I'm new to Gentoo, but not to Linux. I'm a Unix system administrator by trade and I like to tinker with this stuff in my spare time. I installed Gentoo in VMWare ans was impressed by the virtual machine appearing to be more responsive than the host machine. :-) So, now, I've replaced RedHat with Gentoo on my main personal machine (a 2ghz Toshiba Laptop).
I'm a new Gentoo user myself (from Debian Woody), but I've found some answers to these questions. Maybe I can be of some help.
I've been very happy with the documentation I've read so far on http://www.gentoo.org. However, I haven't successfully found answers to the following questions: 1. Gentoo does not use Sys V init... It looks like it uses some sort of dependency tree. Where can I learn more about this system? This is related to the wireless LAN questions, because I'd like to set up, say, privoxy to depend on eth0 or eth1.
See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/rc-scripts.xml for the documentation on that. From what I understand, it takes some dependency specifications from inside the actual init.d/* scripts to determine what gets executed when.
2. Wireless LAN - what's the "right way" to configure WEP? Right
now, I'm running a hacked up /etc/init.d/net.eth1 that calls
iwconfig directly. It works pretty well, but I like to do
things in ways that other people and any GUI configurators will
understand.
I hacked my init.d/net.eth1 script like that too. It seems to work ok, except when I start up Gnome 2.4, it takes a `net.eth1 restart` to get things working right. Anyone know why this might be?
3. How does the hotplugger know to start /etc/init.d/net.eth1 when
I insert my PCMCIA wireless card? I didn't set up any sort of
relation between eth1 and the orinoco module, nor do I know
where this might be set up by default.
Don't know, I don't use a PCMCIA wireless card.
4. Emerge -- does unmerge remove the files from the system? I
unmerged the e100 package (since I actually have an eepro100,
which comes with the kernel), but it didn't remove the files
from /lib/modules or the entry from the modules file. Is this
because removing kernel modules can be a Bad Idea, or am I using
the wrong features of Emerge?
I believe emerge unmerge does remove files from the system, but it does so 'intelligently'. It looks at all the files being removed (directories too) and compares the timestamps and contents to the files originally installed with that package. If they're not the same, it leaves them there. I'm not sure how this applies to kernel modules, but maybe that helps a tad.
5. ACPI - I've never used ACPI before, but I went ahead and added
"acpi" to the USE variable in my /etc/make.conf. The
/usr/bin/acpi program works as advertised -- but my CPU runs at
100% whenever I boot without adding "acpi=false" to my kernel
parameters. When I run "top", all of the usage shown as
"system" -- except for the cpu-time used by the user processes
that you'd normally expect to be running. I'm running the
stock 2.4.20-gentoo-r8 kernel, and the toshiba_acpi module along
with the smattering of other modules in the directory (ac,
batter, button, fan, processor, thermal). Is there any way to
use ACPI without having my CPU pegged all the time?
Not sure. I use ACPI too, but I haven't had time to mess with it.
Enjoy.
-- Joel Konkle-Parker
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