Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo Installer (2) [LARGE]

[Mark Bainter <mark-gt@cymry.org>]

William Kenworthy [billk@iinet.net.au] wrote:
> It is also worth keeping in mind that expert/poweruser does not mandate
> always using command line, manual, prone to human error methods. GUI's
> can be very fast and efficient at certain tasks, and anything that can
> help produce a quick, clean and efficient install (which arguably gentoo
> isnt) can only be of benefit.

I disagree with this.  "Quick" isn't necessarily the sign of a good
install.  And considering that building the packages is the biggest
timeeater when installing gentoo a pretty installer isn't going to help
that.

"clean and efficient" is apparently a subjective term, as I think 
gentoo already has that.  It's sure a hell of a lot more efficent
for me to do a gentoo install than to boot from a custom disk to 
setup my system, and then reboot to some other distro like mandrake
or RH and arm wrestle it into installing w/out breaking my setup
so that I can then go through and fix everything and remove spurious
dependencies and rebuild packages by hand. 

And I'd rather deal with my "human error methods" than the lack 
of flexibility and power inherent in a GUI install.  And I'd rather
not have all that extra fluff on my install CD.

I say if that is what you want, there is a list of available distros
as long as my arm.  Lets not trash this one just to have one more.

> The above is a bit of a ramble I admit, but having installed two gentoo
> systems (and about to start a third) as well as a number of RH and
> Mandrake, I can say it is a bit painful, particularly if you make a typo
> (e.g., get the grub boot partition wrong!) or switch screens so you
> cannot pageup and see what network card was detected etc).

Just as a note, one of the nice things about grub is that if you get
a partition wrong you can fix it right there from the grub boot screen.
That's hardly a big deal.

Also, you don't need to scroll up.  That's what dmesg is for.  While
I haven't checked myself, I'd be surprised if it wasn't on the boot
CD.  Or at least /var/log/boot.msg.  Myself, I generally know what's
in the system before I even begin installing it, so it's not been a
big issue for me.