[Sussex] gentoo - pre-install questions

[John D.]

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 18:43:03 +0000, Stephen Williams  
<sdp.williams at btinternet.com> wrote:

>
> As far as my understanding goes, USE flags allow you to specify the
> support you want when you compile stuff. For example, if you want xmms,
> mplayer, noatun etc. to support ogg vorbis, you need to set the
> oggvorbis USE flag. For sake of completeness, I added everything I
> though I would ever need, which makes for a lot of USE flags. However,
> my system compiles cleanly, apart from the odd blooper such as
> kdemultimedia not compiling unless I use the ~x86 masked version of
> speex.
>
> You get more features supported but the trade off is larger binaries and
> slower performance.

Well, I started off by including every USE flag that I thought I might  
need, and the install just didn't want to happen. So I went back to the  
start and just used the USE flags that I thought I'd need to start with  
i.e. kde, gnome, gtk, gtk2, qt, etc etc (about 20 in the end).

> I don't use optimisation more than -O2 as this can cause problems during
> compile. In addition, use of distcc and ccache cause problems for some
> compilations. I've just done an emerge -u world and it took 18 hours to
> compile, but it's worth it as it was generally very trouble-free.

Yup, that's something else I tried, after what Geoff posted, I tried O3  
but the install didnt like that either, so I changed it back to O2 (which  
was what it wanted to use as a default - which I have to presume would be  
correct as the discs I got where "gentoo originals" for pentium 4  
architecture).

> You do not need /home mounted during the install, but I'd make sure it
> was mounted before I added any users other than root.

Oh, OK that makes sense, though someone on the gentoo forums said about  
having mounted the /home as well.

Right now, the problems have changed a little.

Post install, i've installed the binaries for kde, gnome, etc but for  
reasons that I don't follow I can get the X server to start with the  
generic nv driver, but even though I've emerged the nvidia-kernel package  
it won't fire up when I change the xorg.conf to reflect the proprietary  
"nvidia" driver.

Having checked what I did to get round that last time, I'm just doing an  
emerge sync, and I'll follow it up with an emerge --update --deep world to  
bring all the packages up to the latest available stable version. Which  
may, or may not do the trick (it did last time), and be a long winded way  
of accomplishing that, but atleast it gets things current.

If I have to, I can always get the latest nvidia driver from their site,  
but I'm unsure as to whether I'd be able to install as per their  
instructions or not (being used to RPMs and the like) - it should be a  
case of untarring and then running the script (I think that's what you'd  
call it).

Ah, It's finished the emerge sync and after checking with emerge -upd  
world it's come up with a comment/error that my profile is deprecated and  
no longer supported.

It says that I've got to
# emerge -n '>=sys-apps/portage-2.0.51'
# cd /etc/
# rm make.profile
# ls -s ../usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2004.3 make.profile

Not that I understand what I'll be doing when I do that, but I'll have to  
do it then try the emerge sync and the -upd world again and see what  
happens.


Ha, nothing. So I've just done emerge portage, that seems to have worked.

I'll post again presently.

regards

John D.

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