Today I have been slowly but surely working my way through installing Gentoo under a virtualisation application, VMware Player to be precise. Why use a Virtual Machine? Well, they are tidy and quick to set up, no messing about with partitions which is good if you have no free space to play with and don't want to resize your existing partitions. Besides my only reason for setting up Gentoo is out of curiosity. I don't actually plan on using it so the VM option is good for me.

There were a few stumbling blocks, but progress is being made albeit very slowly. Infact I'm installing/compiling Gnome/GTK+ at the moment and it's taking an eternity, the downside of using a VM is that it's about four times slower to do this. However I plus side is that I can close down the VM in the middle of this process and open it up again tomorrow (which I will do shortly).

Gentoo isn't an instant operating system, it's like nothing I have tried before, even with ready made packages there's still a lot of config to do before you can install them. One plus side about it is that it's fun fun fun! Actually it's only fun if your a geek and you still believe the Command Line Interface to be this retro but cool and very powerful tool and the idea of compiling a large part of an OS and it's kernel using a CLI is your idea of fun The level of control you get is great no choice has been made for you.

After I have finished setting up Gentoo - providing all goes well - I might just start on Linux From Scratch, again just for fun. It would be nice to make and use my own distro as my primary distro but it's a lot of work and I couldn't possibly do as good a job as a team of people can do ... but what a fun thing to build. I'd certainly learn a lot doing it



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