Mini review: Gentoo Linux 2005.0

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Mini review: Gentoo Linux 2005.0
by Robert Storey
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20050509#1
"Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its students."
-- Hector Berlioz

Gentoo is a type of penguin, but is also the name of a popular Linux distro. As I write this, it's No. 8 on the DistroWatch page hit ranking. Of course, that does not guarantee that it's the 8th most popular distro on the planet, but clearly there are a lot of people interested in this operating system. So finally I decided to download the CDs, install and find out what all the hullabaloo is about.

A confession - I've been aware of Gentoo Linux since even before its version 1.0 release in early 2002, yet I've never tried it until this week. Why? Because of fear. Not fear of a formidable technical challenge, but rather fear that I didn't have enough time.

And that's an important point. You see the word "time" frequently mentioned when you read reviews about Gentoo. The usual reason is because this source-based distro requires that you spend a good deal of time compiling. Yet ironically, this was not my biggest complaint about it, but more on that below.


Installation - Not for Wimps
Installation is the big bugaboo that sends potential Gentoo recruits fleeing for the safety of other warm-and-fuzzy distros. And make no mistake about it - this is a major issue. If you've played around much with Linux and the BSDs, you're no doubt aware that installation programs vary widely in terms of user-friendliness. However, with Gentoo you won't have to deal with an installation program at all, because there isn't one.

With Gentoo, you (the user) are the installation program. The way to install is to download the Gentoo Handbook, print it out (or put it on another nearby computer), and manually go through each step one-by-one while typing commands. First partition the hard drive with fdisk. Then run the mkswap and swapon commands. Then format a partition with mkreiserfs, and mount it on /mnt/gentoo. And so on.

How long this will take varies considerably depending on your hardware, experience and endurance. It took me all day because it was my first time, but battle-hardened Gentoo veterans could probably do it in two or three hours. It must be noted that this is for a "Stage 3" (that is, binary) install. You can optionally go for a "Stage 1" install in which you compile everything from scratch - if you go this route, be prepared to spend three days. Personally, I see little reason not to do Stage 3 install, unless you enjoy spending a full weekend watching stuff like this scroll down your screen:

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I.. -I../libs -I/usr/X11R6/include -DFVWM_MODULEDIR=\"/usr/local/libexec/fvwm/2.4.16\" -DFVWM_DATADIR=\"/usr/local/share/fvwm\" -DFVWM_CONFDIR=\"/usr/local/etc\" -g -O2 -c `test -f 'menus.c' || echo './'`menus.c

Of course, some people find that entertaining.

Before I leave the topic of installation, I should add that I had a few issues. First off, the user-friendly cfdisk program is available, so you needn't mess with user-hostile fdisk that the Gentoo Handbook recommends. Also, the instructions call for creating a 32MB /boot partition, but I soon discovered that I couldn't mount this partition. So I decided to do away with the /boot partition altogether and just kept everything in the / partition, which worked fine.

At the end of my installation I found that the module for my Ethernet card was not being loaded, so I had no network. I know that my card uses the via-rhine driver, and typing "modprobe via-rhine" worked, so I added "via-rhine" to file /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and all was well on the next reboot.

Finally, the Gentoo Handbook makes no mention of how to set up X Window. Fortunately, I'm already familiar with the xorgcfg utility which is also included with Gentoo - this worked, except that my USB mouse wasn't detected. Having no mouse was a definite drag - the solution was to edit file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and make my mouse settings as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Mouse0"
  Driver "mouse"
  Option "rotocol" "auto"
  Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option "Buttons" "5"
  Option "zaxismapping" "4 5"
EndSection


A Little Learning is Dangerous
After spending a week playing with Gentoo, I now understand what is so addictive about it: the educational value. The fact that it's source-based is cute, but no big deal, at least not for me. The real benefit of Gentoo, in my opinion, is the education.

