Gentoo on my laptop

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I spent the greater portion of the last two weeks installing Gentoo on my laptop. I wanted to get more in depth with Linux internals and administration and additionally my laptop is somewhat underpowered and it benefitted greatly from doing a source install rather than a binary install. Things are much snappier under Gentoo than they were under Mandrake--which is the Linux distribution I used prior.

I have ALSA, APM, Gnome (with Metacity), Xmms, GDM, vim, pure-ftpd, X, gcc 3.2, pcmcia with a wireless ethernet card (SMC 2632) and a series of other things all installed and working happily with everything else.

The Gentoo forums are great for help as is the mailing list. I found I was able to fix all my problems without too much looking around.

At some point I may post the various configurations involved in getting ALSA and the wireless pcmcia stuff working--that was probably the hardest part and required the most tinkering. The rest was cake.

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