Fun thread + difficulty with gentoo

[Dave Andruczyk]

--- Stephen Burke <qfwfq at adelphia.net> wrote:

> 
> While I'm here, I've been meaning to ask if anyone here can suggest a 
> good site for working through a somewhat frustrating gentoo 
> installation. (other than the actual gentoo site, which hasn't helped me 
> much). After the second try (from the beginning), I have a working 
> system going, all the way up to "startx" which brings me to a very basic 
> x session (xterm on a black screen), but then following the instructions 
> from the gentoo site doesn't seem to help much.
> 
> Emerge, which was working perfectly all through the rest of the 
> installation, fails inexplicably (I can't remember the actual error 
> wording because I set it aside a couple of weeks ago out of frustration, 
> and it's on the same computer I'm using now on a different removable 
> HD), so I haven't been able to install much of anything on it except the 
> system itself.  I seem to recall someone here recently speaking very 
> highly of a gentoo system of theirs, and the whole reason for the 
> removable HD on this box was so I could toy with different OS's without 
> having to triple- or quadruple-boot the thing (which I haven't figured 
> out yet either, since each distro's version of grub seems to want to 
> take over the boot proces).  I put a second HD in here, so that I could 
> still have all my essential data handy no matter which system was 
> booted, but this whole gentoo failure has me pretty much stumped.

See the error that you had would help immensely.
Odds are that a small bug DID slip through and you should "sync" your portage
tree (analagous to apt-get update for other distrros) to correct any errors.

Run these commands:
emerge sync (as root)

edit your /etc/make.conf and edit the use flags if you want to add/remove
support for different features..  (if you open another terminal and read
/usr/portage/profiles/use.desc it descripts what each use flags
enables/disables support for.  I have a faily long "USE=" line in my
/etc/make.conf because I want a LOT of features built in for my purposes.  the
USE line is what deetermines what support your applications have compiled into
them.

emerge world --newuse -uDa (--newuse = meanms check already installed packages
against he changed USE flags in /etc/make.conf and rebuild if needed, u =
update, D = deep, (check dedpendancies deeper than bby deefault, a= "ask" )

let that run (it may go for a long time if you installed and never updated)

after than completes, ,run "emerge kde, or "emerge gnome" to install kde/gnome
or whatever.  By using "emerge kde -a" it'll list the packages it wil install
and prompt you before it starts.   One trick I use to start long merges is to
run it in a "screen" session. (Screen lets you "disconnect" for the terminal
without killing what you started and reconnect to it later)

so to do a long merge without having to leave the window open run:
emerge screen (if it's not installed)
screen -R (the window will refreash and clear,  hit enter to get the prompt
back)
emerge (somepackage_that_takes_a_long_time) like kde
Hit Ctrl-a d to detach from screen. (the emerge is still running and you can
reconnect to it via "screen -R" later)

Let me know what other problems you have....


=====
Dave J. Andruczyk


		
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