Admiral LSD

Install gaim. It handles Yahoo (though this is a bit dicey atm. I have it working but only through some custom patches applied by the Gentoo emerge process), MSN (with the appropriate Mozilla libraries installed), ICQ, AIM, IRC, Napster(!) and even more obscure protocols such as Jabber, Zephyr and Gadu-Gadu. It's generally provided with many distro so have a hunt through the package manager. It's easily the best multi-protocol IM software I've come across.

It's in the Portage tree, you just emerge opera and you're away. There are a number of ebuilds covering proprietary and closed source stuff like that, stuff like WineX, VMWare even the proprietary drivers for nVidia and ATi graphics card. I think it's really cool that Gentoo provide this stuff instead of getting bogged down in licencing politics like other distros as it puts the choice in the users hands instead of just demanding they do things a certain way.

http://members.westnet.com.au/gweber/Screenshot.jpg Gentoo Linux XFree86 4.4RC2 GNOME 2.5.90 Pic is of the Western Australian capital Perth taken from the state war memorial at a place called Kings Park.

Gentoo. There is nothing else.

That's easy, go into Edit -> Current Profile -> Effects, there's an option to make the terminal background transparent there.

I use GNOME. I can't stand KDE and KDE apps. I used to have a small KDE (just arts, kdebase and kdelibs) installed because one of my other packages pulled it in as a dependency (and for compatibility with other KDE apps) but I've since come to my senses and not only set my USE flags to specifically disable KDE related stuff I've masked the core KDE packages so no KDE apss ever get installed.

Quote: Yeah, XP is definately one to leave behind. I'm still working on finding full program equivelency. Then I can leave the W2K. heh, prior to re-catching the Linux bug a year or so ago trading Win2k for WinXP was the best thing I ever did to my PC. Win2k was like some temp had accidentally sent the wrong master CD off to the replicators, XP was a breath of fresh air compared with that POS. If I wasn't so manic about keeping things my 2K discs would be drink coasters by now.

If you want to start kdm on boot with Gentoo you first need to open up /etc/rc.conf and edit the DISPLAYMANAGER line to reflect your choice of kdm before adding the xdm service (this is a generic service, it'll start whatever you define in rc.conf, not just xdm) to the default runlevel using the rc-update command: Code: rc-update add xdm default As for an internet connection through a Windows XP box, provided the XP box is the machine hosting the connection you can simply use XPs Internet Connection Sharing (activated in the property sheet for the internet connection concerned) to create a gateway the Gentoo box can use to download it's packages. Just enable ICS on the XP box and use the net-setup program on the Gentoo LiveCD (or if you're using a different distro, whatever tool it uses to set up network connections) to use the XP box as it's gateway. I do this myself and it works a treat. And lastly, I really wouldn't know how to set XSESSION up as I don't use it, I use individual xinit scripts in /etc/X11/xinit instead as it's much easier to manage.

Quote: The last that I looked, the only NVIDIA drivers that were compatible with the 2.6.0 kernel were the video drivers. The chipset drivers may not have caught up yet with the new kernels. What does the NVIDIA website say? nVidia only ever provided sound and LAN drivers for nForce chipsets under Linux and with ALSA (which has supported nForce chipsets for ages) built into the kernel and a patch (and later, a fully open source reverse engineered LAN driver which I believe has actually been merged into the kernel now) for the LAN driver you didn't really need to use the nVidia drivers (unless of course you had an nVidia video card, there were patches for the drivers there too). I've been using my nForce board (an EPoX 8RDA+) under Linux for nearly a year now and under both kernels 2.4 and 2.6 haven't had any major compatibility dramas with it.

The only part where installing Gentoo in an existing Linux would differ to using a LiveCD would be in actually setting the chroot environment up. The bulk of the Gentoo installation is performend in the chroot and this would be indentical regardless of whether you were using a LiveCD or an existing Linux. It's fairly easy to install Gentoo into a directory, just create the directory and untar the stage tarball there instead of creating and mounting seperate partitions for it (the rest of the installation would proceed as normal) the thing to remember is that after you finish, you can't simply add the new Gentoo install to your bootloader and boot it the normal way. Instead, you have to chroot into your Gentoo install whenever you want to use it. Just use a similar set of commands to what you used to enter the chroot while you were installing Gentoo.

The same way you'd go about installing Linux alongside Windows though with Linux you can set multiple distros up to share the same swap partition. You'll also want to make sure you're using GRUB as your bootloader as it makes it a lot easier to multi boot several Linux distros. At one point I had something like 4 Linux distro's installed on my computer and all I had to do to add another one to grub was copy my entry for Gentoo and change the partition. No need to mount the boot partition of each new distro, no need to recommit GRUB to the MBR, nothing. As soon as I saved the grub.conf and rebooted it was on the menu.

Yep, provided said distro has the tools to create/format disk partitions in your choices of filesystems, the tar command to extract the stage tarball and the chroot command to "switch" into your Gentoo environment and complete the install. You don't even need a seperate partition for Gentoo, you can extract the stage tarball into a directory on an existing Linux parition and chroot into that to install Gentoo.

Gentoo's been able to support the 2.6 kernel for a while, you can even compile everything against the 2.6 kernel headers (which enables such niceties as NPTL support) if you want. Slackware also claims to be "2.6 ready" but misses an important detail: The script to start the ALSA sound drivers (which are now in the kernel) is in the alsa-driver package (which are compiled for the stock 2.4.22 kernel) and not the alsa-utils (or one of the other core ALSA packages) meaning you can't just drop a 2.6 kernel in right away. It's a simple matter to extract the init script but it's annoying nonetheless.

There's a 2.5/2.6 patch for the LAN driver, you can get it here: http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24127

XChat's probably the best you're going to find among graphical client. If you're interested in text clients then Irssis's probably your best bet. Neither look and work exactly like mIRC but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you really want to use mIRC in Linux you could try running it with Wine.