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Installing Gentoo once again. The source based distro based on BSD.

Gentoo Windowmaker desktop.
Gentoo Windowmaker desktop.

My computer is now running Gentoo once again, I installed the x86_64 stage3 tarball and the latest portage tarball and installed the system from within a chroot using my Ubuntu 11.04 distribution. The installation was different from the last time I installed a Gentoo system, I am using newer hardware this time, but now it is all working, the sound and video is all working perfectly and I am typing this in the Chromium 11.0.696.65 (0) browser running on a Windowmaker desktop.

The setup of the /etc/make.conf is the critical part, you need to make sure that the correct USE flags have been defined to build your desired software with the correct options. Here below is my /etc/make.conf I used to build a Gnome based Linux system. I have my intel graphics driver defined so that the correct drivers will be built for the INTEL graphics hardware that I am using. As well as the ogg and mp3 options to enable building the proper plugins for the audacious music player. I copied the source for the 2.6.39-rc6 vanilla kernel to /usr/src/linux and built that as my default kernel, giving me a much faster and more responsive desktop.

homer@localhost ~ $ cat /etc/make.conf
# These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
# built this stage.
# Please consult /usr/share/portage/config/make.conf.example for a more
# detailed example.
CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
VIDEO_CARDS="intel"
# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
# These are the USE flags that were used in addition to what is provided by the
# profile used for building.
USE="acl acpi alsa cairo cdr dbus -doc esd firefox java5 jpeg gnome gstreamer gtk hal nautilus ogg opengl pcmcia png qt3support samba tiff unicode v4l2 X -apm -bindist -kde -selinux fontconfig truetype jadetex gdu extras device-mapper policykit sqlite threads icu udev mp3 flac aac vorbis dvb"

The Gentoo system gives you a very fast desktop system that is faster than Ubuntu, which is becoming bloated and slow compared to other Linux distributions. But even though it requires much more effort to get the system full operational, you can customize the whole build and have everything compiled the way you want it to be. I am currently following this tutorial here: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/NTFS-3G to try and get the ntfs-3g support working then I will be able to mount my NTFS partitions and play my movies and music from those partitions. This is my /etc/fstab, you can see the 3 partitions at the bottom where I am mounting my NTFS partitions, one of which is the Windows 7 partition and the other two are partitions where I have my music and movies stored.

homer@localhost ~ $ cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail / tail freely.
#
# The root filesystem should have a pass number of either 0 or 1.
# All other filesystems should have a pass number of 0 or greater than 1.
#
# See the manpage fstab(5) for more information.
#
 
# <fs> <mountpoint> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>
 
# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/sda1 / ext4 noatime 0 1
/dev/sda3 /home ext4 noatime 0 0
/dev/sda5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,ro 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0
 
# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
# use almost no memory if not populated with files)
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0
 
UUID=FADC6329DC62DF7F /mnt/windows7 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
UUID=2D3046370F1DC4B9 /mnt/media ntfs-3g defaults 0 0
UUID=08A15D3478B8E199 /mnt/moremedia ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

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