[gentoo-user] Advice/best practices for a new Gentoo installation

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

Hi, I'm building a new personal computer. I respect the opinion and
experience of the people on this list and am interested in anyone's
advice on the best way to set up my new Gentoo installation. Things
that you say "I wish I set mine up this way the first time..." or have
learned from experience how to do it right the first time already. :)

Some topics I'm thinking about (comments welcome):
- be aware of cylinder boundaries when partitioning (thanks to the
recent thread)
- utilizing device labels and/or volume labels instead of hoping
/dev/sda stays /dev/sda always
- initrd - I've never used one, but maybe it's needed if root is on
software RAID?
- grub/kernel parameter tips and tricks... i'm already using uvesafb,
and don't dual-boot with MSWin or anything, just Gentoo
- better partitioning scheme than my current root, boot, home (need
portage on its own, maybe /var as well?)
- some kind of small linux emergency/recovery partition? equivalent to
a liveCD maybe.
- best filesystem for portage? something compressed or with small
cluster size maybe.
- SSD vs 10000rpm vs big-and-cheap hard drive for rootfs/system files.
I lean toward the latter since RAM caches it anyway.
- omit/reduce number of reserved-for-root blocks on partitions where
it's not necessary.
- I have never used LVM and don't really know about it. Should I use
it? will it make life easier someday? or more difficult?
- Is RAID5 still a good balance for disk cost vs usable space vs data
safety? I can't/don't want to pay for full mirroring of all disks.

Or any other tips that apply to things which are difficult to change
once the system is in use.

It will be ~amd64 Gentoo using Intel Core i7 920 with 12GiB RAM. No
disks have been purchased yet.

Thanks