Hello, I've been a Debian user for many years and am trying out Gentoo this week. I've found a lot of information online -- thanks -- but I am left with some questions.
1. How can I ensure that my Gentoo system has only Free software? I was somewhat surprised and alarmed to find that "emerge kde" wanted to install Motif, which is generally considered non-free. I observed that the ebuild files in the portage directory do contain a "LICENSE=" line, but I couldn't figure out how to instruct emerge to allow/disallow given licenses. It would be great to have something like USE so I could say LICENSES="GPL BSD -BSD_ADVERTISING". 2. I'm a little confused about the nature of a released distribution and supported architectures. My main reason for interest in Gentoo is to run it on my Alpha -- these machines benefit more significantly from optimizations than PCs tend to. Some of the online docs say that Alpha is a "supported" architecture; yet the only installation CDs for them are in "experimental". That gives me pause when considering using Gentoo on Alpha for critical work. Is that pause justified? Similarly, does one generally track the "stable" distribution by setting ARCH="x86" instead of ARCH="~x86"? If so, are security updates pushed to the stable distribution as well? I observed that, following the manual for building my kernel, gentoo-sources fetched a fairly old (2.4.20) kernel -- one that may have several security holes (though there were so many patches to it, it was hard to evaluate). 3. How do I enable kdm? I emerge'd kde, but found no /etc/init.d/ script for kdm to use with rc-update. 4. What happens if I add "sandbox" to features in /etc/make.conf? That sounds like a feature I'd like, but none of the manpages I looked at would explain what it does. 5. As I work more on the system, I get more and more errors like the following from emerge: * Caching service dependencies... [ ok ] >>> Auto-cleaning packages ... !!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd!!! Invalid db entry: /var/db/pkg/*sys-fs/devfsd !!! Couldn't find match for dev-perl/libvorbis-perl !!! Couldn't find match for media-libs/glut !!! Couldn't find match for media-libs/xvid !!! Couldn't find match for media-libs/divx4linux !!! Couldn't find match for media-libs/libmikmod !!! Couldn't find match for media-sound/cdparanoia >>> No outdated packages were found on your system. * Regenerating GNU info directory index... * Processed 54 info files. The above was from emerge -b kde. What can I do about this, and is it serious? Thanks, John Goerzen -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
