Well, my system is now a gentoo box. It’s a pretty sweet system, though I don’t feel any huge speed increase. It’s nice to be cutting edge though, using devfs, tmpfs, grub, and a bunch of other neat technologies, simply “there” for you. Compiling everything, and getting it all working nicely did take a couple of days, but I’m back where I was, only loosing one partition of data (not important). There are still some issues, some things won’t compile, hotkeys (for the extra buttons on my keyboard) wants to access the cdrom for some reason, and I don’t know where it’s gotten to in /dev (how the hell does devfs deal with the generic scsi module?), my X fonts are… interesting (still) and the ebuild of gabber is fux0red, but other than that, things are nice and smooth. Like I did in debian I have done my best to keep things done “properly” for the distro as much as possible. I could just do it all myself, but I want to give the way it’s supposed to work a chance first. The ebuild system is pretty cool, there are things I didn’t know, like in /usr/portage// there are .ebuild files for each version of the package. So if you want to build an older version of blah/foo, you’d just find the version in /usr/portage/blah/foo/*.ebuild, and run emerge <path/to/ebuild>.ebuild. Their rc-update system is pretty funky too, it fulfills Yohimbe’s requirements for adding and deleting things from runlevels easily (rc-update add|del programfoo default).
I got a nice little contract working with the aformentioned Yohimbe on a project for userfriendly.org [archive.org link] which will be nice. It’s not huge, but fun, and will keep the money wolfs at bay a while longer. As
soon as these last couple of little issues are gone, work will begin!