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Congratulations! You now have a working Gentoo system.

1. Your kernel includes support for ALL your hard-drive controllers, not as modules (Sil680 is modular by genkernel's default)
2. Device mapper support is enabled (in LVM), it's off by genkernel's default
3. Your RAID levels are compiled in (they're modular by default)
4. Once the RAID is up and the old drive is added, DO NOT REBOOT, POWER-OFF, OR POWER CYCLE your system until the RAID is finished rebuilding and the discs are synced. This is where I goofed up. My array went poof & when I went to recover it the filesystem was really mangled. Now I'm posting from an iBook I've just learned may burst into flames at any second while my desktop re-installs everything.

I think Apple's hope was that other UNIX-ish systems might like the launchd concept and replace init with it, but I'm not sure that the faster boot times will really be worth the retraining costs for systems that aren't booted up often.

I think that "-march=pentium-m -msse3" is WRONG, as it will favor x87 instructions rather than use the SIMD vector unit. Result is that the Core benchmarks slower than the Pentium 4. WRONG!

From the Gentoo Wiki http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook#CFLA GS

You're right that the Core Duo is based on the Pentium-M microarch, but it's had some major updates done to it. Fex, the SSE front and backend are completely redone. On the P-M, it took twice as long to decode SSE than X87. Core can handle up to three packed and micro-op SSE instructions at once, making using SSE the advantage. However, when you set -march=pentium-m, GCC prefers to generate x87 instructions. There's other changes that make Core more similar to Netburst than P-M when it comes to cost calculation, prefetch block size, etc., all of which are dependent on -march. Check out gcc/config/i386/i386.c and the IA32 Intel Architecture Optimization Reference Manual. -qed

This seems to be confirmed by posts to the GCC mailing list. http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2006-06/msg00080.ht ml

Linux DOES have to take over the MBR (with either GRUB or LILO),...

No, it does not, and dual-booting life will be much better for you if you get that mistake out of your head.

Put grub (or LILO) into /dev/hda2 (or whatever primary partition you set aside for /boot). Allow windows to have the MBR and /dev/hda1 (or whatever primary partition you set aside for C:\). Now when windows takes over, you just need to use fdisk to set the bootable partition back to /dev/hda2 and linux will be back in charge.

You can (of course) configure grub or LILO to boot /dev/hda1 so you can start windows. And if you are somewhat comfortable with boot.ini, you can configure NTLDR to boot /dev/hda2 so you can start grub/LILO. Set the defaults and timeouts appropriately and your system will just alternate back and forth between the two bootloaders until you make a choice.

A Gentoo article talks a bit about the NTLDR issues, and installing grub into a partition instead of the MBR.

sdb

its (sic) important to understand the fact that Apple has no control over how hots (sic) Intel's processors run

Actually, Pentium M processors have sofware adjustable voltages. I've successfully undervolted my Dothan 725 and the difference in cooling (and the lack of fan noise) is quite stunning. I believe the Core processors have something similar, in which case Apple does have control over the CPU heating.

I've been running Xgl in Gentoo for roughly 6 months now using my X300 card in my Dell D610. Check out the http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL page for details as well as Xgl threads in the Unsupported Software forums at forums.gentoo.org. The latest version (well nearly latest, I just svn'ed up and aparently a new version came out) is very stable and only a handful of apps crash it (GoogleEarth being the big one, but I imagine other OpenGL intensive apps may cause issues).

"but Linux got to be very good as a desktop system and MS saw absolutely no loss of market"

Problems with sound

If you're having glitches/choppy sound, you can either nicen the wine process by starting wow in the command line with:

nice -n 19 wine WoW.exe -opengl
Warning: o rly?

