Gentoo: Ten Years Emerge

The author did a great job of nut shelling the pro's and con's of binary vs source.

Binary: Pro speed of install, Con someone else has made all the functional decisions Source: Con speed of install, Pro the user makes all the functional decisions

Binary: Pro operates on wide array of hardware OOB, Con not optimized for any specific system Source: Con typically operates on a specific hardware set, Pro specifically optimized for the users system.

there are other pros and cons, but the author did a really good job of it.

btw, Happy Birthday Gentoo

I thought Gentoo had a live installation CD. I tried it once but it wouldn't boot properly, so I gave up, but was under the impression that most Gentoo users did a binary installation of the base system (and XFCE maybe).

The recommended install method is doing the stage3 install. The graphical installer has always been hit or miss in its ability to give a functional install. From what I have been told in #gentoo the graphical install utility is being phased out at this point. This raises the bar to actually doing a gentoo install but on the plus side increases the amount of knowledge you will amass.

Personally, I think the Arch install strikes a proper balance. Binary, text installation, but of not very many packages. It's good if you want to learn something/have control. The Gentoo documentation is pretty good, so if you can read, I doubt installing is difficult.

It's not that difficult to install if you read the guide carefully, and once you do it a few times you just breeze through the guide as you go to make sure you get everything right. The stage3 is (as I understand it) basically the base system tools and such compiled fairly generically for the specific architecture. After extracting that you have to download and extract the portage tree, then start compiling other stuff (like, say, the kernel, X, cron, etc, etc....). I think I tried the gui installer on the liveDVD a couple years back, but didn't have much success with it at that time. I generally don't even use the actual Gentoo Minimal Install CD since I usually have a dozen SystemRescueCDs closer at hand. :P

Depending on what you read, one of the first things I do is set up for architecture and recompile the stage3. By the time I'm done with a base install there isnt a single thing that hasnt been recompiled at least once specifically for my hardware.

Your right though, after doing it a few times it becomes fairly routine.

Combining this with Caitlyn's recent Slackware review, we've had some really good reviews recently. Let's hope the trend continues.