I agree with elvis about the gentoo handbooks! However, I highly recommend O'Reilly books - the one that I keep around is "Running Linux". You can find info here:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux4/however, most distributions of Linux have slightly different variations on how they do things - for that - enter the gentoo handbooks.
Hi elvis, Major Rock,
Major Rock - following your link to your thread I got it working -- Thank You!!!
One question: How do you permanently insert the svgalib_helper module? Whammoed's site says:
[add svgalib_helper to the /etc/modules/.autoload.d/<kernel_version> to load the module at boot time]
Do you mind listing the command line you used to do this? (I would hate to screw up my kernel at this point...)
Again, thanks!!!
I'm glad you got it working - that one was a pain. I had to dip back to my C programming knowledge a bit to resolve that one. As far as your autoload kernel module question, whammoed's guide was for his linux distro (I believe LFS) - for gentoo, it's different. This is one of those places where things diverge a bit based on the distro. For gentoo, you're going to modify /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 (assuming you are using a 2.6 kernel (which you should be - you chose to do this during gentoo install).
I use VI to edit files - but I use that for work every day so I am used to it. Actually I use vim which is vi- improved. It is not user-friendly for the beginner user. But it is very powerful if you learn it. If you just want to get by with a windows-notepad-style editor, gentoo includes one called nano. To use this, just type:
nano <name of file>
also under most Unixes, to find out how to use a command, type:
man <command>
which will bring up the manual for that software. So you should do a man nano before using nano, so that you know how to exit the program once you're done using it, etc.
if you are interested in vim (my favorite), you can get it by doing
emerge vim
so, in summary, to change my autoload configuration, I used the command:
vim /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
and I think the O'Reilly book Running Linux has a brief intro to vi in there. They also publish a vi book. But there are numerous vi/vim beginner pages out there - just google for them.
Hope this helps,
Rock