Review of Gentoo 2008.0
As promised, here it is my review of Gentoo 2008.0.
As I did for the Fedora 9 review, I will write this guide as I will proceed through the installation and the first configuration. Therefore if you are interested on the topic, bookmark this page and check back daily. 
Installation
This time I started to write the guide while I am still installing the system thank to the fact I am using a Live CD version (therefore while Gentoo is being installed I have access to a desktop and the internet connection).
On the Live CD there are two kind of installers: a graphical version, in GTK, and a text-based graphic version.
I have originally attempted to use the text-based graphic version twice and the GTK graphic version once, but with disappointing results. On the first attempt the installer quited without any explanation, the installer window just disappeared with no error message. On other two attempts I reached the end of the installation, but when I attempted to boot the system the boot loader (Grub) failed to load anything and it shown a generic command prompt; actually for the last two failures I am positive that there is a pretty clear explanation (and definitively something new I learned about Linux): the booting partition must start at the beginning of the hard disk (I was trying to place the swap partition first).
Now I am trying to install the system for the fourth time (the second with the GTK graphical installer). Let’s see what happen.
Click to better see the image.
Obviously the first thing being asked is to set up the partitions. As I have two hard disk I decided to use the first to contain the root partition (the equivalent of c:) and the swap partition and the second hard disk to contain data. This kind of setup is useful because if in the future the user (me in this case) decides to reinstall the system, or another Linux distribution, he/she just need to format the first hard disk and he/she can preserve the data stored on the second hard drive (very useful especially when the system cannot longer boot and the users has not made a backup for a long time); actually I was already using a similar setup in both Kubuntu e Fedora, but the swap originally was on the second hard drive.
The installer proceeded by copying some installation file on the hard drive, and then it continued by asking to set up the password for the ‘root’ account (the equivalent of the Administrator account in Windows). Then it asked for the timezone.
Click to better see the image.
The next preparatory steps were the setup of the network card and the activation of the user(s) account.
After the initial configuration the installer show a list of installable packages. Contrary to other Linux distributions that provide to the users many bundled application packages to immediately install during the OS installation, Gentoo offers just few basic packages (mainly the graphical interfaces, few configuration tools and Firefox, as a browser will eventually be needed in case the user needs to find informations on how to proceed for the post-install configuration). That is probably due because, as I mentioned in the earlier announcement, this distribution is based on the concept that every application has to be compiled from scratch from the source code in order to achieve the maximum optimization for the user machine and since the source code for all the various packages available to Gentoo Linux cannot be contained on the CD, their installations are left to do after the system is installed.
After the packages are installed, the setup asks which services need to be activated on boot and finally what graphical interface (either KDE or Gnome) to load as default.
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Damn… sorry about the install process, looks like that was no fun at all – the installer should just work.
If it’s any help and if you still have gentoo installed, it shouldn’t need much more to do as root:
I would guess a desktop environment isn’t installed (KDE, Gnome…), try:
emerge –pretend –verbose kde-base/kde
or
emerge –pretend –verbose gnome-base/gnome
If root login is still available, perhaps all you have to do is configure the desktop environment to boot. If a desktop environment isn’t added, there’s a few guides on how to add it (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook).
The most reliable way to install gentoo is to use the Minimal Install CD and install manually. This has a bit of a learning curve though isn’t real difficult.
Gentoo Handbook
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml?catid=desktop
Anyways… good luck… nice to hear the post.
Dirk R. Gently,
thanks for the answer.
Unfortunately I do not longer have Gentoo installed as I did the test on my main (and only) computer, but I just printed your suggestions and I will take them in consideration the next time I will test Gentoo (and as I promised on the post, I will, since I am very interested to experience the performance gain due to the Gentoo optimization).
The comment about the boot partition is incorrect. I stopped reading at that point. Please delete this misleading statement. It is not fair the Linux nor the readers who may simply believe your statment. That might have been true years ago when older bioses could only address the first 64MBs but I doubt this is the case here.