Installing from another distro...

[ibowtotux]

I was thinking of installing Gentoo while in another linux distro. But, I have heard that doing that in a distro using GCC 3.4.3 might be hazardous. Are these rumors with merit?

[lakerdonald]

As long as you have some unpartitioned space on your hard drive, you're good to go. As to the GCC issue, I've never tried 3.4.3, but with 3.4.4 I can't compile (at least the virgin sources) some programs like "util-linux". I still haven't switched my gentoo box up to gcc 3.4.x, so my experiences on 3.4.4 have only been with Jedi 0.2
The gentoo box I'm on has gcc-3.3.5 and there are no problems, so you might want to consider downgrading to 3.3.x or install 3.3.x alongside 3.4.x and use that for your Bootstrapping (you are stage1 right?!) / emerging needs.
Just my two cents.

[ibowtotux]

also another question. I eventually want to do stage 1, but I doubt I'll get that much free time anytime soon. So, how long does stage 3 take to setup?

[lakerdonald]

A few hours maybe. that's about how long it took me when I did a stage3

[variant]

you can do a stage3 in about 35 minnits (if you use all the pre built packages) depending on the spec of your computer

[lakerdonald]

you can do a stage3 in about 35 minnits (if you use all the pre built packages) depending on the spec of your computer

I only used stage3 out of necessity cos of my lack of internet connection (I know you can technically do a stage1 without one, but I'm too lazy) so I built everything I could, which was about 3 hours on my 3.0ghz P4

[ibowtotux]

35 minutes? Certainly that doesn't include all the configuration. That Handbook is HUGE!

[lakerdonald]

Using stage3 and binary/GRP packages is a very fast process, with the only real time elapsed being the time it takes you to type things into configuration files. Although I still don't quite see how you could get a kernel extracted and compiled/get genkernel setup in that amount of time, unless you're on a fast box.

[variant]

once youv done it a few times its easy, you set a few commands going and you can configure the kernel while other things are happening. if you manualy configure the kernel it only takes a few minnits to compile (if your needs a small and system fast) unpacking all the tarballs takes the longest. writing the config files is hardly any time at all (fstab, grub, networking - 10 or 15 lines..) 35 minnits is as fast as i could do it I think.

edit: not using genkernel either.

[variant]

and im not talking about installing kde or somthing here.. just the base system that you can reboot into.