Next to Linux from Scratch, Gentoo is probably the best teaching distro around. Did you ever want to compile your own kernel but were afraid to try? Well, with Gentoo "being afraid" is not an option - if you want this baby to fly, you must compile the kernel. And of course, before you can compile the kernel you first have to configure it manually with menuconfig.

But compiling a kernel is just the start. Did you know how to configure /boot/grub/grub.conf? Did you know that /usr/share/zoneinfo is a symbolic link to a file in the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory? These and other fascinating facts await survivors of a successful Gentoo install.


Tweak Till You Squeak
Aside from the forced education, proponents of the Gentoo WayTM also wax euphoric about the distro's tweakability. In particular, Gentoo lets you play around with "USE flags", which can affect features and performance of the operating system. If you don't know what USE flags are, you're in good company - most people happily go through life without ever twiddling their OS's USE flags, apparently with no ill effects. I won't try to explain the concept - you'll find more than you ever wanted to know about this subject in the Gentoo Handbook. Let it also be said that you really don't need to mess with USE flags - the operating system will work fine if you just accept its defaults. However, defaults are for sissies - real men customize their OS to the Nth degree.

But this raises another question - does all this twiddling in fact do any good? Opinions are divided. The Gentoo faithful claim that they can enhance performance this way, but comparing the results side-by-side with another fast distro like Slackware or Debian, I must say that it's hard to see the difference.

Then again, the ability to get under the hood and see how things work is of crucial importance to developers. Just yesterday I was reading this story about a Gentoo developer who has created a system called initng which dramatically speeds up boot time. It will be ported to other distros eventually, so it's not Gentoo-specific, but it's probably no coincidence that it was developed on Gentoo.


Conclusion - Not for Aunt Tilly
Gentoo is a time-consuming and technically challenging distro that you'd better not install on Aunt Tilly's computer (unless you don't like her). In the right hands, Gentoo can be educational and a good platform for development. In the wrong hands, it can be fritterware (because it fritters your time away). No doubt the developers could make Gentoo a lot easier to use by adding an installation program and a few clever configuration tools, but then it wouldn't be Gentoo. The question you have to ask yourself is, do you want to spend your time tweaking, or do you want something that just works?

Gentoo Linux

Gentoo Linux can be educational and a good platform for development
(full image size: 242kB)

Freesnake

我看见英文就头大……

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Gentoo 2005.0 Review

2005-05-08 17:59:03
By Brian M
Discuss this in our forums.


OK folks, here's my Gentoo review. I decided to re-format and start installing Gentoo 2005.0. What's the deal with Gentoo.

Gentoo's purpose is to have a Linux distribution that is extremely configurable and can be optimized to the nth degree, here's their project goals:

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml

Gentoo's been around since 2002 (if not, earlier). Gentoo's been known affectionately as one of the most time consuming distros to install. I personally remember spending a whole week getting a base system on my laptop with Open Office, GIMP, and Firefox.

Gentoo has a huge cult following, and as a Gentoo lover myself, I'm going to review it.

System Specs:
Compaq Presario 900US
Athlon XP 1700+
512MB PC2100 DDR
80GB, 4200rpm HDD
8/8/24X CD-RW
Integrated ATI Mobility Radeon (i.e., Radeon 7500)
15" LCD Screen (1024x768 max)

The 2005.0 version is the initial 2005 release of the Gentoo Linux distribution. Gentoo releases versions by this format:

major versions per year and minor revisions denoted by .x. Therefore, 2004.3 is the third minor revision for the major release of 2004. Instead of using major/minor numbers (i.e. 1.x), it makes keeping track of the latest version easy because you just have to figure out the year.

Anyhow, here's the bulk of things:

LiveCD
Gentoo Linux comes as a LiveCD. The LiveCD gives you a full working Gentoo environment, but no Desktop Environments here folks, the LiveCD is terminal only. The LiveCD for 2005.0 makes use of the new 2.6 kernel, in the old Gentoo days, there were two ways to start the LiveCD:

gentoo -> starts the 2.4 kernel with only uniprocessor support
smp -> starts the 2.6 kernel with multiprocessor support.

