Looking for an easy to install Gentoo distro.

[hans030390]

My cousin wants to start dual booting XP and Linux. I recommended he use one based off of Gentoo, because I found portage to be decently easy to use.

First off, what is a good Gentoo distro that is easy to install? I've heard Gentoo Linux itself can be a pain. I found Kororaa to be very easy to install, and I learned about Gentoo/portage from it and liked it, but I was worried it might be to buggy.

I looked up Vida Linux. It uses Gentoo as well, and it's probably not as buggy as Kororaa. It also seemed to be easy to install. But, the free version lacks a lot of software. If needed, those could be installed afterwords, right?

If you have any other suggestion about a Linux distro (Gentoo or not), let me know. What we're generally concerned about is installing the OS, making sure it's not buggy, and the install program needs to be easy to use (I found portage to be easy).

Thanks

 

[Brazen]

debian if stability is your main concern, Ubuntu if new features are your main concern

 

[hans030390]

Actually, the main concern is probably how you install software. I liked portage, which is part of Gentoo, so we wanted an easy to install Gentoo distro.

He'll have XP on the system too, so if Linux messes up, it's not a big deal.

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Well since vidaLinux uses gentoo's portage with the same mirrors, the same ebuilds you can find in gentoo, you can find in vidalinux.

I'm not sure if the Gentoo Linux Installer is part of the official gentoo release now, but there's this gui installer made for gentoo that walks through setting up everything from the official gentoo installation tutorial from a gtk app. Here are some screenshots. Click here for the project page.

 

[Nothinman]

There's pretty much no reason to use a source based distro like Gentoo if you want ease of use and high quality packages. Give him Ubuntu, enable universe and multiverse and let him be happy.

 

[sourceninja]

The gentoo gui installer works great, makes gentoo easy to install, but still not as easy as other distros (you still need to know whats going on to get a working system). I'd use jackass or rockhopper personally if I was installing gentoo but that is just as hard as the old way.

 

[nweaver]

portage is great, I loved it coming from Red Hat 9...

then I decided to actually USE my linux boxes and moved over to Debian/Ubuntu. Apt is much nicer.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: hans030390
Actually, the main concern is probably how you install software. I liked portage, which is part of Gentoo, so we wanted an easy to install Gentoo distro.

He'll have XP on the system too, so if Linux messes up, it's not a big deal.

Debian and Ubuntu both use apt/synaptic which is generally regarded as the best package management system you can get anywhere (though personally I like yum from the command line better than apt, but I do like synaptic in the gui better than yumex).

So installing packages is going to be the same on both, though Ubuntu does have some additional ease-of-use features. Primarily though, the only difference is Debian strives for absolute stability and reliability at the expense of packages being a few versions behind, but Ubuntu tries to stay stable and reliable while using the latest packages.