Decision reached, let the migration begin

I finally decided to go with Arch Linux as my Gentoo replacement. I tried Sabayon (very) briefly, and it seemed that it would not give the the modularity that I need. Anyway, I already installed Arch and am up and running, albeit somewhat crippled, with disk encryption via dm-crypt and LUKS. Since this is the first time I've done disk encryption, I didn't want to mess with loop-aes; I'll leave that for some later date. So far, I've noticed no noticeable slowdown with LUKS.

Overall, the setup for FDE has been the easiest part of the whole migration thus far. I had a really difficult time getting X working. Surprisingly, when you install X as a dependency it doesn't install the necessary drivers (read: keyboard and mouse) as well. That took a few minutes to figure out. But overall, I think I have 80% of the apps I need installed now, and I'm really happy with how quickly that went. I am a little shocked that firefox is out of date in the repos, but from what I have read, it's because of some branding issues and I'm trying to see if I have a repo workaround (already installed latest firefox, trying to see if there's an 'Arch' way to do it).

I'm pretty pleased so far. Really, everything has been very smooth aside from the usual distro transition issues. I miss openrc right now (never thought I'd say that), but I think ultimately this setup will be more stable. Didn't realize that vmware-player was not in the repos beforehand, and unfortunately vmware's download server is down right now (go figure). I think vmware-player is the last app I need, or at least would like, before work tomorrow morning.

I really can't stress enough, I am very happy so far with Arch. Moving to FDE was *REALLY* easy, the hardest part was waiting fro my /dev/urandom hdd overwrite (which took approx. 14 hours for 80GB). The pacman package manager is pretty easy to use, but I'm still getting to know the options. For those who want to know, no, I did not tweak my kernel manually (which I DO miss), but I plan to work on that as I go. Unfortunately I do have 74 modules loaded now, but really I haven't noticed any slowdown. My boot time is a bit higher than I'd like, but it's hard to accurately measure (b/c of the FDE password and the ethernet card timeout) which I hope to fix soon.

Here's hoping that tomorrow fixes a lot of issues. For now, hopefully, there is hfsplus support in my kernel (for my backup disk lol).

Oh, and I passed my CISSP exam. w00t!!!