Review of Gentoo 2008.0
Post-installation … failed 
You are probably wondering why the day after I installed Gentoo 2008.0 I did not followed up with the review. The fact is there was not much of a follow up except for a failure that I had to work until today to fix.
When I rebooted the computer, after the installation, I immediately noticed that the boot process was throwing out some errors about initializing the network card and that I should check to have the appropriate drivers. The problem was very weird since the installer actually had the appropriate drivers (proven by the fact I was able to write the first part of this review during such install).
At the moment I was not much preoccupied and I planned to look on it after login to the desktop interface … but that would have not happened. Once the boot process finished I got a text base login screen, a clear sign that the graphical interface was unable to load.
Definitively this problem got the priority over the network card. In order to investigate on the cause I should have had to login and check the logs … here another bump to a wall. When I attempted to log with my user account it complained that the login was incorrect.
I had an identical problem with both Fedora and Kubuntu and the quickest way to solve that was to repeat the installation; in this case this quick and dirt solution had actually more sense since I had two more problems.
So I picked back the installation CD, I restarted the computer, and I repeated the installation; of course I paid an extreme attention to answer correctly to all the installation questions. At the end I rebooted the computer and … same problems.
Actually at the login screen, while I was not able to login with my user account, I was able to log as ‘root’; “good”, at least I have something to start working with. First I tried to load Gnome to see which error message it was throwing out; strangely at first it started, but I ended up not to the Gnome desktop, but to a generic X11 interface with no programs to launch except for a terminal windows. Since there was no point to have a (even a minimal) graphical interface if the only thing I was able to run was the command prompt, I logged out.
I tried to check some log, but the errors messages I got were to generic to think what to do. Result? With no idea on how to fix the above problems and with no Internet connection (for the apparent lack of network card’s drivers) to use to find possible solutions the only viable solution was to give up Gentoo and fall back to a more friendly system (Kubuntu 8.04 at the moment).
I am sure there was a solution to get Gentoo working, but as Illidan used to say: “you are not prepared”; probably the skill necessary to set up Gentoo is the “price” to pay to have an Operative System that is both free, but also very optimized (and therefore efficient).
While I am accepting the setback for the moment, I will to give up and a new attempt to try Gentoo will be placed on my “TO DO” list.
Links
Gentoo Linux: http://www.gentoo.org/.
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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.