Questions while evolving from noob to apprentice

[Elleni]

Hello all,

firstly I want to express my happiness with this distribution. My first and only one I guess. I got what I expected and am still learning everyday I use and enjoy my gentoo boxes. Since last summer I got rid of native M$ boxes and migrated both - first testsystem and then live system to my first linux love, GENTOO. In the same time I did mcsa and now learning for mcse and though running their os only through vmware

For some weeks now I am at the point, where most problems I run into are solved. Before I seriously started thinking of needing a fallback binary distro like suse installed. That was because after an world update I had X only startable with vesa. The problem was troubleshooted in the forum, no solution was found, I opend my first bugreport and even more I did some driverfeedbacks in the hope the problem would some time be fixed. In the meantime I extracted graficcard and lived with the onboard intel chip, though gaming was not possible for me with this one. The next serious issue I had, was the sata sometimes causing panic problem. Also this prob is solved with kernel 2.6.20 so for about a month I am very happy with my system.

Another thing I will never forget is, gentoo saved me from playing world of warcraft
But thats another story...

It was tough at the beginning sure, but the happier I am now. When seeing the performance for ex. how the box generelly works, or even wow through wine with highest possible settings (kk I did not activate antializing).. Amazing !

I decided to learn about linux from 0 and my approach to learn is by try and error at least thats how I get a fundamental by playing around, before I come to a point where I really want to go in depth and go for good literature (...)

I must admit I am impressed in many ways of gentoo. Firstly the idea of sourcebased distro ! Then the documantation. When try and erroring and then asking google I notized posts in other forums that were linked to our wikis because of being very informative and very well documented...

Feeling so I have to express thank you to all - from daniel who s baby gentoo is no mather the probs gentoo may have or have not to every single other human beeing spending their time volounteerly for enabling me to enjoy this wonderfull distro, devs forums mods translaters documentation guys and who ever I would forget to mention in my lack of understanding. Your doing an awsome good job !! Love ya for that !!

My first LiveCD Stage3 Install was about a year ago and as described above it feeled like a baby learning to make its first steps or perhaps learning its first words. Now I seem to have evolved at least a littlebit as manually compiling kernel doesnt freak the hell out of me nor does a broken system after a world update.

My confidence raised in both my knowledge and in what gentoo can do for and with me... I am at a point where I start to understand things within this new world of gentoo and linux in general. I mean a half year ago I was fighting with wow freezing and other things, I even then liked gentoo but now I got in deep love with it as no major problems are left so I started reading in forum. Lots of reading, and this time not for any solutions or workarounds not for problems I have but for example why theres no more stage1, or the ricing thread not to mention and of corse the how to flying gentoo thread...

I also noticed this flame thing among devs and did a lot of reading on that too. I was very happy to read about Daniels comeback and very sad that he and other good devs retired. Without having the background to judge the only thing I can say is PLIIS STOP AND DONT LET PERSONAL PROBLEMS DESTROY THE BEST DISTRO so many are loving ! As it was mentioned by others I beleave it is also a chance an can lead to a good thing if the correct actions are taken out of this mess. There were enough positive posts on this topic that I intend to not fear too much about gentoo anymore although I do not really know how bad the situation really is. I mean even if it means gentoo will sink like titanic I will be with the last to leave because gentoo is too good to sink! I really hope the ones in charge will manage this well and the ones needed to change will do so or leave before poisoning a goldie great distribution...

After all this reading (during the last days) the little ricer in me is born in the meantime I started an emerge -e system twice followed by a world update. As you can imagine I read through a lot of reasonable and unreasonable suggestions. I decided to give some ldflags and cflags a try. Before you tell me, beleave me I also read all about the posts advicing to be bit conservative and not just rice for the ricers sake, what so ever as said I learn by try and error and love to "optimize" the system for the purpose of learning. So I know there are still manpages to be read and I also know that the cflags and useflags choosen may not really lead in a bether result. But I also have no prob to reset to other settings and reemerge whole stuff. Besides that I also took the following in consideration. I looked for the general "sound" of the words of people saying I use this or that flag. If it sounded to me like a too offensive ricer then I also did not trust their posts too much. O the other side the howto flying gentoo thread was nt actualized for some time so I wonder if some of my settings are depreciated or even stupid

I also read about acovea and know if I would really want ro rice it would be an excellent help but this is way to much for me yet though I am looking forward to the day I will find out having learned enough to really try to be a grown up ricer...

Now that all beeing said I wonder if anyone of you experienced ones would like to have a short look to my settings esp. cflags and ldflags and useflags or what else could make sense for ex my xorg.conf that is very basic as I still have to read and learn here or even hdparm results.

cflags and ldflags I have chosen on reading in the forum as well as the recomandations about save settings. The useflags basically are the ones standardly being there from stage three and some others which I found when looking for howto emerge mplayer and vlc for example.