I think nice -n 19 will reduce the priority of the process and likely increase performance problems. nice -n -19 would increase the priority, but normally a non-root user can not increate the priority of a process. Perhaps sudo nice -n -19 su username -c "wine WoW.exe -opengl" will have the effect you want.

or edit the WoW configuration file (~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf) with your favourite editor, adding this line:

Code: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft/WTF/Config.wtf

SET SoundBufferSize "70"

This is a millisecond delay count. You're free to play with it to get it just right, but be sure to not set it too high or you will notice delays between action on the screen and sound actually occuring.

My guess would be too much junk compiled into the default kernel and a huge init script.

For example, the Gentoo wiki page on speeding up boot time mentions switching to a different init script .

Even on gentoo with all this taken care of however, my boot time to a shell prompt is slower than all the way to desktop on XP x64.

1) This is Slashdot. Predictable jokes are allowed here. If you'd made more than 4 posts you'd know this.

2) "I live with a woman" is a funny way to say "I live with my girlfriend / lover / life-partner". My Mom is a woman and "woman" is a word I might use to refer to her, to someone like her, or of her age, or to my landlady, to a customer of mine, or a female I met in the street who I wasn't attracted to. A female I happened to meet whom I am attracted to I would probably call a "girl" or a "lady".

3) If I was writing this from my parent's basement, then that would've made my joke one at my own expense, yes? We do that here.

In particular, posting to the "Ask Slashdot" section is considered to be setting yourself up as a target. I don't believe in flaming someone for posting here, but old and predictable gags are, to me, what makes Slashdot great. With his phrasing - as I explained in (2) above - your hubby was REALLY setting himself up for that - this search will show you a typical example of "the Slashdot humour" and other ways that he can set himself up for similar gags in the future.

I'm really trying not to be confrontational in writing this reply to you. If your reply had made a joke at my expense then I would have laughed about it &/or tried for a witty rejoinder. I mean, the logical answer your question, am I writing from my parents' basement is "duh! yes. where else?". The subtitle of this site is "News for nerds, stuff that matters" and those of us who don't live in our parents' basements pretend to. As it is, I'm reading your reply as having taken offence over comment which is so obviously trivial in the context of Slashdot, and reading you as having gotten snitty at me in response, and I'm struggling not to be catty back at you.

Oh, and BTW my opinion is that your bloke should get himself known to an open-source project and take the opportunity to do some good with his coding skillz. It sounds like he doesn't really need the money from a second job and this would allow fulfil his criteria for deadlines, because many larger OSS projects do set release dates that they try to keep to. OSS projects vary in how formal they are & some would be pleased to see his CV, others would expect him to pick some open bugs in their database and submit patches in order to make himself "known". Becoming an "authoritative" source in an OSS field is very satisfying - although I don't code myself, I have written a couple of long HOWTOs - I'm a little proud to think they're comprehensive (or were when I wrote them - I can't be arsed to maintain them), it's kinda cool to see my own work come up as a top hit when I Google for something and it's satisfying when I get emails from people saying that they've found my work useful. Your partner would surely find a project that interested him if he browsed through Sourceforge, and find many projects that not only really valued his skills, whether that turned out to be working on a database back-end or a Windows port of an instant-messenger, but also helped him to expand them. Be warned, tho', that OSS projects, at least the larger ones that have the formal release schedules that might suit your guy, tend to have ego conflicts occasionally; you can't please all of the people all of the time and he needs to be prepared to shrug it off & say "that guy's an idiot" when someone criticises all the hard work he's done for nothing. It's no big deal - it happens.

Stroller.

I found the solution here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Set_DPI_(Dots_Per_Inc h)

Horsecrap.

HP is a shithouse option.

I have a HP NX6125 (and I am fairly happy with it as a cheapie [650 euros], don't get me wrong), but:

1) HP sells two very different laptops under the 6125nx model number - one a 32 bit sempron & the other a 64 bit turion. You cannot trust a company that uses such vastly components inside a box with the same model number.
2) Wireless card not supported (at least in 2.6.15 kernel, I use ndis wrapper, but I don't like it)
3) ATI drivers suck.

