When emerge fails to get files

[PatG]

Technically, perhaps it is not right to say that emerge is getting the files, but I am not sure yet what all of the workings are behind this process. I suspect that it is actually the shell scripts behind emerge that are doing the work. Perhaps someone else can explain the whole process and comment on the validity of this method.

I am new to gentoo and am currently in the last part of my first install. I was trying to install xfree and the emerge scripts could not connect to a valid source for the XFree86-4.3.0-patches-1.1.7.tar.bz file. After several attempts I thought that I would ftp them to the computer, but alas, there does not seem to be an ftp client from the LiveCD. So I went to another computer and did a google search for the file name and found it on a UK server. I downloaded the files (I grabbed a few others that looked to be updates of the same vintage) and copied them to a floppy. I then took the floppy to the computer being installed and copied the files to the portage/distfiles directory. Next run of emerge for xfree seems to be running fine now that it has all of the files

For people real new to linux the floppy I used was from a windows box formatted FAT. The mount command needed is

# mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

and then

# cp /mnt/floppy/* /usr/portage/distfiles

[ben_h]

FYI, emerge runs 'wget' to fetch files. It's very useful for downloading things standalone, mirroring sites, and a lot of other stuff.