The 2005.0 now utilizes the new 2.6 kernel which adds enhanced support for newer hardware. It also uses coldplug and hotplug so it makes hardware detection more accurate. Before, back in the 1.4 versions (as well as 2004.0 and 2004.1), hardware detection was still being worked on, hence my RealTek NIC had to be modprobed (modprobe 8139too). Nowadays, detecting it is no problem.

Documentation
The documentation is probably one of the best in the linux world. Gentoo's known for its thorough documentation. Gentoo introduces three handbooks:

* the 2005.0 handbook is focused on a CD-based installation, that is, it's meant for people who don't have an internet connection (or have slow, 56K dial-ups - poor folks). The 2005.0 handbook also focuses on Stage 3 installs. I'll get to the differences in stages in a few.

* The Handbook in itself contains a more detailed documentation. Everything from stage types and how to install the different stages. It's far more comprehensive than the 2005.0 handbook, but it does require a broadband internet connection.

* The x86 handbook is for the lazy bums. If you don't want to read the mega-verbose 2005.0 handbooks, this is a shorter more succinct documentation on installing Gentoo.

Personally, I suggest the handbook in itself, however, Gentoo also has different documentation regarding installing X.Org and using KDE/GNOME/Fluxbox as your DE (Desktop Environment).

The Gentoo System

Gentoo uses a bunch of conf files to manage the system. The make.conf file manages USE variables (which controls what packages can be installed in your system), the architecture type, and GCC/GXX flags. It also holds data regarding what mirrors it uses to download packages from.

USE variables are important because you can control what packages to install. For example:

USE="qt kde -gtk -gnome dvd alsa cdr"

This tells Gentoo that you want to use Qt and KDE as your desktop environment, but do not install packages that use the GTK or GNOME libraries (let's say you hate GNOME like the plague). You also want to support DVD's, CD-R's, ALSA in your applications. This level of control is uncanny, but it does require learning how to use it.

What makes Gentoo unique in its make.conf file is that you can specify what kind of package builds you want. There are many types of packages in Gentoo:

* Hard Masked -> This means that the package is still being tested. It's not available for download, in fact, you have to edit your package.keywords file to get it to install hard masked packages. Hard masked packages have a M+ or M~ on it.
* Masked packages are packages that have an ebuild but are still being tested. It's denoted with a tilde (~).

* stable packages are packages that have been thoroughly tested. These packages are the packages that Portage will install.

The ARCH variable is what controls what packages you can/can't install. For example:

ARCH="x86" means to install only stable packages whereas ARCH="~x86" will tell gentoo that it's OK to use masked packages.


The GCC/GXX flags give you control as to how you want to compile your system. When you install software in Linux, you usually use ./configure, and you can specify -Ox arguments on the ./configure line. With Gentoo, you simply specify your argument on the GCC variable which means that when you install software, it automatically uses the GCC variable.

What makes Gentoo work is its Portage system. Portage is similar to FreeBSD's ports - you have a tree that the system uses to keep track of packages and versions. The power lies in the fact that installing software on Gentoo is a breeze. All dependencies are taken care of and the system downloads the tarballs for you. However, as with Ports, you have to synchronize your Portage Tree so that you can keep your software up to date. What's neat is the power of Gentoo's emerge:

emerge --sync -> this updates the Portage tree.

emerge -> this installs a package for you, dependencies are managed for you.

emerge -u -> this simply updates a package for you.

Removing software is just as easy, in fact, you can use

emerge -C to uninstall packages.

The nice thing about Gentoo is that keeping your system in tip-top shape (with the latest security features) merely involves the following command:

emerge --update world

However, the one thing is that Portage does not update dependencies, to do so, you need to use:

emerge --deep --update world

This will update all packages including dependencies.

One thing I didn't mention yet: the stages.

The difference in the stages during the install is how deep the optimizations you want to have:

* Stage 1 installs take the longest because you have to bootstrap your system from scratch - that is, GCC has to be compiled from scratch. Gentoo fanatics swear by the power given by Stage 1 installs.

