Gentoo

Contrary to my last blog I decided to give Gentoo a go before leaving for Newbury. Debian was point-blank refusing to play nice so I downloaded a copy of the Gentoo minimal installer and tried to boot it. Nothing happened. I remembered seeing something on the Gentoo front page about a problem with their minimal installer, so I downloaded the "experimental" fixed installer that will boot with older BIOSes. It booted fine.

I watched it go through the process of checking my hardware and autoconfiguring for it. It looked very sleek. It loaded the drivers it needed, bootstrapped itself up and then ... dumped me at a terminal.

Er.

This surprised me a little as there was no error message or anything. It looked deliberate. I consulted the installation handbook. There was an important note just after where I had stopped reading that said "Read this next bit before you continue". Oops. It turns out that there is no installation routine like in Debian and Mandrake. It simply dumps you at a live console as "Root" and you build your system your way.

What an utterly splendid idea. The manual walks you through what is required in order to get a running system so even those who don't know what they're doing can build their system. There was no installer to get confused by the fact that I have existing partitions that I don't want killing. There was no installer to fuck up the network settings. There was no installer to die horribly with unintelligible error messages.

Building Gentoo is like building a kit-car. You learn how everything is working as you go along and you can build bits of it the way you want. Building everything from sources takes a while but it allows greater control over what goes onto the system. Considering that it is a slower process to make a Gentoo Linux system I was very impressed. There was only one hitch while building the system when the package manager (emerge) suddenly couldn't connect to any of the mirrors it had chosen (all in Germany). I removed the mirrors, forcing it to download straight from the local Gentoo mirror and all was well again. Somehow it feels so much nicer building the system this way rather than watching a progress bar.

So all in all, so far, I really like Gentoo. One of the first things I did was set up SSH so that I can still access it from down here in Newbury and so I shall continue to build things while it's sitting doing nothing so that, hopefully, I will have a nice fully functioning system when I get back.

Meat

Last night we decided we didn't feel up to cooking dinner ourselves and agreed on a take-away Chinese. I went to the Chinese take-away and got two Vegetable Chop Sueys and two Vegetable Spring Rolls. They were a friendly bunch. When I got back home we tucked in as we were both rather hungry. I'd eaten my spring rolls and pretty much finished the Chop Suey when Liz, finishing off her Spring Roll, announced that she thought there was chicken in the spring rolls.

I stopped eating. She put down the remains of the spring roll. I poked around in the Chop Suey and found what looked suspiciously like a small bit of chicken skin. Suddenly I felt quite ill. I dismantled the spring roll and sure enough there were small pieces of some sort of meat in it. We won't be going back there again. :(