Gentoo Linux Part 3, Still going…

Now I have the box booting under it’s own power. Yay! Step in the right direction at least. Now to compile KDE 3.2, and everything that depends on it.

At first, when I tried to emerge kde, it tried installing KDE 3.1.5. Of course, I didn’t realize that until after it has compiled a lot of the dependencies (including the X server), and was about half-way into compiling KDE. KDE 3.1.5 is considered the last stable release by most of the distributions since KDE 3.2 just came out, oh about a week ago. I had to tell emerge through what seems like an oddly-named variable: ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″. This can be done on the command line (e.g. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ emerge kde or by adding it to /etc/make.conf. After I did that about three hours ago, the system compiled the additional dependencies and is still chugging away on KDE 3.2.

One of the cool things I discovered about emerge is that it allows more than one “action” to occur at once — a big problem I have with rpm, apt, and the like. In another screen, for instance, I can “emerge” a completely different application. For example, I “emerged” some other applications like bsd-games (only decent cribbage game, even if it’s text), vi (sorry, nano isn’t what I’m used to), gnupg (gotta have encryption), and I’ll probably think of a few others too.