Well, I’m on the internet Actually, what I’ve been doing for the last 2 weeks is alternating weeknights between working on linux and keeping up on internet reading. I only have 1 internet connection and haven’t sprung for a router so only 1 computer can be using the internet at a time. Last night we had a substantial thunder and lightning storm which knocked out my internet for the night. So, last night, I did neither. Last night would have been my reading night.

It’s been about 4 weeks since I wrote about my experience with Gentoo. In the 2 weeks that followed, I actually didn’t do anything with the computer at all. I was away a week and then Andrea and Emma were here. I was far more interested in spending time with them than I was in getting the gentoo installation going.

Through a bit of trial and tribulation, my gentoo system connects to the internet automatically. I didn’t have to do anything with the network other than configuring network addressing. What I worked on for most of last week and this week was downloading the source for the GUI (windowed) environment and building. The problem I had encountered last week was that the mirror that the build script was downloading from was timing out. What I discovered this week was that the file being requested no longer exists on any of the mirrors. The solution was to update the list of archives (about 160,000) and the dependencies.

So, now I have all the pieces to run the GUI except configuring Gentoo’s settings for the monitor I’m currently using.

It may seem like this is alot of work. And, I suppose it is. But I love learning new things. I wouldn’t recommend Gentoo to a non-technical user. My perception of the Gentoo Linux project goals is to provide a fast, robust and flexible platform. When I do have this up and running, I will have learned quite a bit about how unix was expanded and grown into Linux in terms of supporting new hardware and software. We will also have a system where we will be able to duplicate the environment that homeschooljournal.net runs in. My personal favourite is the fact that I will be using a system which operates solely on OpenSource software.