X11 Video Driver Confusion

jschweg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 85

Hi guys, I'm not new to linux in general, however I am new to Gentoo and have also never really used Linux as anything other than a server OS (Until now that is). I'm confused about a few things and hope to have some of these questions cleared up.

I got a little ahead of myself and compiled xorg-x11 without reading the How-To first. I didn't set the VIDEO_CARD variable in the make.conf (I have an nvidia card). Can I go back and add that variable, then re-emerge xorg-x11?

Also I don't really understand the whole video driver thing :oops:

. Do I need to emerge the nvidia-driver package to get X working (or do you need it to use the above variable?), or is this just for hardware acceleration? When I used to use linux years ago, I thought that I just built the support for the video card into the kernel.

wah · Posted: Wed Dec 13, 2006 8:32 pm Post subject:

jschweg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 85

Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it.

Only issue is that when I run:

jschweg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 85

Was I supposed to type:

wah · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 1:30 am Post subject:

jschweg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 85

No problem, I'm getting closer now, but still having some problems.

On my inital install, I chose to use the LiveCD kernel, which means that there isn't a copy of gentoo-sources in /usr/src. During the xorg emerge it did install gentoo-sources, but obviously there was no .config file to edit when it went to install the nvidia package, so the emerge terminated.

Now that the src is installed, do I need to build a kernel to generate a .config, then re-emerge xorg-x11? Of course when I use pretend now, it doesn't show the nvidia package as a dependancy anymore...