Trying to install Gentoo Linux

Written byBy: Mario Rimann.

Last week we decided to have an additional computer for monitoring of our services at work. As Nagios is not able to run on Windows, we chose Linux as the Operating System to go. But the next question popped up immediately: Which distribution should we install? Our requirements were

• must be one of the well known distributions
• must be free
• should run nagios, apache and some smaller things
• should run X server and either KDE or Gnome
• should not cause head-ache, but also be a small challenge to set-up (learning effect!)

We discussed some possible candidates for that job:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Gentoo

At the end we decided to take Gentoo and perform an install from the minimal disk image.

And since last week I'm trying to install that machine with Gentoo. It's pretty interresting for me as a Windows Admin, to dive deep into the internals of Linux. As I'm used to Ubuntu on my system at home, Gentoo is a big difference for me now! Ubuntu can be installed by non-technicians without problems and within less than 4 hours. Gentoo on the other hand is pretty small and clean - you have to install every single application. Not even the editor vi is installed by default.

Download and compiling of the X server ran over weekend (didn't finish on friday afternoon) and now it's compiling KDE. Yes, it's an older box and thus not the fastest... I expected it to take more time than Ubuntu with the pre-compiled binary packages - but now I see that I under-estimated the time needed for all the compiling...