分类： LINUX
2005-12-31 11:00:09
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The flavor of Linux is rapidly gaining market share because it can easily be optimized for extreme performance and customized for practically any application. The open source development community has embraced Gentoo because of its flexibility and because the tools created for Gentoo are superior to the equivalent tools in other flavors of Linux. In that same spirit, the Gentoo development community has created a new installer package that has been under development for months and promises to become the de facto standard for Linux installers. Today, Jon Hood, a developer working for , who recently took the new for a test drive, reports his results.
The Gentoo Installation CD-ROM that contains the installer, currently available off the “experimental” mirrors at , on the surface seems very similar to the old install CDs. The only major difference seems to be that it contains a small Gnome environment from which the installation program runs. Upon booting from the installation CD, my video and sound cards were detected, but the screen resolution for X was too high for my monitor. I had to manually change it. When X did finally start, I was greeted by a GDM (Gnome Display Manager) screen that logged me in automatically after 10 seconds. The Gnome desktop came up, and I double-clicked the Gentoo Linux Installer icon to start the installation.
It's important to note at that point that a lot of recent development effort went into building the installer, not the current livecd for it. Having the livecd correctly autodetect the video settings is only secondary in this stage of development. Since this is the case, I expected there to be some extra manual configuration to get the installer working. My main goal is to review the current installer, not the medium it's on yet.
The setup process for the Gentoo installation is similar to that of other linux distributions. The main difference is what the Gentoo installer has added. Especially attractive is the gui-based partitioning system. You can easily select how large of a partition you want for each device:
Since I'm only testing installation on a hard drive that will probably be wiped tomorrow for more testing, I decided to go with a simple partitioning scheme:
The installer lets you select which stage tarball to use. Since I have a large NFS share in the office, I keep a mirror of most gentoo-related files around, including the stage tarballs. Note also that, if you can't obtain a tarball from anywhere, you can dynamically create your system using the system on the livecd.
Next, you set up your make.conf settings. Basically, it's just a frontend for editing /etc/make.conf. Here, you essentially do what makes Gentoo so special: complete optimization. If you selected a stage3 install, most everything is already built for you.
I highly recommend starting from stage1 just so you can see how many different options are available. For example, if I were to start from stage1, I would want optimizations similar to the following:
The next step is to install the kernel. If I accept the default, the livecd kernel, the installer copies the kernel from the livecd to use for your gentoo system along with all the autodetection scripts. That is not only easy, but it's also much faster than building our own.
The bootloader, timezone, and networking configuration screens are next and up to par with installers from other distributions. In fact, you may forget you're installing Gentoo.
Eventually, there are screens to set up more options. Gentoo is highly configurable, and many options are left in to chose from.
Some screens aren't as intuitively obvious and are clearly still under development.
Before you finish, the final configuration step is to set up users.
Now, the installation begins! The system is built in accordance with all of your settings.
After the install completed, I was left with a completely bootable set-up Gentoo system. I know, I'm lucky. People aren't supposed to actually USE testing software and have it WORK, but that's exactly what happened. Certainly the Gentoo Installer isn't finished, and it still has a few minor bugs. The interface and functionality, however, are a wonderful step in the right direction for the Gentoo distribution.
Soon, a typical user will be able to install a completely working operating system from scratch using the GUI-based Installer. Once all the bugs and development testing is finished, Gentoo will surely continue to grow in both the desktop and corporate markets.
