On Monday June 28th I started installing Gentoo as a Vbox guest on a Win XP Lenovo laptop. By Tuesday I had twm running, and started an emerge of kde-meta:4.4. Here it is Friday morning and the KDE installation finally finished. There are some problems however. For some reason X crashes when I start KDM using the procedure described in the Gentoo installation guide, but it works if I start it manually. Also, ALSA isn't working, and there are some non-fatal errors occurring during startup. But I reached my initial goal, a working KDE desktop on Gentoo.

It's been years since I've used KDE and it's seems pretty fancy but a bit slow. I've actually grown fond of twm, and it seems a little faster, so I might just stick with it as long as the KDE apps work.

Now it's on to replicating my website, which is currently running on an Ubuntu installation. This should be fun, but I'm not looking forward to all the idle time waiting for things to compile.

I remember having the same problem with kdm myself..
Think this is what fixed it.


check to see if hald or maybe dbus is running.
/etc/init.d/hald status

if it is not started at boot .rc-update add hald default..

Thanks for the tech tip. I executed the command and hald and dbus appear to be running. At the moment I'm not too worried about the non-fatal problems because I am working on getting Apache2 up. After that's done I plan to install some QT and web development tools and then go go back and clean up the other issues. At the moment none of the problems look like they would impact that plan.

The reason I installed Gentoo was to see how it differs from Ubuntu; and thereby, get a better understanding of Linux in general. It's been worth the effort. A lot of what I did on Ubuntu was either point and click, or cook-book procedures. Gentoo has forced me to take a closer look at the mechanics.