Saturday was a lazy day! I geeked out most of the day and attempted to install Gentoo Linux on my new machine. It didn’t start well. I downloaded the CD image for installing, burned that to a disc, and installed a hard drive in the new box. Then I edited the BIOS so it booted from the CD ROM. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the system to boot from the CD. Hmm, weird. I pulled out the hard drive, I checked the CD ROM, and saw that the IDE cable had been pulled out. Doh! I hooked that back up, put the hard drive back in and attempted to reboot. It booted from the disc just fine but now it wouldn’t recognize the hard drive. More futzing around, and I noticed I had forgotten to plug back in the power cable to the hard drive! Woops 😉

With the hardware working, I set out to get Gentoo running. I got pretty far actually. I think I did pretty good. Until it came time to configure Grub, the boot loader. I messed something up here, and no matter what I tried, I couldn’t fix it. I gave up.

I changed my mind, and went with Suse instead. I had a few problems determining what my network card was before I could do the FTP install, but once I got that sorted out, the install went pretty smoothly. Now I have a Linux host running Suse. Major geekfest, but pretty interesting. Some day maybe I will try Gentoo again, once I understand more of how Linux works.

As I said to a couple friends today, I know just enough to be dangerous. I think Suse is going to be a good stepping stone for learning on.