As I mentioned a while back, I’ve been toying around with Gentoo linux off and on for a while, and have been considering running it locally for quite some time. Today, well actually last night, out of boredom I decided to burn a CD image of their latest release. I’d of stuck with the image you gave me mike (lightvortex), but it was about 3 years old judging by what I could see of it and didn’t burn properly. Sorry! So, I burned that particular image, and went about the process of testing it out on my laptop (hint: 5 years old, almost 6, very minimalistic – 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, etc). And with absolutely no fussing on my end whatsoever, which is good seeing as there’s absolutely 0 accessibility on that particular live CD, she worky and she worky like beautiful.
So I fired it up, got myself to the command line with absolutely 0 feedback from the computer (I love having had previous linux experience), and set up the CD so I could remote into it from this machine. That took all of maybe a minute and a half to do. From there, it was just log into the laptop (or, rather, log into the CD in the laptop), and poke around. I could have probably gone right to the instalation procedure from there with absolutely no fuss whatsoever. And would have, except I hadn’t had a damn thing pulled off that laptop yet that I wanted to save. Now, keep in mind I’ve had this machine since about October of 07. Since then, the laptop’s been in a state of semi-retirement, only ever really being used when the router decides it wants to enter into a fit of noncooperation. Since the router’s in the bedroom and the desktop isn’t, the laptop became my troubleshooting tool. But I still never bothered to pull what I thought I’d want to save off of it. So I hadn’t planned on formatting it at all until that was done. Last night, after I logged into the system and poked around, I mounted the internal HD so I could access it from inside the live CD environment. And then I downloaded the whole damn thing, Windows OS and all, into a folder on this HD. Took me the better part of 24 hours to do it (I started it at about 1:00 this morning and it only finished just after 10 tonight), but now, what is on my laptop is also on my desktop in a folder unoriginally named “backup” (I was tired. Sue me.). Now all I have to do is get around to actually whiping it and installing Gentoo. Which may or may not happen this year. I’m curious to start playing with gnome and orca, but not curious enough yet to undergo the manual instalation process Gentoo takes. And no, I refuse to install Ubuntu. Debian, *maybe*. But only if I have to.