GENTOO (<- LINUX <- HOME)

Quick Guide

A concise enumeration of what I think is important to know about Gentoo Linux. Please consult the full Gentoo documentation if you need to know more.

/etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4

List of modules to load at boot time. To make sure that my USB mouse works, I had to add these lines:

input
mousedev
hid
usb-uhci

And the following lines to support pcmcia cards

yenta_socket
ds

The pcmcia modules would probably have been loaded automatically had I already added pcmcia to the default runlevel. See below for how to do that.

rc-update [add|del] script runlevel

Used to add/remove a scipt in /etc/init.d to one of the run levels, usually run level default. Some of them need to be added to the boot level. Usually you find a notice in the script itself - which can be found in /etc/init.d/ - about which run level it needs to be added. E.g. I used the following commands to get support for alsa and pcmcia:

# rc-update add alsasound boot
# rc-update add pcmcia default

emerge sync

synchronize the local tree with the server.

emerge [-p[v]] package

Install requested package plus all required packages. The -p Option will just show what would be done. -v also shows the USE flags which are considered, and which define which additional features are included.

emerge -u[p] (system|package)

Update the system packages or the requested package. The -p Option will just show what would be done.

emerge -lp (system|package)

Tells you what chnages happened between you installed version and the newest one.

etcat -v package

List all available package versions. Some of the newer versions may be masked and not installed automatically when you just specify the package name to emerge.

qpkg --find-file filename

Find package to which the file belongs.

qpkg --list package

List all files which were installed by the package.

qpkg --installed --query-deps package

List all installed packages which depend on the given package.

Configuration Files

See the Etc directory for some of my current configuration files. This includes kernel configuration which I had to fix, because e.g. on bootup I would get messages that /dev/rtc did not exist.

Problems

Missing /mnt/.init.d

One time when booting, right at the beginning of the init sequence it aborted, with the message that it could not mount tmpfs onto /mnt/.init.d. I had to manually create that directory, so that booting gentoo would work again.

Characters not displayed in sylpheed

I had an export LANG=en_US.ISO8859-15 in my .bashrc. While this worked in RedHat, in gentoo sylpheed would not display certain characters. Changing that to export LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 cured the problem.