Variety of Problems, kde, emerge, dual boot with grub, resolution

[rowman]

I have managed to install Gentoo and gotten it to boot and mount all my other drives, but I still have a few issues.

Emerge:
Once I emerge something, how do I run it? I have emerged a few programs (kde is one of them) but I have absolutely no idea how to get them to run.

Dual booting with GRUB:
I can not get my windows partition to boot using grub. I either get 'invalid executable string', 'unable to find partition', or it just displays the entry from grub.conf on the screen and hangs there depending on what settings I put in grub.conf
With some settings it also just restarts my computer when I select the entry from the grub menu.

Right now the windows entry reads:
title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd2,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Gentoo is on primary master, an NTFS storage drive is primary slave, NTFS Windows drive is Secondary master, and a cdrom is secondary slave. I got the hd2,0 from reading the grub docs and trying to figure it out.

Resolution:
Where are the settings for resolution of the command line interface? When I boot from the gentoo livecd I get a much higher res than I do when I boot from my hd.
Thanks

[budman7]

To get Windows to boot, will will have to be the Master. At least it will think it is the master.
Do "info grub" in a terminal and look for how to map the drives.

To get kde to run, do this

nano -w .xinitrc

Put one line in there

exec startkde

Now you can do "startx" and kde will start

[variant]

it doesnt matter what disk windows is on, grub can boot anything.. you just have to trick windows into thinking its on the primary hard disk.

from your grub.conf it looks like you have three hard disks and windows is on the first partition or the third disk, if thats not the case then you need to read up on grub.

here is a great tutorial on configureing windows and gentoo on seperate hard disks:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=18319

remember that hd0 is the first hard disk and hd1 is the second!

[Cabhan]

To get kde to run, do this

nano -w .xinitrc

Just to avoid evil problems, the file actually needs to be in your home directory. So using your favorite editor (mine is vi):

vi ~/.xinitrc

Just wanted to clarify.

[rowman]

Just to avoid evil problems, the file actually needs to be in your home directory. So using your favorite editor (mine is vi):

Code:
vi ~/.xinitrc


Just wanted to clarify.

When you say home directory, do you mean / or /root (if I am logged in as root)

Thanks for the help

[variant]

root user is for administrative tasks only. if you are usingthat login under the illusion that it will make everything easyer for you then you wrong.. the root user is set up so to do admin task and admin task only.. other things like playing games are not even in roots PATH so it will be actualy HARDER to run those programs. not only that but some aplications will refuse to run under root privs. if you insist on having total access to all system files under one user for general usage then set up a normal user and read up on the "sudo" command.

basicaly its just not as clever an idea as it seems "i dont care about viruses" is not the point. it much easyer to use and administer a unix/linux system if you have a seperate root and user account.

[rowman]

Oh, I know that root makes some stuff harder, as I mentioned I am installing the system, so mostly I have been using root so far. Anyways, how do I run installed packages from any user, much less root?

Thanks

[rowman]

Thanks for the link to the gentoo forum post about dual booting. It works now that I have used grub to remap my hard drives.

[budman7]

Instead of root, use su, that is the superuser.

Once you have it installed, and you have created a regular user, make sure that regular user is part of the wheel group.

Then you can type su in a terminal, give your root password.
Now you have your own path, but wiith root privileges.

[rowman]

So I got kde running, what file do I put 'startx' in to make it start every time I log in with a specific user? Also, from kde how can I get back to the command line (without xserv, alt-1, 2, etc does it)
Thanks