Incoming n00b!

[JigPu]

Heya guys

I've been very lightly messing with Linux for a while (first installed Mandrake 9.1 about three years ago), but haven't really had any reason or excuse to dive much deeper than the bi-monthly screwing around in Cygwin.

That is, until my laptop started flaking out on me. Windows was being a bit of a pain, not correctly initializing my wifi card among other things, so I figured I'd reinstall and dual-boot linux on the thing. To make a long story short though, GPartd pwn3d my NTFS partition and I couldn't get my Windows restore stuff to work (I did manage to recover all the data prior to pwn4g3 though, so no real loss ).

Saturday morning I fire up the Gentoo Live CD and begin installing. After much ado about sound refusing to work (I couldn't determine if ALSA was compiled in genkernel or not, and recompiling the kernel was a total failure ), I threw up my arms and decided to take the Live CD's advice and follow the book.

~18 hours of compile time later ("emerge gnome" FTW! ) and I've got a Linux box with a GUI. w00t! Now off to bother all the good folks who reside in Alt OS about a few of my questions....

I apologize in advance if some of this stuff has been covered in countless threads, but true to n00b form, I haven't managed (or bothered in some cases) to find anything that answers my questions.

=============

1) Sound. Whilst waiting for Gnome to finish emerging , I played around with getting sound to work. When compiling the kernel by the book I added in ALSA support and attempted to play some stuff. I emerged mp3blaster (a console MP3 player) and managed to start blasting some Pokemon music (I kid you not. The first song that played was the Season 5 Japanese Intro ) with almost no trouble (amazing considering all the difficulties I've had with ALSA in the past!).

After Gentoo finished though, I rebooted just to make sure everything was fine and dandy and after wresling with X got XMMS open and tried playing some tunes again. Nada. I dropped back to mp3blaster without success as well. Mixer levels are good, and channels are unmuted, so I'm at a loss as to what could have changed over the course of a single reboot!


2) Video. Again whittling away the hours Gnome was taking, I ended up emerging an application (fbi) which would utilize the framebuffer to display images. Framebuffer support was included with the kernel, so I knew it would work, and it did. w00tness. When I quit the app and returned to the console though, the right half-ish of my screen went wonky. Pixel rows (again, only on the right half or so) were wiggling horizontally, leading to an effect similar to when you've got the refresh rate turned up too high. I tried screwing around with the framebuffer config file to no effect, and eventually gave up when Gnome finished.

Rebooted and the problem was gone (phew!). I then struggled with X and my touchpad a bit (uber props to the Gentoo Wiki BTW!) and finally got Gnome to display in all its glory. I failed at getting XMMS to work (see above), so dropped to the console and the problem was back! It appears that it shows up whenever something uses the framebuffer (well, besides the console and ncurses interfaces), and since I don't know of any reset command, only a reboot (or switching back to X) fixes it I don't know if the problem shows up in the Live CD (I'm gonna check this though), but any ideas?


3) /dev/ZOMG! There are tons of devices in /dev. I mean, TONS. Even ones I'm 99.9% sure don't actually exist (for example, the 8th hard drive "hdh" ) I doubt they're hurting anything (other than my brain when I ls the directory), but is is possible to prune the list down to what I've actually got?


4) Packages. I looked through the --help of emerge, but couldn't find any way to list all the packages currently installed on my system. I don't really need to know this, but it'd be handy if possible...

Thanks in advance guys -- Hopefully I'll be seeing more of you in the future!
JigPu

 

[JigPu]

OK, no need to worry about the sound issue -- turns out that I was overlooking the advice I had found earlier... Apparently with my laptop sound WILL NOT play unless the external channel is muted. Oh well.

/me dances to Masami Okui - Kiss In The Dark and tries to get Wifi up and running
JigPu

 

[GML3G0]

I'm not sure about the first three, but for packages, emerge gentoolkit.

qpkg -I

I think qpkg is depreciated, though, and was / is being replaced by equery. That command should still work though, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

EDIT: "qpkg -I" and "equery list" should do the same thing.

 

[su root]

#3 - what you see under /dev are device nodes. On old linux systems, you had to manually create these with the MAKEDEV command (yes, allcaps), so many distros shipped with all kinds of devices prebuilt, incase you ever wanted to use one in Linux.

New distributions use "devfs" (or, device filesystem). For this, I believe you need devfs support compiled into your kernel, and devfs installed on your system. This is an actual filesystem that mounts over /dev, and provides the device nodes of devices that are actually plugged in.

