Feedback

[incabolocabus]

Hi,

First off, great work. Gentoo rocks.

I'm a seasoned redhat desktop user since 7.0, but I've made the switch. It really wasn't bad at all.

I went the route of the GRP cds, which I was happy to pay a paltry 15 bucks for.

Everything went smoothly (more or less, the less being my own dumb fault) except my genkernel.

Two Points:

1) genkernel / liveCD
I figured since I bought the P4 compiled CDs, the genkernel would have figured out my processor type in the kernel options.

Maybe I missed the line in the installation guide, but this small omission cost me several hours of searching to figure out why drm for my matrox would not work. It turns out that drm modules require a symbol (cmpxchg) that appears in the kernel for processors greater than 386. I saw many posts about this missing symbol, but no real info about how to solve it.

So, in summary,
1) It woul be nice if genkernel took care of figuring out the processor (or at least the binary CD had that info on it)
2) I don't know the life-cycle of xfree-drm, if it will be retired or not with 2.6 coming and all, but it would be nice if the build failed (not a gcc master, so I might be wrong here) when the implicit declaration of the missing symbol (cmpxchg) was discovered.


2) Graphical installer thoughts

Yeah, I know, graphical installers are for wimps (I actually learned alot during the non-graphical installation and am no longer a wimp especially after mounting my /home drives on hdb and managing to work around an existing windows 2000 installation without any problems) but I feel that for gentoo to really capture users, a graphical installer option might help.

If anything, some kind of checklist/wizard type prompting with help could have sped the process up for me immensely - its hard to figure out what you are doing flipping through 24 pages of printed guide and finding a link that you just can't click on... :)

Thanks again,
another convert

[BradN]

It appears someone filed a bug report regarding genkernel detecting the CPU type, and this will probably be fixed:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28045

There was also a bug report about the cmpxchg issue, however they closed it without modifying the ebuild to give a warning message or anything. I e-mailed the person who closed it, so maybe they'll do something about this too.

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27345