Finally got nvidia to work. Apparently, there is some problem with the current nvidia drivers and kernel-2.6.13. So, I unmasked nvidia-glx, nvidia-kernel and 2 other dependencies that were required for the drivers. After emerging, just edited the xorg.conf file as given in the handbook and restarted X. I'm using the 7676 nvidia drivers. It's working great now. Time to try out some games .



I'll get to them as well. After spending so much time with this, I'm not leaving any stone unturned. I'm going to learn this distro down to the basics . Thanks for your help.

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your GUI will run alot faster when you get the nvidia driver working.

run "emerge -pv nvidia-kernel"
what nvidia driver version does it report.

I had a problem with some drivers on my AMD64, it turned out to be a driver bug, and i fixed it by changing versions.

to get a list of nvidia driver versions available in portage run



you can cause portage to install a different version of nvidia-driver with the command



be sure that you also change nvidia-glx version to match the nvidia-kernel version.

The latest 1.0.6xxx version would probably work, this is rock stable.

but if you want to go th other way, and try a bleeding edge version which gentoo calls *probably stable but not well tested* (Meaning that nvidia have released the driver as stable, but its new to gentoo, and not tested well amungst gentoo users)

then you can install a version highter that the one gentoo installs by default.

to do this you will need to tell portage that you dont mind using *stable but not well tested* versions of nvidia kernel and lxlike so...



(basically, add the package name, followed by ~x86 *meaning testing for x86)

then running



after you have emerged a different version of nvidia-kernel, unload the nvidia kernel like so "rmmod nvidia"

re-load it "modprobe nvidia"

set Xorg to use nvidia instead of nv

then re-start xdm.

It seems complicated, but after a while, emerge portage becomes second nature.

Gentoo's speed relies on how you install it, what CFLAGS you used, and what USE flags you set.

There are many things you can do to improve the speed further. like using native linux threads insead of the default pthreads, and using kernel's optimised for desktops, and aggressive schedulers etc etc.. but i dont want to ovrload you with Info

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Well, I'm done .

I must say, it was quite easy after I removed the faulty RAM. A straight, simple, by-the-book, easy install. Since I read the handbook 3 times already, it wasn't a big deal. Started the installation at 9PM with a stage 3 and by 1:00 AM, I had X running, and alsa configured and was listening to songs using mpg123 while I was finishing the base configuration. I gave the command 'emerge kdebase-startkde kicker' and went to sleep and in the morning, I had a working KDE installation.

But, in KDE, i realised that konsole wasn't installed . Back to the console and 'emerge konsole'. Now, I've got a konsole and an empty KDE installation. So, the rest of the morning consisted of emerging Konqueror, amarok, ymessenger, firefox and kate.

Now, it's a pretty neat installation. but a lot of things are missing. So, I decided to have the entire KDE package now, so 'emerge kde-meta'. It might take some time, but I'm in no hurry. The important things are working fine.

But, for some reason, nvidia still doesn't load up. I've tried



but it still isn't working. This is the error I got:



Any suggestions?

And another thing... gentoo is definitely fast ... it starts up in 40 sec upto kdm and shutdown from KDE to power off is in 20 sec.... but I was kinda hoping for blazing speed . Of course, the sound in amarok doesn't skip no matter what I do, and the applications and programs open much faster than they did in slackware, but it's not exactly as fast as I expected it to be. I was under the impression that the windows would actually zoom around irrespective of the load.

Maybe the lag is because I haven't installed nvidia yet and only have 256MB RAM. Of course gentoo on 256MB RAM is faster than Slackware on 512MB.

I think gentoo is kinda neat. Once you have everything installed and in place, it's a pretty cool distro. I think people are afraid of gentoo (like I was) because of the huge amount of documentation to go through and the long hours to be spent in configuring the system. It loses its purpose if the system on which it is installed doesn't have a decent (atleast a 100kbps download speed) internet connection.

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No problem, answering forum questions is a welcome break from job seeking [ just left university ] :s


It seems that one of the ram sticks was over-clocked, but surviving.

Maybe a gentoo stage 1 full compile for several hours on an over clocked ram slot must have killed it.

Good luck and next time, make sure your ram chips frequency's match

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Well, I don't know how to say this but ... I guess I've been wrong the whole time. I was under the impression that if slack and winxp were working, there shouldn't be a significant problem with the hardware.

But now, I just checked each RAM individually using memtest and it seems that one of my RAMs is screwed up. I'll have to get it replaced but I don't think that will happen for another 2 months.

Thanks for your help ... I really appreciate you taking your time out for replying so regularly.

I really want to try gentoo out and I'll give one last attempt tonight with my 256MB RAM (I checked it thoroughly and there are no problems). I'll post back on the results.

Thanks once again for your time .

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