Quote:I was checking the portage trees and am very glad to see IceWM and very surprised to see Icecc, the IceWM configurator. I have high speed cable. When I start the install, how does it address partitioning. Say for instance, can I tell it to keep my /home? Does it ask and give options here?

Yep there's a ton of cool stuff in the Portage tree, even the closed source binary drivers for nVidia and ATi video cards are in there.

As for partitioning, like everything else in the Gentoo install you have to handle it yourself as there's no specific "installer" as such. Provided you can read and have a basic knowledge of Linux shell operations it isn't as hard as it sounds, just follow the Install Guide (which is also provided on the LiveCDs) and you'll be fine. It's fairly easy to keep an existing /home partition, just remember not to format it and set it up right in your fstab file. Whenever I rebuild my system I just back up everything I want to keep into /home (which is 50-odd Gb) and format / and /usr. Very convenient.

Admiral LSD, if you did that same stage 1 install with, say a 656 cable connection, what is your idea on how long it might have taken?

I have two gentoo CD's. Is there a way to install them without download nothing from the internet?

You can if you do the complete stage 3 + GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) but really, it's not worth it. If you're going to install Gentoo do the Stage 1 install. it'll take a while but you'll develop a better appreciation for what Gentoo is all about, learn a fair bit about Linux and get the satisfaction of knowing the system you're using at the end was built with your own hands to your needs and not to encompass the needs of millions of people.

Quote:You can if you do the complete stage 3 + GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) but really, it's not worth it. If you're going to install Gentoo do the Stage 1 install. it'll take a while but you'll develop a better appreciation for what Gentoo is all about, learn a fair bit about Linux and get the satisfaction of knowing the system you're using at the end was built with your own hands to your needs and not to encompass the needs of millions of people.

i agree, my first gentoo install was a stage 3 install. afterword i swiped it and did a stage 1 install and i liked it alot better (much faster on my system) right now i'm doing yet another stage 1 install because i screwed up my hard drive with fdisk (deleted the wrong partition then saved, instead of getting rid of an extra storage partition i killed /usr ) while a stage 3 or stage 3 + GRP install is faster the time you save is not (in my opinion) worth what you lose by not installing with stage 1 or at least stage 2

however there are many people who have a stage 3 +GRP install and are just fine with it.

also after you complete a stage 1 install you have a high chance of becoming infected with the "Gentoo Experiance"

OK, I've downloaded the Gentoo stage 1 tarball and untarred it into it's own directory. So what do I do now? Do I edit my RedHat grub.conf to have Gentoo as a choice at boot? What do I add? It seems the more I look at the directions on the Gentoo site, the more confused I get.. ;(

First of all, i would suggest installing from knoppix or morphix (morphix is cool) because its simple to install from a bootable CD.
 
(installing from a distro thats on the harddrive can be a pain)

Yeah, I'm a big Morphix fan too! Can I not run Gentoo from a directory? Right now I'd like to do a little research with it before attempting a full install.

The only part where installing Gentoo in an existing Linux would differ to using a LiveCD would be in actually setting the chroot environment up. The bulk of the Gentoo installation is performend in the chroot and this would be indentical regardless of whether you were using a LiveCD or an existing Linux.
 
It's fairly easy to install Gentoo into a directory, just create the directory and untar the stage tarball there instead of creating and mounting seperate partitions for it (the rest of the installation would proceed as normal) the thing to remember is that after you finish, you can't simply add the new Gentoo install to your bootloader and boot it the normal way. Instead, you have to chroot into your Gentoo install whenever you want to use it. Just use a similar set of commands to what you used to enter the chroot while you were installing Gentoo.

installing becomes a pain when it comes time to partition if you want to preserve the current distro it is a little hassle,
 
if youdon't it becomes hell