Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
You could automatically configure kernel with genkernel.
Might as well run Arch at that point. Spending an hour or two pressing y and n teach you so much.
Arch still doesn’t have the same flexibility as Gentoo. Also Gentoo even offers sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin for precompiled kernel. Personally I use sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel (which autocompiles and installs) and have custom config snippets at /etc/kernel/config.d/.
Agree. Poking around the config menu with all those options definitely showed me just what the kernel actually does and supports, it was oddly cool being able to turn on/off WiFi or Bluetooth for example, or GPU drivers.
Genkernel kinda sucks TBH. I dug into the code recently and it has some hardcoded good assumptions. Just use the distro kernel in 2023 though!