Friday, October 26, 2012

Gentoo On My HP Part 3

Things are going pretty well. Not well enough for me to change my GRUB2 default yet... Well, I guess I could.

But I did run across some curious problems and their solutions. The first was starting X via xdm (instead of startx). SLiM would just get stuck - not starting anything but what looked like a twm session (less terminal window). When I made xdm be the default display manager by editing /etc/conf.d/xdm and changing DISPLAYMANAGER="slim" to "xdm", the result was a loop of xdm trying to start "LXDE" but just kicking it back to the login screen.

Checking /var/log/xdm.log yields
xdm error (pid 2441): Dbus error: Unable to open session: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
xdm error (pid 2441): console-kit-daemon not running?
The solution was to add dbus to the default runlevel and restart. rc-update add dbus default They left that out of the manuals, I guess because dbus got pulled in by something else - not sure what.

As a bonus to adding dbus to the default runlevel, my MP3 player is now auto-mounted when I plug it in. (At least) Two birds with one stone!

Also, I emerged the "murrine" packages - and that cleared up most of my icon problems. x11-themes/murrine-themes and x11-themes/gtk-engines-murrine

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Gentoo on my HP - Continued

I'm pretty sure that I got lucky when I configured the sound on this thing. It didn't work at first, but I'm sure that it's because I didn't have the right flags in make.conf. When I installed pysolfc, the sound worked and I'm pretty sure I did that before messing with the sound configuration in the kernel. And all I did there was to compile it as modules so I could figure out which ones I needed and which ones I didn't.

I had written a bunch of simple scripts for my Dell that I sure miss now. Some of them I rewrote - the really easy ones like the one to watch the progress of the emerge or the progress of the fetch. "tail -f /var/log/emerge.log" - easy, like I said, but I always forget where they put the emerge.log - so it comes in handy. I had a really cool one that backed up imo important files like /usr/src/linux/.config and /etc/conf.d and stuff like that and tacked the date onto it. Now I'll have to figure out how to do that again.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Gentoo on my HP2000-425NR

Well, my Dell died :-( May it rest in peace. So I bought the cheapest good machine I could find, or maybe the best cheap machine - which turned out to be a HP-2000. Memory was on sale, so I got an extra 4G.

Specs:
AMD E300 1.3 GHz processor.
6GB Ram
320GB Hard Drive
Ralink RT5390 Wireless
ATI Technologies Inc AMD Radeon HD 6310 GraphicsATI
ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)

Installing Linux has proven problematic.