[vox-tech] Re: [ijtrotts@ucdavis.edu: [lugod lert] gentoo newbie questions]

[Matt Holland]

Issac Trotts wrote:

<snippage>

>>This is something that happens *during* the Gentoo install?  If so, 
>>maybe you're misinterpreting an instruction, because I don't recall ever 
>>having to mount any filesystem in two places during a Gentoo install. 
>>You do have to chroot at some point, which could cause some confusion.
>>
> 
> 
> Well, no, it's something that happens in preparation to install. 
> Instead of burning a CD-ROM (which involves lots of extra trial-and-error
> since I don't have my CD burner installed yet) I was going to do what
> the Gentoo people said would be easier: install from within an existing
> Linux installation.  

Aha.  Admittedly I'm too lazy to go read the Gentoo docs for myself, but 
from what I remember, I wonder if maybe what you're supposed to do is 
copy the Gentoo install CD contents to a directory on an existing 
filesystem that won't get clobbered in the new system install.  I think 
I did something similar when I installed Gentoo -- I was dealing with an 
old IDE CD drive that for some reason can't mount filesystems under 2.4 
kernels.  I could boot from it, but when it came time to copy the base 
system over, I couldn't mount the CD.  So... after creating and 
formatting my partitions, I either ftp'ed the files from the net or 
scp'ed them from another machine on my network... I'm not sure which. 
Anyway, you could maybe do something like that, except that if you have 
the iso image, you'd just mount it as a loopback device and copy the 
stuff over to an existing filesystem.  To mount img.iso as a loopback 
device, issue a command like:

# mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 img.iso /mnt/img

Of course, I'm kind of shooting in the dark here.  In any case, I 
wouldn't recommend risking any kind of Gentoo install on a working 
system until you've tried it on another system.

Matt


> 
>>I know it's been mentioned before, but Gentoo is not a very 
>>newbie-friendly distribution.  That said, if you have a piece of 
>>hardware laying around for which you can risk a lot of downtime, 
>>installing Gentoo can be a great way to learn a bunch of stuff about how 
>>a Linux system works... if you're ready for that kind of experience.
> 
> 
> There's a machine I have at home that's just dying to be reconfigured.
> Maybe I'll sacrifice it to the little penguin god.
> 
> 
>>Good luck,
>>Matt
> 
> 
> Thanks, looks like I'll need it :^}. 
> 
> - Issac
> 
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