StokeBloke.com

Gentoo

I have been using Gentoo linux now for about 5 years or so. In my house we have 5 computers running Gentoo linux. 2 of these dual boots Windows XP so I can play some of my games I havent tried to get working under Linux.

This page has changed into just some simple gentoo notes. Maybe my blog will replace this.

Installed Software

Below is the list of main software I installed. Other packages may have been emerge too but I dont use them

Desktop

Graphics

Network

Misc

WebSite Dev

Problems

Here are some of the problems I encounted when setting up my new PC with Gentoo.

Xorg -configure did work with my 20inch TFT monitor

In the xorg-config.xml document the Xorg -configure created a xorg.conf.new which would not work with my TFT monitor. The monitor kept saying the refresh was too high. I had to change the max VertRefresh to be the 60Hz standard of the TFT monitor.

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "FUS"
        ModelName    "5110 FA"
        HorizSync    30.0 - 82.0
        VertRefresh  50.0 - 60.0
        Option      "DPMS"
EndSection

German keyboard for Xorg

After a little searching I found the simple solution on setting the keyboard to German. Simply set the XkbLayout value in the InputDevice of the keyboard to be de. You also need to set the XkbVariant to be nodeadkeys if you want the ~, ^, ` etc to work first go. The changes to the section look like this

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option      "XkbRules" "xorg"
        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "de"
        Option      "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
EndSection

Blue Skin GMPlayer

I had a strange problem that whenever I started gmplayer, the skins always appeared blue. This was not because all the skins were blue. It tured out it did not like the 16bit X server. To fix this I changed the xorg.conf to contain the DefaultDepth 24 and DefaultFbbpp 32 to the Screen section. Like so

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        DefaultFbbpp 32
        SubSection "Display"

Misc

Here is a script, I have no idea where I got it from, it allows a random background to be picked every time its called. This can then be added to crontab to change your background every n minutes.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os,random,sys
from stat import *

def get_bgimgs():
    h = []
    #add your paths here no need to remove any if you dont want to
    #any path that isnt there will be skipped
    paths =["~/pictures/backgrounds", "~/pictures/dir2"]
    for imgpth in paths:
        imgs = os.listdir(os.path.expanduser(imgpth))
        for i in imgs:
            i = i.replace(" ","\ ")
            try:
                mode = os.stat(os.path.expanduser(imgpth)+"/"+i)[ST_MODE]
                if S_ISREG(mode):
                    #print "\tAdding " + i
                    h.append(imgpth+"/"+i)
            except OSError:
                print "Error processing " + i


    filename = random.choice(h)
    print "Setting background to " + filename
    os.system("feh --bg-scale " + filename)


print "Processing backgrounds"
get_bgimgs()