scumm_boy | Things to do when you find yourself with a new Gentoo install: (Reply)

Originally published at ScummBlog. You can comment here or there.

First things first. man emerge. Seriously. You’ll be using it a *lot*

***CONFIGURE NETWORKING!!*** If you didn’t choose DHCP, then the installer doesn’t seem to do this correctly. You’ll have to edit /etc/conf.d/net and make the two lines in there look similar to this (you’ll change your IP’s accordingly based on your router):

routes_eth0=( "default gw 192.168.1.x" ) iface_eth0=( "192.168.1.xxx netmask 255.255.255.0" )

Once the file is updated, go to /etc/init.d/ and type ./net.eth0 restart to make the new configuration live.

You’ll definitely want to start off with emerge --sync to get your portage tree current. Second: emerge --update portage since there is a new version of Portage since the 2006.1 LiveCD was built. This is the easy part.

Since the LiveCD will *not* do a networked install (I’ve tried 5 times and various ways. It just *doesn’t* work.) You will have to download the Kernel source. Now. Here’s the rub. The LiveCD gives you kernel 2.6.17-r8. emerge gentoo-sources gives you kernel 2.6.18-r6. As I found out, this is *not* ideal. This means you get to compile a kernel right off the bat! emerge genkernel will help you greatly, as custom kernel compiling, while awesome, is not something you want to just jump into. Gentoo has some great HOWTO’s on compiling kernels. I’d recommend starting here and following the Kernel Compiling (the genkernel method, of course), then the guide on Configuring the Bootloader (GRUB if you chose the default in the install.) This should get you a shiny new kernel and source, making things like compiling Nvidia Drivers and such actually work. This one took me a borked install to learn.

Now, if you’re all “hey, Gnome/KDE is awesome!” you should install them at this point. emerge --search gnome or emerge --search kde will point you to the right overall package to install. I personally prefer the GUI Minimalist feel, so I ran emerge fluxbox. Once you have that done (it will likely take a while. Go have a sandwich.) you will want to update your base X install. The one that comes with Gentoo is Xorg, and it can be updated via emerge --update xorg. This, too, will take some time.

Once your preferred X components have finished installing, you can actually log in. startx should bring up your window manager of choice. Now you can open up multiple terminal windows and *really* bring your system to it’s knees by running multiple emerges at once! MUAHAHAHA! At this point it’s really a matter of preference what you install. I’d recommend emerge --update mozilla-firefox or emerge mozilla-firefox-bin to get up to Firefox 2.0.0.1. I also threw in emerge eterm as I hate the default xterm.

If you’re having problems with sound not working, I would *highly* reccommend the ALSA Guide. If you run an Nvidia card, I’d also recommend you checking out the Nvidia Guide, as it’s excellent.

A couple more packages that are worth it: mplayer and ffmpeg. If you’re going to play movies in Linux, these are the programs you want to use.

So I hope this has been at least a semi-informative guide as to what to expect on a fresh install of Gentoo Linux via the 2006.1 LiveCD.