Taking the Plunge-- Still

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jmneedham
> Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 4:09 PM
> To: Kris Bodenheimer
> Cc: kclug at kclug.org
> Subject: Re: Taking the Plunge-- Still
> 
> 
> Hi guys:
> 
> Thought Gentoo would be cool,but I am obviously not seasoned 
> enough to know what I am doing with it.  Got the X server up 
> and still dinking... made a decision to try and download the 
I'd be glad to help you get it up and running. But it is really
for advanced users.

> FTP install for SuSE 8.2 because it is still not Redhat or 
> Mandrake (no offense please to those of you who like those 
> distros, just not had good luck with them myself)... Debian 
> would be a good idea too, is there a P4 optimised version of 
> it out there and it is easy to install?  Is SuSE easy to 
> install?  I want to avoid building my own kernel for the time 
> being because I frankly don't know what i am doing 
> obviously... thanks for any and all help.
You really should learn, but you should learn with one that
that someone else has built for you and has all your hardware
working. Reason being it is much easier to learn one compile
at a time which setting you need to change to add functionality
for a single piece of hardware, than it is to try to figure
out *all* the settings you might need to tweak to get your
system up. Hence, a prebuilt kernel distro is the way to go.
Debian is also a bit heavy on the techie side, but getting
much better from what I hear. That said all of the major 
"user-friendly" distros have different drawbacks and
strengths. I don't care for SuSE, but others do. It's generally
an easy install, but *do* pay attention and *read* all the way
through the install docs *before* installing and keep them
handy while doing it. One wrong move and you could seriously
fubar the install, in ways that are not immediately obvious.
[Same goes for Mandrake, for different reasons]

Also on your gentoo. Missing modules is a sign you have disabled 
or not enabled an important section in the kernel configuration.
You really need to know what kind of hardware you have and 
modify the kernel compile parameters accordingly. I suspect you
left out support for a whole range of devices. If you send me 
your kernel config file and all the devices I'll send you back
a config that will load support for all your devices.

X has a new option to autoconfigure itself. So getting X to work 
is relatively painless these days.
XFree86 -configure
should do it.

Brian