Vidalinux

[George Harrison]

I want to desperately install Gentoo but after failing numerous times I just can't do it. I heard someone saying that Vidalinux is essentially the same thing (uses portage which is what I want) and looks nice. Has anyone tried this? I might give Gentoo another try in the summer, I don't know yet. How does portage work? Is it anything like Debian's amazing package manager? Are Vida and Gentoo wildly different? Near the same? I usually hate fork offs of popullar distros (like the 100 or more off of Debian...) so any personal advice would be most appreciated. Thanks.


EDIT: Oh and are there any more Gentoo clones out there (and/or are they better than Vida?)

[LeFou]

here's an introduction to Portage:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=2&chap=1

I'm new to the gentoo scene, and am going through some growing pains, but my understanding is that it resembles apt-get in terms of resolving yr dependencies for you, but it's all compiled from source, with a great many flags that tell Portage about yr system.

The advantage being that you don't install every available option for a piece of software-- just the ones that are appropriate to yr setup.

And the hard part is understanding yr setup well enough to describe it accurately to Portage.

[George Harrison]

OK thanks for the link.


I might give another go with Gentoo.. this time I'll just use Genkernel

[bryansmith]

I tried VidaLinux for a while. It was solid (except for a couple of hiccups along the way). It is Gentoo based meaning you can use Portage (which is awesome by the way). From what I have read, it is essentially 99% Gentoo right out of the box and 100% Gentoo after an update.

Hope that helps,
Bryan

[genesus]

Vida linux looks good, but its just a stage three tarball with anaconda, i think, as the installer. i think it would be much better to go pure gentoo; what problems where you haveing before? Did you follow the handbook, I know its long?

Vida linux also causes many users problems when they try to update world via portage, which may or may not be an issue.

[bryansmith]

Vida linux looks good, but its just a stage three tarball with anaconda, i think, as the installer.

Yes, VidaLinux does use the Anaconda installer.

Vida linux also causes many users problems when they try to update world via portage, which may or may not be an issue.

I had some problems trying to do an update world. You will see that x.org is blocked; you will have to emerge that first. There was an error during the actual update world but I can't remember what it was now.

Hope that helps,
Bryan

[George Harrison]

OK thanks for the tips.


Stuff started to go south at the kernel. I'll just do genkernel next time.

[GotAMD]

VidaLinux didn't work for me when I tried it. It did a kernel panic on booting the first time after the install (on my laptop which runs all other distros of Linux fine including pure Gentoo).