Talking Gentoo?

[David Csercsics]

>Well actually, after reading the Gentoo installation instructions, I'm not
>sure I'm ready for it yet.  I didn't exactly run away screaming as I pretty
>much understand what's going on, but it is a bit time consuming to install
>Gentoo.  With Gentoo, as I understand it, you do most of the configuration
>work yourself whereas with, say, Debian 3, you just tell the menu system
>what to do, and when you boot up for the first time you've got a nice base
>system, ready to be configured.  It does all the hard work for you.
>Also, why do you have to build a kernel to use Gentoo?  Why can't you just
>use the one from the live cd?
>Jayson.

Technically you don't have to build your own kernel. If you use
genkernel you get a kernel for your new system identical to the one
the live cd uses. It's not recommended to do this as the kernel will
support a bunch of hardware you don't have and it will be bigger
and slower than necessary. You'll also be forced to use hotplug and
devfs which is deprecated but if that 's  what you want to do then
it's your system.