Hello all,

I'm considering switching distributions to Gentoo, and I'm wondering if the
following strategy would work. First, some background on where I am (please
skip to the next paragraph if you're not interested). I currently run SuSE
on my laptop, version 7.1 plus any number of upgrades, changes, etc. (new
kernel, new KDE, new gcc, new X, blah blah blah). Even though I've been able
to upgrade well so far, I'm getting frustrated as the system core
increasingly seems to be fundamentally out of date. Every time I try to
install anything, there are countless problems with missing libraries, etc.,
and I have to chase all over the internet to find upgrades. In some cases I
haven't been able to solve obscure compile issues at all, and I'm getting
sick of it.

I don't wish to lose everything, so I was considering the following: use my
extra caddy/hard drive to install and configure gentoo on a backup disk, and
when I'm happy I have things how I want them, put my main hard drive in an
external caddy and copy everything EXCEPT /home over onto it -- I would if
possible want to keep /home exactly as it is (is this OK?). I have all the
major directories (including /home) on their own partitions, using pretty
much standard sizing guidelines, so I would just delete everything off each
of them and replace it, maybe with a few backups for config stuff.

That's my main question. I have a few about gentoo also, if that's OK.

1) I love the flexibility it seems to offer, and I'm a CS/math student who
develops alot and stuff like that, so overall it seems perfect to me. But
does it have to compile absolutely everything? KDE took several days last
time, so I'd rather not repeat teh experiment if possible. : ) Although part
of what's driving me in this direction to begin with is a wish to move from
KDE, which I can't do right now because of messed up configs.

2) Will there be any major differences from SuSE as in defficiencies? I know
I'll lose YaST, which I will honestly miss, but I'll get along OK. It's time
I got in deeper anyway. But if everything requires super-expertise to
configure, then I'm not sure. Has anybody made this switch happily?

3) I have an old laptop -- 166MHz Pentium, 30GB, 112MB. Will Gentoo play
nice with it?

Thank you!
Stephen McKeown

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:26:21 -0500, Stephen McKeown wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm considering switching distributions to Gentoo, and I'm wondering if
> the following strategy would work. First, some background on where I am
> (please skip to the next paragraph if you're not interested). I
> currently run SuSE on my laptop, version 7.1 plus any number of
> upgrades, changes, etc. (new kernel, new KDE, new gcc, new X, blah blah
> blah). Even though I've been able to upgrade well so far, I'm getting
> frustrated as the system core increasingly seems to be fundamentally out
> of date. Every time I try to install anything, there are countless
> problems with missing libraries, etc., and I have to chase all over the
> internet to find upgrades. In some cases I haven't been able to solve
> obscure compile issues at all, and I'm getting sick of it.
>
> I don't wish to lose everything, so I was considering the following: use
> my extra caddy/hard drive to install and configure gentoo on a backup
> disk, and when I'm happy I have things how I want them, put my main hard
> drive in an external caddy and copy everything EXCEPT /home over onto it
> -- I would if possible want to keep /home exactly as it is (is this
> OK?). I have all the major directories (including /home) on their own
> partitions, using pretty much standard sizing guidelines, so I would
> just delete everything off each of them and replace it, maybe with a few
> backups for config stuff.
>
> That's my main question. I have a few about gentoo also, if that's OK.
>
> 1) I love the flexibility it seems to offer, and I'm a CS/math student
> who develops alot and stuff like that, so overall it seems perfect to
> me. But does it have to compile absolutely everything? KDE took several
> days last time, so I'd rather not repeat teh experiment if possible. : )
> Although part of what's driving me in this direction to begin with is a
> wish to move from KDE, which I can't do right now because of messed up
> configs.
>
> 2) Will there be any major differences from SuSE as in defficiencies? I
> know I'll lose YaST, which I will honestly miss, but I'll get along OK.
> It's time I got in deeper anyway. But if everything requires
> super-expertise to configure, then I'm not sure. Has anybody made this
> switch happily?
>
> 3) I have an old laptop -- 166MHz Pentium, 30GB, 112MB. Will Gentoo play
> nice with it?
>
> Thank you!
> Stephen McKeown

Stephen,

Everything you don't want to loose should be on /home anyway, the rest
should all be system stuff.

To do the copyover from one drive to another, the second drive needs to be
at least as big as the first and the partition scheme needs to be the same
or lots of things will break. Why not do the build on the final drive then
copy /home over when you are ready to move?

You do not have to build major things from scratch. There are binaries for
things like KDE and OpenOffice. If you start from stage 3 the install will
be even faster.

Your laptop hardware should be OK. I have Gentoo on a k6-2 500MHz with
128Mb RAM and 4.3Gb disk. No X yet, but it used to run RedHat 7.n.

Regards,

Roy Bamford
--

Computer users fall into two groups:-
Those that do backups
Those that have never had a hard drive fail

> Stephen,
>
> Everything you don't want to loose should be on /home anyway, the rest
> should all be system stuff.
>
> To do the copyover from one drive to another, the second drive needs to be
> at least as big as the first and the partition scheme needs to be the same
> or lots of things will break. Why not do the build on the final drive then
> copy /home over when you are ready to move?
>
> You do not have to build major things from scratch. There are binaries for
> things like KDE and OpenOffice. If you start from stage 3 the install will
> be even faster.
>
> Your laptop hardware should be OK. I have Gentoo on a k6-2 500MHz with
> 128Mb RAM and 4.3Gb disk. No X yet, but it used to run RedHat 7.n.
>
> Regards,
>
> Roy Bamford
> --
>
> Computer users fall into two groups:-
> Those that do backups
> Those that have never had a hard drive fail
>

Hi Roy,

Thank you for the advice. The reason I'm not doing the build on the final
drive is that while my main hard drive is 30GB, my backup hard drive is only
6. I'd like to keep the 30. :-) And I don't want to nuke my current config
before beginning, since even though theoretically everything I want to keep
is on /home, there are a lot of config issues and stuff like that in /etc
and (occasionally) /usr that I'd hate to lose if things didn't work out,
such as my wireless lan configuration, which took ages to get straight. And
I'd hate to rebuild KDE. :-) I could copy my current config onto the 6Gig
and build gentoo on the main drive. I'll think about it while I download and
eat lunch.

Oh, one other question please: on gentoo, does it mess things up if you do
install something without using merge? For example, to get my wlan going
finally, I used an obscure driver I DLed from the mfgr of the chipset. It
might be on gentoo, of course, but it might not, and if not I'd want to go
ahead and compile and install it. Would that be OK?

Thanks!
Stephen

Sounds good. Thanks! -S