Gentoo: AKA Time Well Spent

Eight days ago, I started installing Gentoo Linux on my laptop.
Three days later, I had a working Gnome Desktop.

And now, after much patience, it's finished. Who'd have thought I'd finally get around to doing this?
Not me, if you'd asked me when I first understood what Gentoo was about.

There's still the odd little thing now and then, but they're now restricted to my making spelling error when trying to use Portage. The graphic frontends aren't entirely perfect, but they're good at what they do, and I'm getting to grips with how the whole thing works.
I've even managed to get some apps working that never worked for me before.

The biggest bother for me though is lib* updates - more often than not, this results in a lot of packages that depended on the old version needing to be rebuilt - but with the handy command of 'revdep-rebuild', even this is no problem.

I like Gentoo. It's a bit of a hassle to get up and running, especially if you're a stranger to configuring your own kernel (Which I cheat on and use genkernel with a few tweaks), but in the end I think it's worth it.

Not one for those without much patience though, that's for sure - especially if you decide to compile Firefox, Xulrunner, Wine or LibreOffice from source. These do take time. LibreOffice's ebuild helpfully says that it could take 'up to a day' depending on system speed. I found this to be a little inaccurate, taking this laptop a little over six hours - but even so, this is a bit of a wait.

Right, I'm done for now. Expect Gentoo-related posts whenever I remember I have a blog again unless something manages to push me off it. Which isn't likely.
Rock on.

From Gentoo

That's right, Gentoo. After only a few issues with getting the graphics card and wireless to play nicely, I have a functional Gnome desktop running on Gentoo.
I've been after something like this for a long time.

The problem now remains that since I chose to emerge gnome-light instead of the full Gnome suite, I have to fetch all the other bits and pieces I want, copy all kinds of things from my Sabayon home folder, and generally finish setting it up the way I want.

But the point is, it works.
And now I'm going to see how long it takes for me to break something.

This will probably be until I change USE flags, or add any more testing packages. Firefox 4 is one of them, but emerged after only a few minor issues.

Oh. And I have to get used to Portage. This could take me a bit longer. So I'm going to see what graphic Portage frontends there are and use one to give me a hand in this area.

That's all for now.