Hi all, First of all, a big thanks to Robert for the use of his facilities, and to Chris and Nick for their gentoo guruhood, and others who were there who all offered useful tips top this gentoo n00b.
The Good: * Sound just works. No surprises there, every distro I've thrown at this laptop has managed to make noise thru my speakers. * Eth0 also works - again no surprise - linux is pretty good with most wired ethernet (don't ask me about wireless). * USB storage thingies (thumb drive/pen drive/flash drive/whatever-ya-call-it) works. It automounted as soon as I plugged it into the USB port, but wouldn't let anyone but root browse its contents until they were added to the group "plugdev". I dicovered the group is called "plugdev" by checking who owns "/media/usbdrive". * Some power management stuff that never worked under Mandrake 10.0 now works fine! - When shutting down, Mandrake would require manual use of the "power" button to physically turn the laptop off after runlevel three was reached. Gentoo powers lappie off automagicly when it shuts down. - The is now a battery moniter in the bottom right corner (next to the clock) that tells me whether lappie is plugged in, how much battery "juice" is left, and if plugged in it tells me if it's charged or charging. Mandrake never gave me that. It could just be that I never URPMIed the right packages to make it work - maybe a recent version of Mandriva would've given me everything gentoo has given me. Overall, I think I'll stick with gentoo for a while. The Bad: * USB mouse only works if it is plugged in _after_ gentoo has booted. If I boot with the mouse plugged in I have to unplug, plug back in, and it goes straight away. Minor annoyance, but most n00bs wouldn't think of just unplugging and plugging back in, so could've been I show stopper for n00bs. The Ugly: * When booting, a whole lot of messages scroll past for about 15~20 seconds complaining that it can't remove certain files - "operation not permitted". I suspect this is part of a clean-up operation. If I could find the script that's doing this, I could knock it on the head. Not a show stopper, but also not a good look if I want to demo gentoo to a potential convert, hence I've categorised it under "ugly". Yuri de Groot Recent Gentoo convert
