Today I decided that it was time to upgrade my notebook. Not that there’s anything wrong with my existing Asus V6J! But the upgrade will let me shuffle all of our notebooks up a place and retire the oldest (also an Asus) which is starting to feel its age.

In this and the following posts, I’ll give a blow-by-blow rundown on the process of how I install Gentoo on the notebook. I’m figuring that, since this is the 5th time I have carried out an installation of this type, i should be able to do it with the minimum of pain — and give you some pointers which go beyond the technicalities.

Why Gentoo?

As I have indicated elsewhere in this blog, the choice of a distribution is largely one of personal preferences. However, I suggest that there are 2 compelling reasons to put Gentoo close to the top of your list…

1. Once you have installed Gentoo, you will never have to install it again. Why? Unlike other distributions, Gentoo is Gentoo and can be continuously updated. Most of the other distro’s that I have dealt with have relatively frequent new releases which almost invariably mean that you are faced with a major process when the time comes to upgrade (often a total reinstallation on your system).

1. Because everything (including the kernel in my installation method) is installed from source code, everything that you use can be totally optimised for your hardware. Again, this can be emulated , but not matched with other distributions.

There are a couple of disadvantages with Gentoo. Installation of applications will always take longer than with alternatives due to the installation from source. For example, even of a pretty gutsy machine, OpenOffice will take more than 12 hours to install!

Another disadvantage can be that less common applications may not be available as ebuilds (the Gentoo equivalent of an RPM or DEB package).

Objectives.

My objectives are pretty straight forward…

• to get access to all of the features of the M50VC
• to have a lean, mean optimised kernel which supports the available hardware, and nothing more
• to provide a guide to installing which will transcend the specifics of my hardware and needs
• by describing any issues during the process, to indicate how easy (or hard) it is to “Switch 2 Linux NOW“

Step 1

As I’m writing this from my home office, and the machine is still in my city office, Step 1 consists soley of downloading and burning the latest Gentoo LiveCD (2008.0) from this page. Although this is larger than the minimal install CD, my experience suggests that booting from a LiveCD to start with will give me a pretty clear indication of likely problem areas which will be faced during the installation.

The results of booting from the LiveCD will also provide a wealth of information which we will be using when we build our custom kernel.

See you again soon!