I’ve been on a mini-vacation over the past week with a cold and a death in the family. I had some time to give gentoo another install try and it went really good.

The directions in the Gentoo Handbook are written step by step and are pretty easy to follow. I had better luck installing it on a blank single hard drive with no dual booting. Everything has been flawless with that install, so I decided to install it on the main machine, which has two hard drives and booting Windows XP.

After going thru the steps as normal and keeping my partitions straight, I only had a problem in the fstab file and that was easily fixed. I should of caught that mistake right away, but it is up and running in KDE now. I am in the process of adding the applications I want and updating to current versions.

The world of emerge is a wonderful thing. It takes some getting use to, especially after you have been doing apt-get for the last 2 years. The emerge process is time consuming tho, so be aware of that.

The thing I noticed is the speed of gentoo, it’s amazing. My old PII 400 computer just flys now. I debated about the 64 bit version and I guess there is a 2004.3 out for it, but it would not detect my ethernet card on the livecd so I went back to the 32 bit livecd.

If your interested in gentoo, take a look around the forums and you will find a very active community and a wealth of information. It’s worth the time to install gentoo.