Gentoo - Another crack at it

 A couple years back I tried installing Gentoo Linux with little success. Recently I got a server back that was begging to be used and abused. Here on my desk sits an old 450mhz AMD with a whopping 384mb of ram (is it 384? what is 128+256?) and a 10gb disk.

So the first step is to get the latest gentoo. On my fc2 box, I get the latest gentoo torrent.

I already have bittorrent installed on the fc2 box, so I fire up a terminal window and put in the magic phrase:

btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 \
--url http://torrents.gentoo.org/torrents/install-x86-universal-2005.0.iso.torrent

And it looks like the download will be done by the afternoon. Nice.

While the torrent is downloading, I found the Gentoo Installation Handbook, which is good. Once the torrent is complete, I'll have half a clue on what to do with it!

Well, let's see. It's May 2nd, 2005. I just listened to the Alaska Aces defeat the Trenton Titans 6 to 0, giving Peter Aubry his first post-season shutout of the year. Yeah.

Anyhow, hocky news aside, I burned the iso to CD. I don't know why, but on my server, I have to change the cdrecord command around a bit, instead of going dev=1,0,0 , I just put -tao and it's good to go. But whatever. It's burned, and I toss it into my dusty old tower.

The CD boots up, and it sez I need to pick a boot, whatever. I type in gentoo and it lights up. It's a good thing I found that Installation Handbook, cuz apparently I now gotta read it to determine what to do next.

DAY 2:
I start by booting up and doing the net-whatever eth0 to get networking up. btw, I am looking at the Gentoo Installation Handbook and going along with what they say. Time to create paritions. I go along with the suggested partitions in the book.

And when I go to activate the swap partition with

swapon /dev/hda2

guess what I get?

swapon: /dev/hda2 Device or resource is busy

Great. This is going down just like my previous Gentoo attempt did.
I google and come up with similar cries for mercy over at the Gentoo forum.

Fine, I try out something a bit different

swapoff
swapon -a

And what do I get in reply? Nothing. I don't know if that is good or bad, but it beats the "Device busy..." so I figure it must be good.

Okay, I am now at 4e. Mounting. I go along with what it says

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo

and the result?

mount: /dev/hda3 already mounted or /mnt/gentoo busy

Okay, I reread the docs, and see a blab about if it's ext3, well, that didn't work either.

Figures. Well, I give a crack at unmounting it. Hey, if it's mounted, I should be able to unmount it, right?

umount /dev/hda3
umount: /dev/hda3 not mounted

That's it. I'm not going to waste another day. I am going to find another Linux distro to try out. This is the second time that Gentoo Linux has failed. I'm a fairly competent person, so I'm not feeling like I've missed the obvious or failed to read the docs. I'm systematically going through the install step by step. And it's going just as badly as it did before.

Out comes the CD. Maybe I'll try Gentoo in another two years, but for now, if it can't be installed, well, that's that, ain't it?