* Stage 2 installs are somewhat long, the bootstrapping is done for you, but the system packages is yet to be compiled.

* Stage 3 installs means that the system has been bootstrapped and the system packages have been compiled to binaries. Gentoo assures that they compile the stage 3 binaries to the best of their abilities.

Another feature that Gentoo has is its ease of use when it comes to initscripts. Gentoo uses its own initscripts but the end result is that it makes linking daemons to initscripts much easier. For example, if you want XDM to start at the default run level, do:

rc-update add xdm default

What makes Gentoo unique is that the init scripts are controlled by rc-update which makes adding and removing initscripts to any run level easier.


Conclusion

What of it all? Well, Gentoo has its ups and downs. For the most part, Gentoo installs take a long time - depending on the speed of your machine, it can take hours, days, or even weeks.

Gentoo's rc-update puts convenience in the hands of an administrator. Adding initscripts to run levels couldn't be anymore easier - using one command to update initscripts is just a pleasure versus editing inittab.

Gentoo's Portage makes installing software a lot easier. However it does have its drawbacks. When I installed Apache 2 on my 2004.2 server, I ran into these issues:

Apache 2 in Gentoo uses apache2.conf not httpd.conf, so it makes looking at the Apache documentation nill.

However, considering that a bit of re-learning for the convenience of emerge? I'd rather stick with emerge, since it manages all of my dependencies.

Want more? Gentoo's rc.conf is interesting, you can choose your display manager using the DISPLAY_MANAGER variable and then your desktop using the SESSION variable. Changing desktop managers is easy, just update those two variables to the desktop manager and desktop of choice and you're set.

I did run into a few snags when I was installing 2005.0, for one, I ran into trouble with svgalib-0.19, as I scoured the web for an answer, I was told to install GCC 3.4. I did, but the svgalib-0.19 package would not install, so I had to force svgalib-0.21 package to install (it's hard masked, I had to edit package.keywords to make sure it lets me).

Gentoo's advantages work more for System Admins looking for better administration, emerge and rc-update do make the jobs easier. However, Gentoo is meant for advanced users. Beginners beware, as good as the documentation is, Gentoo does a few things differently hence making working with Gentoo a difficult task if you're a newbie.

Lastly, Gentoo is a mighty fine distro. Being able to compile specifically to my CPU makes building highly optimized systems easier. Emerge makes updating my system easier, and rc-update lets me add or remove initscripts faster.


overall, I give Gentoo 8/10


Pros: Fast, great package management system

Cons: some packages have bugs, and a week to install Gentoo is just plain insane.

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By Aaron Meder | Published  Today | Gentoo  |
Aaron Meder
I've had my first experience with GNU/Linux in 2001 with RedHat 5.3, i think. Somewhere in 2002 I started getting truely into GNU/Linux and installed Redhat 9 on my Laptop (and kicked my windows away). I loved the bluecurve look'n'feel. In the next year I tried almost every distro you can get and had a wonderful year of running Gentoo GNU/Linux. At the moment I work with Ubuntu Hoary and Gentoo 2005. I'm very interested in the developement of the Gnome Desktop Environment.

View all articles by Aaron Meder
Gentoo 2005.0 Introduction
Introduction

Since I've started using GNU/Linux seriously with RedHat 9 which is a distribution that uses the RPM-Package System, I wasn't very spoiled with something I call a good package managent.

After some Linux time I learned that there are debian and debian-based distributions which make the installation of packages much easier than I knew it before. So I switched to Mepis Linux, a modern distribution with a modern KDE desktop. I liked it, but somehow I wasn't satisfied.

What I was looking for was a fresh, modern distribution with a good package management and the possibility to start from a base system. I've never liked menus that are blown up with hundrets of tools that you're probably never going to use.

So I thought of a basic debian system and downloaded the cd images. But since there wasn't no easy installer for it at this time I didn't get it with my still very basic Linux knowledge.

