# 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
