[Sussex] New Gentoo user

[tealeg at tealeg.uklinux.net]

John...

OK.  

1.
The turquoise U just means that it is a package you already have
installed that would be upgraded,  The version number in blue is the
version currently installed.

2.
When emerge tells you it wants to update portage I'd usually follow its
advice.  However, if you've used:

export ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

... then I'd hold of from doing it.  That line tells Gentoo to use the
bleeding edge packages.  I told you to use it so that you could see
version 1.0-5328 of the Nvidia drivers.  Until you understand more about
what the implications of that are I'd hold of from doing things like portage
upgrades while its switched on.  Luckily doing an export only sets a
variable for the length of a shell session.  If you open another shell
then it won't know that you set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS.  You can always
explicity get rid of that setting as well by using:

unset ACCEPT_KEYWORDS

However, what you should be doing at some regular interval ( I do it
daily, but you can get away with far less often) is:

emerge rsync
emerge -up world
emerge -u world

,,, that will take care of things like portage updates for you.

3.
The message about config files.  This is warning you that programs you
have installed have config files that haven't been edited since you
installed them.  Portage will leave any existing config files you have
already edited in place when you upgrade software (this stops you
loosing your config every time you upgrade).  The "new" template config
file will be stored eleswhere so that at some later date you can merge
the two if necessary (portage provides a process for diffing and merging
config files).

The golden rule for newbies:  ignore these messages if everything is
working fine.  Config files don't usully change drastically - until you
are confident that you know what each file should be like don't attempt
to merge these things.  The 54 files in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb are
almost definietly of no consiquence to you anyway!

-- 
GJ Teale
mailto : tealeg at member.fsf 
http   : www.tealeg.uklinux.net

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