Daniel Robbins Sven Vermeulen Chris Houser Jerry Alexandratos Seemant Kulleen Tavis Ormandy Aron Griffis Brad House Guy Martin Pieter Van den Abeele Joe Kallar John P. Davis Pierre-Henri Jondot Eric Stockbridge Rajiv Manglani Jungmin Seo Stoyan Zhekov Jared Hudson Colin Morey Jorge Paulo Carl Anderson Jon Portnoy Zack Gilburd Jack Morgan Benny Chuang Erwin Joshua Kinard Grant Goodyear Gerald J. Normandin Jr. Donnie Berkholz Ken Nowack Lars Weiler This is the Gentoo Handbook, an effort to centralise Gentoo/Linux information. 1.60 March 6, 2004 In this part you learn how to install Gentoo on your system. Users not familiar with Gentoo do not always know that choice is what Gentoo is all about. You can install Gentoo in many ways. You can use our LiveCD, an existing distribution etc. If you want to install Gentoo using the Internet, you need to setup networking. To be able to install Gentoo, you must create the necessary partitions. This chapter describes how to partition a disk for future usage. Gentoo installs work through socalled stage-files. In this chapter we describe how you extract a stage-file and configure Portage. Independent of what stage you chose, the eventual result is that you have a Gentoo base system at your disposal. This chapter describes how to progress to that stadium. The Linux kernel is the core of every distribution. This chapter explains how to configure your kernel. You need to edit some important configuration files. In this chapter you receive an overview of these files and an explanation on how to proceed. Several bootloaders exist. Each one of them has its own way of configuration. In this chapter we'll describe all possibilities for you and step you through the process of configuring a bootloader to your needs. As mentioned before, Gentoo is about choices. In this chapter we help you choose and install some important tools. You're almost done. We'll just create one (or more) users for your system and leave the installation to reboot into a brand new Gentoo system. Now you have your Gentoo system, but what's next? Learn how to work with Gentoo: installing software, altering variables, changing portage behaviour etc. USE-flags are a very important aspect of Gentoo. In this chapter, you learn to work with USE-flags and understand how USE-flags interact with your system. The main reason for portage is to maintain the software on your system. In this chapter you learn how to get information from a package, update your package database, install/remove/update software and more... Gentoo's Portage allows for several features that improve portage-related aspects, such as build time. This chapter explains the existing features. You can tweak Portage to your own needs/environment. Learn how to protect files, select mirrors, change directory locations and more. Gentoo uses a special initscript format which, amongst other features, allows dependency-driven decisions and virtual initscripts. This chapter explains all these aspects and explains how to deal with these scripts. With Gentoo you can easily manage the environment variables for your system. This chapter explains how you do that, and also describes frequently used variables. Gentoo is able to turn your system into an extremely powerful desktop. This part lets you discover the power of the Linux desktop and how Gentoo enables you to deal with this immense plethora of choices. XFree86 is the X Window server which allows users to have a graphical environment at their fingertips. We explain what XFree86 is, how to install it and what the various configuration options are. One of the most used desktop environments is KDE. This chapter tries to describe all aspects of KDE, including installation, configuration, usage, ... Another frequently used environment is GNOME. As like with the previous chapter we describe all aspects of GNOME, including installation, configuration, usage, ... Right next to the desktop environments, which tend to cover all aspects of desktop usage, we have the window managers which only provide an interface to manage the various graphical tools. Here we try to give a sum up on the available window managers. A desktop without sound is hardly a desktop. This chapter explains how to setup ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) on your system and have it work flawlesly with your installed DE/WM. It is a frequently heard myth that Linux doesn't support 3D. This is hardly true as you will find out when you read this chapter. A desktop by itself is a desktop. But many users have a LAN at their disposal and really like to have their Gentoo desktop integrated in the existing network. This chapter explains how to setup Samba for file- and printer sharing.