I know what you mean. I took off slackware on my laptop and placed ubuntu thinking I could get my wireless card to work and now I am reformating and reinstalling slackware. I just can't leave slackware. It just seems so lightweight and fast.

do both my slack broke and i had to reinstall (its kernal freaked out)
so now i have slack and emerde (like portage) but i just can't get gentoo to work again so i am installing it on hda2 while in slackware and then i am going to use both... i tried the livecd and it erased everything... i have to do it manualy again but now i can take breaks.


P.S. i know that they are both great distros thats why i went to slack when gentoo broke but i would half to say i love portage

P.P.S. why not dual boot it

I suggest adding or editing the line ALSA_CARDS and specify all in /etc/make.conf. This will make sure it compiles every sound card, but it will take a while. The kernel have to have only sound (soundcore). If the kernel is compiled with ALSA and OSS, emerging ALSA or OSS will not work. Make sure the symbolic link /usr/src/linux is set to the kernel source directory.

gstreamer have to be compiled with cdparanoia support or else you have to attach an audio cable from the CD/DVD drive to the sound card's CD-ROM input connector. I recommend using cdparanoia for the best sound quality if your computer is fast enough.

I suggest locking the computer in a room and keep all the keys with you, so people can not touch the computer while it is compiling the programs. Another way is to use nohup, daemon, and screen commands to really lock down the compiling, so users can not do anything. Though the power could go out, so I suggest an inline type UPS device.

I usually compile a new fresh installation of Gentoo in a virtual machine like VMware. It takes longer, but I can pause a virtual machine when I want to power down the computer. After it is done compiling I either use dar or mount an external drive to copy the data to it.

what is vmware? how do you get it? is it installed? once it is finnished can i install the compiled system to a blank partition?

Vmware is a piece of software that allows you to run virutal machines on your computer. Like you could run Windows XP then use vmware to run say Gentoo on the same computer at the same time. It Does require use of hardware so you make sure that you have plenty of ram and extra hard drive space. For a real good explanation check out their website.
www.vmware.com

are there any smaller virtual machines

Look into user mode linux or Xen I believe they might have a lighter load to them.

The Xen Source project only works with virtual machines that are running the same OS. If you do not mind upgrading to processors with Virtual Hardware extensions, Xen Source project will be better. VMware does have free software.

Information on plenty of RAM and extra hard drive space is too general. To run VMware, I suggest a minimum of 512 MB of RAM and 500 MHz processor. The amount of space that a virtual machine takes up depends on the virtual disk and the OS. If you set the virtual disk to allocate all the desire space, it will do that. You can set the virtual disk to only allocate what the virtual machine will take up with out allocating all the desire space. The OS is dependent on space. Some OS can get by with a few hundred megabytes. Others will take from 4 GB to 8 GB. Hard drive space is cheap.

As with all Virtual Machines, it will not be as fast as the native processing. Expect slow performance.

I assume you mean my Gentoo installation. Yes it is done. It finished about two weeks ago. I could put in a dar file and save it to a DVD disc. Though you may not like the settings and I have not tested on computer that is not a Pentium 4 even though I compiled with i686.