Everything else is well supported in Dapper however.

Yes:

emerge -uDp world can totally destroy your system, however, there is now much more effective ways to ensure your system doesn't break as mention in reply to parent the gentoolkit fixes most of these issues. There is new recommended methods of updating the system that eliminate the issues.

You are totally correct the default portage is broken by slowness, however, there are as always ways around this, adding psyhco to portage speeds things up a lot, using esearch instead of emerge -S speeds things even more and adding ccache adds another speed boost, this is in addition to the improvements that have been made to portage from the devs.

I would seriously urge people to try gentoo now there has been a lot of improvement in recent months and will optimisations found at Gentoo wiki you can improve it even more.

Ok, I'll bite, because I figure that you're young enough to not know how google works. ndiswrapper should take care of your network cards. as for the printer, look here. Oh, and do make sure you never buy any new piece of hardware until the company which makes it at *least* releases working binary drivers. That should help move things along rather nicely. Also, before mods mod me down as offtopic... This here's a real-world luser with a real-world problem. He's stuck between a GoodThing(tm) (the linux driver dev process) and a BadThing(tm) (crappy hardware companies who think they've something to hide), with nowhere to go.

Gentoo wiki has a nice list, not sure how up to date it is though - HARDWARE_Video_Card_Support_Under_XGL

Exactly what I was thinking. I run a Gentoo server and I have asked various questions of the IRC channel while I was setting it up. However, I did a bunch of research before I asked them; reading through the guidebook again, searching the wiki, Googling, even experimenting myself. They have on the whole been very friendly to me, though I have occasionally had to be patient waiting for a response.

I think, really, the key in support is give and take. Users requesting support, especially for a free product, need to be aware that they are probably not the most important thing on the minds of the developers (or even the support techs). They need to avoid as much redundancy in their question as possible, and this means doing some work to eliminate the obvious possibilities first. I have found that as a support tech, whenever someone has done this before asking me a question, I was much happier to do work to answer a question because it wasn't work that had already been done. And as a user, I've found the same response in the people for whom I'm asking questions.

Which is why Gentoo is the best distro. Sure, it has an aura of snobbery, but generally speaking the users themselves are not snobs. And the manuals are extremely easy to understand. Though it takes some time and typing to use Gentoo, it's very easy to use otherwise, because everything is spelled out. http://gentoo.org/ http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/

My freshman year (2000) in college started with me not knowing what a "linux" was. This all changed when a friend handed me a Debian distribution burned to an ISO. He encouraged me to repartition my hard drive and install this next to my Windows 98 SE installation. Like a lot of new people, I hosed my hard drive. I ended up doing fresh installs on both OS's and getting the dual boot to work. There were cheap little games and some truly great and historical open source software on that disc also. The next day in class, the guy couldn't get me to shut up about how great it was. I had hit a few snags but the answers were all online.

My first college kegger could not compare to the first time I ran Linux. Nor would a kegger ever be as memorable. A free operating system? That works?

A year or two later, I'm in a new class. There's a kid sitting in front of me going on and on about Linux. Up to this point, I've used Debian, Mandrake & Red Hat so I drop a question out there:

Me: "I really like Mandrake, what do you think is the best distribution?"
Student A: "It's obviously Gentoo."
Me: "Gentoo? I haven't even heard of that one..."
Student A: "Well, it's clearly the superior distribution."

Ok, so my first encounter with Linux people working against Linux people in a childish d*ck measuring contest. To my horror, I overheard the following conversation thereafter ensue between him and a person in the class looking for a Linux installation experience:

Student B: "I use Windows and I'm confused even as where to start..."
Student A: "That's easy, just install Gentoo."
Student B: "I ... Where do I get a disc for that?"
Student A: "They're freely online, you just have to find them and install them--I recommend an ftp install so that you get the latest versions of everything. And with Gentoo, you can just emerge whenever you want to update. "
Student B: "'Emerge'--what does that mean?"
Student A: *snorts* "If I have to tell you, there's no point in you even getting Linux."

