Well, I intended to write Friday, but I ended up going to the doctor. Turns out I have infected sinuses and inflammation in my lungs. This kind of thing happens every year, so don't worry about me. Anyways, while getting sick, I've decided to get rid of Ubuntu and try something completely different. I've used Arch Linux before, but now I decided to go a step further and download Gentoo Linux. So far, it has been quite the undertaking.
With Ubuntu, it's just sit back and let the CD do everything. With Arch Linux, it let the CD get you started, and you have to figure out how to set it up to your liking. With Gentoo Linux, it's even less than that. You start on the CD, which mine is a minimal CD. You connect to the Internet, but you don't have any wireless drivers yet, and that's a little problem for me since I have Wi-Fi all over my house. Then you have to set all the spaces in your hard drive. You download the latest files and Portage, Gentoo's way of getting files which is also used in Chromebooks, which I didn't know until today. After downloading and extracting those two things, and a lot more configuring, you can tap into the hard drive using chroot. You still can't reboot and pull the CD out yet. There's a lot more to do.
As I'm still doing this. I'm downloading a kernel, the layer between the hard drive and your programs if you don't know much about computers. I'm am going off the handbook on the Gentoo Linux website, and I'm only on step seven of twelve. This took me about three hours, and I feel I'm taking it at a good speed. Even though in Arch Linux, you'd be fully up and running with visuals and everything.
This has been quite the experiment. Gentoo Linux gives me probably the most customization I could ever imagine without building Linux from scratch. While it will take a while, I think, and hope, the wait will be worth it.
The question for this article is:
What's your favorite computer experience?
What computer experiences have you hated?
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