It's that time of the year again

It's happening again, I want to reinstall gentoo , stage 1 this time ( not my average stage 2 ) and have to find time to do it, I was wondering if there are any suggestions you guys have for making this not suffer as much, timewise. I'm gonna take a while looking at the compilations options I can set in make.conf and see if there are any that i'm going to change.

I'm going to go for it soon as my paper is due, or I have it finished, or I feel ike being an idiot and heading to school to type it in the CS labs (Which are buggy, from windows code, IT department still trying to find out why the CS labs suck, if I were them I'd at least run Linux on the SERVERS) anywho- I just wanted some suggestions on what would cut down the time, creating some of the binaries now with new optimazion settings I'll be using on my stage 1 install and storing them in a new partition?

Well, this might not be the answer you are looking for, but I save time on Gentoo installs by planning out my install with my sleep schedule, heh :) A couple hours before I go to sleep I will start the install, have the base system up (I have a speedy cpu) with my somewhat aggresive optomization flags. Then, it's just a matter of one big emerge xorg-x11 xfce4 etc etc. By the time I wake up it's just a matter of a little configuration (X, etc) and I am good to go. I add on other packages here and there as I need them.

The only difference between a stage 1 and stage 2 install is one command and a couple of minutes/hours. If you know what you want to install in your system, after you reboot and you're in your freshly installed system, do a

emerge -f package1 package2 package3 && emerge -v package1 package2 package3

That way portage won't spend so much time downloading and compiling a package, then download the next package and compile it and continue the cycle until all the packages are done. You might want to copy your configs onto another partition/media that way you won't spend time configuring your programs too (/etc/X11/XF86Config is one). You can also use screen to send the emerge process to the background if you don't want to leave your computer logged in.

You can do this before you go to sleep or have a long day of school/work. There's no way to "speed up" a stage 1 installation so might as well get everything downloaded/compiled in one sweep.