November 21, 2020

I got my Gentoo VM up and running again, but its the classic scenario where you can’t necessarily follow the Gentoo AMD64 handbook verbatim, as I had made the mistake in making ‘/dev/sda2’ or /boot as ’ext2’ when you need to make it ‘vfat’ to handle the UEFI based boot process.

I had to adjust this by moving everything from /boot to /home, reformatting /boot to be with:

mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2

Then, I re-installed Grub 2, and it worked thankfully after rebooting. I also enabled ‘dhcpcd’ this time around, so that networking is handled for me automatically.

That had to be like the 4th time I installed Gentoo (for reference, the third and fourth time were successfull). So, it’s not like I didn’t learn anything. I learned so much in how Gentoo works with its “emerge” tool, as well as how to merge changes between files. It’s a pretty exciting process in the weirdest way, but then again, I’m really a Gentoo fan from the deepest part of my heart, and loathe Arch. The main reason is that Gentoo FROM THE GET-GO offers you the ability to choose to create a Linux system without ‘systemd’ while you have to use a fork of Arch to even give you this option. This fact alone makes Gentoo that much more based.

However, this did not come without a few losses as I did unfortunately lose all my Gentoo installation notes that I made since the stupid SSD that went into read-only mode is exactly where I stored the notes like an idiot. Honestly, SSD’s are such a meme, but unfortunately they are the future of drive storage.

As a result to kind of circumvent this issue from happening again, I’ve vowed to only make anything OTHER than the main Linux laptop to have one-way Git repos meaning they should only PULL changes, and not do any upstream changes.

I also did some re-organizing on my local Linux laptop to have a “hub” section to house all my repos and directories in one spot. I’m debating how I might use this kind of idea to also host my Org-Mode notes on my site so I can interact with them between machines easily. I’ve been getting into really thinking and writing down different tasks for at-home projects, or even just pet projects, and it really really really has kept me focused on what I can do now, vs. what I can do another time.

I did a lot of research into cable management as well since I still have the world’s most giant Ethernet cable running throughout the house, so there are a few options to fix this, as well as the multitude of audio cables for music stuff in the home office room too. I prefer it this way because most Wi-Fi drivers on Linux simply run on non-Free software (Free As In Freedom), so you can’t trust any of the non-free drivers as there’s always the potential of it working against you. So, just use an Cat 7 ethernet cable, and your problem is solved. Luckily there are a few ways to help manage cables like this, so I am happy to gauge what what options are the best for this scenario.

I found this dude’s site since he’s a guy from Freenode IRC that is into “Software Defined” Radio, which is pretty neat. Love the site’s easy layout, and might steal some good design layouts, and I like how easy it is, especially with the left and right sides of the page:

Speaking of software defined radio, it’s not that expensive to get into it, and you don’t even need a Ham Radio license to listen in since its all about RECEIVING signals and not transmitting (Yes, there are transmitting-capable SDR’s too, but they’re boomer-tier priced, and its better to just use the cheaper option listen in anyway for this kind of thing).

Here’s the more budget friendly option to listen to Ham Radio bands since you can stick this near a window sill, and you’re good to as you just need to plug it into your computer’s USB port and utilize it with related free radio software:

Here’s the boomer-tier priced one I mentioned earlier that can transmit, but it ain’t cheap:

Here’s a list of RTL-SDR compatible software for Windoze and Linux:

On a total separate note, I’ve been debating getting a used Sony PS3, since the games are super cheap, and I would love to play some of the “Warriors” series ports again, as the Sony ports were always superior. More and more, I’ve become okay with game consoles being just better than PC’s, as the modern Windoze PC spies on you anyway, and I prefer just single player offline games not connected to the Internet from time to time.

The deals on eBay for old used PS3 games are pretty enticing, I must say.

I might look into stealing more cool ideas from Emacs configs from the likes of “Uncle Dave” from YouTube, as well as Sacha Chua, both of which have deep knowledge of Emacs inside and out. Here are their configs for reference:

Looking forward to maybe getting EXWM aka Emacs Window Manager up and running as well as X-Org running on that Gentoo install, as I wanted to “live” within that Gentoo VM for 6 months before transferring the entire setup from a virtual machine to bare metal hardware. I just don’t want to take the jump necessarily yet because I don’t want to lose any data if I screw up along the way, and also, since I’m trying to ween into being that kind of elevated super type of Linux user.

Planning to use this Gentoo guide as a reference for the X-Org setup, as I’m kind of a noob that’s a bit too used to making a login manager like ’lightdm’ do this for me automatically, but I’m looking forward to figuring out how to make X-Org work with ‘startx’ and then figure out how to tweak it to my needs:

Ideally, I would want to boot into X, which would then boot into Emacs via Emacs Window Manager so that everything contained within each buffer could interact with Emacs seemlessly.

Some really cool YouTube videos that show how awesome this is include the following:

Keep Having Fun Tweaking Your Setup!

~ Sam