							1999-05-17
							Emil Brink

			gentoo Installation

INTRODUCTION
The current release of gentoo does not use autoconf, automake, or
auto-anything. gentoo is developed under (vintage Slackware) Linux.
I always strive to have it compile with 0 warnings on my own system,
but since not all Unix(-like) systems are created equal, your mileage
will most likely vary. I try to test-compile gentoo on at least
Solaris 2.6 and Red Hat 5.1 before a release, though.


DISCLAIMER
All released versions of gentoo that have an odd minor version number
(the second, middle, number in the major.minor.micro sequence) are
are development 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 compile and run gentoo, you'll need GTK+ version 1.2.x, where x
should be as large as possible, installed and ready to run. Normally,
gentoo is developed using the latest stable release of the GTK+
toolkit, and not tested with any development releases of it (devel-
opment releases are numbered x.y.z, where y is odd), so if you try to
build it against one you're on your own.
	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. As a bonus, you can find out the exact version
of your GTK+ library by supplying the option --version to it. If this
program doesn't exist, you don't have a correct GTK+ installation,
and gentoo won't compile or run.
	In addition to these libraries, you might want to make sure
that you have a "good enough" version of the 'file' command on the
system, since gentoo can make good use of this program. In particular,
gentoo assumes that "file -f -" makes the 'file' command accept file-
names from stdin. Since not all 'file' commands support this usage, you
might want to upgrade yours.
	If you want to upgrade your 'file' command, I can recommend
the one available in <ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/>; it's the
standard 'file' command for (according to Ian Darwin, the author)
"Linux, *BSD and other systems". I use version 3.26. To compile
gentoo, you need GNU's version of the "make" tool. On some systems,
this is installed under the name "gmake".


BUILDING
To build gentoo, cd to the source directory, which will be called
gentoo-VERSION (where VERSION is the version number). Now invoke
GNU make, and hang on.
	After a successful compilation, you should end up with a
single executable named (aptly) "gentoo". This is the application
itself.
	Because the executable includes debugging information by
default, it might be rather big. If you have access to the program'
"strip", you could run it on gentoo to shrink it down a bit. Please
note that doing so will strip the executable from potentially valuable
debugging information, though.

BUILDING ON Solaris
All versions of gentoo since 0.9.12 should build under Solaris. You
will most certainly need access to GNU gcc for the build to be
smooth, though.
	At school, which is where I get access to Solaris machines,
gentoo generally builds right out of the box, the only thing I need
to think about is to use "gmake" rather than Sun's "make".
	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.


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 hunting down stuff in the binary registry and the six hard
reboots! (Nah, just kidding :)


/Emil
