why: me, thinkpad and gentoo
I am an employed java developer. MS Windows user since 90s.
since the announce of win-vista I have decided to switch to linux. I won't to explain why on this post... maybe another day.
I need, obvious to say, a stable and usable system. and fancy too.
I always tried many linux distros: The first one was Suse, than RedHat (later Fedora) the last one was Ubuntu, for approx. 3-4 months. Then I'd like to try a more customizable distro, and I have found and tried gentoo, because of his package management system (portage).
The first install took 2 days, to have a not-yet-fully functional system. Not happy I have reinstalled gentoo from scratch. This time the system was better, but not perfect. To many experiments... :-)
Now i'd like to install a perfect instance of gentoo on my thinkpad R51 (1829-9MG), and this is my adventure journal. Hope can help someone else.
here a list of what needs to work on my laptop
- Graphical user interface (still deciding if GNOME, xfce or KDE, but till now I've used GNOME)
- Ethernet: wired and wireless, including network profile switching (very important!)
- display switching (LCD, External Monitor, Both)
- Video card performances (ATI Radeon)
- two or more jdks (1.5 and 1.4)
- eclipse and other java tools
- VMWare 5 for a Windows environment
- USB Devices (External HD, Memory sticks, dig. camera)
- An audio player (not decided yet. help needed) w/ mp3 and ogg support
- A video player (not decided yet, help needed) w/ DVD DivX Xvid mpg wmv ... support
- Open office 2.0 as office suite
- Firefox 1.5 ( +plugins ) and Thuderbird 1.5
- A 5250 emulator for iSeries connections
- A terminal server client
- Graphics/Photo tools
- IM (MSN+Jabber) and Skype (with bluetooth headset working)
- MySQL Database server 5 and JBoss 4
- CD and DVD Burning with both my internal drive and an external USB2 drive
- Photo printing on my HP Photosmart 7760
- Windows shares access
- Some other software (picture previewer, acrobat7)
1. Basic gentoo installation
I have followed the Official gentoo installation handbook available here
I have chosed to create 3 partitions on my 60 Gb /dev/hda:
- /dev/hda1 for /boot of 128 Mb ext2
- /dev/hda2 for swap 1 Gb swap
- /dev/hda3 for /, all available space minus 4 Gb for future usage reiserFS
2. UI
I have chosed to use KDE, till now I've used GNOME, it's time to try something else. I have downloaded a distribution with KDE 3.5 to play with, and I must say that my first impression is very positive. Surely better as for 2-3 years when I tried KDE for the first time.
What I absolutely don't like is the default theme (window, style and icons) but I have browsed www.kde-look.org and I think there are some good looks.
What has impressed me a lot is Karamba the widget engine, seams better than gDesklet.
...to be continued...
