Today I decided that it was time to upgrade my notebook. Not that there’s anything wrong with my existing Asus V6J! But the upgrade will let me shuffle all of our notebooks up a place and retire the oldest (also an Asus) which is starting to feel its age.

In this and the following posts, I’ll give a blow-by-blow rundown on the process of how I install Gentoo on the notebook. I’m figuring that, since this is the 5th time I have carried out an installation of this type, i should be able to do it with the minimum of pain — and give you some pointers which go beyond the technicalities.

Why Gentoo?

As I have indicated elsewhere in this blog, the choice of a distribution is largely one of personal preferences. However, I suggest that there are 2 compelling reasons to put Gentoo close to the top of your list…

1. Once you have installed Gentoo, you will never have to install it again. Why? Unlike other distributions, Gentoo is Gentoo and can be continuously updated. Most of the other distro’s that I have dealt with have relatively frequent new releases which almost invariably mean that you are faced with a major process when the time comes to upgrade (often a total reinstallation on your system).

1. Because everything (including the kernel in my installation method) is installed from source code, everything that you use can be totally optimised for your hardware. Again, this can be emulated , but not matched with other distributions.

There are a couple of disadvantages with Gentoo. Installation of applications will always take longer than with alternatives due to the installation from source. For example, even of a pretty gutsy machine, OpenOffice will take more than 12 hours to install!

Another disadvantage can be that less common applications may not be available as ebuilds (the Gentoo equivalent of an RPM or DEB package).

Objectives.

My objectives are pretty straight forward…

• to get access to all of the features of the M50VC
• to have a lean, mean optimised kernel which supports the available hardware, and nothing more
• to provide a guide to installing which will transcend the specifics of my hardware and needs
• by describing any issues during the process, to indicate how easy (or hard) it is to “Switch 2 Linux NOW”

Step 1

As I’m writing this from my home office, and the machine is still in my city office, Step 1 consists soley of downloading and burning the latest Gentoo LiveCD (2008.0) from this page. Although this is larger than the minimal install CD, my experience suggests that booting from a LiveCD to start with will give me a pretty clear indication of likely problem areas which will be faced during the installation.

The results of booting from the LiveCD will also provide a wealth of information which we will be using when we build our custom kernel.

See you again soon!

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I use Skype extensively for communication with clients as well as low cost international calls. But, I have to admit that every time the configuration of the sound system on my Asus V6J (Gentoo powered) it takes me several days to get the microphone working again (even though it continues to work with every other application!)

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Since my last kernel upgrade (linux-2.6.25-gentoo-r7) on my Asus V6J laptop wireless networking, which was working perfectly, suddenly stopped.

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install_qa_check

I’m not sure that there is a connection, but at about the same time that I updated my Gentoo profile to 2008.0 developer I started to get strange errors when doing an emerge —update world. The errors were not very helpful, one being “poor programming breaks airplanes” That might be cute (and even true), but does not provide much help to the hapless user trying to work out what to do!

Anyway, after some digging around I found out that the issue is a result of my setting the ~x86 keyword for portage, something which I clearly needed for a long forgotten issue, long ago.

It turns out that the test version of portage (sys-apps/portage) has changed the default QA Check Setting from strict to stricter while at the same time debugging the change.

So, if your Gentoo installation is endangering airplanes, just add

FEATURES=”-stricter”

to your /etc/make.conf file and all will be well again.

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I wanted Bluetooth on my EeePC for mobile connections and therefore wanted to use BT for an external mouse so that I did not have to use 2 usb ports which would be the case if using a standard wireless mouse.

However, I do not always need the mouse (and I have 2 BT mice) as for quick use on-the-road, the touchpad is OK.

I’m sure there will be cleverer ways to do this, but here’s how I use a BT mouse on my EeePC.

Naturally this assumes that you have the bluetooth services running (sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start)

I created a trivial script and installed it as ~/bin/bmouse

#! /bin/sh

sudo hciconfig hci0 up
sudo hidd --search

Now I can connect to any BT mouse by putting it into discovery mode and running ~/bin/bmouse

This is doubly helpful as it seems that after some time of inactivity, the connection is dropped!

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It has taken me a ridiculous amount of time to discover the following simple truth…

Since the update of net-misc/neon to 0.28.2 app-arch/rpm must be installed with the ~x86 keyword. This pulls in app-arch/rpm 4.4.6-r5

Without the ~x86 keyword, the emerge will try to compile rpm 4.4.6-r3 which is guranteed to fail.

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A little while ago I gave in to the temptation to buy a Eee PC based on some favorable comments by people I trust. I even bought it from a Department store, here in Melbourne. Without a word of a lie, the only thing that the Sales Assistant knew about the machine is that they had sold out of “white ones”.

This little device, by my reckoning, is the coolest big boys’ toy known to mankind. On a slightly more serious note, it is absolute proof that all that is needed for Linux to move into the mainstream is the backing of a manufacturer prepared to say NO to Microsoft. In other words, there is absolutely no technical reason why linux powered, full size notebooks and desktops are not readily available on the consumer market.

The EPC has done everything that I have asked of it, out-of-the-box. And when more than passing knowledge is required, all that is required is a few minutes Googling.

So far, without reading a manual, and without spending much time on it, I have…

• with a few mouse clicks set up WiFi connections to my office and home networks;
• upgraded Skype to the latest beta which allows painless video calls;
• connected to the Net using the modem in my Nokia E61; and
• attached a bluetooth mouse using an external USB Bluetooth adaptor.

Now that I have the Bluetooth dongle, I am expecting to be able to connect to the Net using the 3g network without any problems.

Anyway, i’ll tell you more about my Eee PC adventures over the coming weeks.

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I have just completed upgrading a workstation from Mepis 6.5 to Mepis 7

After this finished (relatively painless) my WiFi did not start. Turns out that the same issues, and the same solution, applied as I described in my earlier post.

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It has annoyed me for some time that when I print pages from Firefox on Gentoo my default printer settings were not recognised. However I didn’t spend any time trying to solve the “problem” because it was just an annoyance.

But recently I added a HP Color LaserJet to my office network and found that printing from Firefox not only didn’t recognise that this was my default printer, it didn’t print in color, even though the default configuration for the printer was to print in color. Read the rest of this entry »

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My earlier post referred to the Liberation fonts on Gentoo.

As you know, although I use Gentoo personally, I also use Mepis on desktops. The fonts are not installable from packages on Mepis so here are the steps required to install them and set them as your default fonts in Firefox…

1. Download the tarball file from here
2. Uncompress the downloaded file — you’ll then have a bunch of font files in a folder
3. Open your Systems Configuration (Settings) application
4. Select System Administration=>Fonts Installer
5. Optionally enter Administration Mode
6. Select Add Fonts and browse to the folder containg the new fonts
7. Select all files in this folder
8. The fonts are now installed!

To set these fonts as your defaults in Firefox…

1. Close all open Firefox windows
2. Start Firefox
3. Select Edit=>Preferences
4. Select Content=>Fonts and Colors=>Advanced
5. Set the default fonts
6. ENJOY!

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