Author: fsckin

That wasn’t so hard… was it?

Just used a networkless installation off the 2007.0 LiveCD and everything is “working”.

If by working you mean hopelessly out of date, indeed.

The difficult part now is to get the complete system upgraded.  I found Pothole.  It’s a perfect GUI for using Portage.  Works great, I just need to figure out how to utilize Gentoo’s so called “most important contribution” to package management before it pisses me off.

The errors, even in Pothole are cryptic.   “Before this shiny new nVidia driver will work, so that your system doesn’t perform like a 89 year old grandaddy who forgot his Viagra, you need to fix 7 errors in a conf file in the /etc filesystem.   Type in “man emerge” and look for the configuration section.”

What a crock of sh*t!   Where exactly do I start looking for these 7 conf files with errors?  Where is a log that tells me these specific files have errors?

If it doesn’t work out of the box – that’s like me saying my most important contribution to the world is that I’ve consumed way, way too much Diet Coke in the past 3 years since I switched from Mountain Dew – it’s a useless contribution.

Also I’ve decided that if your LiveCD performs as poorly as an installed system (due to using svga driver instead of nVidia), you gotta get your act together.

I’m done ranting.

Ubuntu is GREAT for a new linux user.

However there are problems. Random “security” updates routinely kill various parts of the system. Unsigned updates warning me that if I install them, it could be from a malicious, unverified source. Compiling (when needed) just works half the time with unreadable errors pointing me towards log files that I have to hunt down.

Ridiculous!

Gentoo here I come. I’ve got the livecd-i686-installer-2007.0 downloaded, camera ready and I will document every step of the way.

This should be one of two things:
1. Fun.
2. Exercise in frustration.

I’ll put my money on numero dos.