Hi Curtis. If it helps any, I'm running Gentoo on a PII-400 with 448M RAM (3x128M sticks, and a 64M stick - for those wondering about the odd number).
Yes, the compile times can be a little long, but I find they're pretty reasonable for most things, once you have the core system and the usual dependancies set up. For example, Apache only tacks about 20 - 30 minutes to compile. (I should time it one of these days, or sit at the computer during the compile.....) That said, I don't think Gentoo is for everyone. It probably isn't the best distro for a desktop system - especially for a non-technical person. However those who are more interested in servers and have a technical background will love Gentoo for it's simplicity, and speed. (My server does have a sound card, but I don't need sound on a server. So, I haven't played with alsa or oss too extensively yet... That, and my kernel is still 2.4.x) My thoughts. Shawn -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Curtis Sloan Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2004 9:38 PM To: CLUG General Subject: Re: [clug-talk] Gentoo & linux-2.6.x/ALSA On Sat April 10 2004 21:56, nick wrote: > On April 10, 2004 02:22 pm, Curtis Sloan wrote: > > I don't use Gentoo, but I do compile the most recent ALSA source releases > > in addition to the kernel driver (can't get enough bleeding edge ;-) > > Which would be a good reason to use gentoo. ;-D Touch�. :-) I am not opposed at all to using Gentoo; my two outstanding reasons for not using are: 1) I only have a PIII 450MHz w/ 256MB RAM and compiling WINE alone takes two hours, and 2) I can be unsettlingly lazy sometimes (i.e. untested binary packages are my friends sometimes). ;-D Feel free to refute either of these reasons and you may convert me, especially point 1. ;-) > <snip> > > > > Does having an ALSA USE flag on Gentoo mean for the kernel, or for > > compiling ALSA separately? Sorry for not being "hip" and in-the-know > > about Gentoo. ;-D > > Actually it tells emerge [gentoo package manager] to add in ALSA support to > packages which have it as a compile-time option. That in turn causes ALSA > to become a necessary dependancy, hence it gets compiled. Caveat emptor with me not being a Gentoo expert, but I would expect that this is where ALSA source releases such as alsa-libs and alsa-oss are being called upon (to be compiled). Those two packages don't require the configured Linux kernel source to compile, but they do need to find an already compiled ALSA driver (and alsa-driver requires compiled kernel source :-P). So there may be a bit of a 'chicken and the egg' scenario happening for you. Of course this is strictly conjecture, since I'm speaking of source tarball compiles, and not emerge packages. > When I said I > injected it that means I told it ALSA was installed, which it was, but in a > different way. Kinda confusing, esp if another package needs the ALSA > source to be able to compile. Maybe not a bad thing, if you did already have some alsa-lib, alsa-oss and alsa-utils portage packages installed (compiled? What do Gentooers say, anyway? ;-) previously. If not, that could be where things are going south. I think the sometimes confusing part is that "ALSA" is now included in the kernel (as of 2.6), but all this refers to is alsa-driver. <snip> > > So I still need alsa-lib, but alsa-driver is in the kernel? Yup. Here's the skinny: o alsa-driver: available in 2.6 kernel. Available separately as well, but requires the "configured" kernel sources to compile correctly (from the ALSA documentation). This might be your problem -- the kernel sources need to be "configured", which I translate as meaning "compiled once" (make bzImage && make modules at least; an unpacked Linux kernel source tarball is not enough). o alsa-libs: AFAIK, the libs are only needed for other programs (but not to access the driver). I really should look into it deeper. Caveat emptor, but I say think of it as a *-devel type RPM. o alsa-utils: are really only for setting your mixer settings -- especially the first time, since all channels are muted by default. Maybe other programs can work around this by using the OSS Mixer API -- I'm not sure. o alsa-oss: OSS compatibility library. It's still important to have OSS emulation from ALSA for a number of programs (a lot of id Software games come to mind ;-). So, at the end of the day, you still need all four, but nowadays one is provided via the kernel (alsa-driver). HTH, Curtis _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
