Hi,

I have a question about how to re-emerge a package in Gentoo with new USEFLAG settings.

I emerged KDE in Gentoo without the arts USEFLAG, thus my KDE sound system does not work. I have already set up ALSA and needs to re-emerge KDE with "arts" flag in.

I updated the make.conf file and used the following command:
emerge --newuse kdebase_meta

However, it shows me that the KDE is up-to-date and does not re-merge it for me.

Can anyone let me know how to re-emerge a component in Gentoo with the new USEFLAG?

Many thanks.

Hello,

SEt the new use flags, then run "emerge -auDvN world". Everything in need of a recompilation will be emerged again.

You don't need to. In fact, I highly recommend you against doing so. Arts is crappy, tends to waste cpu uselessly, adds even more latency (not that you care about that for a desktop, but still). It adds yet another intermediate layer in top of ALSA, and gives not additional features (ALSA now enabled dmix by default, so there's no problem even if your sound chip can't do hardware mixing). Arts also has its own assort of bugs, and is completely unmaintained since years ago.

KDE can use a 3rd party program to play system sounds, if that's really that important for you. Look in the control panel, you can set an external program like mplayer, mpg123 or play to play the system sounds, no need to enable arts just for that. The rest of the stuff should work via ALSA, like it always did.

Hi

Thanks for your reply and explanation. I am going to take your advice and not installing arts.

I now understand why there are so many posts on internet saying "do xxxx without aRts"...

Many thanks.