Gentoo For Mac OS X
My housemate is a jerk. Dumb jerk. He has a powerbook running Mac OS X and I told him tonight about Gentoo for Macs. I told him that there was a special version of the super-popular (and super hard to install) Linux distro that ran on Macs.
He had the thing running in a couple of minutes. That’s why he’s a jerk. I spent a whole evening and the next day installing, compiling, and configuring my Gentoo system. He only had to download a dmg file and double click it. Then he had Gentoo running.
Gentoo can run on Mac OS X
If you go to Gentoo-Wiki.com you’ll find detailed instuctions on a not-so-difficult process of installing Gentoo. What takes a significant amount of time when starting from scratch only takes a few minutes when you’re embedding it into a running OS. Here are the steps required:
- Download the .dmg file available here
- Double click the installer (it’s called “Gentoo For Mac OS X Installer.pkg”) inside the image.
- type
# emerge --sync - Now you have Gentoo running. Perfectly.
It’s a frustrating thing that one of the most difficult to install Linux distros can be so simple if you’ve already got a host system. It just takes the glory out of it. However, this is a keen illustration of how Gentoo is less like a proper distribution and more like a meta-distribution. Gentoo is mostly just Portage (Gentoo’s package manager) and it can be run on any POSIX-compliant OS (FreeBSD, Mach, Linux). If it can run on a Mac, I really want to see what else it can run on.
