This thread got me in the mood to tinker with my system (yet again!)
I had XP Professional installed with the following disk partitions:
C: - 20GB (XP Pro)
D: - 20GB
E: - 20GB
F: - 20GB
G: - 20GB
H: - 20GB
I had music, videos, software etc all on their own partitions.
Anyway, I went hunting for a decent Linux distribution. I've used Mandrake, RedHat and Debian in the past but in the end I couldn't live without XP.
I had a look for info on the Internet and the general opinion seemed to be that Gentoo was a great distribution.
You can choose from three types of installation - stage1, stage2 and stage3, going from the most versatile to the least versatile respectively.
I went for stage1 - not realising what was ahead
I downloaded the required ISO which was 50MB and burned it to CD. I started the installation process with high hopes. All was going well - I'd configured the kernel and begun compilation.......5 hours later it was still downloading and compiling packages from the gentoo server. Hmm I was getting bored so I went online and saw that it can take upwards of 20 hours to fully compile - UGH. That was the end of that.
Sooo.....it was time to try the stage3 install which required a 100MB download to start with which was the barebones system. This time things were much better. It only took a few hours to install...hehe.
It's nice because you get the basic system up and running without all the bloat that you get from something like Mandrake or RedHat.
The next thing I did was install KDE which actually took the longest time of all. I started the install at 5pm today and it finished about 30 mins ago (1am).
I've just finished setting up the KDE environment to my liking. Sweetly enough you can make KDE look remarkably similar to XP, which is nice.
I'm just downloading FireFox too now but it's complaining because I don't have libgtk so I have to get that too. I suppose that's one of the downsides to have a barebones install - you have to keep downloading dependencies.
Anyway, end of my waffling :)