So I have my Dell Lattitude booting up to a prompt and everything is working and massively fast. Bootup in less than 5 seconds. Amazing. I understand why people love it.

Along the way, I found an hdpram tweak that does wonders.

I also got Xorg configured, which means that soon I can boot to a pretty graphical interface. I’ll be sure to post a picture of the desktop when it’s done. 1024×768 with 16bit color on an old laptop. Not bad for a first try, I guess.

Meanwhile, I’m discovering the wonders of the usepkg flag on the emerge command. Trying to emerge icewm without causes a lot of errors while it tries to find mirrors.

Unfortunately, the gentoo system is built entirely without network because I don’t have a nic for it. That’s okay, I plan on getting it to work with a usb drive so that I can take documents off of it. I plan on using it as a writing tool and a notepad. Oh yeah, it’s going to play the occasional CD as well.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.