And I quote myself...
If I were younger, I’d try: GentooI thought for some reason I was younger this morning, so I downloaded the Gentoo LiveCD and gave it a whirl. Now, six hours later, I am defeated. Everyone who has installed Gentoo raves about it. I now understand why. If you are able to get this OS installed, then you'll have achieved something that not many people have: Getting through the cruft of doing an install the hard way. And this is coming from a guy who clicked-clicked through the graphical install of Gentoo's LiveCD. See, the first thing I tried was doing an install through the minimal CD (about 60MB). I gave up after an hour of trying to figure out how to do things. Then I gave the LiveCD (about 450MB) a try. But, every time I got about half-way through the install, my notebook would ungracefully die. Huh? After the fourth (and almost last) try, I put my finger next to the exhaust port on the side of my notebook and found that I almost scalded off my skin. Apparently, Gentoo did not want to control my CPU fan! So, while the install was Emerging (ie. getting and building packages), it was toasting my CPU. Yum. I worked around that by turning on the "Always Run CPU Fan When on AC Power" option in the BIOS. Now, I was ready to get Gentoo installed! But, the install took forever, and when I thought it was done, it wasn't. It was still Emerging stuff. Those that know me, know that I'm all for instant gratification. This install was taking way too long and I wasn't getting the gratification I was looking for. Ubuntu is being installed back onto the system now. All this installation was brought on by me wiping my system last night in some macho fashion thinking that I could get wpa_supplicant and CentOS 4.4 working together. Sorry, but it just does not work. Dammit. Anyways, I'm going to get Ubuntu back on my notebook and Blubuntu it. Then I am going to feel grateful that there are instant-on, instant-gratification distros like Ubuntu (and CentOS) which work without much doing-of-crufty-things. I am sure that Gentoo works most awesome for those that have the patience to get it installed. Don't take me wrong, I am not knocking Gentoo. It's just that the installation of Gentoo is not my cup of tea. Now, at least I can say I tried to get Gentoo installed.