Re: [PLUG] Gentoo install

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 10:27 PM, Robert <mlists@zoominternet.net> wrote:
>
> Presently I am running Sabayon and I like it a lot.  I recently bought
> a couple of SSD drives and figured that I would install Gentoo on
> them.

The experience should be somewhat similar.  Obviously Gentoo is much
more configurable.

It sounds like you have time to think about things, and that is
probably good since you mention a "couple of SSD drives."

Some things you'll want to consider:
1.  Is this dual-boot with another OS?  What OS do you want to have
manage the bootloader.  I don't think you'd have too much trouble
having either Sabayon or Gentoo manage it, though I'm not sure offhand
how Sabayon automates it.  Also, I'm not sure if this is EFI (if so I
have a general sense of how it works but have never actually done it
myself - I should really try it in a VM).  If this is EFI you also get
to consider straight EFI-kernel booting vs a bootloader like gummiboot
and such.
2.  How do you want your filesystems to work?  Is this mdadm+lvm+ext4?
 Is this btrfs (very experimental, but if your main goal is to learn
and not do production work there is no reason to be afraid of it)?
GPT or MBR?  What kind of partition layout are you aiming for, and are
you going to need an initramfs (these days I recommend one all the
time, but some really dislike them).
3.  What init are you going to run? The main options on Gentoo tend to
be openrc or systemd.  You'll find many who use either, but few who
think they are equal.  :)  It is probably easiest to pick one at
install time but it isn't that hard to switch later.  FYI - I have
rough notes that I still need to publish on the wiki/handbook/blog at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VJlJyYLTZScta9a81xgKOIBjYsG3_VfxxmUSxG23Uxg/edit?usp=sharing
4.  Then you get to make all the usual userspace choices like cron
implementation, MTA, desktop environment, and so on.  These are pretty
easy to switch around but no sense wasting time configuring one just
to switch to another.  Actually, there isn't really anything in Gentoo
that you can't change later (though switching between
x86/amd64(multilib or non-multilib) would be one of the exceptions
because of the mess changing it makes of /lib and so on - I can't
think of a distro that supports this).

For a first-time install you're probably not going to want to use
hardened (selinux and other options as well).  You can actually do
quite a bit there and I hear that there have been virtual hosting
providers who have used Gentoo for many years mainly because it has a
lot of support for multiple hardening technologies.

Gentoo is pretty malleable and there isn't any one right way to do it.
I'd aim to start simple, but you should definitely consider a volume
manager of some kind before you partition your disks, especially with
multiple drives.  That is also one of those things that is really
painful to add on later, but if you start out with it then it becomes
much easier to tweak just about anything having to do with storage
after the fact.

--
Rich
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