[Klug-general] Gentoo Users++

[George Prowse]

On Sun, 2005-03-20 at 00:08 +0000, Athon Solo wrote:
> 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.

You chose the right distro, Gentoo was the first with full AMD64 support
and has good support forums and channels specifically for it. I myself
have a 3400.
> 
> 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.
> 
This one is a bitch. Everyone always says that it does it but no-one has
cleaned it up. Because i have been using Gentoo for well over a year im
used to writing all the config myself.
> 
> 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"
> 
well the March settings that can be used are March="amd64" and
March="k6". In the installation instructions it says to look at the
make.conf.example and that lists all the possible March and mcpu (for if
you dont want to break compatability with other cpus) examples.
> 
> 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.
> 
emerge "beeps" at you? i never get that! All the info that you see in
the emerge process can be found on the actual ebuild for the package
itself so for instance you needed to look at the recent version of xorg,
just go to /usr/portage/x11-base/xorg-x11 and you will find 3 *.ebuild
files that you can open with a text editor and at the print_info() part,
read what the output was.

I agree though that it is far from ideal but normall its nothing useful
(apart from when changing from 2.4 to 2.6 kernels).
> 
> 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.
> 
a little tip, dont forget to compile your motherboard ide driver into
the kernel, everyone does that and wonders why all HDD requests are
going through the processor...

Also, if you used genkernel, make a note of what modules it loads up,
and compile them into the kernel. Genkernel uses modules for everything
therefore the startup is slow.
> 
> 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.
> 
Well Gentoo is exactly what you make of it, there are enough variations
(gentoo on the dreamcast, xbox and 256mb flash drives) for you to do and
go exactly where you want with it. 

Even freebsd's installing is easier than gentoo's but there is an
installer on the way, i cant imagine most of the people using it
though...
> 
> 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

Pop by #gentoo-uk and have a chat once in a while :)

George
> 
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-- 
George Prowse 
http://cokehabit.homelinux.org