot. The install went very smoothly, and all was well, until I discovered that the thing came with GNOME. I really, really can't stand GNOME. For some reason, that GUI just offends me. I stayed in there for a good half hour, accomplishing trapping my taskbar-ish-thing on the right side of my screen, and enlarged my icons up to morbidly obese.
That was it - Ubuntu had to die. Although, Kyle claims each release comes with an animal name, and mine was the Breezy Badger. This was almost enough for me to keep the thing.
So, I decided to jump on the Gentoo bandwagon. I heard it would take a while to install, but what the heck. I was fighting the man! Or something.
The plan was set. Next day (Wednesday), following Japanese class, Gentoo would make its way onto my system. Apparently Sam also liked the idea, and since he had a recently freed hard drive as well, he up and started the install on his system at about 10am. He started at stage one.
Along comes 6pm, Japanese class time, and he's still installing. No way I can do this at 8pm when I get back. I expected to spend four or five hours on the install, but apparently I need to devote an entire week to it!
The idea is presented that I do I stage three install, see if I'm pleased with the distribution, and if I am, plan a day to do a stage one install, so it's specially compiled for my system (<3). I think this is a good idea.
The stage three install begins at about 9pm, and begins to wrap up 'round midnight. Not even full packages, just the base install. At this point, GRUB is stuck on there. GRUB claims it can't read its own file system, and therefore can't boot. This seems like it's fixable, but it's late, and sleep is needed. The install, in theory, can complete/be fixed the next day. All that was left to do was pick a few needed packages, anyway.
The computer attempts to boot into Windows, but with no luck. GRUB wandered onto another hard drive (not even the one set to boot first - that's the Linux one), and took a giant crap on my Window's MBR. What the hell? I gave Gentoo its own hard drive! Yet it still phucked with Windows. What a plucky little OS.
I've been wanting Linux on my newly freed up 3rd hard drive for a while, now. Finally my drives were happy, my BIOS settings were coping with my video card, and life seemed good.
But, what distribution shall be placed upon the free hard drive? I wanted the install to go smoothly, and frankly just wanted anything besides Windows on the thing. Apparently Eli's roommate somehow got a ton of CDs for this distribution called Ubuntu. I hadn't heard of them before, and their disc on the desk in front of me, so I figured I would give it a shot. The install went very smoothly, and all was well, until I discovered that the thing came with GNOME. I really, really can't stand GNOME. For some reason, that GUI just offends me. I stayed in there for a good half hour, accomplishing trapping my taskbar-ish-thing on the right side of my screen, and enlarged my icons up to morbidly obese.
That was it - Ubuntu had to die. Although, Kyle claims each release comes with an animal name, and mine was the Breezy Badger. This was almost enough for me to keep the thing.
So, I decided to jump on the Gentoo bandwagon. I heard it would take a while to install, but what the heck. I was fighting the man! Or something.
The plan was set. Next day (Wednesday), following Japanese class, Gentoo would make its way onto my system. Apparently Sam also liked the idea, and since he had a recently freed hard drive as well, he up and started the install on his system at about 10am. He started at stage one.
Along comes 6pm, Japanese class time, and he's still installing. No way I can do this at 8pm when I get back. I expected to spend four or five hours on the install, but apparently I need to devote an entire week to it!
The idea is presented that I do I stage three install, see if I'm pleased with the distribution, and if I am, plan a day to do a stage one install, so it's specially compiled for my system (<3). I think this is a good idea.
The stage three install begins at about 9pm, and begins to wrap up 'round midnight. Not even full packages, just the base install. At this point, GRUB is stuck on there. GRUB claims it can't read its own file system, and therefore can't boot. This seems like it's fixable, but it's late, and sleep is needed. The install, in theory, can complete/be fixed the next day. All that was left to do was pick a few needed packages, anyway.
The computer attempts to boot into Windows, but with no luck. GRUB wandered onto another hard drive (not even the one set to boot first - that's the Linux one), and took a giant crap on my Window's MBR. What the hell? I gave Gentoo its own hard drive! Yet it still phucked with Windows. What a plucky little OS.