the corner office

Been studying, mostly, but I've made a bit of progress setting up the new PC. Xorg and Gnome installed without a hitch earlier this week, and getting the ATI drivers for my new graphics card working was a breeze, too. The ATI-specific X config tool (fglrxconfig) isn't the most user-friendly of configurers, but it did the job. I had my monitor up and running without any hassles. The Gnome installation is also a lot nicer. In addition to the +kitchen_sink standard Gnome install, there's now a gnome-light package which installs a bare-minimum Gnome desktop, leaving you free to pick what bits and bobs you want to add. The main saving this brings is not being dependent on some of the bigger Gnome packages, like Evolution and Mozilla. I noticed though, that Mozilla still gets installed to satisfy some odd dependency, but you can apparently sidestep this by setting 'firefox' USE flags which tells Gnome to rely on firefox wherever it needs a browser engine.

(The only trick is that if you install Firefox natively on x86_64, you can't use old-fashioned 32-bit plugins like Flash. The only way around this is using 32-bit Firefox binaries, meaning you have to have a source version of either Mozilla or Firefox, and the binary version. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

Setting up a Gentoo box from scratch takes you through a couple of milestones. The first one is getting the kernel built and bootable. Once you can actually boot up the machine, you can start mucking around with drivers and whatnot, knowing that you can always roll back to an earlier kernel if things go wrong. Usually at this stage you get ssh going, so that you can connect to the box and do all the set-up remotely.

The second big milestone is getting X (and your desktop environement - in my case, Gnome) up and running. This gives you a GUI to work with. A GUI is nice, but for me, the third milestone is getting sound going. When you can listen to mp3s, the machine is 'inhabitable' :-)

So this evening I got the sound drivers set up, which was also a straightforward case of following the documentation. I love Linux, because it lets you do cool things that you just can't do (or conceive of doing) with Windows. For example, to test whether sound is working, the Gentoo ALSA docs suggest that you just redirect random noise to your sound device with

cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

Lots of static for free!

Anyway. Next step was installing VNC on my old PC. That's allowed me to 'move' across to the new PC, but still I get back into my old PC's Gnome desktop to do stuff like type this blog entry into my Notes client.

Next step is to start installing apps on this machine, and start moving my data and junk across. This is all still going incredibly smoothly...

Links (for future reference)

• Gentoo ATI driver HOWTO
• Unofficial ATI drivers FAQ - for installing the proprietary ATI drivers
• Gentoo Linux ALSA guide - sound configuration guide