Whats the way to a neat working Gentoo-System?

dracea · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2008 Posts: 20

Hi,

I am a Gentoo user since 2007. I chose Gentoo because I wanted to learn a thing or two about Linux and shared office with a dev (who helped me to solve a few problems I had during the first install). The system worked but still had some rough edges (like audio-error-msgs while opening mplayer, audio itself was fine / "nv" never worked, only "nvidia").
Now I wanted to update my system. A "emerge system world" turned into a week long nightmare. Now I've got my audio back (well, apart from the front speakers), my favorite keymap works, even if I am not sure why, revdep-rebuild can't resolve a problem with a library...

What do I do wrong? I like playing around with SW, otherwise I would have gotten Ubuntu 3 days ago, but now I want a reward. A neat system.
Which is the better place to set my USE flags? make.conf or package.use? Which combination will give me a working system without conflicts. Where are all these config-files.
Why does HAL still creates problems? The thread here is nearly a year old. When I try to find answers I find obscure blogs writing about even obscurer xorg.conf-options (AutoAddDevices). That helped, but why? When I search for that option on x.org I can't find it? So how did the blogger find it? The xorg source???

I know it's a very generic question, but how/where can I set my system up, to get a nicely working, conflict-free install? Any hints on how to find those infos?

szczerb · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject:

The conflicts probably come from the fact that you haven't updated your system for a long long time. So if you have blocked packages you might need to disable a use flag temporarily. There no universal 10 word advise how to solve all problems. You wrote 7 posts. It is great that you do your own research, but if you encounter something you can't solve just ask on the forums.

To solve your problems, start by creating a topic for each problem and describe in detail what seems to be wrong. Then we can try to do something about that.

And I also have no idea where to get some proper hal configuration documentation ;] But finding out is on my to-do list ;]

loki_val · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2008 10:27 pm Post subject:

The way to a neatly working Gentoo system:
*Update bi-weekly at least
*Run revdep-rebuild when you do
*Run emerge --depclean before revdep-rebuild
*Always use --oneshot when you're re-emerging stuff. The more cruft you have in your world file, the more packages you'll have to keep track of.
*Remember that Gentoo is a continously updating system and that if you follow the mean Gentoo user in updating, other users will have ready answers for any compile problems that arise.

node_one · Apprentice Joined: 07 Apr 2008 Posts: 165

Pretty much everything peteralf said.
* If it does not work, mask it in package.mask and downgrade.
* Do not unmask packages unless you know what you are doing.

I use both make.conf and package.use. I would say if it a global USE flag, more likely place it in make.conf, local USE flag, more likely in package.use.

I have problems with both xorg and HAL too.

dracea · n00b Joined: 28 Sep 2008 Posts: 20

Thanks for your answers. I will try to do biweekly, maybe monthly, updates. I also removed the "~amd64" from my make.conf.

Now I need only a way to figure the "strange" config issues out. My keyboard works fine now, even if I don't know why. My clock insists that I am 2h in the future (even if I set it manually, after a while it skipped forward again / yes, I set the timezone correctly). And today I got kdevelop and I have now idea where some of the USE flags came from. (I looked in make.conf, mpackage.use and the ebuild itself)

It can be quite frustrating when you don't understand how the system works.

Night @all

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