Hi, Gentoo. After a few weeks of effort, I've just gone live with my very own Gentoo system. :-)
The last stage was copying most of my files over from my old box, which involved a significant degree of screwing the disk drives. It is such a relief to say goodbye to my ancient Debian system, which no longer had a functioning package system. Also, my ten year old hardware was feeling ever more underpowered as time went by. Installing and configuring Gentoo was significantly easier than Debian, even though it took about the same amount of time. The approach "insert the DVD, press the button, and everything will work OK" is fine, until something _doesn't_ work OK; then you've got several hours (or days) of tedious searching for the answer. By contrast, with Gentoo's 41 pages of detailed instructions, you really can't go far wrong. And at the end of it, there's further detailed documentation to get X and window manager etc. set up. I think there's really only two ways to install Linux: you either go the Ubuntu route, where everything's done for you and you accept somebody else's defaults, or you go with Gentoo, where you do everything yourself. I think anything in the middle, like Debian, just leads to confusion and uncertainty. I don't know where Fedora and SuSE fit into all this. Anyhow, I'm now up and running, with some installation and config still to do: things like how to get British English and German keyboard layouts in XFCE, how to make it's terminal have a black background and things like that. I also need to find a decent PDF viewer, and a decent jpeg viewer. So, thanks for all the help, everybody! -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
