gentoo first attempt

i finally decided to jump in, and created another btrfs partition for gentoo with two subvolumes. with btrfs i don't have anything on the root subvolume.

i really didn't expect an install to drag on for so long. i don't like to give up part-way, unless i feel it is a lost investment.. and i was losing it! i would have, but for some kindly folks on the gentoo forum. the gentoo forum is one of the most responsive and helpful forums i have been in.

i made some major mistakes.. some inadvertantly, and many due to my misunderstanding of gentoo portage. what made it exponentially troublesome was the long compile times to try and get back the system to what i thought would be the normal. what made it worth continuing was the folks on the gentoo forum, and the extremely detailed online documentation.

one thing which i find disturbing is the diskspace requirement mentioned in the docs, and the discrepancy i find in my own experience. some others on the forum seem to be using many times over what i have ended up using. not comforting..

the other thing was watching the screen flash past too quickly for me to read anything useful, and too long for me doing nothing but stare at it hoping it will finish in another moment.

i was determined not to give systemd/udev a leg in here, and was chuffed that i could block/mask them out. i had a working eudev.

but all good things come to an end too.. so at the end of a very long day and an almost sleepless night.. early morning found me holding a shiny new gentoo install with lqxt :)

i was chuffed that my first reboot was a success! there weren't any visible errors.

however all was not well in my gentoo land. i think i borked the kernel config, and lsmod lists only two modules. i couldn't bring up my wifi interface. but ethernet worked. i could go online. i had lxqt running with qupzilla :)

but the toll of this looong time spellbound watching matrix flow through my screen has been a bit too much. i don't have enough energy left to celebrate my euphoria, or document my install notes. i have to leave gentoo land now for some zzz..