Admiral LSD

I hate dual booting to pieces, moreso when two OSs are involved whose native filesystems can't be read by one or the other. My problem is that I need access to the ext3 partition my Slackware install is on from my Windows installation. Since ext3 isn't too far removed from ext2 and I only need read-only access will a tool for accessing an ext2 partition work with ext3 or do I need a whole new program and if so, does anyone have any recommendations?

Has anyone ever got this combination to work? If so, can someone explain how? When I try War2 complains about not being able to find some file on the War2 CD despite having low-level CD-ROM support enabled in VDMSound.

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.

...that this place usually has about 30-40 people looking at it at once, with the record being 96, yet virtually noone is registered and posting and only a handful of new topics/replies are posted every few days?

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.

Are you compiling GRUB yourself or using a binary package? If it's the latter are you sure the CDs you're using have compiled it for your Athlon or at the very least, basic i686 or x86? edit: Also, when you compiled the kernel did you explictly enable support for your HighPoint RAID controller in the config?

See? I told you it wasn't terribly difficult to get nForce/nForce2 chipsets operating under Linux Seriously, audio is probably being provided through either ALSA or the kernel's older i810_audio OSS module (with the slight possibility that it's using nVidia's nvaudio module) and the LAN well, I wouldn't have a clue. The nVidia LAN module is proprietary and closed source meaning that most distros don't include it. There is an open source module, called forcedeth but I wouldn't think MEPIS would be including that yet. There is also the possibility your board doesn't use the nVidia LAN at all (a few boards do this).

nonono, don't replace the build directory it should remain as a symlink but try and find out where it's pointing to (you can do this in a terminal using the command ls -l) and if it's not your installed kernel source change it to point to the source. It's using that symlink to try and find the kernel source and not being able to find it could be one of the reasons the build is failing. The .config file used to build the kernel should be provided somwhere, either with the source or installed as part of the binary kernel image in /boot (it'l be called something like <kernelversion>.config). Just copy it into your source dir as .config and that should be it. You also mention that you see a lock on the icon for this particular symlink. That leads me to believe you're not doing this stuff as root - that's also important. You need to be root to access a lot of these directories and the compiler may be confusing lack of permission to access with lack of existence. You can quite easily elevate yourself to root priveliges temporarily by using the su command in a terminal. After entering it you'll be prompted for the root password after which you'll be in a shell that's virtually indistinguishable from one root opened itself.

If Linux is you're only concern then nVidia's probably your best bet. Even in the most basic test imaginable (glxgears) my 9500 Pro gets less than half what even a GF4 Ti4200 can achieve. In fact, the overall performance of the drivers has actually dropped over the 8 months I've been using it. Under Windows though the tables are turned with the 9500 Pro able to convincingly edge out most of it's competitors in the same price bracket. Ultimately it'll come down to what OS you see yourself doing the most 3D intensive stuff in. If you plan to dual boot and do all your gaming etc in Windows then go ATi but if you're planning on doing all your 3D stuff in Linux then go nVidia.

Dude, what the hell are you on?

You can if you do the complete stage 3 + GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) but really, it's not worth it. If you're going to install Gentoo do the Stage 1 install. it'll take a while but you'll develop a better appreciation for what Gentoo is all about, learn a fair bit about Linux and get the satisfaction of knowing the system you're using at the end was built with your own hands to your needs and not to encompass the needs of millions of people.

Quote: I was checking the portage trees and am very glad to see IceWM and very surprised to see Icecc, the IceWM configurator. I have high speed cable. When I start the install, how does it address partitioning. Say for instance, can I tell it to keep my /home? Does it ask and give options here? Yep there's a ton of cool stuff in the Portage tree, even the closed source binary drivers for nVidia and ATi video cards are in there. As for partitioning, like everything else in the Gentoo install you have to handle it yourself as there's no specific "installer" as such. Provided you can read and have a basic knowledge of Linux shell operations it isn't as hard as it sounds, just follow the Install Guide (which is also provided on the LiveCDs) and you'll be fine. It's fairly easy to keep an existing /home partition, just remember not to format it and set it up right in your fstab file. Whenever I rebuild my system I just back up everything I want to keep into /home (which is 50-odd Gb) and format / and /usr. Very convenient.