Is GUI gentoo installer any easier than the text based one?

[gruven]

Gentoo still takes 2 days being up compiling stuff to build a gentoo system?? I remember that last time i tried installing gentoo that was about 4 years ago, took 2 consecutive days, resulting a successful install but unable to get a GUI lol. If u gentoo can be installed without having to compile everything from scratch and chrooting and doing all that stuff. I would use gentoo

I want to be able to install gentoo in 30 minutes.

It isn't hard to get a base gentoo install in 30 minutes, depending on how fast your machine compiles the kernel. I have my config files backed up, so all I have to do is partition, download the stage 3 tarball, portage snapshot, emerge kernel, copy config files over from backup, compile kernel, and install a few programs and grub.

With a decent (read 1.5 Mb/s+) internet connection, it shouldn't even take 30 minutes.

Then, of course, I update gcc and change my cflags and re-emerge the system and world to get everything compiled with the new gcc and options. That only takes about 10 - 12 hours on my Core 2 Quad with 8 GB RAM.

But yeah, I can have X + window manager installed and running within 1.5 - 3 hours, depending on which window manager.

One last thing. The install is part of the gentoo experience. It isn't meant to be easy, it is meant to teach you a small amount of what you will need to maintain gentoo and to get used to using the package manager (portage) a little bit. If you don't have the time to install it, you really don't have the time to maintain it if something breaks. Of course, it is a lot easier to fix things that break in gentoo than it is in other distro's if an upgrade breaks something.

[i92guboj]

Gentoo still takes 2 days being up compiling stuff to build a gentoo system?? I remember that last time i tried installing gentoo that was about 4 years ago, took 2 consecutive days, resulting a successful install but unable to get a GUI lol. If u gentoo can be installed without having to compile everything from scratch and chrooting and doing all that stuff. I would use gentoo

I want to be able to install gentoo in 30 minutes.

You just want ubuntu with the Gentoo logo at boot time. If you want Gentoo, you must be willing to learn a bit. If you are not (nothing wrong with that) there are a ton of distros out there that do quite well and can be installed in 10 minutes. No need to turn Gentoo into "another one".

Is it? What's the actual difference? Screen shots?


Thanks

No need for screenshots. The installer is a graphical installer under x11, using gtk if I remember ok. I just know that it fails quite a lot and do weird things.

I always advice doing the manual install, using the handbook. If you are not prepared for that, then you are not prepared for Gentoo, and you will fail to do even the most basic maintenance tasks. Consider the handbook and then manual installation as a learning course to understand the basic principles of both linux and Gentoo.

If you still want an easy to install derivative of gentoo, you can search for sabayon. Note though that sabayon is not gentoo, though it is based on it. There's also vidalinux (i think it was called that way, not sure).

[oz]

Gentoo still takes 2 days being up compiling stuff to build a gentoo system?? I remember that last time i tried installing gentoo that was about 4 years ago, took 2 consecutive days, resulting a successful install but unable to get a GUI lol. If u gentoo can be installed without having to compile everything from scratch and chrooting and doing all that stuff. I would use gentoo

I want to be able to install gentoo in 30 minutes.

Yeah, the last time I installed Gentoo (a couple of years ago) it took the better part of a full weekend (I did take time out for sleep) to get the system with GUI fully compiled, installed, configured, and tweaked. While I do like Gentoo very much, it's too time intensive for me, even for some package upgrades.

[robd]

Yeah, the last time I installed Gentoo (a couple of years ago) it took the better part of a full weekend (I did take time out for sleep) to get the system with GUI fully compiled, installed, configured, and tweaked. While I do like Gentoo very much, it's too time intensive for me, even for some package upgrades.

The main reason I like Gentoo is for the huge range of packages (and I am a bit of a masochist too ). But I don't fully agree with the time-intensive bit. Yes, starting from scratch is slow, but last month I bought myself a new x86_64 desktop box, and I just cloned across the root and usr partitions from my relatively new x86_64 laptop. It took a little while to re-do the kernel config and set up X for the different video hardware, but I kicked off a kernel re-compile then went off and ate dinner. And the last time I emerged a new version of xorg I kicked it off and went to bed.

The big upside to Gentoo is that once you have all the huge packages installed you can install utilities in minutes, e.g. downloading and compiling the wireshark ebuild took less than 5 minutes. I haven't tried any other distros recently, so I don't know how good they are in comparison, but I am so old that I can remember the rpm dependency hell of the early Red Hat distros.

Anyway, it would be a boring old world if everybody liked the same thing.

Regards, Rob

[oz]

But I don't fully agree with the time-intensive bit.

No, that's why I said "it's too time intensive for me". I didn't say that others would find it that way. So, I stand solidly behind my own opinion.

Anyway, it would be a boring old world if everybody liked the same thing.

I'm in total agreement!