Gentoo help please!!!

[geeojr at krombie.net]

> I am/was attempting to do a stage 1 install and when I get to the
> make.conf file I have problems. I am following the documentation from
> Gentoo for the x86 and it sayes very little as far as what you "NEED" to
> do here. I Know there are probably lots of things that could be
> optimized here. In the actual file "make.conf" only one line is
> uncommented. Is it supposed to stay like that? I went and uncommented
> all lines that looked like commands and set paths.

Most of the options in there are for customizations. The defaults do most
people just fine. There are some things you should customize in there in
order to Gentoo to take advantage of your particular hardware. Below is an
example from one of my systems:

USE="3dnow sse mmx imap mysql php gd truetype aalib jpeg gif png -X -qt
-perl -kde -gnome -alsa -arts -gtk -sdl"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-mp -O3 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

These should, in my opinion, always be setup with Gentoo. The USE variable
tells gentoo what software you want it to build for or ignore in the case
of the ones starting with '-'. This is from a headless server so you'll
probably want to clean it up a little (i.e. put kde or gnome back in).
Adjust the CFLAGS for your processor, in your case just make it an
athlon-xp. CXXFLAGS just re-uses the CFLAGS variable. In addition, you also
might consider:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS tends to pull somewhat newer packages and is considered
somewhat more unstable -- use at your own risk (I just removed it from most
of my systems). MAKEOPTS allows you to pass options to make. '-j3' tells
make to run 3 jobs at the same time. General rule of thumb is to set this
to one more than the number of processors. This will help keep your system
saturated during installation. It might even shave a few seconds off of
your compiles.

> Also I have an AMD XP
> processor so as the Gentoo docs say to specify "-march=athlon-xp" BUT in
> the make file it also has as an example after that "-03 pipe"

I have an athlon-xp that runs fine with these pretty conservative
optimizations.

> Maybe I should just go with a stage 2 or 3 .

It saves quite a bit of time to go with 2 or 3 and probably doesn't hurt
you all that much in speed. At least, it's nothing you'll ever notice.

Hope this helps,

Jeremy R. Geeo

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