General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?

[Arc Riley]

These days it's not hard at all.  It has a nice installer.

Because Portage is more active than other package systems, people generally
hit more blockers/etc and need to resolve conflicts.  There's a fairly
complete set of instructions on this through the Gentoo Docs project (a
wiki), but it takes more grey matter than other distros as you continue to
use it, and is why many people are afraid of it.  I don't recommend it to
people who don't know or are afraid of editing config files.

Unlike other distros, we don't really have "versions".  My system here was
installed 3-4 years ago, and I've got the same set of packages and support
as anyone installing fresh.  The releases, such as 2008.0, are just
up-to-date install releases so you can start out with a mostly updated
system.

Updating the whole system is as easy as "emerge -auv world", which shows you
(v) what it'll upgrade (u) and ask you (a) for confirmation before doing
anything else.

Unlike other distros you also have MUCH more control over how things are
compiled.  You can select to turn on features you need, disable things you
don't want, etc via USE flags.  For some math/sci apps that can be pretty
important, where other distros just try to compile for most users.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Labitt, Bruce <labittb1 at tycoelectronics.com>
wrote:

>  Hmm, not sure I'm scared of Gentoo – I don't know enough to be scared!
>  I've used SuSE in the past, it is ok.
>
>
>
> How hard is it to set up Gentoo?
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* Arc Riley [mailto:arcriley at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Wednesday, July 09, 2008 5:27 PM
> *To:* Labitt, Bruce
> *Cc:* Coleman Kane; gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> *Subject:* Re: General Procedure to get ATI/DRI card running?
>
>
>
> Everyone I work with who uses the radeonhd drivers uses Gentoo.
>
> I agree with Coleman's assessment - it was said earlier in this thread that
> you'd likely need to upgrade your X server, it really is ancient, and likely
> Mesa too.
>
> The output shows that the radeonhd driver does support your card and is
> detecting it, but something else is going wrong down the chain.  Since newer
> Mesa's have expanded OpenGL support (ie, OpenGL 2.0) some apps may not even
> work unless you're running a semi-recent version of it.
>
> If Gentoo scares you, the newest OpenSUSE may be your best bet.
>
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