On April 11, 2004 09:37 pm, Curtis Sloan wrote: > 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
1) You'd have a bootable system in fairly short order if you went with a stage 3 install, and used the binaries where appropriate. Plus, you'd see more improvement than most when you did an update world. Once the stage 3 is done, you've got a useable system. If you needed to wait for updates after that, it certainly wouldn't be any longer of a wait than waiting for an RPM to become available. 2) Thats a good reason to use Gentoo. My Gentoo box runs Rsync 2.6.0. I've given up trying to find either the srpm or the rpm for rsync 2.6.0 on Suse 8.2. And there's no way the compile will take anywhere near as long as updating Suse (which I will from now forth refer to as Novell Linux) to 9.0. So Emerge is FAR easier. My box started as Gentoo 1.2, and "emerge -update world" got me through 2.4 and wil continue to take me past that... It's FAR easier than updateing to 9.0, and then 9.1, etc, etc, etc... Sure, it takes a while to happen, but the box is totally useable while the emerge is happening, so this isn't really a problem for me. With an upgrade from Novell Linux 8.2 to Novell Linux 9.0, the box is down through the process. Frankly, downtime is worse than compiletime, in my view. Kev. > 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
