Juergen Starek wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I recently installed Gentoo for the first time (stage 3, networkless, from
> standard CD, onto a dual P3 @ 900 Mhz). I'm left with four problems that I
> haven't been able to solve with the information I found with Google:
>
> - The AltGr-key on my keyboard (German layout, 102 keys) is not working.
> I've seen posts that point to xorg.conf and /etc/conf.d/keymaps, but I'm
> quite sure I set those variables correctly... Where else might I look?

Dunno, you are looking in the right place. Perhaps your keyboard type
differs a wee bit from the one you specified...

> - I have a problem understanding portage: How can I get statistical
> information from it? I'd like to get overviews on what ebuilds are
> installed, a list of those available, more verbose descriptions of
> the software etc. (something like aptitude does for Debian's package
> management system).
> Additionally, I'd like to alter screen output so I can see how much
> of an emerge cycle is already done -- a quick glance on a text console
> tells me what the compiler is working on, but it'd at least be nice to
> see how many ebuilds are still queued. Are there frontends that can do
> this?

You can try a search for the string portage with emerge -s portage or
emerge -S portage. The -s looks in the name of the package, the -S in
the description.

For a list of packages you can simply look in
/usr/portage/category-name, eacht subdir should be a package, for
instance /usr/portage/sci-astronomy

I think it's impossible to see how many percent of a compilation that is
already done.
And normally the top of your (x)term says something like: emerge: (11 of
37) sys-devel/gcc-4.1.1-r1, so you know how many are left.

> - Eclipse 3.2 depends on both Java 1.5 and 1.4, the latter seems to be
> necessary for building the ebuild only. I'd prefer to only have
> JDK 1.5 installed. If I install the binary Eclipse package from
> eclipse.org, am I likely to run into troubles?

I don't know. You can however back up a compiled, installed package
(although Java is a binary release AFAIK) with quickpkg, then unemerge
it and if things don't work out re-emerge it with the emerge -k
packagename command.

> - Finally: How can I tell a Linux machine to use a high resolution text
> mode (like 132x50 chars)? I cannot use a framebuffer because, according
> to various sources, this conflicts with 3D acceleration for ATI Radeon
> cards.

I'd be interesed in hearing that too!

HTH,

Wimmy