>>51063556Once upon a time, with release 2004.3, I installed Gentoo and used it as my primary OS. It was my first linux distribution. It was my first exposure to *nix. Gentoo back then had no installer. It had a livecd, some tools for creating filesystems, and a set of tarballs to choose from to decompress over that drive containing some kind of minimal userland.
From here, with the help of the Gentoo handbook, I created a partition with fdisk, made an ext2 partiong with mke2fs, I untarred my stage 3 tarball onto the target drive, chrooted into it, downloaded the latest linux release from
kernel.org and hand compiled my own kernel, installed and configured grub, installed a few userland tools, edited my /etc/fstab to reflect my system, and then rebooted. I edited my cflags to optimize for my system at the time, a 1.5GHz P4 Willamette.
I continued to run Gentoo for a year or two after, but then I discovered while it taught me a lot it is a monumental waste of time for anything that you might hope to use in production at large scale, so I switched to red hat/centos/fedora, and later Debian/Ubuntu, and later still, when I was managing thousands, and then millions of linux hosts at my dream job, I just got a macbook.
