Yesterday I tried to switch my ~amd64 box from Gnome/systemd to Xfce/openrc. I followed 
the wiki [1], [2] to install Xfce from a Gnome terminal:

- switch profile from 17.1/desktop/gnome/systemd to 17.1/desktop
- emerge xfce4-meta and some xfce4 applications/panels/extras
- unmerged systemd and emerged OpenRC
- emerge -uDvN world to account for the different profile flags

During the emerge I had to hard reset the system [3] which obviously did not boot so I 
found a PCLinuxOS live cd from 2014 and managed to chroot into the partially updated 
system. I resumed the emerge successfully, unmerged gnome and dependencies (this almost 
took more than building Xfce...), rebuilt the kernel with the init system set to OpenRC 
(make && make install), update the grub menu to no longer pass to the the kernel the 
systemd init.

Now both emerge -uDvN world and emerge --depclean show a clean system. But the system 
won't boot...

I attach a picture of the last kernel messages. I am not familiar with init systems but it 
seems to me that init has started but then hangs at some point. From the chroot I 
re-checked the /etc/runlevels contents, all links seem fine except a couple of stale ones 
which I removed (mpd, syklogd and few others from pre-Gnome days). /etc/inititab looks 
fine also.

One thing I notice from the boot log is that the root FS requires recovery. My live CDs 
did not let me because they are too old  so I'll try to find a more up to date live CD.

Other ideas? Have I missed some obvious step in the process?

thanks,

raffaele


[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xfce
[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xfce/Guide
[3] While emerge was ongoing I left the system alone for dinner time, when I got back gdm 
had kicked in and did not let me log back in, neither through the GUI nor in a terminal 
with CTRL-ALT-Fx. This is probably due to me having unmerged GDM before starting the 
emerge to fix some dependency, thus a vivid example of PEBCAK