Gentoo help!!
 

Well i finally installed Gentoo. In that one menu i took the gnome desktop. Now looks like its installed but when i log in with the user i created there are just windows like terminal and no icons or anything just xterm Default Client list, Session log, Checkpoint, Shutdown and a weird frame wandering with my mouse. Help?

Xsession instead of GNOME?
 

It sounds to me like you're in the default Xsession instead of GNOME. If the window bars and borders are greenish-blue, it's using the TWM window manager. That's the default session started by XDM on a fresh installation of X. I suspect that you told the installer to install GNOME desktop but it didn't set it as the default Xsession.

What display manager are you using? The DM is the piece of software that displays a graphical login prompt. You might be using XDM, which is a very simple username and password dialog on a crosshatched gray background. You probably should be using GDM, the DM that comes with GNOME. GDM is themable and has a couple of menus in addition to the login prompt, usually "Session" and "Action".

What, if I may ask, were your reasons for selecting Gentoo? It's one of the least newbie-friendly distributions, just above Slackware and LFS. I wouldn't usually recommend it unless you want to spend a lot of time at the command prompt or you have some esoteric hardware that makes other distributions difficult.

I tend to -respectfully- disagree :)

I can only recommend Gentoo (unless you have problems reading manuals or are lazy, then choose anything else). It's a learning exercise, but it's worth the trouble. Once you get the hang of it then it's easy , because everything is documented, and you don't have to guess things. The community is knowledgeable so the Gentoo forums are actually helpful, unlike the forums of most distros that I have tried. There you can actually solve problems, without people around telling you to reinstall to solve every single problem.

phlenix, if you want to use GDM, emerge it and then set it on /etc/conf.d/xdm. Make sure that you enable graphical login at startup:

If you don't use graphical login, then launch gnome (or whatever you preffer) from the ~/.xinitrc file for your user. The command should be gnome-session or something like that (not a gnome user).

It this doesn't help, just let me know and provide a bit more of info on how do you login.

elemecca:
yeah its that greenish blue thing. i how can i start gnome then?
guboj: i dont get what your telling me lol

We need to know how are you login into your account to be able to tell you exactly how to enable gnome instead of twm.

The login thingie is where you enter your user name and password. Is that a text screen with a black background and white text or is it a graphical login manager?

EDIT: Re-reading your posts, I think you installed using the graphical livecd. I advise you to use the handbook and install manually instead. You can consider it an introductory course and a learning exercise. During the manual install you learn how to use these things (and hence the things I spoke about above would have sounded familiar to you). If you can't do a manual install, then you are going to have a very very very hard time using Gentoo and maintaining it.

hm yeah i used the live cd gtk+ install. yeah its a graphical log in. help?
btw: what do you mean with manually?

Then you are probably using the stock xdm, shich is a very limited login manager. You probably want gdm, which will allow you to select any available window manager (including gnome if it's installed) at login time from a list.

To use it you first need to install it as I instructed you in my other post. You need to run "emerge gdm" as root, it will take some time to compile and install it, after it's compiled, do as I told you and edit /etc/conf.d/xdm (as root as well).

You'll see a line like this:

Change "xdm" in that line by "gdm", then do this to restart your login manager (as root as well):

X will be restarted, and gdm should load. Make sure you have saved all the docs you have open in X programs. Since you will get no warning when X is restarted. In gdm there's a list to select the session type that you want to use. To use gnome just select it on the list, then login as usual with your user name and password.

This assumes you already have X configured and gnome installed.

I mean how Gentoo has always been installed since it was born. By reading the handbook and following it.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml

For example, for x86 it would be this one:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...intable&full=1

The Gentoo documentation is very complete. But as I said in my other post, Gentoo is not for the lazy. You need to read the manuals, and get your hands dirty. Gentoo is all about "do it yourself". It just provides the info and the tools.

how can i emerge it from the live cd cause it always tries to emerge it from the internet but i dont hve any connection on that pc?

I don't know if the livedvd will contain the needed packages. It would really simplify the things if you could move the box next to an internet connection. It would save quite a lot of time and pain.

If the livecd contains the needed packages, you should be able to emerge gdm by doing this:

Where you have "/mnt/cdrom/" is the cdrom drive where the Gentoo livecd is mounted. And "pkgdir" is a directory in your livecd containing the tarballs, usually a bunch of files with the extensions .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz. But note that:

• first, I am not sure if the livecd contains such a thing (it should, because as far as I know it install from precompiled binaries)
• and second, and more important, even if it has some binary packages, I don't know either if it will have the stuff you need to install gdm

If that doesn't work, you can still do another thing. Use this command to get a list of the file you need to install gdm:

Then you will have a list with the required files in "list.txt". You can then use that list in another box to fetch all the files. Once you have them, copy them into /usr/portage/distfiles, and use

Again. Now emerge shouldn't need to download anything.

Also, and just to make sure: are you sure you don't have gdm already installed? It seems strange to me that a gnome-based livecd doesn't give you an option to install gdm. Please, if you can, and just to avoid unnecessary work on both sides, could you post the output of this command?

well it says:
these are the packages that would be merged:

[ebuild R] gnome-base/gdm-2.20.3 USE="branding ipv6 etc.... and then
Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), size of downloads: 4.206 kB


is it already there? and if not how can i get internet to wor cause i plugged in ethernet now but i doesnt work?

well it says:
these are the packages that would be merged:

[ebuild R] gnome-base/gdm-2.20.3 USE="branding ipv6 etc.... and then
Total: 1 package (1 reinstall), size of downloads: 4.206 kB


is it already there? and if not how can i get internet to wor cause i plugged in ethernet now but i doesnt work?
and for some reason it sayd permission denied if i want to acces /etc/conf.d/xdm?

That's another entirely different topic. The first thing would be to check how are you connecting to the net (ethernet, dialup, wireless or whatever) and see if that device is detected and working. If you are using ethernet, provide the output of "ifconfig". You will need to be root to run that command.

Gdm is installed already. So forget about my post telling you how to install it.

You need to be root to edit system files. So, open a terminal and type "su -" to become root (or login in text mode directly, whatever you wish). You should know the password for root. You set it during the installation.

Once you are root you can edit that file. Then restart xdm as I told you above.

i am in root. but still it says: -su: /etc/conf.d/xdm: Permission denied.
What??????
I signed in as root and my root password.

Is your root partition mounted read only for some reason? When does it give you that error? When trying to open the file with nano (or whatever text editor) or when trying to save it?