Right now ~900 of 1100 packages are reemerged with this configs and I am looking forward to find out wether it leads to problems or to a fast and rock system

Some general baby ricer questions here:
- hdparm. I have two disks. The system disk is a sata (Boot partition is ext2 and / is ext3) as it comes with standard installation. Is there any more ricing adviced then to put noatime in fstab as it sounds faster Does that make sense ?

Then I have a second hd which is ide and with hdparm/dmesg it looks its set do udma mode 2. Well the ricer in me started to feel adrenaline as he smelled ricing oportunity here. I could surely tweak the hell out of the drive but then I started thinking of the function of this ide drive. Its the storelocation of my data - mainly large files. So before loosing data with mislead settings I am wondering now whether I actually would feel anything if tweaking that drive. I mean its not the system drive and copying data it did quite good enough... I put on reiser from kernel (3.6) on that ide drive.

If I got it correctly the only really making sense ricing concerning my harddisk situation would be to consider to export portage to this second disk everything else would not be worth right or is it a huge difference between udma6, 32 bit and other hdparm stuff enabled and the way my drive is standardly accessed ?

Whatsoever in a way I am happy that my system is build on the sata disk so I cannot screw up by trying to rice too much on the system disk.

I also emerged whole kde n gnome plus xfce to just have a look at "everything" because of beeing curious and feeling the need to look and learn. I know that I probably waste diskspace but dont care about that. The benefit to learn gentoo is much more important for me which brings me to a last question.

Topic is graphical ui for x. I have seen some so far and they all seem somehow similar. Now in older days I happen to install a desktop modifier for M$ (desktopx) and there was some really artfull peace of work. It was called hoverdesktop from treetog if I remember correctly. Now this gui looked totally spacy and like from an other time...

My question would be are there also projects or guides to highly customize your desktop far more then using standards like kde gnome ? Nothing against them this is not a its not good enough for me question in contrary I love having the joyce but what I love still more is eye candyness of gui and naturally I installed aiglx feature coming with xorg and started having a look (am deeply impressed) to beryl. Oh this brings me to the very last question... On my actual system I have a "too new" radeon to be supported within opensource driver. So I am not sure wether to give xgl a try for having beryl here or should I wait as there could be some progress to get it done with aiglx support for fglrx in near future or perhaps ati has announced to do same as nvidia ?

Anyway thank you very much if having followed my unstructured thoughts until here as I know my writing skills suck !

And if accepted I would bring in any asked and needed info to short analyze system. If not, I will go with the many good meant suggestions and switch back to stable and standard settings unless I will underlie a huge placebo effect and think that I gained about 189% on overall performance

And thanks again for Gentoo !

Kind regards,
Happy Gentoo User
Elleni

[IQgryn]

My suggestions are this:

• Have a swap partition on each drive you have, and make sure you set the priorities properly (lower is used first). In your case, the SATA drive should have the lower priority. To set the priority, use pri=x in the mount options (x being an integer). With two drives of equal performance, set the priority to the same level for both to enable automatic striping across both swap partitions.
  
• Moving portage to the IDE drive probably won't help much; SATA drives are generally a bit faster than IDE. Putting /usr/portage and your ccache directory on reiser partitions, and putting /usr/portage/distfiles on an ext3 partition with dir_index enabled would help, though. Depending on how much ran you have, you might try compiling in ram, as well.
  
• As far as customizing your desktop, there are several window managers designed for this. Two that come to my mind are fluxbox and fvwm (screenshots at the links). I don't know if these are compatible with beryl (I don't use it or them).

[Elleni]

Hello IQgryn,

thank you very much for your reply. I will take your three points in my pending list as they sound very promising. I remind having read about those points too but I had forgotten them lately. My other pending and looking forward to learn points are:

- enable suspend to disk
- customize look of bootprocess (eye candy boot)

But first I will look to the points your suggesting

- Swapfile on both disks. As for the performance - I am still world updating. When done I will put some hdparm results here as it is not really clear for me which drive is faster (size of sata drive 40 gb and size of ide drive 160gb).

- Portage to other drive: As drives are nearly the same level I thought perhaps the system would be more responsive during emerges and then I also read about reiser beeing great at small files. Thank you for clearing that out, I will try to find out about dirindex_enabled and then export only /usr/portage and ccache mayby distcc directory to reiser/ide disk and leave /usr/portage/distfiles on ext3/sata disk. Or am I supposed to bether make a new partition for distfiles and only add dirindex_enabled to the distfiles partition ? Btw does noatime in fstab help in gaining speed while reading/writing to disk or is it not recommended to set ? But the best reminder is to have a look to compiling in ram. The box does have 1 GB of ram I will have a look at it and find out if its recommended with this amount of ram.

