Tuesday 8 March 2011

The Beauty of a Gentoo installation

I have installed various linux distributions so far but Gentoo installation has an unmatched beauty to it. It is special because you can stop the installation and resume it at will. You just need to chroot back in if you have not completed the base system installation. Once the base system is installed, you can keep adding features at your pace and suiting your internet speed.

Unlike other distributions, Gentoo offers very fine-grained control over the packages you install and what features those packages have enabled. This is done using USE flags.

If you are looking a graphical installer that does its job without asking you much, this is not for you; but if you want robust control with proper dependency checking and stability, Gentoo is the right choice for you.

While other distributions have trouble connecting to the internet from their install environments, Gentoo minimal install environment had Intel Wireless microcode (iwl3945-ucode) and I could connect to a WPA network and do the installation.

Support on #gentoo sets Gentoo apart from every other distribution. I have solved problems of other distributions on this channel. Every time you have an issue, you can find someone here to help you out.

The beauty of the installation process lies in the freedom and the host of options that it allows you.

1 comment:

lyecdevf said...

Indeed gentoo IRC channel is good and very frequented as there are as many people on there as the main linux channel. Unfortunately I have not yet worked on gentoo but instead use the sabayon which is based on it.