this morning, i switch on the thinkpad to wake it up from hibernation and go for a shower…just to come back to an utterly buggered root file system…sugar…i try a quick file system check but that does turn into an endless drone of error messages (and i’ve even started the file system checker in automatic “yes” mode), but eventually “declare the bazaar closed”: the system is a goner. fortunately, my /home partition only has a few defects and can be rescued with fsck…i decide to not reinstall fedora 3 but instead try gentoo
installing the gentoo distribution basically means installing everything from source. you start off with a minimum install CD (about 59MB) and then pull in a couple of setup files, configure the build process (i.e., which CPU, which optimisations, which features) and off you go…a day later you have a customised system that only has the stuff you want — in my case i’m really surprised at how much space all of a sudden i’ve left on my drive. it works so well that i decide to switch travelbear to gentoo as well…(and, yes, somehow it’s cool to know that i have a self-compiled mozilla firefox 
p.s.: the crash turns out to be a fatal combination of fedora 3/4 with software suspend2…