And on it went, with Student A asserting his superiority. When I got home, I tried to install Gentoo. It took forever, I hit a million snags but eventually got it working. I hated it. After talking again to them, the only reason Student A was using Gentoo was because he had some crazy chipset he needed to compile everything for (a dual AMD setup which was rare back then) and he also revealed that he spent every Sunday night "emerging."

Luckily, I intevened with Mandrake and gave him something close to Windows that an idiot probably could install. I told him all the cautionary advice I had to give and I feel that he most closely identified with me.

The truth is: not all Linux experiences are for everybody.

This might just provide laptops with enough power to run Aero Glass .

I agree, Linux sure is easy these days.
Why just last week I was upgrading Xorg on my Gentoo box, and only had to recompile my entire system (including kernel) and copy /usr/share/fonts/misc from a working X installation, and edit some config files.
Next week I may just see about upgrading gcc from 3.3 to 3.4.
Thank heavens I live in a modern era.

(Of course I actually like gentoo, and for most things it is simple to maintain, but some things are not quite...)

http://en.opensuse.org/Xgl http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XGL#Prerequisites

Flybook... Nuff said...

Yeah, it already works in Wine, but it would be nice to be able to run it without that.

Following the guide in the gentoo wiki, with a little alteration, I was able to get Google Earth working on Slackware.

A word of warning, might save someone a day or two:

The RaLink-based wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular due to the parent's assertions (which I agree with).

I bought an Edimax EW-7128g from http://www.openforeveryone.co.uk/ as I was assured Linux compatibility. I followed the excellent Gentoo wiki rtx00 HOWTO the instructions of which are geared towards that specific Edimax card.

It is common knowledge that this card has the rt2500 chipset, however the two cards I received have the RT61 chip (from RaLink also). You can get this driver from Ralink.

Minutes after downloading that driver I had the card setup and connected to another machine. I have not used it for long enough to give an idea on its stability however.

Undervolting a processor without changing the clock does not affect performance. With a processor, the clock synchronizes the electric pulses which maintains a constant instructions-per-cycle rate. As long as the voltage is high enough to create adequate digital voltage differences, the processor will function properly. You're basically using a letter opener instead of a kitchen knife to open a sealed envelope. Both approaches get the job done, but one's more efficient than the other. And if asked to do so, you could open the same number of letters per hour with either tool.

Also, for the Gentoo users: HOWTO Undervolt a Pentium M CPU.

mnemonic_

Do you have two network adapters in the Gentoo box? If so, piece of cake (as far as all things Gentoo, go).

I mean, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of PVRs? ;)

I personally still have an AMD 1Ghz Thunderbird still ticking. I don't use it much because I have my AMD64 system, but it runs like the day I got it.

A machine like that makes a great home web/mail server. Mine got pressed into that type of service when the P!!! dually I had been using went tango-uniform. (The dually was a pair of 500-MHz Katmais on an N440BX. Some power-regulation components on the motherboard literally burned up.)

The Athlon's on a Biostar M7MIA, which is one of the few Socket A motherboards that still had an ISA slot. I bought it about five years ago. It's been running alfter.us for about two years now. It still runs fairly well, but now that there's a way to run Gentoo on the Linksys NSLU2, I might switch to that at some point.

For what it's worth, it's not immediately obvious how to do this. If you were to add multiple servers entries in ntpd.conf, all with pool.ntp.org, then DNS would just cache the first call and you'd point to the same machine all the time. The way to do this is as follows:

server 0.pool.ntp.org
server 1.pool.ntp.org
server 2.pool.ntp.org

Now you'll get a different server and life will be good. You can also use country specific NTP servers like 0.us.pool.ntp.org. Sorry if this is obvious to most people, but it wasn't to me. We've been reluctant to rely on the pool in case of a bad machine that will cause all our timed jobs to fail, and this fixes the problem. There's a good wiki at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP.

