how do i setup the mirrors then ? shorly i need them to be able to download files, e.g. Gnome. I think i saw somewhere that i can d/l Gnome 2.8 :-) but can i download things without the mirror being set ?

if you do not have any through mirror select it will automatically cycle through them, and they are all pretty fast.

so can i just leave the whole mirror thing alone then ? also could i just skip this page ? http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ap=4#doc_chap1

do i have to change any settings for the Rsync etc or is everything ok to just be left alone?

you can ignore the mirrorselect stuff, as for the file protection page, I have been using gentoo for a few months now and have never seen that page

by default /etc is protected try running emerge info it's protected by /etc/make.globals. for mirrorselect you can let it choose the best mirror or you can manually choose from a list if you want to manually choose mirrorselect -i is what you want

ok this might sound like a stoopid question but im not sure how to use gentoo. how would i install Gnome ? would "emerge Gnome2.8" work ? i really want Gnome 2.8, im not so keen on 2.6 but 2.4 is good!

if anyone can help please reply
Thanks

emerge search whatyouwant

or you can manually find it in the portage directory tree:
look in /usr/portage/ there are category directories followed by application directories, and inside those are version Ebuild files, emerge NameOfEbuild or emerge Path/To/Ebuild, emerge search will try to find something for you, so for instance if you want x w/ gnome type emerge xorg-x11 gnome, if you want a specific version of eather find the proper e-build and use it, if you get an error saying you need ~keyword type: ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge whatyouwant all in one line. and you can spcify multiple things to emerge at the same time. to see everything that will be downloaded and installed in an emerge type emerge -p whatyouwant and it will give you a list. dependancies will be taken care of for you.

emerge -s <package> works well or try esearch <package>. Can't say one is better than the other but esearch is faster. Gnome 2.8 is hard masked so ~x86 won't help emerge it. you could add the gnome 2.8 stuff to /etc/portage/package.unmask but I wouldn't recommend that as alot of stuff is probly broken. what I would do is emerge gnome 2.6 or 2.4 until they fix problem and unmask 2.8 if you prefer to use 2.4 you can use emerge =gnome-2.4.2

Thanks for the info, guys. I've been having Gentoo issues as well. When I'm at the point of running bootstrap.sh to build system, I've received a message indicating portage should be updated to the latest version yet the docs don't provide info on how to do this AND this happens in the middle of a new installation.

Any ideas? I'm installing 2004.2.

Peace...

there is a new version of portage. Do emerge portage

Ok. Will this be safe to do even though my installation hasn't completed yet?

Peace...

it's safe

wicked i now have a working gentoo system after one failed attempt except one problem which i cannot figure out. when booting the lasŧ thing the system does is try to bring up eth0 but i get this error.

do you know why it would do this ? i added support for my NIC in the kernel config and i am pretty sure that i did everything correctly, the liveCD auto-detected my NIC!

can anyone give me any advice please ?

is the module for nic loaded?

if you compiled your own kernel you eather made the netowrk card driver a module and did not tell it to load at boot, or you did not compile that into the kernel at all. if you did not compile your own kernel you should have cause now I can't help you ;-) j/k look in /lib/modules/[kernel-name]/kernel/drivers/net/ for the correct module, if you find it type: modrpobe modulename to load it, you can add a module to some file (I think it is modules.conf somewhere) to load it automatically, but I have never bothered with that, I compile things I need all the time directly into the kernel, and things I use sometimes I manually load as needed.