ronny.haryan.to

Happy 2006, everyone!

So I’ve had it with Gentoo Linux. Goodbye Gentoo, I’ll always remember the good times, and the bad times. It’s not that Gentoo is bad or anything, it’s good in many ways, don’t get me wrong, but it also has some drawbacks, at least for me. I think I’m not that interested anymore in living on the bleeding edge. I just can’t be bothered to compile, tweak and tinker with a lot of stuff anymore nowadays, I just want to get my work done. If I need something, I want it quick and painless. Hey, apt-get install something sure beats emerge something most of the time, time-wise. Sure, there’s a price to pay, but nothing is free, there’s always going to be some trade-offs. I think I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

My Ubuntu install was almost glitch free. I already have some LVM volumes from my Gentoo systems, so I simply want to activate them in Ubuntu. The installer (partman?) would not let me finish the partitioning step if I enabled LVM. So I had to skip the LVM during the installation, and it was really trivial to add the entries to /etc/fstab afterwards and do mount -a from runlevel 1, et voilà, everything is there like it should be. Of course, a little bit of preparation beforehand helps. Based on my previous bad experience, I printed a text file containing the output of df -h, fdisk -l, cat /etc/fstab, pvdisplay, vgdisplay, and lvdisplay. So if shit happens (they do happen, trust me), I will have something to refer to. I also made, beforehand, a list of applications that I use daily, so I could quickly apt-get install them by following the list. Oh, and backups! Did I mention backups? It’s crucial to backup properly before doing something like this. At least the home directory and everything in /etc.

I’m not quite finished with the setup yet, but I’m very pleased so far. With Google by my side, everything was easy breezy (pun intended) to install and configure (there’s nothing much to configure really), the only thing left is setting up Harvard BibTeX and Ruby on Rails. There’s a rails package, but it’s out of date, so I’d prefer to install it from rubygems, unfortunately there’s no rubygems package. Looks like I have to install them manually, just like I did Sun Java, Azureus, and AllTray. Ironically, I could simply emerge all of them in Gentoo. Heh.