BT's BIG Gentoo Project. - Page 7

Well, ALSA can be very difficult if your audio card is not detected properly. What you normally have to do is find what kernel module your audio requires. The best thing I can say is to go here:
http://www.alsa-project.org/

If you find your card then you should be able to find the module that you need to enable in the kernel. You then need to recompile the kernel. Fortunately, if you're using gentoo then that process should be pretty easy.
Then you just have to load the module on boot. Once that process is done you have to edit the alsa.conf (I think that's what it's called) with your card's info.

If you need help just let me know where you're stuck and I can walk you through. Seablade here is a wiz with the audio stuff so he might be able to give you some suggestions. Now, it sounds like the card may be working, but your surround isn't... is that the issue?

As for the video card, I've had terrible luck with ATI. I get poor performance even with the newest drivers. Nvidia, on the other hand, is quite good. So if you're using ati then I'm afraid to say that you're not gonna get great performance. I successfully emerged the nvidia drivers and installed them from the installer file from nvidia.com, so either one should be sufficient.

Finally, the stuttering maybe because you didn't enable dma in the kernel. Your overlay settings also may be wrong in the xorg.conf. There's actually quite a few things that could be going wrong.

I'll look into that, thanks. I have to finish my laptop so this may be a good oppotunity to try this. I've only started from stage3 and compile times are not bad at all. The problem is going through all the config files.

The only thing that really takes a long time to emerge is gnome. I just emerged firefox on my opteron server and it only took about 10 minutes. My opteron server I'm working on (only my 2nd gentoo install) took me about 2 days of solid work to get gnome and most of the basic stuff installed. It took about another week to get all of my server services running for my webapp and security related services going. The only thing I have left to do really is configure a bunch of cron jobs.

Even though the install is a beast (taking about 3 days as opposed to 3 hours for most distros) I'm flying through everything else, which normally takes forever to get working on other distros.

I actually once had stuttering dvd issues because opengl overlay was enabled in the xorg.conf. Once I turned it off things were smooth again. But 90% of the time it's dma related.

Well, it's been a while so I guess it's update time again...

I stopped working on my desktop gentoo machine to begin work on my server. I've been plagued with problems with this server for months. I've tried get Fedora, SuSe, Debian and Ubuntu running on this machine with no success. If one thing works on one distro, then it doesn't on another. Long story short I ultimately get everything working with gentoo.

Here's what I needed to get running:

1. Java Webapp- Apache2/Mysql4.1/SunJDK1.5/Tomcat5
In addition I needed mysql admin and mysqlcc working.

2. Raid Controller- I have a 3ware 9550sx raid controller. I have a total of 8 300gb sata2 drives (over 2tb), configured as raid5 with one hotswap. Needed to get kernel module working and web daemon for management.

3. Pearl scripts- Needed to import my pearl scripts and schedule them to run at various intervals via cron to process pdf documents.

4. Implement ssh/scp, vnc server. Need to securely transfer large amounts of data over the network and internet.

5. Compile kernel for smp support.

6. Enable NPTL for better java performance.

7. Develop scheduled backup system (cron with tar and rsync)

8. System for monitoring logs. Integrating (html) log outputs into my webapp via eframes. (almost done)

9. Do all of this on a 64bit distro

So i'm virtually done after about 2 weeks of 14 hour days, 7 days a week. The only thing I really have to worry about is closing any security holes (some services are still running as root).

The whole point of jumping into Gentoo was to get this server running and I can finally safely say, Mission Accomplished!

I should probably make this topic a little more relavent and get Gentoo going on my laptop.

Those Promise and Highpoint integrated controllers are essentially software raids. The only advantage they offer is that you can manage them through a bios (extremely useful for windows, but useless for linux as you can configure a software raid during the install process).

3ware is the ONLY hardware raid controller for linux. Now that's an exageration, but it's mostly true. The 3ware controllers, especially the one I got, are supported phenominally in linux. Unfortunately, it was such a pain in the ass getting it to work.

Knowing what I know now I could go back to the other distros and probably get it working, but the reason I have this knowlege is because Gentoo requires you to understand the system's inner workings. SuSe and Fedora just confounded everything with their non-standardness (i know it's not a word).

I spoke to several people that only administer linux systems and they all agreed that 3ware is the only way to go in linux. I'll let you guys know how it all works out. I'm still learning the management utility.

I didn't look into the Intel ones mainly because I'm using opterons. I didn't want to risk stability/compatibility. I've had Intel wifi cards in the past that were not compatible with amd processors so i'm wary of repeating a problem like that.

I just tried this out tonight. I think this is gonna be my main backup script. I looked into about 5 different typse of scripts and liked this one the most by far. Seems to work really well. I just need to scrape up another harddrive to test the restore. Thanks for the link!

-BT

I've got my web app running 100% on the Gentoo server now. I'm starting to integrate the server management utilities and system logs into the site framework. Thought this was kinda neat, I have the 3ware raid controller management utility running inside my site framework now. Here's a screenshot: (I purposely degraded the array, so disregard that error)


I'm not sure I'm gonna keep this in as it may pose a security risk (I don't want a hacker destroying my raid if he hacks my account). Also, the only reason i'm running windows is for testing purposes...

This Gentoo server serves pages sooooo much faster than my dual core laptop in windows. I feel like I'm working in slow motion when I have to access pages that aren't cached on the windows machine.

Happy the thread was of some interest. I've only been using linux seriously since this past september, so i'ts been crash course learning experience for me for the past several months. The thing is, I have to administrate a critical server. Therefore I have to not only build the system, but also know how to restore it from reliable backups if it goes down. To be able to do these things you have to be able to work with linux at a much lower level.

For instance, prior to using Gentoo I never knew how to restore grub if a reinstall of a windows partition blew it off the mbr. Now I I realize it's a piece of cake, you just chroot into you linux install and reinstall grub. Problem is with distros like fedora and ubuntu you never experience manually partitioning your drives and installing grub so you really wouldn't know how to fix that issue.

The reason I'm bringing this stuff up is because I would have saved soooo much time had I gone with gentoo from the start. There were some really fundimental concepts I didn't learn because I started off with Ubuntu. Even though I got Ubuntu working well quickly, when things went wrong I had no idea why they happened or how to fix them. Gentoo is an absolute bitch to get installed (process takes a few days to get a gui working like a vanilla windows xp install), but once it's working it's fast, highly optimized and, like mmarkin noted, perpetually upgradable. And also, I don't know of any other distro that supports 64bit better.

So it's probably good to start with ubuntu to get your feet wet. If you like the environment and want to function better in it i'd look to install gentoo asap. The knowlege you gain is invaluable.