G's Blog

gentoo

I made the jump to Gentoo ( #100DaysToOffload Day 14)

So after thinking about it for a few days i decided to make the jump to #Gentoo. I'm glad i did. I forgot how fun using Gentoo could be. It has it's drawbacks like compilation time, understanding use flags and some dependency quirks but i knew all this going in. Overall i find it makes my system run ever so slightly faster. Is it a placebo effect? Maybe but i'll be damned if i'm not going to embrace it. Either way the feeling of running software optimized for my CPU is something. As silly as that is.

One thing that i wanted to try and avoid(And maybe another of gentoo's quirks) is getting in a hell of 32bit dependencies like i did last time. By default gentoo will only build 64bit libraries and applications. It can build 32bit when needed and that's controlled via the abix8632 use flag. I don't recall exactly what happened but i remember that i was in a mess of everything wanting to build 32bit versions but nothing could build because something else would not be happy if something had 32bit support. It was a vicious circle of turning off/on 32bit builds of things. I ended up giving up and going to funtoo who at the time did things a little different when it came to 32bit(Now they only offer pure 64bit).

Anyways one thing that still requires many 32bit parts is steam. I do use steam for most of my gaming so i needed a solution. Something that could allow me to have mostly(all) only 64bit libraries/applications on my day to day but still run steam. Luckily gentoo provides a guide for setting up steam inside a chroot so that's what i ended up doing. With work and all it took most of the last 3 days to get that just right. Some of this being moving data back and forth when things got messed up with the chroot setup. But that's all sorted out now. Steam is working great. Gotta find another solution for Diablo 3 and Star Wars: The old Republic. Not that i play those 2 often but when i get the itch i want to play them...

Still a few general things left to setup. Automate backups(I manually run them in the morning not a big deal just a few cron entries), Yubikey (which i just got working before writing this) and some missing fonts for a better web experience. Other than that i'm happy with the move.

I could ramble for a while about things i did to get back up and running but i think i'll leave it at this for now. I'll end by saying that i did find a cable for that HDD enclosure from my last post so in a future post i will see what's on those 2 drive i found.

Until next time stay safe!!

@mgrondin@youdabomb.social

#Tech

Until next time. Stay safe!

G @mgrondin@youdabomb.social