Gentoo 2012 (1 Viewer)

[Buickman]

I recently upgraded my gamer which left me with a spare moboard, an intel 950 quad-core, and 8 gig of ram, so I figured, why not? It's gotta be faster than a single core or a duo.

For those of you that aren't familiar with it, Gentoo is, to me anyway, the most difficult Linux OS out there. You boot from a cd, but it drops you off at a prompt rather than a desktop, like Ubuntu or Fedora. You start there building your hard-drive partitions, formatting them, then you have to start building your kernel. After that, any program you want has to be compiled. If you've ever wanted to learn the guts of Linux, then this is the OS for you.

So, I got thru all of this using genkernel to build my kernel (yeah eaux-yeah, I cheated) and successfully rebooted to the first prompt. This is when I saw how awesome a quad-core is in Gentoo. In the past when I started to emerge xorg-server, I would start it, then go to bed. The next night I would start Gnome, then go to bed. With this CPU, I had xorg-server, Gnome, and the Nvidia driver compiled in just a few hours. But I still had a problem because X wouldn't load. The system would freeze everytime I tried to start X. So I cheated again. I copied the xorg-conf file from my Debian system over to this drive and everything ran like a champ. I was up and running in Gnome. But I was still having problems getting compiz-fusion and emerald to run...I want my eye-candy. I'll deal with it another day.

I got the following to compile and emerge;

Gftp
Libreoffice
Gkrellm and lm-sensors(so I can monitor cpu temps and activity)
samba
k3b
vlc
firefox (because I did the minimal gnome install)

Now, I was also using the --unmask command when portage called for it. That's where disaster struck. After running "emerge whatever --unmask" It makes a file and tells you to run a command...can't remember the name and now I can't go back and see it. I ran this command and it gives options for each time I ran --unmask, ie changing the keywords.package file, etc. I was reluctant, but I did it with a file (I did it so fast that I wasn't paying attention) that ended up changing all of my passwords, including root, because I was dumb and told it to overwrite the original. The system doesn't recognize any password I use now. I can't do squat with this thing.

So, does anyone have any ideas? My next step is to wipe it and start over. Not a biggie, but I'd also like to save some time.

Also, if I want to share a folder using samba I can no longer just right-click the folder and select "share folder." Again, any ideas?

Thanks Guys.

 

[Hedon James]

Wish I was able to offer assistance, but you're WAY above my pay-grade Buick! However, I AM very interested in Gentoo, Arch, and/or LinuxFromScratch due to the hands-on nuts & bolts involved. I'm not ready yet (I don't think...), but I've got my eyes on one of those projects in my future, just for the acquisition of the knowledge. I've marked this thread and Imma grab some popcorn in case a willing teacher appears. Good luck Buddy!

 

[Buickman]

So, I started this up again yesterday and wanted to pass along some information to anyone that's interested in trying Gentoo.

Normally when I compile the kernel I just run;

genkernel -all

In the past when I've tried messing around with the kernel settings I've usually screwed up and can't boot into it so now I just let genkernel do all the work. The problem is that after my first reboot I couldn't access the network. What I did was boot back on to the cd and re-run

net-setup eth0

On the first screen this will tell you what driver it wants to load. Make a note of this and reboot without the cd and run

genkernel --menuconfig all

This brings up the kernel menu. In here you can find your network driver and either enable it to load as part of the kernel (which I did) or as a module. If you also plan to install Xorg, a video driver, and a desktop like gnome, then you also have more stuff to do in here. The guides for those will tell you what you need so just take a look in them first.

Speaking of which, the new guides for installing the nvidia driver is incomplete. The guides for xorg and nvidia just says that you need to have the lines

INPUT_DEVICES="evdev" (for keyboard and mouse)
VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia"

in your /etc/portage/make.conf file and then just emerge xorg-server. The guides say that will install everything you need. Well, that's not accurate. After doing some googling I found that you still need to run

emerge nvidia-driver
emerge xf86-input-evdev

to get the video, keyboard, and mouse to work. I couldn't find that anywhere in their guides, so they really need to fix that.

Next I installed compiz and emerald and amazingly I got both working. The only hiccup was that I was reading thru the guide too fast and skipped a step or two.

Today I'll be working on Samba. I'll post any issues I run into on here as well.

 

[Buickman]

I had everything running just fine for a few weeks. Samba was a snap (it helps storing the smb.cnf file from another build) as was most things. Then I did a big update and things went crazy. I won't go into detail but it was so much that I've finally given up on Gentoo. It just isn't worth the pain.

On to the next thing.

 

[Hedon James]

bummer. you were my guinea pig who was gonna blaze the trail and light the way for me. you're useless. ;-) ah well, i've still got "build an Arch system from scratch" on my bucket list.

 

[Chinny]

I love gentoo. It's the perfect hobby OS. It's great if you enjoy tweaking things to the maximum - otherwise if can be a pain

Nice thing is, once you have everything setup "emerge" is automagic