							1999-01-06
							Emil Brink

			gentoo Installation

INTRODUCTION
The current release of gentoo does not use autoconf, automake, or
auto-anything. Still, it compiles right out of the box on my fairly
old Slackware distribution, and also Debian 2 and SunOS 5.5.1. Your
milage is likely to vary.


DISCLAIMER
All released versions of gentoo that are numbered 0.9.x are devel-
opment releases. This means that things can (and will) change between
releases, sometimes drastically. It also means that things can be
less than stable, and that unexpected crashes should be expected. If
you get gentoo to crash, please run it again through gdb, and mail me
a description of what you did to cause the crash, and gdb's output
(source file & line, and preferably a stack trace ('where') too).


REQUIREMENTS
To run gentoo, you'll need GTK+ version 1.0.5 or later installed and
ready to run. gentoo has not been tested with the development tree of
GTK+ (the 1.1.x versions), but I've heard from users that it won't
work. It does work with GTK+ 1.0.6, though, since that is what I use.
I don't *think* that gentoo requires 1.0.6, but if you have problems
with the interface you might want to consider upgrading. Not that the
1.0.6 release is free from trouble, but hey...
	Like most (if not all) other GTK+ programs, gentoo also uses
the companion GDK and glib libraries, so you're going to need those
too. If you have GTK+ installed, you should be all set. A quick and
easy way to test if your system has GTK+ installed is to run the
gtk-config program. If this program doesn't exist, you don't have a
correctly installed GTK+ library, and gentoo won't compile.
	In addition to these libraries, you might want to have a good
enough version of the shell command 'file' handy, since it can provide
considerable amounts of file recognition power, which is easily used
by gentoo and used to select colors and icons for your files. Note that
there are differences between the capabilities of various system's
implementations of the 'file' command - gentoo assumes that "file -f -"
makes the 'file' command accept filenames from stdin; not all versions
of the command do this (especially, Sun's 'file' command doesn't).
	If you feel that you need a better 'file' command, users have
suggested that the one available from ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/
should do the trick. I haven't tried this one out myself, though:
I use a 'file' command originally written by Ian F. Darwin, that came
with my Linux installation.
	To compile gentoo, you need GNU's version of the "make" tool.
This is sometimes installed under the name "gmake".


BUILDING
Just typing 'make' should do it. It will compile all the source, and
you will end up with an executable named 'gentoo' in the same dir-
ectory as the source. This is the application itself.
	Depending on your compiler, there may or may not be any
warnings during compilation. On my system, which is a Slackware Linux
with gcc version 2.7.2.3 (ancient, huh?), I get no warnings at all...
	Since all releases so far of gentoo have been development ones
(numbered 0.9.x), the executable includes debugging information, which
makes it kind of huge (~2.1 MB on my system). You can either live with
this, or run 'strip' on the final executable to trim it down.

BUILDING ON Solaris
Since 0.9.12, I've started trying to get gentoo to compile on Solaris
as well as under Linux. Since these two environments are the ones in
which I spend most of my time (Linux at home, Solaris at school), this
makes sense to me. I use gcc both under Linux and Solaris; Sun's 'cc'
compiler is not used. However, since I've made some efforts to get the
code considerably more ANSI-clean, you might be able to get it to work
using cc. While getting the code to compile under Solaris, I had great
trouble with the _POSIX_C_SOURCE symbol and its friends. You may have
to fiddle around with this, just in case your Solaris system isn't
configured *just* like those in my school...
	It might be interesting to note that what is said about the
'file' command above is *highly* relevant if you're going to compile
and run gentoo on Solaris; the 'file' command supplied by Sun does NOT
understand the "file -f -" syntax, and therefore fails to work with
gentoo. You might want to look around for another implementation of
the file command...


INSTALLATION
You can install gentoo manually. Just copy the executable to e.g.
/usr/local/bin, or wherever you keep your third-party binaries.
That's the easy part. The hard part is the icon graphics that gentoo
really need to look its best. I recommend creating a directory, for
example, /usr/local/lib/gentoo/, and copying the entire "icons"
directory there. Since the documentation is so incomplete, I do not
recommend installing it anywhere. Sorry 'bout that.
	In fact, these two things (copying the binary to /usr/local/bin
and the icons to /usr/local/lib/gentoo/icons) are done for you if you
type 'make install'. Of course, you probably need to be root to be
able to write to /usr/local.
	You may also wish to create a site-wide configuration, to be
used as a starting point for user's own configurations. If you want
one of these, start gentoo up, configure it until you're happy, and
then save the config. Now find and copy the file from ~/.gentoorc to
/usr/local/etc/gentoorc (the default, see PTH_CFG in the Makefile
if you want your site-wide config someplace else).
	An example config is available; copy gentoorc-example to
~/.gentoorc (or /usr/local/etc/gentoorc) before starting gentoo to
use it.
	If you start up gentoo and it seems to have trouble loading
the icons (all your icons show up as just an empty frame), you need
to set a better icon path for gentoo to use. Check out the "Paths"
tab in the configuration window to do this.


UNINSTALLATION
Remember where you put everything, and remove it! Oh, and don't
forget the registry and the six reboots (nah, just kidding). :)


/Emil
