Gentoo/XP

[justwes]

Any idea as to how well they play together?

I'm asking because I want to install it on my laptop, but I still want to keep my XP partition safe & sound.

Curretnly have SuSE on there with XP but I'm wanting to play with something new.

But I also have a feeling that I'm not going to be getting the hardware support I need.

[kkubasik]

actualy the portage system has incredable amouts of hardware (obviously it wont come preinstalled as there is no such thing in gentoo) Getting them to work together is quite simple, read the installation handbook on the gentoo site and see if it answers all your questions.

[justwes]

actualy the portage system has incredable amouts of hardware (obviously it wont come preinstalled as there is no such thing in gentoo) Getting them to work together is quite simple, read the installation handbook on the gentoo site and see if it answers all your questions.

Yeah, I've got the handbook open now and skimming through it.

It's just that I've been having some hardware issues with some of the knoppix flavours.

But I'm sure that if the need arises I can get some help here.

[kkubasik]

part of that is knoppix fits a GUI onto a cd along with many common apps, leaves very little room for drivers, the team has a tough job selecting what will be included in each distro.

[justwes]

part of that is knoppix fits a GUI onto a cd along with many common apps, leaves very little room for drivers, the team has a tough job selecting what will be included in each distro.

And it's an awesome distro, in all it's flavours.

But the main issues I was having was with some of the off-shoots of it (STD, PHLAK, Overclockix).

[variant]

what hardware (please be precsice) were you having problems with?

[justwes]

With STD & PHLAK, was having issues with my NIC (Realtek Gigabit ethernet).

In STD, none of my wireless cards worked, ORiNOCO, Netgear, Cisco Airnonet, & Blitz.

In SuSE I had speaker issues, but they aren't too big of a deal. I have 4 speakers on the laptop but sound would only come out of the front two, not the two above the keyboard on the LCD panel.

STD also didn't recognise my USB optical mouse, but that's minor as well. Because it did see my touchpad with no issues.

The laptop is an Alienware so it uses pretty much the equivalent to desktop components.

All minor issues in the long run and with the Knoppix and it's branches all being live cd's I'm not too worried. I can always remaster the cd's if I really need/want. But I'm hoping that with Gentoo I can install the needed drivers and such to get everything working.

[justwes]

haven't attempted to install yet, still reading the install guide. But I do have a question.

Will the smp kernel work with a P4 and see the hyperthreading? Or should I install the default kernel?

[kkubasik]

use the smp kernel as its the 2.6 and will support hyperthreading, and more likely to have better device support, alone with several other updates.