[Klug-general] Gentoo Users++

[Athon Solo]

Hi all,

Just a quick post to say I've now joinedthe ranks of Gentoo users. I've 
chosen to use it on my new nx9105 laptop to take full advantage of its 
Athlon 64 3000+ processor.

Problems that occurred during install:

1) The mirror select program sucks in automatic mode. It spurted 
gibberish (probably binary data) into my make.conf file, then selected 2 
mirrors that I could never contact, 1 which always gave 404's and 1 
which was horribly slow. This was solved by running it in interactive 
mode and manually selecting some european mirrors.


2) My network randomly dropped dead and I had to reboot the laptop to 
get it back. Restarting networking failed when dhcpcd was unable to 
contact the dhcp server on my network.

This appears to have been fixed when I compiled out SMP and framebuffer 
support from my kernel, and installed udev. According to the friendly 
people on #gentoo-laptop this is probably a known problem that occurs 
with APIC, which is part of SMP support.


3) Problems finding the correct x.org setup.
Pretty common I think. This laptop is slightly "wierder" because it has 
a widescreen screen (1280x800). I had to disable an option for the 
nvidia drivers in /etc/modules.conf (I think - some file like that 
anyway), disable the auto detection of some values using EDID in the 
nvidia drivers section in xorg.conf, and search through a few different 
modelines found using google until it worked.

I found a nice utility repeatedly which can generate modelines - except 
HP don't supply all the required information in their manuals, which is 
a PITA.


4) The area of gentoo installation detailing the CFLAGS and related 
settings in make.conf is "fuzzy". I had to go off searching to find the 
right setting for athlon 64's, since the amd64 version of the 
installation "handbook" was using athlon-xp as it's example, with 
repeated notes saying "this is not the right setting for athlon 64 users"


5) While building packages, emerge will beep at you asking you to read 
something, only to promptly throw it off the screen with the next 
package (I was emerging kdebase from a basic install, so obviously it 
had to do x, qt, kde and all deps there of). IMO these should be logged 
or saved up until the end of the complete emerge (I did ask on 
#gentoo-laptop on Freenode, and these messages are not logged). I'll 
never know what these messages actually said now.


The only thing I've had to manually install so far is the nvidia nforce 
drivers (which should power my audio, when I get that far). Right now 
I've just got to set up KDE to start on X startup, then install some 
programs under that and I'll start getting to the stage of a "usable" 
desktop.


In summary, Gentoo is a lot of work when you compare the installation to 
other OS' - even Debian Sarge's relatively ancient feeling text based 
installer is very nice compared to Gentoo, but it should mean I don't 
have to put up with little annoyances like Synaptic depending upon gksu, 
despite kdesu being a perfectly good alternative.


I'm considering upgrading my main PC to an Athlon 64 too, so I may start 
running gentoo there if that happens, and depending upon my experiances 
until that point with Gentoo.


Allen