As for the eyecandiness - thanks for links - will love to go through and have a look. If I understand you correctly that means that many of this windowsmanagers have the possibility to higly customize for eye and look, cewl thing ! Well when beeing through the most technical points I wanna learn I will also have a look and try to find some info on howto make desktop look way more unique

[IQgryn]

It is easier (in my opinion) to have a separate partition for distfiles, but it is perfectly safe to use dir_index on your main partition, and have distfiles be part of that. You can even add the dir_index option to a current ext3 filesystem using tune2fs. I find it easier to use a separate partition because I don't have to mess around with symlinks or mount --bind, and it limits the space that distfiles can take up (it'll never run /usr/portage out of space).

As far as noatime goes, it is perfectly safe to enable it. All it does is stop keeping track of access timestamps; creation and modification timestamps are still updated as normal. It provides a speed boost, especially on /usr/portage and your ccache directory. I currently use noatime on every partition except my distfiles directory; the performance hit there is minimal, because it is mostly large files, and having access times helps me remove the least recently used files. This is another reason that separating distfiles into its own partition is beneficial (IMHO).

Also, if your system is not very responsive during emerges, try setting

[Elleni]

re

Emerge world first pass went very well

I also got rid of openoffice as compiletime is quite long. Instead I emerged new binary 2.2 version

Just one single package that wouldnt emerge, koffice-i18n. It gave out a patching error and I am not sure if it is a bug, because in the Emerge error I have seen it beeing called koffice-18n with a missing "i" before 18. It is also reproducable on my other gentoo box (which has no edited cflags nor ldflags).

Now I am resizing partition and it scares me a bit because after having waited for about over 3 hours and the status bar on gparted counted to 100% I thought it would nearly be finished and will thus create the 1 gb swap partition next. But instead it proceeded doing some quick things and now it says it will need another 3.5 hours to get 100% on the statusbar.

I hope this is a normal procedure and parted is not in some sort of loop and will finish when hd is gone or I pull the plug

As not yet beeing able to do hdparm results for comparison of disksspeed - in the meantime here are some config info I use:

CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mtune=pentium4 -O2 -pipe -mfpmath=sse,387 -funroll-loops -ffast-math -msse2 -mmmx -falign-functions=4 -fprefetch-loop-arrays -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-ident"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--sort-common -s"
MAKEOPTS="-j5"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=""
USE=" X 7zip a52 aac acpi alsa amr arts asf avi berkdb bidi bitmap-fonts cairo cdda cdio cdr cli crypt cups dbus dga divx4linux dlloader dri dts dvd dvdr dvdread eds elibc_glibc emboss encode esd fam ffmpeg firefox flac fortran freetype gdbm gif gnome gnutls gpm gstreamer gtk hal httpd input_devices_evdev i8x0 input_devices_keyboard input_devices_mouse java jpeg kde kdeenablefinal kernel_linux ldap libg++ live mad matroska mikmod mmx mmxext mp3 mpeg ncurses nls nptl nptlonly ogg oggvorbis opengl oss pam pcre pdf pdflib perl pic png ppds pppd python qt3 qt4 quicktime readline real reflection samba sdl session skins spell spl sse sse2 ssl stream svga tcpd theora truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode userland_GNU vcd videos vlm vorbis win32codecs wxwindows x86 xanim -xmms xml xorg xv xvid zlib"
FEATURES="ccache distcc parallel-fetch userfetch"
DISTCC_DIR="/var/tmp/distcc"
CCACHE_DIR="/root/.ccache"
CCACHE_SIZE="2G"
ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0"
VIDEO_CARDS="fglrx radeon vesa i810 i915"
LINGUAS="de"

And these are the modules loaded in xorg.conf:
Load "dri"
Load "glx"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "bitmap"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "record"

Driver Section looks like:
Driver "fglrx"
Option "UselFastTLS" "1"
Option "EnablePrivateBackZ" "on"
Option "Capabilities" "00000800"
Option "KernelModuleParm" "locked-userpages=0"

Anything I should add to squeze more out of my radeon x1300Le ?

Cant wait till gparted finishes as I am very courious to emerge world second pass in ram

I have noticed that I did emerge the wm's but not the themes and that s probably where I will find some nice looking things

Edit: Any thoughts on beryl with this grafic card ? Is aiglx to be possible sometime with the fglrx drivers or or will they perhaps follow nvidia and implement it in the driver ?

I heard that aiglx is the bether approach then xgl needing to install a lot of things where functionality is within xorg server. I am willing to wait or should I go on with xgl as there is nothing planed ?

