[tlug] Back to Gentoo!

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

After that inspiring email last week and some more Ubuntu annoyances,
I decided to take the leap back to Gentoo. I figured at least one or
two of you might be interested in how it went.

First, the background: I have a ThinkPad T420s with four 2.7GHz cores,
8GB of RAM, and an SSD. I use it for developing an "enterprise" Java
app, using IntelliJ. The machine runs Tomcat and GWT dev mode when I
am running my local dev environment. Nothing more than that.

I installed Gentoo with no trouble, after the annoying task of backing
up my hard drive from the Ubuntu install (when I first installed
Ubuntu on my MacBook, I made sure to create a separate partition for
/home, but when I installed on my new ThinkPad, I forgot to confirm
that /home was separate, so the defaults bit me in the arse).

I installed the stage3 (yeah, yeah, I know, but I tend to recompile
with my preferred USE flags as needed, so I'm not too fussed about not
starting from stage1 or 2), then created my user and dropped my Ubuntu
home directory into /home. Rebuilt the kernel in less than five
minutes, set up GRUB, rebooted.

The machine booted, taking around three seconds from the time I hit
enter in the GRUB boot menu to the console login prompt!

I logged in and built X.org and Openbox (and all dependencies), which
took around 10 minutes. Installed the google-chrome package (binary
version of Chrome), typed "startx", and became productive. The rest of
my environment Just Worked, as my dotfiles contained all the magic.

So I had a working Gentoo in under two hours! What a difference 10
years of Moore's law makes! ;)

Every once in awhile, I had to install a new package as I hit an
Openbox-mapped hotkey (e.g. notify-send, alsa-tools, etc.), but as my
machine is an absolute beast, emerging doesn't usually take much
longer than "aptitude install" did.

Loving Linux again,
Josh