Getting online with Gentoo?
 

I just installed Gentoo on my laptop. I'm trying to emerge fluxbox and a few other programs I'd like, but can't seem to download them. How do I edit my /etc/hosts to tell Gentoo to connect to the internet through my wife's WinXP box 192.168.0.1? (my gentoo is 192.186.0.2)

Type the command:

route add default gw 192.168.0.1

at the command prompt to set the default gateway. You can add that command to your rc.local file (probably in /etc/init.d but not sure on Gentoo) so it gets executed at boot time.

you may also need to enter DNS information in /etc/resolv.conf

What would I write in resolv.conf?

Is there a guide somewhere that would explain things like this to me?

Just write this one line and try:
---------------------------------------
nameserver 192.168.0.1
---------------------------------------

Perhaps you can tell us how your linux box is connected to your wife's win box? Like what kind of cable, what port, where is the modem, etc.

Well, this is all my /etc/resolv.conf says

i.e. the DNS IP's for my provider.

I'd imagine that you'd just use the IP of your wifes PC for the default gateway, as mentioned above.

But if you don't want to take hours compiling the fluxbox or whatever, you might want to check the gentoo doc's site and more specifically the portage docs to see how you'd check for any precompiled binaries for fluxbox etc (or even if you have the second disc, the one with the GRP packages on it, you could disconnect from the wifes pc, then mount the disc and do emerge -k fluxbox to see if you can get that - it's a hell of a lot quick to get up and running).

regards

John

Yea! I got it working. I just used DHCP and everything is mostly fine now. Thanks for all your help everyone. My laptop is connected to a switch which is also connected to my wife's computer and that's how that is set up.