Edit 2: Puh, gparted crashed n data are still here. Now the partition was resized and not yet moved upwards. I had planed to place the swap file at the beginning of the disk but now instead of waiting another some hours I think I will place it at the end of disk and do some hdparm tests just to claryfie which drive s faster and then go on with emerge world in ram..

Edit 3: Here are the hdparm results firt the sata 40gb hd:

Timed cached read: 992 - 1003 MB/sec
Timed buffered disk reads: ~56 MB/sec

On ide 160gb it has the following settings:

/dev/hdb:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 20023/255/63, sectors = 321672960, start = 0

And results:

Timed cached read: 975 - 993 MB/sec
Timed buffered disk reads: 26-29.3 MB/sec

After having set to udma6 and "activated" unmasking and 32bit support:

Timed cached read: 992 - 1006 MB/sec
Timed buffered disk reads: 26.8-29.2 MB/sec

I come from seeing that udma6 seems not supported as I dont see it here and also it doesnt seem to care what I set in dma the * remains at umda2...

hdparm -i /dev/hdb

Model=HDS722516VLAT80, FwRev=V34OA60A, SerialNo=VNR43EC4G2DBGK
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=52
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=7938kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=268435455
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 udma3 udma4 udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 3a: ATA/ATAPI-2 ATA/ATAPI-3 ATA/ATAPI-4 ATA/ATAPI-5 ATA/ATAPI-6

* signifies the current active mode

Edit4: I come from finding following messages in dmesg:

ide0: Speed warnings UDMA 3/4/5 is not functional so I leave hdparm alone.

Then also seeing various reiser error messages. Now I am not sure if they are because of hdparm testing so I will reboot and see if they persist. Is it bether having swapfile at beginning of disk anyway isnt it ?

Edit5: doing a reiserfsck --rebuild-tree as the quick check within parted failed...

lol, should have canceled gparted when I wanted to (right after having resized partition and shortly after starting to move data) as it seems it lost the data it had beginned to move partition as resizing it did correctly, not too bad though, as I copied important things... I wanted to free some space anyway as there were only 4 gb left, and now the check prog did it for me having 61gb free now

Should I leave priority on both swap files on everydisk or should I favour one of them based on hdarm above ?

Tried also to set dir_index, went well on sata partitions (ext3) on ide (reiser) partition it gave out an error message indicating cannot finding superblock..

[Elleni]

finished second pass of world -e. Went fine 1093 Packages, and just realplayer would not download but that s probably a temporary issue and nfs-utils (A file listed in the Manifest could not be found: /usr/portage/net-fs/nfs-utils/files/nfs.confd.old)

Took it bout 28 hours for it, awsome fast ! (thanks to comp. into ram I guess)

Any further answers/suggestions on some of my questions ?

Btw. Am I supposed to notify emerge errors as realplayer and nfs-utils or the one mentioned above (Failed Patch: koffice-18n-1.6.1-es-fix.diff!)

Only 3 out of 1100 Packages failed (this is very little faults in thus very good quote in my opinion) !

[steveL]

[daybyter]

Reproduced the koffice-i18n es patch problem. Is there a way to localize kword without the entire koffice-i18n package?

TIA,
Andreas

[Elleni]

I come from retrying. Problem with koffice-i18n persists. Try emerging unstable version as workaround, worked for me. (Needs also koffice-data and koffice-libs to be updated).

You will get following error though when trying to update world:

"Multiple versions within a single package slot have been..."

Tried remerge of realplayer too, seems to also be still a prob as both stable and unstable version could not be downloaded with Error: Couldn't download 'RealPlayer-10.0.8.805-20060718.i586.rpm'. Aborting..

Not a prob for me as having it already installed but I will try to report bug on this and on koffice-i18n too.

PS. Coming from installing an hp usb printer/scanner. Was awsome easy to setup, and xsane with usb useflag was all I needed to get scanner to work. Installation of this device was way easier then in w$ ! No cd with driver nothing needed. Pluged it in, kernel module was loaded, emerged hplip and added to default runlevel, choosed printer driver in cups, then started xsane and did first scanning, awesome ! Am very exited.

Linux and Gentoo are just improving so much redmonder should take care, opensource is more then ready to take over much users, even not experts...

Edit: For RealPlayer there already is opened a bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172068
Edit: Reported Bug, hope correctly.. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172351

[Elleni]

koffice-i18n emerges fine now.

Anyone knows more about aiglx and fglrx, is there anything planed so its worth waiting ?

[Samoth]

I have heard nothing about fglrx being able to do AIGLX. If you want to do 3D desktops, try XGL. If you have a card supported by the open-source drivers, then you can try to use the "radeon" driver and do AIGLX.
_________________
The Early Bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

[egoist]

How Lamarckian.

[Elleni]

translation ?