On Oct 16, 2003, at 4:15 am, Bruce Kingsland wrote:
In a similar vein .... I desire the gentoo CD, but do not want to buy it; rather I want to download ISOs and burn them. And I just found the url to do just that.
The why is that I have a s.l.o.o.o.o.w 28.8 connection for my home network (linux based) and my friend has WinXP on a cable modem (115K) where I use putty to do stuff on my linux box. My friend is not interested in using linux (but I'll deal with that separately).
The stages thang is attractive, but running that over the dialup seems ludicrous. So, the concept that I have is to download stage1 to a CD on the WinBox, and install that; then findout what stage1 wants from the website and download that to another CD, etc. etc. etc.
Or, perhaps the two CD's I found on http://cudlug.cudenver.edu/gentoo/releases/x86/1.4/livecd/x86/ will cover my needs.
I was looking at LFS, but was sold on the gentoo series by the portage/emerge package management in a discussion at kplug.org . I have several platforms (486, dual pentium, pentiumPro, Athlon, and a 386 floppy firewall), so a single automatic binary doesn't do the deed. Also, each of those platforms has specific duties (in my home quasi-cluster), and I want to streamline each of the platforms to have only what I need on a particular platform for the services it is intended to perform.
A stage 3 will give you only what you need for a minimal Gentoo install - you can then download additional packages for each machine on the LAN. However, as you have probably observed, stage3s are optimised for different platforms, so no one will do all your machines - I don't know what's on the 2 CDs you have found, but if they are images of the retail Gentoo GRP 2CD sets, then they will contain useful but non-optimised binaries.
Additionally, any Gentoo install CD is, by definition, out of date as soon as the Portage tree changes, within hours of its completion.
The only way to solve these two issues - to get the current version of packages & optimise them for your architecture - is to download the source to packages. To be honest, I would probably just bite the bullet, install from stage1 & `emerge -f whatever` before any emerge (the "-f" fetches the packages, but does not compile them) - it won't take *that* long to download them.
Since your friend has a fast connection, you could `emerge -Ufp world >> somefile.txt` on your Gentoo systems. This will give you a full path to all the files you need to download (I think it is neatest if you only have one mirror listed in the GENTOO_MIRRORS line of /etc/make.conf). If you boot from a Gentoo or Knoppix CD on your friend's system, then you should be able to pipe somefile.txt into wget, or write a one-line Bash to `for $PACKAGE in somefile.txt do wget $PACKAGE done`, or something. Save the downloaded source tarballs on the friend's hard-drive, then get him to burn them to CD for you.
If you export the Portage tree as a NFS share on the first machine on which you install Gentoo, you will then be able to access it transparently from all the other machines on which you install. I would advise this, as it will save you from downloading the same source packages several times. When you install you will find that there will be some upgrades to the base system, so that even if your machines have different roles they will have a number of upgrades in common.
if you search http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user you will see that exporting the Portage tree as a NFS share has been documented here a number of times.
HTH,
Stroller.
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