I spent nearly an entire summer doing this, back after I graduated from High School in 2003. If you just follow the manual and enter the commands blindly, you can do it a lot faster. Instead, I took the time to look up each package I was installing, figure out what it did, why I was installing it, and so forth. Chipped away at it a few hours a week, then went through the process of install X windows, _which was the worst experience of my life_.