I take it I'll need to reboot to check my bios to see if it supports running off the reader? (That doesn't happen often, since Hibernate is a thousand times more useful)
Hibernate shuts down the computer entirely, so you can hibernate it, power it on, and go into the BIOS without losing your system state. Bear in mind that you might need to have a device plugged in for it to actually show up on the boot list.
Well, I was almost thinking I might want to try my hands at gentoo. After having played around in busybox, and muddles my way through installing stuff by source using an unfamiliar package system, an SSH console, and all the rest, I thought it could be a good learning experience. Of course, I'd still need a good tutorial on compiling that beast, just in case.
Using Gentoo really isn't all that hard, but it does require patience. Some particularly painful packages (i.e. Firefox, OpenOffice, etc) are available as binary packages assuming you use the x86-32 version of the distro. Configuring the kernel is by far the most painful part, but there is a generic kernel available that works well in 99% of all cases, so even that's not really a necessity.
As far as package management goes, that's all done automagically through the Portage package manager. You don't have to actually dig in and manually compile anything. Installing X is as simple as typing "
emerge xorg-x11".
Best of all, the entire installation process is explained in meticulous detail:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml. The directions are based on building Gentoo from the Gentoo LiveCD, but, really, the instructions are applicable to any environment. Like I said, I bootstrapped my Gentoo system from Fedora without a problem. All you need to do from your host environment is be able to do is create and mount partitions, download files, copy over the resolv.conf from your live system, extract bzipped TARs, and chroot into the environment (oh, and access the web so that you can view the handbook, if you don't have another system available
).
If you need a hand during or after the installation is complete, feel free to ask. Gentoo is a meta-distribution and as such can be configured to do just about anything, so it's pretty easy to get overwhelmed. I think I've built enough Gentoo systems that I can give you a lot of help with it.
I was looking at trying to do that with Ubuntu, after having looked at a couple different distros, but I thought I should ask since you've had a lot more experience with different distros.
Damn straight.
I really don't recommend Ubuntu for much of anything nowadays. About the only advantage that I see in it is that the user community is overflowing. Like I said elsewhere, I had issues simply assigning my computer a static IP address, only to have
1501495834[/tweet]]someone tell me that it's not something that novices normally do. Huh. As good of an excuse as any, I suppose.