Peep

Take that partition and give new distros a try. One thing I'd do before playing with distros too much is learn how to use grub as a bootloader--in my experience it is much easier to boot multiple distros with grub than lilo. With a computer that fast, gentoo's compile times won't be all that big a deal. It'll definitely take a while to get up and going with the initial install, but the day to day usage shouldn't be that bad. Go with phunni's advice on the stage 1 install. The install docs at gentoo.org are among the best docs I've seen. I moved to gentoo in the past month. After a year with Mandrake I was ready to get my hands dirty and try something new. For me, it's actually much easier to find software with gentoo than it was for Mandrake. With urpmi I had to worry about constantly adding new sources or downloading third party rpms (which frequently didn't work well). Portage has virtually everything I've looked for and everything installs seamlessly. For the long-term, I like the fact that gentoo doesn't have to be reinstalled to be kept up to date. With mandrake I had to reinstall every 6 months to keep up to date. This is going to be a problem for commercial distros because it's harder to make money if nobody has to re-buy your product :( The software in gentoo's portage tree also seems to be less "tinkered-with" than mandrake's software, so it all seems to work together more smoothly. I can't really explain it, but things seem to break less frequently than they did in Mandrake. Gentoo's definitely worth trying. It's got a big community of users out there so you can feel confident that if you come upon any problems, someone else has seen the problem and probably worked to fix it already, which is nice.

What can yo do via ssh to get someone's attention while they're using another machine? The best I've come up with is SSH'ing to the other machine and doing an "eject" and then an "eject -t" to put the cdrom drawer in and out... but there's probably something funnier that can be done. X apps all open on the remote machine, so I'm at a loss for other ways to get a girlfriend's attention when she's in the other room playing frozen bubble or lbreakout. (killing the process works, but is unpopular) Any ideas?

ok, after posting the above I went in with my digital camera and was going to take a picture of the gibberish on startup, but when I rebooted it worked just fine. I was able to start X and it looks normal. This makes me think it's definitely not a BIOS type issue. I don't think it's a heat issue since the system is generally pretty cool and the air coming out the back fan is cool. I'd love anyone's ideas :)

I'm not sure where to post this. My desktop has been flaking out occasionally for a while and one of the main reasons I started using linux in the first place was trying to figure out a way to get it to behave. Yesterday it locked up hard in KDE and the only way I could get it to reboot was to ssh in from another computer to reboot. On reboot the first stuff up on the screen was pretty corrupted-looking. You could still read the words, but about half the letters had been replaced with smiley faces and weird symbols. It proceeded to boot, but X wouldn't load. When I checked from the other computer, however, I was still able to ssh in and the underlying linux system seems ok (apache's running fine, etc) 1) Could this be a video card problem somehow? (Sounds unlikely, but who knows) 2) Could this be a linux problem? (Sounds unlikely, since it happens before the system even gets to the hard drive and it happens for both gentoo and mandrake) 3) Any ideas?

ok, i'm going to reply to myself to dump on genkernel for the second time today. Genkernel apparently also doesn't install the necessary options to run shorewall, which seems like it'd be a no-brainer to include. who knows why it's missing.

Ok, I tried using genkernel to get all the fancy stuff working on my laptop and it simply WILL NOT work from within an existing install (no loop,etc). Lots of threads on other boards, including posts by SoulSe and maybe others here :) I'll definitely steer clear of genkernel from now on. Trial and error with menuconfig seems much safer.

Hmm, you're right. I thought I had seen it in mdk, but now that I look, it isn't there. I actually think that the constitution would've come in handy a few times if I'd known it was there.

That is a cool idea and would probably be more appealing to many people than a liveCD + USB keychain. It's pretty expensive, though, so I'm not sure who the target market would be. Hardcore linux nerds could just make their own.

I've found all sorts of weird stuff before, notably the info in /usr/share/misc, but /usr/share/state just seems a bit odd. I'm a patriotic american and all, but it seems weird that several of the distributions I've checked all have the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence hidden away. bill@pico bill $ ls -l /usr/share/state total 56 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45018 Aug 17 20:27 us-constitution -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9331 Aug 17 20:27 us-declaration Is there an interesting story behind this? Why not add documents from other countries, or something like the UN Declaration of Human Rights? Weird.

wow, I guess I was using the wrong keywords when I searched that forum... it's a bit embarassing to miss an exact answer to my question posted only a few days ago :o instead of emerging other stuff, maybe i'll just try to sleep through the rest of KDE's emerge process :P

great, thanks!

I've emerged x.org and evilwm and am sitting here as KDE begins its monumental compilation. Is it harmful to open another terminal and emerge some smaller program at the same time? I already tried it (I did an "emerge cowsay") and there weren't any obvious conflicts, but I don't want to make a habit of this if it will break things. As always, thanks for the help :)

I've only been a gentoo user for about 2 days now and it's good to see there are still some gentoo users around :lol:. It was looking like everyone had left for arch. I've done two installs so far, one genkernel and one not. Can't really comment on the pros/cons yet, both were very easy. Thanks for the wiki link, it looks helpful.

or just click on the icon that appears in the lower left-hand corner of the page when a popup is blocked.

post the error message and someone might be more likely to be able to figure it out. :D