From WindowsXP to Gentoo Stage 1

Journal BobPaul's Journal: From WindowsXP to Gentoo Stage 1 2

Journal by BobPaul on Monday August 08, 2005 @10:41PM

For years I've used OSS (Various Mozilla builds, Netscape 6 briefly, Mozilla, Pheonix->Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Azureus, edonkey, etc), but have long shyed away from switching to linux after I failed to catch on in 6th grade with Redhat 6.0, 7th grade with Mandrake 6.5, and then finally Gentoo (both stage 1 and 2 failed, I'm assuming because I later found I had a bad stick of memory) and stage 3 "word-for-word" left me with a windows partition half formatted with ext2. (/dev/hda1 != /dev/hdb1)

Now, obviously Gentoo left a bad taste in my mouth, but one of the big reasons was poor font support. I always had a number of Knoppix builds laying around my desk/dorm, but the fonts sucked much and KDE sucked more. My only experience with Gnome was on Redhat 6 and Mandrake 6.5, and that was in the early days and it too sucked.

I hadn't tried linux, other than knoppix live, since.

Until last week when I saw the article about Xandros on Slashdot while I relently realized the only way I could regain 16-bit app support and the existance of my "Compatibility Tab" in XP was a format--seriously, it's just gone... it's like the WoW service was disabled, but it reported perfect operation--I thought, "Fuck.. I should switch to linux".

So I popped in the Xandros Open Dist cd, had it resize my windows partition, and installed Xandros.

It sucked.

I couldn't get it to use my SBLive 5.1 instead of the secondary Ensoniq $0.50 card I use for Skype-chat cord calls and I could tell the package management was for n00bs. Where I was expecting to see a plethera of interconnected packages, I so less than 20, and most everything was installed in the "System Package". No wonder installation was a breeze... there's just one package!

So I didn't even spend a full hour with that. I immediately downloaded a Gentoo minimal and a Ubuntu live cd and rebooted.

"Ah, shit. I need the ubuntu install cd!

So I installed Gentoo from Stage 1. That was on Thursday. It's now Monday at almost 10pm and I just finished making gnome look a little prettier:
( De-Uglify Gnome, End User Gnome, Make Fonts Less Suck, Installing Gnome, Make Numlock ON)

And now I fire up Firefox and everything looks great! Gnome is fast and sleek, I have all of my extensions and grease monkey scripts, I just watched a DVD last night and I swear it looked about 50% sharper than it ever did in windows and so I head over to firefox and BAM: Suck Fonts!

WTF?!? I spent almost 2 hours emerging font packs per the instructions last night, while I simultaneously spent an hour in profuse going through all of my use variables so that I could "emerge --deep --update --newuse world" for the 3rd time in 3 days only to find that slashdot still looks terrible!

I followed all the steps in the "Fonts Less Suck" guide and everything looks great everywhere on the web I've been except for slashdot... I don't get it. They're so huge and weirdly shaped. Obviosuly AA is working, but they don't look like what I'm used to on Windows and OSX...

So, I guess I've got some more work to do...

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I set my proportional to Sans-Serif 15 instead of Serif 16 and things look a little better... Did I only have 2 choices for proportional fonts in Windows, I wonder? I still don't really like it...

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