On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 10:24:43AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > 1. How can I ensure that my Gentoo system has only Free software? [...]
This is being worked on. However, due to the recent security issues, the development of ACCEPT_LICENSES has been pushed back in favor of signed ebuilds/e-classes/... See the threads on "License Checking" and "Gentoo Internal Structure" on gentoo-dev [1]. > 2. I'm a little confused about the nature of a released distribution and > supported architectures. > > My main reason for interest in Gentoo is to run it on my Alpha -- these > machines benefit more significantly from optimizations than PCs tend to. > Some of the online docs say that Alpha is a "supported" architecture; > yet the only installation CDs for them are in "experimental". That > gives me pause when considering using Gentoo on Alpha for critical work. > Is that pause justified? At Gentoo there is a distinction between the installation and the running aspect of the distribution. The Alpha installation CDs are in experimental, but once installed the fact that you installed from an "experimental" LiveCD or not is completely unrelated. > Similarly, does one generally track the "stable" distribution by setting > ARCH="x86" instead of ARCH="~x86"? If so, are security updates pushed > to the stable distribution as well? I observed that, following the > manual for building my kernel, gentoo-sources fetched a fairly old > (2.4.20) kernel -- one that may have several security holes (though > there were so many patches to it, it was hard to evaluate). In your case, "alpha" would be appropriate. Security updates are immediately pushed in ARCH as well as in ~ARCH. The gentoo-sources ebuild in particular has been patched for the recent brk()-flaws. You can run "emerge -pl gentoo-sources" to view the ChangeLog. > 3. How do I enable kdm? > > I emerge'd kde, but found no /etc/init.d/ script for kdm to use with > rc-update. You have to add "xdm" to the default runlevel, and edit /etc/rc.conf so that "kdm" is used for the graphical login. A nice document is http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/desktop.xml, which describes this too. > 4. What happens if I add "sandbox" to features in /etc/make.conf? That > sounds like a feature I'd like, but none of the manpages I looked at > would explain what it does. It is activated by default. Removing it is very dangerous :) > 5. As I work more on the system, I get more and more errors like the > following from emerge: [...] I personally haven't encountered this yet, but you might want to check up on the Gentoo forums [2]. Wkr, Sven Vermeulen [1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel [2] http://forums.gentoo.org -- ^__^ And Larry saw that it was Good. (oo) Sven Vermeulen (__) http://www.gentoo.org Gentoo Documentation Project
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