A look at Gentoo 2004.2 [LWN.net]

A look at Gentoo 2004.2

Posted Aug 10, 2004 20:52 UTC (Tue) by dododge (subscriber, #2870)
Parent article: A look at Gentoo 2004.2

Here's my experience from trying Gentoo 2004.2 last weekend (installing
from the universal CD stage3):

- the mirrorselect + grep instructions in the Handbook produced a huge
sequence of null bytes that broke the make.conf file.

- "emerge nvidia-kernel" kept trying to install the old 4496 drivers for
some reason, which screwed things up. I'm pretty sure the 6111 ebuild
was in /usr/portage but for some reason emerge was ignoring it.

Admission: at this point I ran the Nvidia 6111 installer directly, because
it seemed to be the only way to get that version installed. Chaos ensued...

- "emerge tuxracer", or indeed trying to build anything that used
OpenGL, was a problem because somewhere along the way <GL/gl.h>
disappeared. For example at one point there were symlinks in
/usr/include/GL to non-existent files.

- "glxgears" was the only OpenGL application I could seem to get to
run. After managing to build tuxracer and neverball, they kept
insisting that OpenGL wasn't available despite glxinfo claiming
otherwise. winex-cvs wouldn't even build because of some missing
OpenGL definitions.

Various attempts to uninstall, emerge, and so on never got the machine
back into shape.

Now, this is my first time working with Gentoo, so I assume I'm missing
something obvious with regard to the 4496 vs. 6111 driver issue. I plan
to try again from scratch next weekend.

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A look at Gentoo 2004.2

Posted Aug 12, 2004 19:54 UTC (Thu) by drathos (guest, #6454) [Link]

The newer nvidia drivers are "keyword masked". This is something akin to Debian's testing branch. The proper way of installing masked ebuilds is to create the file /etc/portage/package.keywords and add the proper package and keywords. For the nvidia drivers add:

media-video/nvidia-glx ~x86
media-video/nvidia-kernel ~x86

(This is assuming that you're running x86, not amd64 or something more exotic.)

A look at Gentoo 2004.2

Posted Aug 13, 2004 2:24 UTC (Fri) by dododge (subscriber, #2870) [Link]

Thanks for the tip. I brought up the driver issue on a LUG mailing list and some Gentoo-knowledgable folks there explained the keyword-based system in detail. Hopefully my next install attempt this weekend will go more smoothly.