Well, it took me about one day to make Gentoo useable for me. Here I am on Mozilla right now, waiting for Thunderbird, Firefox, Gaim, and XMMS to compile. Ah.

Well then, to install Gentoo’s base system, it took me about 12 hours in total. Compiling everything is extremely time consuming. Also, if you thought Slackware was evilly hard, then you’ll die on Gentoo. Die. As long as you follow instructions, you’re alright. Luckily, I had another computer, so I didn’t have to print out 109 pages that is the installation handbook.

Of course, where it takes forever to compile stuff, it is easy to install software on Gentoo. None of the packages are on the CD, so you have to download your entire system, minus the install stages. I’ve got the base system down, but now it needs X. So to get X, all it took was # emerge xfree . I love Portage. Amazingly easy. Want a package? emerge it. That downloads and compiles it and it’s installed. Now, I just have to get Gnome and the desktop should be ready. After that are apps and stuff. Yaef!

Once again, I have begun to put together a plan to rid myself of the spawn of the devil: Windows. Last time, I got comfortable using it until a kernel recompile went awry. This time, I’ll make it. I’m still debating on using Slackware or Gentoo. But this time, I cannot leave any reason to go back to Windows. I’ll be taking everything with me this time: games, apps, and docs. I’m also hoping of reducing the size of that NTFS partition so I can actually move all of my stuff. If all goes well, I’m hoping that I can reduce the NTFS down to about 5 GB and have everything else be for Linux.

I'm going to guess that my main box is out of commission for the next day or so, what with compiling Gentoo and all. I'm worried, because it seems like it's compiling glibc with every language possible. Ah well. Hopefully, I'll be able to use it in the afternoon sometime before getting it up and running.

It’s time for redesign!

blkmage will be undergoing a redesign very soon. It’s in the planning stages right now.

I’ve always wanted my site to be as standards compliant as possible. I design in Photoshop and truck them out in ImageReady, so I’d always used deprecated HTML and tables. Just now, I discovered that I could export my stuff in XHTML and CSS. That means validated site for me!

At first, I was going to redo my current site in XHTML and CSS, but that turned out to be too much work. So I’m going to make a new design and it’s finally going to be in XHTML and CSS. Ah. Good ol’ standards.