And then I've read of Gentoo. I think this was in the beginning of 2003. A system that takes much time and nerves to install, but than could satisfy my needs. Well I gave it a try.

I think I had 3 days or something for my first installation. I did a stage 1 instalallation which was quite easy actually but had some tricky parts (e.g. hard disk partitioning, since everything was done with fdisk and no word of much easier tools like cfdisk or the grub configuration). However the installation documentation was and is the best I've ever seen and if you would ask me how you can learn more about Linux and get some more deep information about your favourite OS I would recommend you a stage 1 Gentoo installation.

Sometime after nearly a year of happy gentoo-use I broke my whole system while I was getting gnome 2.6 from testing. That really chew me up.

So I decided to look around again and landed with Arch Linux, which is a very interesting distribution btw., than went to debian again and setteled down with Ubuntu in 2004. However last week I've decided to have a look at Gentoo's newest release: Gentoo 2005.0 Gentoo 2005.0 Installation
Installation

Since I've already done a stage 1, 2 and 3 installation I've decided to do something this time. I've always worked with the wonderful, big, powerful and detailed installation documentation but was looking for a shorter one and found the Gentoo Linux x86 Quick Install Guide. At this point I've got to say that “quick” is surely not as quick as e.g. a Arch Linux or an Ubuntu installation. Quick was something about four or five hours for me on my laptop.

My laptop is a compaq nx7000 with a 1.5 Ghz centrino CPU and 512 MB of RAM. Centrino means that I've got a intel ipw2100 wireless card built-in and this was a card that made much problems to me in the beginning of my Linux time. The first distribution it worked out of the box for me was Ubuntu Warty. The graphic card is a ATI mobility radeon 9200 which worked very good for quite every distribution. All in all I had called my laptop “linux unfriendly” earlier but i wouldn't call it that now, because times and linux have changed.

So packaged with a fresh burned Gentoo 2005.0 universal live-cd and the quick install guide I was ready for this new adventure. After booting into the installation disk I was as surprised as hell since I was surfing on a wireless lan here in my office. I actually didn't do anything. It connected to it automatically. Well that was a big surprise! After that installation went pretty easy and smooth. I already knew most of the steps and there wasn't much new to me. After some hours I was finished with my basic stage 3 Gentoo installation and was ready for a reboot into my system.

And there it was again: Grub, my friend. I had a heavy time on configuring it until it booted into my system without producing a kernel error. But finally after 10 or 15 minutes I've fixed my bloody configuration failures and logged in to my system. Use

Two and a half hour and an “emerge gnome gdm xscreensaver” and some xorg.conf-tweakings later I could start my favourite display manager and log into my favourite desktop environment, which was available in Version 2.10.0, which is a very good and new version.

Here is screenshot of my desktop:



Actually wireless lan didn't work at the beginning but it was very easy to get it working with an “emerge ipw2100” and a “modprobe ipw2100” this time. The only problem was that I had to activate two crypographic modules. Now everything works very good and I'm quite pleased again with this system. They did a good job with the “new” release.

My rating for Gentoo Linux 2005.0 is this:

Installation = 3 Stars
Ease of use = 2 Stars
Performance = 4 Stars
Up-to-dateness = 4 Stars
Package Management = 5 Stars
Overall rating = 4 Stars
Conclusion

Gentoo is the one distribution if you're interested in tuning your systems as much as you're able to, want a wonderful package management, and don't shrink of waiting an hour or two for you're tool to be compiled. What you get is a solid, modern and fast Linux operating system with a touch of BSD.

