There are many things happening in the Gentoo comunity right now. There even was a fine bugday killing problems out there beside a new init system showing up, promising to be gentoo’s future init: OpenRC.

Why not trying it out? The maintainer says, it’s pretty stable and working.

So I went out searching for documentation and found hardly any hints beside the mailinglist and some forum postings arguing about how easy it would be and that it would be working with baselayout2.

Well – so let’s unmask it and start the emerge process. Merging the configuration was an easy thing due to etc-update and colordiff. So I rebooted and watched error messages raising. I couldn’t believe my eyes: the rootfs was mounted read-only.

As swearing and cursing didn’t remount it correctly, I had to do it manually in a shell, trying to figure out what went wrong. So I looked through the init-scripts using grep, which pointed me to /etc/init.d/root – the script that actually remounts the root filesystem. I added it to the runlevel ‘boot’ and retried booting. Success.

After all, my system is up and running smoothly, without any problems. Hey – some words about OpenRC can be found over here.