Lunar versus Gentoo

[cornstalk]

Today is my day for posting to this forum.

Anyway, I was talking to some people on the SciPy mailing list and they said that Gentoo does not have an automated installer, but must be installed "by hand." They said that it's the work of a couple of days, at least, to get Gentoo installed.

Can that be true? I'm surprised that a big distro like Gentoo would work that way. This would seem to be a big point in Lunar's favor. It took me perhaps, a few hours when 2-3 years ago I installed Lunar on my machine at home (I admit it took much longer on an old laptop). And my limited understanding is that the new install works even better.

[mwplinux]

No, none of this is completely true. If you make a stage1 install of Gentoo on a mordern PC, it will take about a day (done it in about 6 hours on a amd64 3000+ with 1 Gb RAM), for the basesystem and setup. To day the default way to install Gentoo is a stage3, and takes less than 1 hour because it a precompiled system, you then can recompile after installation.
Today you can download a test LiveCD of Gentoo with a beta release of a GUI installer. You can get it from one of the Gentoo mirrors under experimental.

[sofar]

like they say the gentoo "installer" is rather beta - lunar's installer however pretty much takes all the hard work away from you - and I can boot a newly installed machine in less than 5 minutes if it's a fast machine.

there is also no such thing as 'stage1' 'stage3' in lunar - you get a fully i686 -O2 optimized PC after installation. If you want to change this you can do a rebuild after installation, but that should be done in about 2/3 hours normally, not a whole day, and it's often not worth spending the time.

We get a lot of gentoo people who switch to lunar because the lunar installer is so easy, so that says a lot to me!

[RedKennedy]

Lunar's a much quicker install, I can install it from the cd in about 15 minutes (that includes compilation of the kernel) on this amd3400+. My boot time, from hitting enter at the lilo prompt, to a login prompt, is 16 seconds. And it's about 1.5 minutes on my old 100mhz 586 (and that has a shitload of services starting at boot). Much faster than Gentoo ever was for me.
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In Soviet Russia, ISOs install you.

[jose]

yeah lunar installer is a lot easyer i just installed and i start love it in my amd64 fx 55 tnx for the nice distro guys, sorry for my english is my 2nd language

[withoutclass]

well, I myself have at one point installed gentoo, and I've spent some time poking around the Lunar docs/faqs. I like that it seems like a less complicated version of gentoo, with still much of the bonuses.