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Laptop Review
A review of the Linux Laptop

This is a brief review of the Gentoo Laptop as installed by oddjobz using equipment kindly donated by NEC. Hopefully a number of independent reviews are to follow, so I guess you might want to refer to this as more of an advert as to what can be done with Gentoo on a Laptop, rather than how well it works in practice. (which isn't to say that this configuration doesn't work well, just that very few people have tried to break it yet ..)
The Kit
laptop

Here's a summary of all machine's specification and all it's main features. Worth noting that there is also an internal Winmodem which is not listed as part of the review or supported, however drivers for it will probably be appearing soon.
CPU          Intel® Celeron® M Processor 350, 512MB DDR-RAM
Storage          40GB Hard Drive (7200rpm) + DVD/CD-RW
Screen          15" XGA Display with Integrated 64MB Graphics (1024x768)
Network          10/100 Network Interface + Intel® PRO Wireless LAN (802.11b/g)   
Battery          Between 3.5 and 5.5 hours based on usage

Notes

    * The processor actually runs at 1.3GHz which in absolute terms sounds a little on the slow side. Don't be fooled however, I don't notice much difference compared to a 2G workstation, if anything it feels faster.
    * The hard drive and CD/DVD are both relatively quick and quiet, a DVD writer might have been nice, but then I can count the number of DVD's I've ever written on one hand ..
    * 1024x768 sounds like low resolution to many people, especially if you're used to using your laptop as a desktop replacement. However, if you want a desktop replacement, my advice is buy a desktop machine. This is a laptop and is designed to be carried! Weight is a little under 3Kg !
    * The NIC is a Realtek and works well at 10 and 100Mbps and the Intel Wireless runs the Intel IPW2200 drivers and again works very well.
    * Battery life is outstanding (on first inspection) , I'll be doing a number of tests to see how it lasts under different conditions ..

Note that I'm covering the run-time and usability of the machine as opposed to actually getting the software onto it. It should be possible to take it as read that after reading this and seeing the screenshots that the software can be obtained and installed given sufficient time. (I'll cover the installation of a second machine at the end of this article)
Booting

The machine supports a proper bootsplash setup which results in the rather nice Gentoo 2005.0 splash, progress bar and highlighted icons. A major improvement in the look since 2004.x.

I've no screenshot because framebuffer shots are pure eyecandy and have no practical use.

Similarly there's no screen shot of the login prompt, suffice to say that the machine boots directly into X and presents a GDM based login screen based on the theme of your choice.
Profiles

At this stage it's worth saying a little about profiles. Quite a bit of time's been spent trying to make all the clever laptop features available to Linux, as far as I'm aware (with the possible exception of the modem) , all features are available.

The system runs two profiles, default (which assumes ac / mains power) and battery. (which does not).

When running in default mode, the machine pretty much behaves like a workstation and maximises the user's experience with little or no regards for power consumption. Once you switch to battery mode, the battery profile tries to use every trick in the book to reduce the power being used and hence extend the period over which the machine can survive without mains power.

Battery optimisations

    * The screen is 'dimmed', an obvious optimisation as the screen is one of the heaviest users of power.
    * The disk spindown time is reduced to 120 seconds of inactivity
    * The CPU is shifted to an ondemand governer which increases and reduces the frequency based on CPU load
    * A number of system services (notably cupsd) are shutdown to avoid unnecessary network chatter
    * The wireless interface is put into low-power mode

Closing the lid

    * Nothing too clever, this simply turns off the screen.

Pressing the power button

    * If the machine is off, it turns it on (as you'd expect)
    * If the machine is on and you hold the power button in for 5 seconds, it will power the laptop down (immediately)
    * If you press the power button (for ~ 1 second) while the machine is up, it will active the suspend-to-disk mechanism. This will take an image of your memory and what's running, then save it to your swap partition, then power off the machine. When you subsequently reboot the machine, it will look for a valid signature on the swap partition and if it finds one, restores a live session from the swap partition. If not (as you'd expect) it performs a boot from cold ..

      Q: So - how well does suspend-to-disk work ??
      A: Thus far, it seems to work surprisingly well. If you're quick, you can suspend and re-power up without losing a remote SSH session !!

