[clue-tech] Gentoo discussion was: Distro musings

[Collins Richey]

Top posting: starting a new thread.

[ snips ]

On 7/31/06, Ken MacFerrin <lists at macferrin.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> They fear what they do not know ;)

How true.

>
> [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
>

Yes, I checked USE variables carefully and re emerged everything, but
that didn't seem to fix the problem. Both CUPS and KDE hung on to the
minimal list of choices across restarts. Reboot a la Windows was
required. Now the printer is working.

>
>
> > 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).

I'll give that a try when I have more time for tinkering.

>
> 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.

1. Have arts installed
2. Hve double checked USE settings. I evenre emerged kdelibs.
3. Should work, but it doesn't (test sounds will not work,changing
from autodetect to alsa results in a dialog box "reloading sound" but
this has no effect). The speaker button (volume) is missing from
bottom right on the panel. Sounds work fine in a non-gui request
(aplay).
4. Thus far no one on forum or gentoo-user has much of a clue.

Another disappointing discovery. The Epson CX4200 is an all-in-one,
and scanner worked out of the box on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has major udev
rule sets for scanners, but USB scanners seem to have been relegated
to a "roll your own" project on Gentoo. I've done losts of RTFM but no
success. sane-find-scanner reports my scanner, but scanimage, xsane,
and gimp acquire  will not work. Not a critical problem, but still
disappointing.

Also, I was bummed out to find the win32codecs is still masked for
amd64. mplayer is pretty much worthless without that. I'm probably too
far ahead of the curve running amd64 instead x86.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.