Ok, so I really want to like Gentoo Linux. Really, rather a lot. And I even wrote a post about how awesome VMs were. But here's the issue of the hour.

I wanted to try gentoo, because I was kind of sick of having to fight with ubuntu/debian to get at more contemporary packages. Having a distribution that's really picky about these things when I'm not running a server, and capiable of deciding if I want to install something is... anoying. Espically when I'm likely to install it myself, the "stability feature" seems downright painful.

And I'm in the process of testing things out so it seems fair to give one of the "rolling" release cylce distributions a test drive. Ok, so here's what happened.

There aren't--that I can find--VMs with pre-built Gentoo desktop installations in abundence like there are for ubuntu. Which means I have to install it from scratch. Except that that's really finkey and I've thusfar screwed up in a couple instalations. Once by not reading the instructions correctly and setting some weird keyboard layout that I couldn't recover from, and this second time because the network wouldn't connect in the virtual machine so there wasn't a display manager aside from xdm, and while I'm good with the shell, I'm not that good with it.

I think I should attempt to get a good solid install into the VM before I order hardware for real, but this last issue seems to be more an issue of "tycho fighting with the vm engine" rather than "tycho fighting with linux" so that's helpful, at least a little.