You should have installed this if you did the manual gentoo install:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=9#doc_chap1

Even using devfs, there still will be a pile of ptys and ttys there (terminals), I count ~700 items in my /dev using devfs

 

[electrorcamd]

#3 - what you see under /dev are device nodes. On old linux systems, you had to manually create these with the MAKEDEV command (yes, allcaps), so many distros shipped with all kinds of devices prebuilt, incase you ever wanted to use one in Linux.

New distributions use "devfs" (or, device filesystem). For this, I believe you need devfs support compiled into your kernel, and devfs installed on your system. This is an actual filesystem that mounts over /dev, and provides the device nodes of devices that are actually plugged in.

You should have installed this if you did the manual gentoo install:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=9#doc_chap1

Even using devfs, there still will be a pile of ptys and ttys there (terminals), I count ~700 items in my /dev using devfs

Umm... devfs isn't used anymore. It was replaced by udev, so devfs should not be installed whatsoever, unless you are using a 2.4.x kernel. That's what that link says anyway.
See here.
I have 123 files in my /dev directory, although that is on FreeBSD. I think I had around the same amount on my last few Linux installs.
To try to fix the screen in a console, you might try the command "reset". Not sure if that would work for your problem or not.

 

[JerMe]

#2 Try going over the framebuffer howto at the gentoo wiki site again. Whenever I had a framebuffer problem, it was usually 'cause I missed a step. I'd recheck kernel settings first.


#4 Gentoolkit - http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoolkit.xml, specifically, the equery command. While you're at it, emerge genlop to help parse your emerge log files (for example, genlop -t gentoolkit will tell you how long it took to emerge gentoolkit.)


(#5, wifi) What wireless card are you running? Wireless was the biggest PITA when I first got into Linux. It's a tad bit easier now, thank goodness. Let us know and we'll try to chime in.


Have fun Gentoo'ing~

 

[su root]

Umm... devfs isn't used anymore. It was replaced by udev, so devfs should not be installed whatsoever, unless you are using a 2.4.x kernel. That's what that link says anyway.
See here.
I have 123 files in my /dev directory, although that is on FreeBSD. I think I had around the same amount on my last few Linux installs.

I guess they changed it again then.. all of my Gentoo boxes are a few years old now, they're all running devfs on 2.6 kernels. My laptop is running Kubuntu, using udev. All have ~700 devices.

 

[Captain Newbie]

Welcome, my friend. Welcome to the future.

Gentoo is a hard distro to start with I think...but let me know what you think of it, since I'm considering taking the plunge myself to gentoo. (Ubuntu user.)

 

[JigPu]

Thanks for the help guys I got equery, and it's exactly what I was looking for. As for all the /dev devices, as long as it's normal (or at least was in the last kernel revision ) I suppose it's not too bad. I'll do more reading up on udev though.

I'll give the framebuffer howto a whirl. I hadn't even thought of searching the wiki for it, as much as I've used it in the past week...

As for my wireless card, all I can remember off the top of my head is that it's a Broadcomm card. Getting it to work with ndiswrapper was very easy. The only problem I am currently having with it is that connecting to an AP is a bit harder than in Windows, but I'm sure some GUI exists out there for that purpose

Again, thanks for the help. It's so nice to have a dedicated linux box.

======
@Captain Newbie: Gentoo is a bit more "manual" than other distros I've used in the past, but I really enjoy it. I installed it on a really old box temporarily a month or so ago, and pretty much fell in love with emerge. I knew that if I was going to ever get a dedicated box, Gentoo would definatly be going onto it. If the LiveCD installer works just fine for you (it almost did for me), then Gentoo is not really much more difficult than other distros. The real difference is that instead of getting binary of apps to install, emerge compiles everything. It takes a while longer for everything to finish, but after finding RPMs absolutely impossible to deal with and just ./configure && make && make install-ing everything anyway, it isn't that big a difference (and is actually faster since I can just search for packages instead of googling them, downloading them, finding them, etc)

JigPu

 

[OSGentoo]

there is a very nice front end to portage called porthole and truthfully, i like the command line for package management, but porthole is the only portage GUI that i really prefer to use over the command line, it really is a nice app

as far as i know it is masked by the ~amd64 and ~x86 keywords so if you want to install it, you will have to type "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~x86' emerge porthole" (no quotes). If you are on an an amd64 you simply need to replace the ~x86 with ~amd64.

porthole will tell you all your installed packages and not only show you the available packages, but it shows each available version of the packages (comes in handy).