I'm installing Gentoo. LFS was a great learning experience, and it was really fast and responsive, but I was fed up with having trouble installing software. I never had any trouble with any simple ./configure && make && make install package, but some of these programs require you to do all these funny steps and half of them are outdated and dependant on non-existant packages. So I'm installing gentoo. I'm almost done the install. I'm glad I had Knoppix to install it from (I still have it burnt on a CD from when I installed LFS), because from what I saw in the Gentoo installation instructions, their liveCD comes with practically nothing on it, and the best browser it comes with is lynx. So here I am with graphics (and my brother listened to some music on the NTFS partition) as I watch the kernel sources download (that's near the end of the install). I can't believe that it was all compiled from source and it took so quick! LFS took me days to install. I was going to start from stage1, but they had a stage2 specifically optimized for pentium4, and basically the only optimization I would have done differently would have been -O3 instead of -O2, so I stuck with stage 1. I'm very impressed with portage. Well the kernel's almost done downloading, so...

Well, it works. I had to go for a while, and then I had some trouble getting my network card (used for Internet) working, but now I'm all set up. I emerged links (with USE="-X") and am posting from it. I'm also busy emerging xfree and its up to package 7 of 7, though, of course, package 7 is the biggest one (x itself). I'm very impressed with Gentoo. It gives me everything LFS did (except for the learning experience, and I don't need two of those) and its much easier and faster. And it appears to have every single piece of software in existence in the portage tree.

Hmmm...There is apparently a problem (which I'm experiencing the effects of) with Gentoo, X, and nVidia (even the "nv" driver). Not fun.

Quote: Original post by clum
Hmmm...There is apparently a problem (which I'm experiencing the effects of) with Gentoo, X, and nVidia (even the "nv" driver). Not fun.

I'm running the xfree X server on a 2.6.3-gentoo-dev kernel without problems. There were some issues with 2.6.7 and the nvidia-drivers, though.

Make sure you use the latest nvidia-kernel module: as of today, I'm using media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.5336-r4. Since it is considered unstable it is masked by the "~x86" flag. So, to emerge it, you have to explicitely specify "~x86" in your ACCEPT_KEYWORDS:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge nvidia-kernel. I find it practical to mask the earlier packages (to make sure I don't downgrade by accident), by adding the line <media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.5336-r4 to my /etc/portage/package.mask file (you may have to create it).

Similarly, I use media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.5336-r2 for GL.

I was a victim of these problems. That's why no one heard from me again. I got so befuddled (trying to unmerge and who knows else what and getting compile errors!) that I gave up and am reinstalling it. I also heard that the USB 2.0 drivers where contributing to the nVidia problem, so this time I'm going to disable it, as the only USB 2.0 devices I have don't work in linux anyway (I didn't choose them, not my fault).

BTW, #gentoo (on irc.freenode.net) is an amazing channel. I commented on the large amount of traffic that it had and one of chanops told me that it is the biggest channel on freenode.net (and they actually have several channels - that's just the main one) and someone else told me that they like to think of it as "google with attitude", because they can pose any question an pretty soon someone will answer it.

Should I possible only install linux 2.6.5? That way I can avoid the whole problem entirely...

Quote: Original post by Fruny
Make sure you use the latest nvidia-kernel module: as of today, I'm using media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.5336-r4. Since it is considered unstable it is masked by the "~x86" flag. So, to emerge it, you have to explicitely specify "~x86" in your ACCEPT_KEYWORDS:
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge nvidia-kernel. I find it practical to mask the earlier packages (to make sure I don't downgrade by accident), by adding the line <media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.5336-r4 to my /etc/portage/package.mask file (you may have to create it).

Similarly, I use media-video/nvidia-glx-1.0.5336-r2 for GL.

Judging from what I can only assume to be educated opinions on the gentoo-user mailing list, the use of ACCEPT_KEYWORDS on the command line is discouraged. (That, and the use of the [reviled] -U flag, seems to be what is debated the most heatedly on the list ...) It may be a better idea (in any case it makes life easier) to just add it to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file (for the uninitiated: it may not exist; just create it):
media-video/nvidia-kernel ~x86

I don't know what would be wrong with using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS, but anyway...
I know have the 2.6.5 kernel. Things are running much smoother, but I still had one problem (I'll write about that in a second). I'm sitting here with only links (with console graphics!) and irssi, and am currently emerging X. Curiously enough, I ran mirrorselect, and none of the mirrors it found were in Canada! In fact, one of them appeared to be from Germany. I don't know what's up with that. But anyway, the only weird problem that I had was once, while switching virtual consoles away from links, all of the consoles (including the one links was in) got extremely messed up. All the consoles were multicoloured, seemed to have the output of vt1 (the console I was trying to switch to) at the time of the switch in the background, and it was a few lines off (i.e. I had to press enter a few times to see the output of the command I had just typed). I got shocked, but managed to fix that by restarting links with the same graphics mode. After I successfully started links like that, all the other terminals were fixed. Another problem is that links doesn't understand my (PS/2) mouse. It seems to thing that I really want to get to the top left corner of the screen, and it heads in that general direction when I move the mouse.