Gentoo Install gone bad

[MikeTbob]

Ok, I got 3/4th through a Gentoo 2006.1-LiveCD install to hard drive and either the installer crashed or CD is bad/dirty. My question is this, can I just download the portage snapshot and continue from there, because that's where my install went bad (308 of 386 packages). It seems I have a fairly working Gentoo install, but no X, no modules, and I'm sure there is other stuff that is missing too.

[Juan Pablo]

Please tell me you are not using the GUI or ncurses installer?!
They are plain buggy and mostly useless

But we can try to repair your half installation, have you tried resyncing the portage tree? Did you get a kernel binary already to boot from? Is fstab fine?

[MikeTbob]

Please tell me you are not using the GUI or ncurses installer?!
They are plain buggy and mostly useless

But we can try to repair your half installation, have you tried resyncing the portage tree? Did you get a kernel binary already to boot from? Is fstab fine?

HEH
I am using the GUI, and you're right, mostly useless.
I haven't tried resyncing, I figure maybe it was a bad/dirty CD and that tree wouldn't be any good. I can boot to gentoo kernel, it complains about missing modules. I think fstab is good, I can recreate that, no problem.
It's probably a better idea to start from scratch, and not use the Installer this time, but man this takes a long time.

[Juan Pablo]

Yes, starting from scratch may be the best solution, Gentoo takes some time to get installed but it's great after that.

Things like the X server and major DEs will take a large amount of time to compile. I would recommend something light like wmaker or Fluxbox if it's your first time with Gentoo

[daark.child]

I have never had any success with the live cd and many people report that its buggy. I suggest you use the minimal install cd.

[Juan Pablo]

You can also use an already working Linux installation, it should be the same if you already have the partition where you want to install Gentoo

[MikeTbob]

I am in the middle of Installing Gentoo again, this time I am using the Alternate install as suggested by Juan Pablo, I am using the HOWTO Installing Gentoo from an existing Linux distribution
One question I have is, did you have to configure the USE flags in /etc/make.conf or is that for really serious tweakers??

EDIT: Changed a typo from /etc/make.profile to /etc/make.conf

[tech_man]

^^ Just go for the basic ones, anything more is for tweakers.

[spencerf]

you might as well spend some time figuring out what USE flags you want to use because this is what truly sets Gentoo apart. It lets you customize the binary that will be created from your compile to fit your particular needs/wants/desires for your system. The most common example is whether you would like a GTK, Gnome based system or a QT, Kde based system. If want either, both, or neither you can do this by using USE flags.

Other nice flags are the ones used by mplayer for cpu optimization you can see all of them by doing an emerge -pv mplayer. And you can see your flags by doing

cat /proc/cpuinfo

plus there are hundreds of other flags that are useful. You can always edit them later and reemerge any programs effected by the change when you do a global update by doing:

emerge -va --update --newuse --deep world


and you can also define USE flags on a per package basis by defining the specific package in

/etc/portage/package.use

hope this helps or at least provides a little insight

[MikeTbob]

Thanks for all the tips and hints folks, I now have a working Gentoo install, of course I am taking my time and trying to be very thorough. I'm still using a chrooted environment because my wireless isn't setup yet. I am at the point of installing xorg (emerge xorg-x11), this might take awhile!!
Once again, thanks for the help and hints.

Ok that too a long time, but uhm, KDE is going to take even longer. 1 of 400 pkgs!
Anyone have any experience installing madwifi in Gentoo? Any good HOWTO's?