Gentoo newbie

[Scoofy12]

I've been planning on nuking my current linux partition and installing again, and was thinking about going with gentoo. they appear to have a prebuild distro, and of course the option to compile all the stuff. it says the base install will take about 36 hours to compile. heres the question: can i go ahead and install the prebuilt stuff now, and then go back and recompile it later, piece by piece, if i want? and what real benefit is it to do even have it custom compiled? especially if htey already have a build for athlon XP?

[Kosh]

You can rebuild packages if you like later (if you do 'emerge -p <package>' it will tell you that the package is present and it will rebuild it then you can continue on), I don't know how easy (or useful) it would be to do a mass recompile (commands like 'emerge world' would only check for upgrades and I don't know of any way to force recompilation on a large scale).

It's unlikely that you will really notice a speed increase of any sort, mostly you can benefit from things like USE flags where you can say

USE="+gnome +gtk2 -kde -arts" emerge something

and get a package emerged for use with gnome and gtk2 but without kde and arts support -- this does depend on the package having those options in the first place of course ... you'd have trouble emerging kde with gnome and gtk2 support .

Good luck with whatever you choose.

[rsbriggs]

Well, I got Gnome installed (the 2.4 beta) from BreakMyGentoo. But, it's a very far cry from the screenie that Dyy showed. This thing is so plain, it's pug-ugly. Suggestions for sprucing things up would be much appreciated....

[rshepard]

You might begin at themes.freshmeat.net-- I don't know if the Beta you're running supports GTK themes, or Metacity, or both. Poke around some at art.gnome.org as well. That should get you into a theme you like. As for the layout of panels and such; well you'll have to play with that. I personally prefer thinner panels (Small or X-Small). At home I run a full-length panel across the top with the menu, some launchers, the System Monitor applet, and the Workspace switcher. Then I have a small corner panel in the Lower-Left, with date-time, Volume control, and the weather applet. At work I use 3 panels- top, bottom, and left edge; but I scatter a lot more launchers there
Hope this gives you a place to start.

[Dyyryath]

LOL, I warned you that it needed some attention to make it look & feel comfortable.

http://art.gnome.org has some stuff. You may also want to look at http://www.pycage.de/software_gdesklets.html and http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org.

You can find the icons I'm using across the bottom of my screen on my home page: http://www.zerothelement.com.

My current desktop is here:



The bar on the right of the screen is called gkrellm. The theme it's running in the ss is called glass2. The icon theme I'm using is called TuxNTosh. the icons down the left side of the screen are mounted devices using this theme. The icons on the right side (under gkrellm) are also from this theme.

The chat window is X-chat with the background set to transparent. The DF client information in the lower right corner is a quickie gdesklet display I threw together. The network & disk info in the upper left corner are also gdesklet displays.

If you want any of the themes, wallpaper, icons or gdesklets and you can't find them let me know & I'll post them for you.

If there was something in the old screenshot that you were particularly enamoured with, let me know.

[rsbriggs]

OK - well, let's see. Guess I better start by emerging in a browser on that machine. Myabe I'll give the opera emerge a shot.....

EDIT:

Well, that went quickly and well. Off to find an interesting theme...

[rshepard]

(must..resist...temptation of...browser war...)


OPERA????
Galeon, man!!!!

[rsbriggs]

Well OK - I can give that a try too. Hate the opera ad banner, anyway...

Just don't tell me you use emacs...

Edit....

Umm. Hows come emerge -p of galeon shows me that it's going to merge all of mozilla?

[rshepard]

Just don't tell me you use emacs...

Nope-- quite happy with nano from the command line


edit: Galeon is built on top of Mozilla

[rsbriggs]

Why do I want a skin for Mozilla? I could just run Mozilla...

Actually - Opera was a 6 minute download and build. Galeon is a 2 hour download so far, with another two hours of compilation to go, probably.... You have to wonder if the difference is worth it, eh?

[rshepard]

I don't know that I'd think of Galeon as a "skin" for Mozilla. If you consider Mozilla as the "all in one browser" and Phoenix as the "bare bones", then Galeon falls somewhere between the two (YMMV). My main complaints with Opera are that I don't care much for the interface, and the last time I checked it flat-out refused to access the web-based control system I use at work. The bottom line still comes down to "what are you comfortable with?"

[rsbriggs]

Mozilla runs, Galeon doesn't. And now some of the little icons are messed up. I'm trying to get a screenshot attached, but it's too big, and I don't have any tools to shrink it. Suggestion there? I went with "Celestia" for a background....

[rshepard]

I'll have to yield to Dyyryath on this one--- I've never seen that msg about a galeon schema before, so I have no clue what it's looking for
Maybe your BreakMy Gentoo build broke Galeon??

the rest looks like its coming along nicely tho.....


<Long edit:>
I pulled this off the FAQ:
# When I run Galeon I get a message about GConf not being configured properly. How can I configure GConf?

First and foremost, be sure you have a new GConf (1.0.7 is the latest at this writing) rather than an old one. In particular, 1.0.4 is too old and causes problems.

If you do ps jaxwww | grep gconf and see two gconfd-1 processes, that's what's wrong; just kill them both and restart Galeon. This problem has not been reported with GConf 1.0.7, only older versions.

