Last month I posted an article on my frustration with Gentoo. After I posted the article, I realized that the Compiz Fusion install was actually the culprit in breaking my last Gentoo system. During the install, I edited xorg.conf to enable Compiz but forgot to revert back to the old configurations when I decided not to use it.
Since I was frustrated at the time, I thus decided to use PC-BSD but later switched to Linux Mint 4.0 KDE. With each of these two distros, I had the same problem with xorg-X11. With LM KDE, I had to change my driver from nvidia to nv to get back into KDE. Now I am confident this problem was not anyway Gentoo related, I decided to give Gentoo another try on my Desktop.
Last night I decided to give Gentoo 2008.0 beta2 a try. All I got to say is wow! It installed much easier than Gentoo 2008.0 beta1 and is probably one of my fastest Gentoo installs ever. I selected the Minimal CD/Install CD and started a stage 3 build with Daniel Robbin’s stage3 tarbells. In just three hours, I had installed a base Gentoo system with xorg-X11. By the time I woke up this morning, KDE 3.5.9 was already compiled (In the US, I could have done this in a shorter time since the bandwidth there is higher than here in Vietnam).
I really did not have to do much configuring this time around. I manually compiled my kernel and was a bit surprised that it compiled easily the first time around. I was worried about grub-install, this is where I usually made my mistake when installing Gentoo. This time around, I made it through the install successfully. The only real configurations I ended up doing dealt with ALSA. That was not really major since I just had to compile the ALSA modules into the kernel (which I should have down in the beginning). After I unmuted my soundcard, I got sound in ALL 5 of my speakers 🙂
Surprisingly, I did not have to configure xorg-X11 to get my nvidia card to work properly. It did that automatically during the install. Direct rendering was even enabled!
Overall, the Gentoo 2008 beta2 install was probably one of the easiest Gentoo installs for me. All the bugs from Gentoo 2008 beta1 have been dealt with. I think it is ready for the mainstream now but that is for the Gentoo Developers to decide. Gentoo 2008.0 stable should be around the corner.
I have been waiting for gentoo 2007.1, now 2008.0. I’m frustrated waiting for this one now!! I’m thinking to give beta 2 a try. I tried Fedora 9, but since x.org 7.4 is still in development there aren’t any nvidia driver (propriety one) that can be installed w/o hack. Does gentoo 2008 beta 2 uses xorg-server 1.5 or 1.4? And how stable is it?
I started off with Daniel Robins stage3 tarballs and completed installing kernel and basic configurations without problem. Tonight I’ll set off the X11 compilation. Speaking of the eye candy stuff I generally don’t bother installing them, as you rightly said they tend to be unstable.
Cheers!
Good to hear you got everything working!
Today I woke up to find 197 packages successfully installed! . KDE 3.5.9 up and running! yay!
I agree. Gentoo _is_ the fastest Linux I’ve ever used. For me there are many Gentoo servers around NY (and US in general) that give pretty good download speeds 😉
The reason I was waiting for gentoo 2008 was KDE4. I played with Fedora9 for some time and I think I can wait till 4.1 comes out. Some of my favorite apps (amarok, k3b..) are still in alpha stages if I’m not wrong and it will take a while (months or year?) before we actually start using kde4 systems. In the mean time I’ll keep an eye on the KDE4 developments. Cheers!