Evil Home Stereo

Nathaniel McCallum wrote a short guide on how to switch your Gentoo to the recenetly released X.org X-server:

1. Make sure that all your config files are updated by running “etc-update”. The reason is that after xorg-x11 is installed there will be over 200 new config files to update. Most (if not all) of them just need to be replaced. You just don’t want to get old non-updated config files to get mixed in with this (and possibly break something).
2. I made sure I had a binary package available of xfree. If you dont a simple “emerge -B xfree” will do.
3. Then I made a binary package of xorg-x11 without actually installing it (ie. “emerge -B –nodeps xorg-x11″). This way I had binary packages of both in case of problems (to avoid multiple compiles if there is a problem).
4. After that I stopped xdm and xfs (in my default runlevel; ie. “/etc/init.d/[xfs and xdm] stop”)
5. Then I uninstalled xfree (”emerge -Cp xfree”).
6. Then I emerged xorg-x11 (”emerge -k xorg-x11″).
7. The only major changes are the name of the config file and the path of the fonts. Once xorg-x11 is installed, there are lots of config files to update. So then I ran etc-update and just entered “-5″ to overwrite all the config files with the newer versions.
8. Then I edited my old XFConfig-4 to changed the new path to the fonts. All fonts are now in /usr/share/fonts/.
9. Change the name of the XFConfig/XFConfig-4 file to xorg.conf
10. Re-start xfs and xdm.
11. Done! It was actually very painless. And my machine even seems
    slightly faster. But perhaps I’m just immagineing things :).

And Neil Bothwick added:

To save recompiling such a large program to create a package, use “quickpkg xfree” to build it from the currently installed files.

Unfortunately did I read this after I unmerged XFree and kicked off the compilation of the new X. So no binaries for me. Let’s keep the fingers crossed and see if it goes smoothly anyway…

Nice quote from the current c’t editorial:

When a company like T-Com claims that their creative heads discovered the brand new trend to be telephone flatrates, they probably believe as well that the radio was invented by removing the ray tube from the TV.