Day 5: Gentoo 2008 Beta1

I am beginning to feel at home with Gentoo again.  Sound is working and I can watch my favorite Japanese Anime, and of course, Battlestar Galactica.

A couple months ago, I did manage to install Gentoo on my desktop but I could not get the sound to work.  I ended up giving up since I had no idea what the problem was.  ALSA was configured correctly.  Well, I think I mentioned before, I just had the speakers plugged into the wrong jacks.  They were plugged into the internal sound card jacks, not the external sound card jacks.

I tried sticking with PC-BSD and FreeBSD on my desktop but unfortunately, I really needed to use VirtualBox for some of my projects.  Plus, only Windows seems to support my Canon laser printer.  Drivers were released for Linux but I have no successfully got a Linux box to detect my printer.  Hence I am stuck with VirtualBox.  Yes, I did try QEMU in PC-BSD.  It is a pain to set up.

It is nice to be using Portage again.  Ports is nice but Portage is much easier to use in my book.  I see the strength in Gentoo-FreeBSD using Portage.  Portmanager and Portupdate are great Ports applications, but Portage, but emerge is much easier to use to me.

So far, the only application that I have not successfully compiled was OpenOffice.  Most likely some USE flag errors.  Luckily, a binary version is available in Portage.

More updates about Gentoo 2008 Beta1 later but as of now, I am using it as my default desktop.