Yes, right now as I type. On this machine. Using links.
If you didn’t know, Gentoo is a Debian-based Linux distro. It’s based heavily on compiling source, and uses a nifty system closely related to apt-get called emerge.
Why Gentoo? Apparently, the emerge system checks for, and automatically grabs dependencies. Also, SuSE kept rewriting the /etc/fstab after I changed it to sync my Neuros.
Why am I posting this? Because I can.
I’m midway between the jump from RedHat to Slackware (desktop system is all-Slack, laptop is Fedora 1/WinXP), and I’m interested in what kind of machine you have and what kind of connection you have. I’ve got a fast processor on my laptop, for example (Pentium M), but I am stuck behind a slow dialup link. That’s the main thing keeping me from using apt-get or yum (yum is the RedHat equivalent of apt-get). The notion of having to download a full X install at 2 KB/s is downright painful, especially since my connection will time-out even if it’s in active use. This is also what keeps me from trying out live CD distros that offer free ISO image downloads.
Compiles are no problem, but getting everything through my thin pipe is the major sticking point.
Gentoo is a sources based distro, not a Debian based distro. Yes, Gentoo is awesome. The forums are friendly and everyone is helpful.
Welcome to the “One, true, Distro”. 
Cheers,
Vega
It’s also optimized.
1.5 Ghz Athlon processor with 512 MB ram, and a cable modem.
Thus far, portage has pulled very little off the Internet. I installed Gentoo from a Linux Format cover DVD (and a very good thing, I’d’ve been completely lost without the guide in the magazine.)
Funny thing happened installing it. It was about 4:00 a.m., and I was trying to install x.org. The magazine said to run
emerge xorg-x11 -av
.
This kept returning an error. I tried looking online for an answer:
links http://www.google.com
bash: links: command not found
Well, hell. links wasn’t installed. So I decide to try emerging w3m, my text-based browser of choice. This is where Something Odd happened. It was taking an awful long time to fetch/compile the sources, and I kept seeing references to X.Org in the rapidly-scrolling text. Turns out it installed x.org as a dependency to w3m.
Now it’s working fairly well. I haven’t tested sound, but the network is (obviously) working. I just need to figure out how to get my nVidia GeforceFX 5200’s acceleration running, the scroll wheel on my mouse working, and some of these USB devices working. And hopefully, once I get a few more things emerged, it won’t take so damn long to emerge other things.
Tentacle Monster: So, was it grabbing X.org from the Internet or the DVD? I understand that part of the appeal of Gentoo is to have the latest packages optimized for your machine, but why would they ship it on a DVD if it was going to grab everything from the net anyway?
Bah. I don’t know why I’m so curious. Fedora 1 will probably be my last non-techie distro: The lure of Slack and OpenBSD is too strong, Slack for its dead-simple and logical organization and OpenBSD for its interesting otherness. I value simplicity and cleanliness of design over speed or user-friendliness.
(I can’t leave this thread without giving an example of how Slackware is simpler and more logical than, say, RedHat: Slackware’s packages are gzipped tarballs. The tarballs have all of the directory structure they need to install the files in the right places assuming they’re run from the root directory (or the root of the chroot jail you’re building), and you don’t need a special tool just to install a package on your system. You must still satisfy the dependencies the package relies upon, but the OS itself is perfectly capable of telling you which libraries the program failed to load.)
Emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx, then change the server to nvidia in /etc/X11/XF86Config (or XF86Config-4) and make sure the nvidia kernel module is loaded, that should take care of the acceleration.
Scrollwheel should be a matter of defining the 2 buttons it functions as in the same file and using the right mouse driver (proberly ImPS2).
// blinx - long time Gentoo user.
Well, it was Linux Format Magazine, which is based in the UK. I’m pretty sure it checks against a database and grabs the local copy if it’s as fresh as the remote copy. And it was grabbing X.org from the local machine.
blinx: My problem is, after I emerge nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx, I try to modprobe nvidia and it returns
FATAL: Error inserting nvidia (/lib/modules/2.6.7-gentoo-r11/video/nvidia.ko): Invalid module format
I’ll try editing xorg.conf like you said (xorg.conf is what X.org uses instead of XF86Config).
No your not , its a figment of your imagination , at the end when you boot up that little Fedora will still be there
Anyways , hope it goes well for you. Gentoo always seemed like the distro for low end computers ,where you needed an optimized custom system, rather than drake or fedora or suse.
Declan
That would truly frighten me, in that I was running SuSE 9.0 before I reinstalled. :eek:
Anyway, I got the mousewheel working and I’m about to finish off (hopefully) my nvidia problem. I had to download the .run package from nvidia’s website. Now when I startx, the nVidia logo pops up but I’m still getting no acceleration. But, I’ll fix that as soon as I finish this post.
Everything runs so much faster now. Even Flash animations run better now (under the old OS, everything kept desynching. Especially Salad Fingers). Firefox fires up a lot faster, too.
Well, after an epic struggle with /etc/portage and some help from the folks in #gentoo, I got my acceleration on. Now for a celebratory game of armagetron.