Gentoo Linux for the rest of us: Part I

So there I am last night in my "Switches and Routers" class listening to my teacher jaw on about the differences between Distance-Vector protocols, and Link-State protocols board out of my mind. Sure, the stuff is worth learning, and I find it interesting, but the material really is rather dry. Anyway, I look over and I see this nerdy guy in my class, We call him Neo because he always dresses in black and wears sunglasses even at night time. Anyway, Neo opened up his laptop and booted up to a Linux distro that I had never heard of before. I was watching him play with it, and at first I thought, maybe it was Ubuntu, then I notice the guy playing with a bunch of cool 3d animations, so I immediately thought, 'wow, this guys got XGL working.' After a while he shut it down, and I finally noticed the logo was not Ubuntu, but Sabayon.

I immediately thought to myself, "Self, what is Sabayon? I must look that up!" So I did. Sabayon is a rather new Gentoo based Linux distro. Well, what does that mean to you and me? Well, if you haven't tried to do a Gentoo install yourself, you just haven't lived. Gentoo is what I refer to as a royal pain in the arse. You literally have to compile the kernel yourself and build it from the ground up. The first time I was getting into Linux, my old supervisor loaned me an old laptop and told me to install Gentoo on it. After three days of downloading binaries across my DSL connection, I finally gave up and found Ubuntu. Gentoo apparently has a Live CD installer, but each time I tried it it failed. Seriously, installing an operating system shouldn't be hard. Well, Sabayon apparently is a Gentoo install, without all the fuss.

I haven't actually installed it yet, I am currently downloading it now. The full install is over 3GB in size, so make sure you have a DVD burner to put the ISO on. I will keep you all informed on what I find.