I don’t have a lot of experience using Linux. I am setting Gentoo based off of a recommendation from a good friend. I have the system loaded up on an old IBM R40 laptop with 512M of ram and a 20G hdd. So far–so good. This page is where I am keeping notes of commands I need to use and have looked up. Hopefully it will help me remember them. (Brettski 2/15/2008)

I have pretty much dumped Gentoo for now for CentOS.  I was just getting tired of fighting with it all the time to get stuff setup.
(brettski 7/20/2008)

Kernel build select menu: [kernel-2.6.23-gentoo-r8]
from /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfigIf you make changes, save them and rebuild the kernel and modules
# make && make modules_installCopy the new kernel to /boot
# cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel_nameFinding modules built
find /lib/modules/<kernel version>/ -type f -iname ‘*.o’ -or -iname ‘*.ko’To automatically auto load the modules add to:
/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

Bringing network interfaces up and down:
Reference
/etc/conf.d/net.interface_name start|stop
# /etc/conf.d/net.eth0 start

(02/20/2008) I just loaded Windowmaker on my laptop Gentoo build and have a few messages at the end to record:Messages for package media-libs/freetype-2.3.5-r2:After upgrading to freetype-2.3.5, it is necessary to rebuild libXfont to avoid build errors in some packages. The utilities and demos previously bundled with freetype are now optional. Enable the tuils USE flag if you would like them to be installed.

Messgaes for package media-libs/fontconfig-2.5.0-r1:

Please make fontconfig configuration changes in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ and not to /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, as it will be replaced!
GNU info directorry indx is up-to-date.

[read up on the 4 config files in /etc after emerge already!]

A really big requirement for X windows is an X windows server, duh. I thought that is what wdm was going to do for me, but I was mistaken, still not sure what wdm is exactly. Anyway, following http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml, and installing X11

re-initialise environment variables: env-update
followed by: source /etc/profile