Setting up Gentoo

Setting up Gentoo has become, for me, more painful than installing these days. Everything from SLiM to Fluxbox to Conky to bitchX gives me trouble.

I’ve got everything installed and restart and SLiM won’t start despite the nVidia logo popping up. Well, apparently I had the mouse named one thing in the device section and something else in the screen section. Then I tried again and the same thing happened. Apparently on Gentoo you have to install the evdev driver independently. So now SLiM will start but Fluxbox will not after logging in. Yes, you can see where this is going. So apparently leaving the ampersand off of the command to start conky on login stopped fluxbox in its tracks. I cannot explain that one but that appears to be what happened.

I then spent the next hour or so trying to figure out bitchx. I never would have guessed that making bitchX appear in the background as part of the desktop was such a painful ordeal. Yeah, well it is. If anyone ever wants help doing it leave me a note. Maybe I’ll stuff on article in the Gentoo Wiki on it. Maybe I’ll do it for my own sake. Either way I think I now have it working. Here’s another oddity though. I set the geometery of the Eterm terminal through the command and through Fluxbox’s app file. For some reason doing that made bitchX take up 100% of my processor usage. I can’t explain that one either.

Good luck setting yours up. This is crazy. Oh yes, and lets not forget my adventures in font land. Needless to say Paludis still works flawlessly with no setup hassle.

Enjoy the Penguins!

4 Comments

    • Donnie Berkholz
    • Posted 29 May 2008 at 2:05 AM
    • Permalink

    Hi there! I saw your blog post and wanted to respond to a couple of your points.

    - evdev should be installed by default. It’s in the default USE flags for normal profiles.

    - Leaving the ampersand off in .xinitrc means that xinit stops running at that point. How it works is that it runs lines until it finds one that doesn’t exit immediately, and it hangs on that one.

    - As for nvidia, I can’t speak to that besides to say I don’t use closed drivers. =)

    • Andreas Nilsson
    • Posted 29 May 2008 at 3:09 AM
    • Permalink

    About that amepersand. That is not so very strange at all. I assume you use .xinitrc. As an example .xinitrc, here is mine

    conky -c ~/.conkyrc_r &
    kmix &
    knetworkmanager &
    exec startfluxbox

    As you can see every command prior to fluxbox has an ampersand. Why? Because it backgrounds the process so the script can continue launching the next process. If you leave out the ampersand, the process wont be backgrounded which means nothing after that line will be executed.

    To see that this is so, use your old .xinitrc, log in via conky and then ctrl+alt+f1 login as your user and killall conky and go back to your X session. Voila, fluxbox in all its glory.

  3. The ampersands I’m talking about are actually in the fluxbox startup file in the users (this case me) home directory. Going out on a limb I would assume its the exact same thing going on.

    There was no problem with nVidia, I was merely stating that it was working, but X was not.

  4. I haven’t tried bitchx but I have setup irssi. I wrote a guide to it.

    http://linuxtidbits.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/setting-up-irssi/