User:Renrutal
From Gentoo Linux Wiki
This is a page about me, my preferences, my dreams and my Gentoo way.
BTW, the nick is renrutal, with no caps. Or you can use just ren :).
[edit] The pathway to my perfect Gentoo, by renrutal
Of course, this is where everything begins, with Gentoo. From the latest LiveCD, being it Gentoo released or crafted by me using Catalyst or manually.
[edit] The machine
I've installed Gentoo in many different machines, going from my Pentium IV 1.6 GHZ to a really old Compaq Pentium 200 MHZ(or was it a 166?) and a beasty Athlon XP 3000+, 512 MB DDR 400, two SATAs 80 GB mirrored with a ASUS A7N8X-E hardware RAID.
The old one need a night or two just to compile the base system since the part of my LiveCD with the stage3 was bad. Too bad I didn't have a machine with distcc ready to help me(to be discussed later). By the time the compilation ended, I was already in love with the Athlon.
The Athlon was not really a cakewalk, to me it had many new technologies, I've learned a lot from it. My main problem with it was the video card, until I found out the driver I was using in xorg.conf was the wrong one. There were two Athlons, and the one I built had a nVIDIA GeForce 4 MX. Since they were identical, I didn't notice the diffence until I cat /proc/pci.
So gents, first lesson of the day: next time you deploy an OS in any machine, know the hardware you are handling with.
Another way to see what devices are installed and recognized by the PC is using lspci;
# emerge pciutils # lspci
[edit] Loaded and ready to fire
So you're done reading the whole Gentoo Handbook right? If not, then RTFM!! Not reading it entirely can be a major source of problems to you. No kidding.
Now, a small rant:
Gentoo is great and all mainly because of Portage, it's way too easy to install and uninstall stuff, and there's also dozens of thousands of packages just waiting for an install command. Great if you want to install the program you want. But there's a con: It's too easy to get addicted and install every package you find like all the desktop environments, office programs, IMs, text editors, etc. Really, you are NOT going to use them all at the same time, you will even forget what you installed and during a emerge -pv world after a portage syncronization, it will query you to upgrade a program you don't use in months! So, please, do not waste your precious computer resources, just uninstall them and clean your distfiles dir.
With this said, take care with metapackages such as gnome. It will install every and all the GNOME Desktop Environment packages. This includes all the Evolution packages and the Epiphany web browser. If you don't want to download and compile them, follow these steps:
# emerge gnome-light # emerge -p gnome
Now take that huge list and emerge the ones you want individually. I know it's a pain and probably you will have to do it with every major GNOME release. Yeah, more control means more sacrifices, but it really pays off.
To be continued...
renrutal 04:31, 14 May 2005 (GMT)
