Gentoo: getting closer

Right now I'm posting while running in the Gentoo minimal installer, after some reading of the Handbook; I'm liking this, can see going for an install to HDD soon. Gotta go print out the Handbook and read-up a bit.

Ugg don't print out the handbook otherwise it will be like 80 pages. If you can just get a laptop or another PC and see if you can pull the handbook up along side it.

TalRW said:

Ugg don't print out the handbook otherwise it will be like 80 pages. If you can just get a laptop or another PC and see if you can pull the handbook up along side it.

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Excellent idea, especially since my pos printer is out of ink. :-|

ihrsetrdr said:

Excellent idea, especially since my pos printer is out of ink. :-|

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also first thing I install is links, or lynx, for text browsing, then you can read the handbook from your machine you are installing from.

Oh yeah! set the handbook up in a different screen, then do your work from the original screen.
I modify the html handbook to a pdb and put it on my PALM so i can read it with mobipocket.

I have printed the handbook, but it's easier if you have a 2nd computer there.

This latest motherboard of mine has been more temperamental to configure a kernel for... I'm having issues (maybe solved now) dealing with both SATA and PATA devices and the conflicts between libata and the old ide driver. ACPI has been acting weird too, but I think some of that might be my use of a SSD.

I don't think I'd recommend a SSD yet for most purposes. The writes are simply too slow, and it will lock up your whole PC on you. I ended up adding an old 40GB hard drive to the system which I use for all the /tmp, /var/tmp type directories as well as the swap files / paging files. That's speeded things up a lot. That's annoying in itself, since I bought the SSD for speed... I paid $170 for 64GB. I do think the reads are fast, and hence the boot, but the writes (especially if it involves an erase cycle first) are horrid. Maybe the lesson is to not buy MLC drives and only buy SLC, but the price of the latter is absurd.

MRD said:

Maybe the lesson is to not buy MLC drives and only buy SLC, but the price of the latter is absurd.

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I had read that the SLC outperform the MLC to a great magnitude but its like $500ish for a 64 gig hd in some cases. I'll wait a bit for that to come down

ctrl+alt+F# keys are your friends on the CLI. so you can be doing all your work on F1 (tty1), then have the handbook open on F2 (tty2) in lynx.

The SLC's are much better. The MLC's cause your machine to totally lock up when the disk is being written to... not exactly speedy.

Any issues with nvidia cards, specifically the quadro fx 500/600 that this box will have?

Gentoo works quite easily with all nvidia cards. Support for nvidia is excellent.

You want to add this to your /etc/make.conf:

VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia"

and add the two use flags to make.conf (to your existing list of useflags):
nvidia video_cards_nvidia

emerge nvidia-drivers will install the nvidia drivers. Add nvidia to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and then run update-modules (as root). This will make it load the nvidia module every time you start. You can do it manually the first time with a "modprobe nvidia".

You will need to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and make sure the Load glx line is there, change the driver from nv or vesa to nvidia, and make sure the Load dri line is not present or is commented out.

You can do a lot of the configuration if you start up X and run nvidia-settings. It's a nice gui tool to configure stuff... although I mostly use the command line out of habit. I'm not sure if it's installed automatically... if not, just "emerge nvidia-settings"

I'm not sure how old the quadro fx cards are... if they are the same as the geforce fx 5 series, then the regular drivers should work. If you need to use older drivers (like for geforce 4) then you need a driver < 97.0 (set this in /etc/portage/package.mask). If you need even older drivers (geforce 2 and earlier) set it to < 72.0. Anything more recent than the geforce 4's is covered in the most recent drivers, so you don't have to mask anything. (Not quite sure how quadro's fit in with that, never had one, but I know they are supported.)

i always see directions to add modules to the autoload list, but I have never had to do so. in my experience, udev does all the work for you. in my eyes the autoload list is depricated tho I've never seen anything specifically stating that.

splat said:

ctrl+alt+F# keys are your friends on the CLI. so you can be doing all your work on F1 (tty1), then have the handbook open on F2 (tty2) in lynx.

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Screen......

{PMS}fishy said:

Screen......

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For some reason I dont quite follow this contribution... what is it this is supposed to mean?

http://linux.die.net/man/1/screen

lets you kick things to the background and recall them while you are on CLI.

Stratus_ss said:

For some reason I dont quite follow this contribution... what is it this is supposed to mean?

Click to expand...

splat said:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/screen

lets you kick things to the background and recall them while you are on CLI.

Click to expand...

What he said.

ahh perhaps a further ellabriation would have helped. thanks splat. There is always some 'new' thing in linux which i was unaware of (new as in new to me)

Alright, laid out the partition table, setup file system and downloaded the stage3 tarball, with the expectation that it would be in /mnt/gentoo, which I believe is where the[very excellent] Handbook indicated it should be d/l'd to. It ended up in lost+found, but for reasons beyond my understanding could not 'stat' the stage3.tar.bz2 to cp or mv to /mnt/gentoo. ??? Didn't want to try a second download, @15k/sec for the 130mb file. Instead, I took 2 aspirins with a glass of water and called it a day.

Oh, please, just a quick question:

how to close a tty, or at least navigate back to a cli prompt when only a blank screen with blinking cursor is showing?

It will download it to wherever you were when you started the browser, unless you gave it a path when specifying the download name.

-unpacking stage3 tarball...


...zZzzZzzz