After dishes, delights and horrors beyond my comprehension await me...I will be installing Gentoo. I need a good distraction today because work was a lot and overwhelmed me. I need a boss battle task to exorcise this strange ass mental energy that will doing my head in for hours.
Likely, I will not sleep well or no more than 2 hours anyway. So with luck, I have Gentoo installed and ready for the next phase by the time a brief slumber takes me.
Oh boy, I thought the horrors had begun after I had connected to my Wifi using the nmtui (Network Manager Terminal User Interface). However, I discovered that fdisk can in fact print the current partition table for me so that my life is easier. It will not be as hard for me to create this new partition table for Gentoo. I just need to actually do it now. ROFL
I have successfully used fdisk to create partitions (I don't use swap so...that was left undone), had them labeled correctly, flagged...Basically everything you can do with partitions. To prepare them for the upcoming steps. It took more than an hour because the keymap for the Gentoo minimal installer is fucked. Not as bad as the FreeBSD one. I had to constantly recheck all my keystrokes or I'd be screwed.
It was a long and drawn out process downloading/unpacking the stage3 file necessary to create a Gentoo install (a lot of typing with a wonky keymap). But I have run "emerge --sync" I am sure a lot of Gentoo heads know that I am almost there...Surprising the horrors haven't found me yet, despite my lack of experience with terminal heavy installation processes. The Gentoo Handbook is a light in the darkness of a terminal.
Well, my Gentoo Journey ended at the "env-update && source /etc/profile && export PS1="(chroot) ${PS1}" part of the Gentoo Handbook, it did not like my selection. I feel like I should've chosen the one I felt was right. Basically all the steps up to that point were correct, however, not choosing "en_US.UTF-8" honestly fucked the install up. Booted me out of chroot and I couldn't do anything else after that.
So that was fun, I might use the KDE Live Image to install Gentoo to speed certain aspects along. As setting up Sway after such a marathon is going to be a pain in my ass...At the same time, I don't need the minimal Gentoo installer defeating me like this. I will probably use the power of spicy geek spite to get me through this install process, as I was so fucking close.
It took me 5 hrs to fail, which is impressive because I thought I wouldn't nearly make it towards the kernel build.
Gentoo Round 2 is about to begin, as I am willing to give myself another few attempts because this is honestly a very technical installation process. If I fail too much, I will call it quits and decide to be sane about this. I don't have an infinite weekend nor time in order to succeed.
I have a Calamares installed distro at the ready in case of emergency that will only take me at most 2 hours to return the laptop to a previous state.
@wendigo I think the reason why I failed is because of the locale set. They defaulted to a different one than "en_US.UTF-8" in my case. Honestly, that is when I needed to make a judgement call and use my en_US when setting locale.
Everything else was pretty easy to understand and follow, shame it ended the first time before kernel building. Yeah, I think they need to section out openrc and systemd better as they mix steps together. For an intense process like this, that isn't cool.
@wendigo I just want openrc, cause systemd, he be doing too much!
A little of your mojo and my geek spite will make this install happen! I just need to make my body calm the fuck down first, taking longer than I thought.
Crest of Light
Brian Nicar