New plaything

I’ve made myself a christmas present and got another ASUS since they wouldn’t repair my old one.

Intel Core 2 Duo T7200
2G RAM
120G S-ATA disk
ATI X1600
Intel High Definition Soundcard

Same procedure as last year: and boot from a random Linux-based rescue CD. Use parted or qtparted to resize Windows. Create swap and Linux partition. Wanted to use Gentoo Minimal Installation. Latest version does not support Ethernet and WIFI hardware. Used Kubuntu LiveCD (according to a forum this CD supports the Realtek 8111 Ethernet card). and followed the Gentoo handbook (one forgets a lot). For the use flags I checked here to see what goes with my CPU.

Video: The graphic card requires ati-drivers-8.30.3-r1 (there was an important bugfix). aticonfig produced a good stub xorg.conf, and after adding stuff for the touchpad and some options for the fglrx X now works (actually it’s getting less painfull every time). Now my beloved NWN works again, yayyyyy.
I’m using fluxbox again, although Ohad showed me his Beryl setup; I must admit it IS intriguing. As Beryl is a window manager just like fluxbox, I need xfce4 (smaller than KDE or Gnome) instead.
I can’t use AIGLX at the moment so I followed the Gentoo wiki to use Xgl. On some systems it seems to disable the Windows key (which I use for most of my short cuts) and the alt gr key. Thanks to Kevin Colyar and josteinaj for pointing out that there are XkbOptions and the .Xmodmap file to improve that dire situation. Also the shift+backspace logout is a bit annoying, adding keycode 22 = BackSpace BackSpace to .Xmodmap helps.
Installing Beryl on Gentoo is easy too, and it looks quite nice.

WIFI: needs the ipw3945 driver and then just works. – now also with wpa.

Ethernet: is a Realtek RTL8111 which works with the kernel’s r1000 module.

Sound: works with Gentoo’s alsa-driver. After emerging it, alsaconf ensures that everything is set up properly. Although I’ve got some problems as there is no volume control – have to check that.
Instead of xmms I try songbird (ebuild from the Sunrise overlay project) and so far it works. I haven’t tried all the features yet (there are plenty of them), but the essentials (playing audio files) works after I emerged gst-plugins-mad.

Suspend: works after increasing ProcSetting extra_pages_allowance in the suspend2.conf and following the Gentoo Software Suspend guide. At the moment I use the suspend2-sources.

Cardreader: I’ll try the Gentoo guide as soon as I get my digicam back. – w00t, works.

Bluetooth: couldn’t test that yet, as I have no suitable device.

Webcam: under development.

Oh, by the way I’m not using amd64 at the moment. I’ll start with chroot and testing if things work out before I switch :)