Void's Forums

Hi there.

As I said recently I had a hard drive failure on my Fedora machine, and after a bit of time I have finally received a working HDD (the ebuyer returns dept working overtime to get it out that fast)

I decided I wanted to try something new, I really like Fedora, its definately my favourite so far, I am also a big fan of Ubuntu, not really too keen on SuSE and XandrOS or whatever is really quite rubbish (Windows wannabe - Why would it want to be Windows?)

I have tried a few more distros than that but those are my most recent choices.

I decided to go for Gentoo - but my god man - how much effort is involved in just getting it installed let alone working how I like.

Unfortunately I have tried a couple of 'walkthroughs' but the one that I have decided to stick with seems to keep going off the plot to tell me interesting but useless pieces of information.
The guide is also trying to explain more than one way of installing Gento, but it is mentioning one thing then describing something else then going on about something else, its doing my head in.

I have downloaded the stage3 file from the 2004.3 release and I have unpacked it, I have also downloaded the latest Portage release, although I think I may have the wrong one - not sure yet, that was unpacking the last time I checked the computer, but now I am lost, I don't know what I need to do to continue, any ideas anyone?

Thanks for ANY help

Dave

PS: Also if you have any suggestions for good distributions that are NOT Debian or Red Hat based, please pass them on (also I would prefer to stay away from distros that try to ram KDE down your throat as I don't like it. (Oh and definately not Mandrake/mandriva as I can't stand that)

PPS: I don't even know what GUI Gentoo uses, I just fancied a none Debian or Red Hat based distro - but am I too lazy to enjoy Gentoo?

Ok not sure if I am back on track now, I took a breather then looked again and it seemed to make a bit more sense.

I thought it is best if I say that as of now, I think I am back on the track to installing Gentoo (although I would still like some none Red Hat or Debian based distros to try)

Cheers

Dave

PS: wish me luck

I haven't tried a gentoo install yet, may try one today.

Surprisingly enough, I found Slackware to be incredibly user-friendly and easy to install, even though it is not X-based and known for being non-graphical. It's not an easy distribution to upgrade or maintain, but it is a great learning experience, and easy to install.

Well I think with me I want to try something else, the thing is I don't mind playing with something once its installed, but this much effort just to install it - nah, not for me I am embarresed to admit.

Well maybe I will try it again in the future.

The thing is I actualy want a GUI distro, preferably gnome, but like I said before - not Red Hat or Debian based, although I think it was Void Main that once said to me I should stop trying the Debian based distros and go straight for Debian as I haven't actually tried that yet.

Oh well I think its enough linux work for tonight, my heads hurting now.

Dave

dickinsd wrote:

I think it was Void Main that once said to me I should stop trying the Debian based distros and go straight for Debian as I haven't actually tried that yet.

He told me the exact same thing when I was trying out Debian-based distro after Debian-based distro and didn't quite find what I was looking for.
Followed his advice, tried a Sarge netinstall and never looked back since ...

I stated this in various forums and I'm not sure it will remain like this, but I'm using unstable and unlike the name suggests Sid has been more stable for me than any other major distro I tried out!

Ice9 wrote:dickinsd wrote:

I think it was Void Main that once said to me I should stop trying the Debian based distros and go straight for Debian as I haven't actually tried that yet.

He told me the exact same thing when I was trying out Debian-based distro after Debian-based distro and didn't quite find what I was looking for.
Followed his advice, tried a Sarge netinstall and never looked back since ...

I stated this in various forums and I'm not sure it will remain like this, but I'm using unstable and unlike the name suggests Sid has been more stable for me than any other major distro I tried out!

Off to download latest Debian now.

Thanks for advice.

Dave

EDIT: Just at a Debian Mirror now - there are 14 ISOs on this site:
http://ftp.ticklers.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/i386/iso-cd/

Is this correct - 14 CDs worth of Debian - my god what do you get with it?

Just download the little install ISO and do a network install. You don't need all 50 bazillian Debian packages on CD.

Go to this page and grab the netinstall image.
It will install hte bare minimum to start a network install, after that you can stay in testing or apt-get update your way to unstable if you want more bleeding-edge packages.