[clue-tech] Distro musings

[Ken MacFerrin]

Collins Richey wrote:
> Yes indeed. I've been lambasted on another list that I've participated
> in for years for exactly that ebullience in praise of Gentoo. I've
> been studying and using the alternatives for some time now - just to
> see what is offered and (in the case of CentOS) to have a distro on
> hand that we use at work (RHEL4)  - but I've reached the same
> conclusions I already knew years ago.

They fear what they do not know ;)

[snip]
> 
> Also, I'm still waiting for anwers to setup my printer with cups. I've
> installed all the cups/foomatic/gimp-print/etc. but the list of
> available printers is incomplete. All of the Epson CXnnnn definitions
> are missing, for example, and I have a CX4200. This printer worked
> just fine on Ubuntu.
> 

A quick "locate" on my Gentoo box finds the files listed below:
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_CX6400.xml
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_CX5200.xml
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_CX5400.xml
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_CX3200.xml

Then an "equery b
/usr/share/foomatic/db/source/printer/Epson-Stylus_CX6400.xml" shows
that the file belongs to "net-print/foomatic-db-20050910"

I'd make sure you have the "cups" and "foomaticdb" USE flags set in your
make.conf file and then re-emerge "foomatic-db".


> I had a great deal of difficulty with my sound card (ens1371). That's
> more of an alsa problem than a Gentoo problem. Now that the sound card
> is working (the ens1371 module must be loaded, removed, and loaded
> again to work!!!), no one can tell me how to get KDE sounds to work.
> KDE sounds also worked without a hitch on Ubuntu.

I'm not sure what the module loading problem is about.  It's possible
that the ens1371 module is not loading it's dependencies correctly and
is trying to load itself before the alsa "snd" module is loaded.  I'd
make sure that "snd" is listed in your
/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 file or just compile it into your
kernel (which is what I do).

As far as KDE sound.. make sure that you have "kde-base/arts" installed
and then you should be able to test and configure the rest through the
KDE control panel.

-Ken