The desktop
desktop

I guess it all sounds good, but seeing is believing, yes ? Ok, here's a shot of the initial desktop pre-configured for a demo user using all the goodies that are installed. Now I'm guessing this screen shot will make a lot tekkies cringe, that said, appreciate that this is aimed at someone who is actually going to be using the laptop as opposed to playing with it. In this context, ease of use for the casual user and working toys are far more important than development tools and mutt.

In summary, we're running the Gnome desktop (2.8) with gDesklets, Gaim and NetworkManager. AC power is available, sound is switched on and the mailcheck applet is checking an internet IMAP4 mailbox every 5 minutes.

Battery power indicator
ac

This is shown in the pannel (bottom right hand corner of the screen) and lists the current battery charge and CPU frequency. The first graphic here shows the machine running with mains power, the second shows it in battery mode with a slight discharge and the CPU frequency down to minimum.
battery

gDesklets

Of no specific practical use, but they do look nice. In this instance we're providing GrabNews to show the current BBC headlines and GoodWeather for the current forecast. (these items are embedded into the desktop)

NetworkManager
notification

If you're a wired / wireless use then this is one of the absolutely critical factors and features you'll be looking at when choosing a laptop. How easy is it to setup and run a wireless interface, and how do you select between wireed and wireless at runtime without looking foolish in meetings and having to fool around with init scripts.

This is a Gentoo port of Redhat's NetworkManager tool which does exactly what you'll want by interfacing with DBUS/HAL and replacing the machine's standard network control scripts. nm01 The screen shot shows the machine working in wired mode (the default) and you'll see a small graphic representing an RJ45 network connector in the notification area. (panel, top right)

When you right-click on the Rj45 icon, a drop-down menu (shown right) will list your available wired networks, and any wireless networks that are in range. Each wireless network is represented by the networks ESSID and it's signal strength. It can cope with both encrypted and unencrypted (and hidden) networks and will ask for authentication on demand.

In this instance we have one unencrypted local network called LINUX, clicking on the LINUX entry caused the wired network interface to be shut down and the wireless network initiates the new connection. Worth noting that many wireless networks can be managed simultaneously, however working DHCP on your network is pretty much a requirement. nm02 First, the system re-scans to check out network details, then it applies any necessary authentication. Finally it displays a signal strength indicator in the notification area to replace the RJ45 icon.

This application is not directly available for Gentoo, however version 0.34 is a very simple build and works "out of the box" under Gentoo. nm04 Note that in order to make this work properly you need to remove the standard networking scripts from the rc setup.

There's a while new version in CVS with lots of new features, however it relies on all new versions of HAL, DBUS and a number of other key components that do not appear to be backwards compatible with current versions of other applications. (i.e. to get any major fixes will be a case of waiting for the next major Gnome release)
Graphics Performance
lara

Well, this machine was never intended to be a graphics or games workstation, however the ability to access multimedia and play basic games is never a feature to be totally ignored. To this end we have DRI/DRM/GLX all running happily and providing over 700 FPS using the glxgears benchmark. (this is around 1/5th the speed of an Opteron 144 with an NVidia 5200, however it's still a lot faster than non-OpenGL capable machines. Just for demonstrative purposes, here we are watching the lara croft DVD using the totem viewer. As you can probably see it's using around 30%, presentation from where I'm sitting is 100% with no jumps at all. Indeed you load the machine fairly heavily and it will continue to play DVD's perfectly. (the wonders of a pre-emptive kernel!)

Just to prove you're seeing proper OpenGL performance, I tried Quake III running in demo mode, if you take a look at the CPU usage you'll see it's not exactly sweating (somewhere around 20%). All the graphics options are turned up to maximum definition. It's worth noting that I was unable to make UT2004Demo work with sufficient speed to make it playable, however after much reading this looks to be an issue with (specifically) the demo version of UT2004 as opposed to the machine itself.
Installing

As promised above, some notes on installtion. I've managed to create an image of the above system and duplicate it via and NFS based install using a standard 2005.0 boot disk. Next exercise, burn it to a DVD together with a standard 2005.0 boot disk ..