"It would also be nice if ISPs would set up their own pools (and advertise them) so clients wouldn't have to go off network"

Agreed. Most do, but as you mention, don't advertise them. I am not sure how many people would actually know what to do with them if they were advertised though.

It would be quite slick if they advertised them via DHCP, and clients used that info to auto-configure their ntp client. All quite possible and very easy to do by the ISP. NTP servers can be advertised via dhcp.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTP

http://www.greyware.com/software/domaintime/techni cal/architecture/dhcp.asp

Yes. This has been around only for a week or so I think...
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_GoogleEarth_w ith_wine

The article is a little gentoo-specific but I'm sure that shouln't be an issue for other distros.

Grub can do it too.

Check this out: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Remote_Kernel_Upgrade

One thing that people commonly overlook is the DisplaySize option in xorg.conf. X basically has to know your monitor size in order to render fonts correctly. The fonts on my laptop looked *awful* by default...it is a 15" 1024x768 display, and since it is a laptop it only works at native resolution. The defaults likely assume your display is 1280x1024 native. Once I set this, fonts now look identical to my desktop (which uses a 17" 1280x1024 LCD) and I don't have any more strange font rendering issues. Here's an article on this often overlooked not very well documented option: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg_and_Fonts

Yes, of course: Building ALL of X has to be slower. But have you actually ever taken a look how much tools and libraries X comprises you won't ever need?
Compare the whole list for gentoo at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Modular_Xorg#Unmask_x org-x11 with what you will need under normal circumstances (http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Modular_Xorg#Emerge_ X.org) and guess building which one will be faster :)

Yes, of course: Building ALL of X has to be slower. But have you actually ever taken a look how much tools and libraries X comprises you won't ever need?
Compare the whole list for gentoo at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Modular_Xorg#Unmask_x org-x11 with what you will need under normal circumstances (http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Modular_Xorg#Emerge_ X.org) and guess building which one will be faster :)

"To use the old glibc libraries set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to the directory these libraries are located. Additionally prepend the game binary to run the game with the old ld-linux.so.2 dynamic linker/loader (as the one with glibc 2.3 does not include the GLIBC_2.2, GLIBC_2.2.1 or GLIBC_2.2.3 profiles used with glibc 2.2.5 for some reason)."

Can you really do this with screen?

Of course! Screen can do anything!

I'm not sure exactly what you're shooting for, but you can "split" a screen session like this:

In a console, run screen. This will create a new session inside screen. Tell screen to split the window by sending the keystrokes CTRL+a S (that's a capital 's'. If you send a lowercase 's' you will freeze the display. Resume it by sending CTRL+a q).

The screen should split into two vertical windows. Tab into the lower window by sending CTRL+a <TAB> . Now create a new shell by sending CTRL+a c. You can go back and forth using CTRL+a <TAB> . Once you have a shell running in each you can do and/or run anything you want to. To close a split session, give it focus and send CTRL+a X (note the capital 'x').

Gentoo's Wiki site has a nice writeup of screen. It makes it real easy to get up and running with screen. It includes the above example as well as instructions on how to resize the split and do many other things.

You could install Gentoo on it.

Binary-level compatibility is a far greater problem in Linux than in Windows. For example, I am able, on the latest Windows XP, run the last 4.x release of Netscape. On Linux (Fedora Core three), I need to set up a special chroot() environment that runs RedHat 6.2 to run this application.

Another example: Those old Loki games? Games of the same era (Read: The Windows versions of the same Loki games) run fine on the latest Windows XP with problem. However, to run these games on Linux requires some non-trivial contortions.

Binary drivers for Linux running between kernel versions? Forget it. It's against the religion of some kernel developers.

People still want binary-only applications and drivers. Windows beats Linux hands-down in this arena.

