Gentoo

[Dave Andruczyk]

> I have Gentoo file manager is that what your talking about or the 
> distribution? Sorry for my lack of knowledge of either and also about openGL.

Gentoo the linux meta-distro. (www.gentoo.org)

> 
> What little I know about openGL is that I'm using the equivalent GPL version 
> of XFree86-Mesa-libGL ?

XFree86-Mesa-libGL is the OpenGL that comes with X11. (software rendering) and
is not hardware accelerated.  Teh various distros have their own (and pretty
incompatible) ways of installing Hardware OpenGL drivers(like nvidia's)

Gentoo uses a little tool called "opengl-update" that switches a series of
symlinks that point to the appropriate OpenGL libraries/headers.

On gentoo the Xfree (or Xorg-x11) Open GL stuff is installed into
/usr/lib/opengl/xfree(or xorg-x11)
when you install the nvidia driver (vi energe nvidia-driver) it stuffs nvidia's
stuff into /usr/lib/opengl/nvidia

the opengl-update program sets the symlinks in /usr/lib, /usr/X11R6/lib and
/usr/includeGL/ to point
to the appropriate files under /usr/lib/opengl/gl_vendor/*

It's the best method I've seen and it's painless to switch OpenGL from xfree to
nvidia and back .(i.e. if the version you emerge happens to cause issues with
some bad app, you can run "opengl-update xfree" to switch to the xfree libs for
the "bad application"


> If you could elaborate a little more about the gentoo process you mention 
> above, I'm game in giving it a try.

The best way to install gentoo is to go to www.gentoo.org and read the Gentoo
Handbook (listed on the links on the left hand side of the main page).  Read
through it a couple of times before you attempt the install if you're a first
timer.  Print out a copy to have by your side during the install.

It's best to have a fast machine to get gentoo up and running (as it's
predominate install method is to compile from source, thoug some large
packages, like mozilla and openoffice are availabel in precompiled formats). 
Prepare to start some of the processes and then leave the system alone for
hours while it compiles.   If you have other machines you can be creative and
setup distcc (distributed C compiler helper) (it's talked about in the manual)
to have the other machines help speed up your compile significantly.

The main advantage of gentoo in my opinion is you can usually be running the
latest and greatest of most programs out there, and updates/upgrades are pretty
painless once you get used to the gentoo portage system.  Another great point
is you only have what you want,  most of the fluff you get with an install of
another distro isn't installed with gentoo, unless you explictly tell it to
install it.

However, if you're on dialup,  then gentoo isn't recommended as downloading the
source packages  and keeping the system current would take too long.


=====
Dave J. Andruczyk


	
		
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