💾 Archived View for 1436.ninja › Phlog › 20191205.post captured on 2020-10-31 at 01:12:00.
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# On mellow ### entered in vim via gentoo x201 ### soundtrack: a playlist of Russian Black Metal on MPD ### 20191205 Things are pretty damned mellow at the moment. The local job market is pretty much stalled until the new year passes. I have dozens of apps out just waiting. In the mean time, I had a project. The installation of Gentoo Linux on my Thinkpad x201 (don't write me an "actually, that's Gnu/Linux..." email, I don't subscribe to that BS). #### Gentoo Previous to installation, I found Gentoo daunting. However, in reality it is very much like installing Arch, plus a bunch of compiling. Since I don't have much to do, this was not a problem. I followed the [wiki][1] during install and not much else is needed. I did have to locate the [Thinkpad x201 page][2] (which was not much help), and then some additional resources to get sound working. The third Kernel I compiled did the trick. I still have some work to do: to switch from listening to MPD to a video in Firefox, I need to restart Alsa and PulseAudio, then vice-versa to go back to MPD, or there is no sound. Also, I only have the headphone jack working ATM, no sound from the builtin speakers. This is honestly fine as I have a keybinding to restart the sound engines and I recently bought a set of ZS10Pro in ear monitors that I really like. All the same, I will eventually get to the bottom of what is going on. The only other thing that is not working is powerline in vim. I have it working for i3. It just doesn't want to show up in g|vim. That too will eventually get looked at. EDIT: figured out the vim issue -- I had another plugin that was conflicting. Once removed I have my sweet sweet powerline status line! #### Other Software I did get vim-latex-live-preview going and redid my resume in LaTeX. It looks better than the libreoffice version I had been using (IMHO). The whole process of writing LaTeX is a very Zen thing. I rather like it for document production. I think I'll script up a document skeleton creator so it is super easy to jump into making a new document... I also installed the plan9 ports today and screwed around with the sam editor. I think I'll stick with g|vim. Call me uninitiated, but plan9 in its entirety just seems primitive. I do not think I'm all about being that minimal. Even Linux or BSD command prompt doesn't seem that terse. Plus I dislike rio and prefer tiling WMs. Meh. Maybe I am just backwards for thinking that Unix and Unix-like systems are perfect and the Unix-haters are/were off-base. I have taken to using Thunderbird for email/rss/usenet over mutt. The decision was based upon the fact I was already using X and it kills three birds with one stone. Another benefit is reading HTML email from the state employment commission in its native form. #### Final Thoughts I really like Gentoo and may attempt to do an install for my music studio computer. This may be a down the road idea as Ubuntu Studio has so very many audio related packages preinstalled and it Just Werks^TM. [1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page [2]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X201