Somehow the developers found a workaround to the infamous MS-compiled ACPI bugs that make it difficult to read battery status, etc. I've got to figure out how they did that.

On my last birthday I posted this tutorial http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_screen and I am glad so many people contributed to it since.

I tried to give a) verbose descriptions as well as b) a short command list as a quick guide and c) to give a visual representation in form of an animated gif.

That page has been accessed 17,344 times so far and I would love if some more readers could proof-read.

And thanks for the invitation to this shameless plug! ;)

All in the title .....

See setup steps here :

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Looking_Glass

This page http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Initng has instructions on using it with Gentoo. Very cool project, worth checking out.

A .5 GHz XScale would make for a good RISCOS experience. However, a high-powered (battery-sucking) Pentium emulator is likely to run at a workablespeed too. And no ARM, StrongARM, XScale is going to outperform a mainstream x86 in native desktop speed, simply because it was neither designed or taylored for it and did not have the momentum to evolve on the same scale.

More importantly, however, is that an emulator is only software. This is relatively cheap to develop and VERY cheap to produce, whereas any hardware development is quite expensive. You could easily spend you first 50.000 on selecting the SBC that best suits your needs. (not just getting the boards, but invetsing time to study them. Then you need to either port a licensend version of the OS to the new hardware (or emulate RISCOS compliant hardware). By that time , the SBC may not be available any more, spec may have changed, etc. Even on relatively simple systems under high time presure with adequate staff (like in case of tomtom go navigator) this seldomly takes less than a year.

You will have burned close to half a million, sans marketing and you'll probably make less than 100 per item shipped. Ie. this won't work for a market as small as RISCOS. Compare this to any skilled software engineer writing an ARM emulator in a few weeks or months. (Actually, some decent emulators are already available for free.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Softgun_ARM_Emulator
http://www.skyeye.org/index.shtml
http://www.arm.com/support/ARMulator.html

i just did:

modprobe ohci1394
modprobe sbp2

and it showed up as a scsi device.
if it does not I recommend scanning your dmesg for problems.

I have also added added a parameter into modules.conf that made sbp2 module load with serialize_io=1. This slows down the io, but makes the requests linear, which seems to fix some issues.

My biggest problem was that it was showing up as a scsi device, but not a disk. It took me 45 minutes to realize that the problem was that the enclosure was not plugged in :'(

just a pointless link to some instructions: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_FireWire_Mass_Storage _Device

Cool... thanks for the insight.

I may try that some time. :)

Although, according to The Gentoo Wiki this is being removed whenever baselayout 1.12.20 goes stable.

I built my myth box with Gentoo, and the Gentoo MythTV HOWTO recommended EvilWM. It's very minimalist. No focus problems, and so low-profile it's practically invisible. Ctrl+Alt+Enter opens a shell if you ever need one.

actually, knoppmyth has some built in support for epia via nemehmia C3 CPU mini-itx mobo's. (which kinda is a slower cyrix embeded chip, when you think about it, right?) ;)

But knoppmyth is a cool solution to getting mythtv running quickly without nearly the dependencies headaches/etc.

But if someone likes and is comfortable with gentoo there's no reason not to use the distro you like/comfortable with (well the only reason NOT to is that there's better mythtv specific documentation for x,y, or Z distro like )

But there are Gentoo guides out there Gentoo MythTV guide *Shrug*

What was the question again?

e.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_build_a_LiveCD_from_s cratch Check this howto I made for making your own personal livecd from A gentoo install which is highly maintainable.

"Some people think that Open-Xchange is a GPL'd version of SLOX (SuSE's Groupware Server). This is not true. It's just the other way round. SuSE has made a ready-to-use server called SLOX, which is based on SuSE Linux and open-Xchange which is not a product of SuSE but of Netline Internet Service GmbH, Martinstr. 41, D-57462 Olpe, Germany. It allows for much of the functionality of MS Exchange"

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Open-Xchange