If you have trouble with 1.0.7, most likely it's because your home directory is NFS-mounted and either your operating system doesn't support locks in NFS directories or you have stuck locks due to a hard system crash. Try rm -r ~/.gconf*/*lock if you are sure you have no gconfd processes (for your login name) running on any machine using your NFS home directory. If you nuke the lock when gconfd is running and bad stuff happens, it's your own fault. ;-)

If you want to use GConf while logged in from two different machines, sharing the same home directory, you must enable TCP/IP for ORBit by adding the line ORBIIOPIPv4=1 to /etc/orbitrc and restart gconfd. You will need to do this on both machines; one machine will contact the gconfd running on the other. This setup is poorly tested but should work.

It's possible schema installation failed when you installed Galeon, so you can try reinstalling them as follows:

GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=`gconftool-1 --get-default-source` \
gconftool-1 --makefile-install-rule /etc/gconf/schemas/galeon.schemas

Be sure your GConf config file is set up correctly by editing the path file in the directory $sysconfdir/gconf/1. A basic configuration for the default backend would look like:

xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory
include "$(HOME)/.gconf.path"
xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf
xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults

You can also take a look at $sysconfdir/gconf/1/path.example and in most cases you can simply move it to $sysconfdir/gconf/1/path. Be sure that the path file can be read by all users.

Ensure you have a $sysconfdir/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults dir set up with the right permissions. In most cases you can run chmod -R 755 $sysconfdir/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults.

WARNING: The GConf deamon makes heavy use of a cache so when changing your setup you will probably need to restart it.

Be sure you have no applications depending on gconf running and then run:

gconftool --shutdown

GConf will then restart when it is required.

If none of the above works, enable user syslogging and see if gconf is logging any error messages. On Linux, to do this try adding this line to /etc/syslog.conf:

user.* /var/log/user

then run service syslog restart, reproduce your gconf problem, and look in /var/log/user for messages. If gconf is failing to get a lock then the issue is probably the NFS thing mentioned earlier. Otherwise maybe there are other informative error messages.

If you still can't figure it out, try mailing gconf-list@gnome.org, describing what happened when you tried all of the above and what version of gconf you have, what exact error messages you get, etc.

[rsbriggs]

There's is something borked up with gconf in the beta. I'm doing an upgrade to rc-1....

[Scoofy12]

does anyone have an Audigy 2 sound card working in gentoo? or in linux at all for that matter? anyone have resources at ready hand? im about to start looking at ALSA stuff but never dealt with that before so we'll see.

[Dyyryath]

I've got an original Audigy which works fine with a special ebuild under the 2.4.x kernels. However, if you use the 2.6.x kernel, you may find that you don't need anything special at all. It contains support for quite a few new soundcards.

[rsbriggs]

The 2.4 Gnome builds aren't on BreakMyGentoo anymore. They do show up in Gentoo if you set your flags to use ~x86.

What are you emerging to get the 2.6 Kenel stuff? mm-sources? I figure maybe I'll just go for broke with the new stuff, and maybe not emerge an update until they all make it into production....

[Scoofy12]

in theory, you emerge development-sources, but when i tried that, it attempted some sort of download from several locations (including kernel.org) and got a lot of 404s and the like, and couldnt get anything. i just ended up downloading the vanilla source from kernel.org. so heres a question, if i need to rebuild, for example, nvidia-kernel, can i just move the /usr/src/linux symlink to my 2.6 tree and re-emerge nvidia-kernel?

[Dyyryath]

To install the sources for the 2.6 tree, do this:

emerge /usr/portage/sys-kernel/development-sources/development-sources-2.6.0_beta5.ebuild

This will install the latest (currently) version of the development kernel source in /usr/src where you can build it and install it into the appropriate location in your /boot directory. Make sure you update your boot loader configuration when you do this.

When your new kernel is installed (and running), ensure that your new kernel is linked in /usr/src as 'linux', then just do:

emerge nvidia-kernel

to update your video drivers. Keep in mind that this will 'unmerge' the old version, which contains the driver for your last kernel. If you want to be able to boot into either kernel with your video drivers, you'll need to copy the video directory from /lib/modules/OLD KERNEL/ to somewhere safe before doing the emerge. When you're done with the emerge, you can just copy the video directory back into the old kernel's /lib/modules directory.

Finally, gentoo offers a cool way to keep different modules auto loading for multiple kernels. You'll want to specify what gets loaded for what kernel in /etc/modules.autoload.d. Once you've emerged the new kernel sources, check this directory and you'll see what I mean.

[Scoofy12]

is there any difference between gentoo's development-sources and the regular vanilla kernel.org source? i already have that compiled, just havent booted it yet.

[Dyyryath]

The biggest difference is the extra ebuilds that get loaded as dependencies. The additional module.autoload code is one example...

[Scoofy12]

turns out the 404s i was getting were because it was looking for the wrong version of the new modultils or one of the prerequisites. i emerged sync and all was well... they are currently compiling, so we should have news of my 2.6 build shortly

[Scoofy12]

i have a 2.6 kernel working, and my sound card finally works (the whole reason i did this), but now, even though my nvidia module loads without complaint, the X server doesnt like it. i'll look at that later, but any ideas off the top of your head?

also, how bout installing windows fonts?