no openoffice,no screensaver, emerge fetches nothing

[battletroll]

Hi, I'm new to Gentoo, though I've used some RH based (FC 3, Conectiva) and Debian based (Debian, Ubuntu, Linspire) in the past. I don't know if this is the most correct forum to post my queries, if not please direct me where it should be.

I have a machine with a Sempron 3400+, 120GiB harddrive + CDRW. It has a partition with WinXP on it (10GiB), and I went on with AMD64 LiveCD - everything worked just seamless (I even had sound right from boot, impressive).

Working with the LiveCD I had an option to configure the screensaver from gnome, and I played with OO and, aside from being soooo slow (as usual ), everything was right.

Then I proceeded to install using the GTK+ installer, I placed in a 2GiB swap partition, 40GiB reiserfs as / and 50GiB xfs as /home.

The install went on smooth and it apparently ended OK, so I rebooted, now booting from HD. And then...

First surprise: there's no way I can configure Xscreensavers from within gnome (I don't even have the corresponding menu item, not even when I login to gdm as root).

Second: OO doesn't run, when running it from command line it quits with an error like "object bad registered" or something (sorry, I'm writing from memory)

Third: Since I don't have internet access at home, I tried to do a:
emerge -puf world 2> links.txt
as suggested in gentoo-wiki in order that I may fetch files from work or internet coffee and then use them at home... guess what? "links.txt" is EMPTY!!!

In fact, if I don't redirect output, i get nothing. If I do "emerge -uDf world" I get a lot of error messages talking about "[...]/portage/distfiles without write access". I checked that portage directory, and saw I have no directory "distfiles".

Can anyone help me? I knew what I was getting into when I said now I wanted to try Gentoo, but hell, this is waaaay more frustrating than I thought (I've reinstalled at least 3 times, and the problem remains).

Also, I too experienced the problem mentioned in another conversation in this same forum, that the HD gets sloooooow after a lot of work with IDE hard drives, in my case this happens whenever I copy a file from /mnt/windows to any other partition (but specially with the xfs one), only solution I've found is to reboot. Before reading those posts, I thought it was some bug with the ntfs code. In the end... is this bug fixable in any way?

[drjimmy42]

First surprise: there's no way I can configure Xscreensavers from within gnome (I don't even have the corresponding menu item, not even when I login to gdm as root).

gnome doesn't use xscreensaver anymore. Try gnome-screensaver. Its a gtk version. After that, check out the main menu->System->Preferences menu. There should be an entry there called Screensaver.

Second: OO doesn't run, when running it from command line it quits with an error like "object bad registered" or something (sorry, I'm writing from memory)

Not sure, maybe google for the whole error string?

Third: Since I don't have internet access at home, I tried to do a:
emerge -puf world 2> links.txt
as suggested in gentoo-wiki in order that I may fetch files from work or internet coffee and then use them at home... guess what? "links.txt" is EMPTY!!!

In fact, if I don't redirect output, i get nothing. If I do "emerge -uDf world" I get a lot of error messages talking about "[...]/portage/distfiles without write access". I checked that portage directory, and saw I have no directory "distfiles".

Can anyone help me? I knew what I was getting into when I said now I wanted to try Gentoo, but hell, this is waaaay more frustrating than I thought (I've reinstalled at least 3 times, and the problem remains).

I honestly can't imagine admining a gentoo machine without network access. You have to do an emerge sync from time to time to update the list of available packages. That fixes a lot of problems, and since distfiles doesn't belong to any package, its probably created by doing the emerge sync. You can try creating it manually, but the networkless thing is probably going to get you in the end.

[i92guboj]

First surprise: there's no way I can configure Xscreensavers from within gnome (I don't even have the corresponding menu item, not even when I login to gdm as root).

If you really want to use xscreensaver under gnome, you can still run xscreensaver-demo from command line, or configure a menu or desktop link for it.

Second: OO doesn't run, when running it from command line it quits with an error like "object bad registered" or something (sorry, I'm writing from memory)

No idea.

Third: Since I don't have internet access at home, I tried to do a:
emerge -puf world 2> links.txt
as suggested in gentoo-wiki in order that I may fetch files from work or internet coffee and then use them at home... guess what? "links.txt" is EMPTY!!!

First, gentoo without internet is just a pain in the ass. Besides requiring an unnecessary and worthless effort. That said, you should know that gentoo learns about new packages when you do emerge --sync (which is impossible since you dont have internet at home). You can download the latest portage snapshot from the gentoo mirror and then untar it manually. Until you update portage, emerge -pu is not gonna report anything, since, there is no way gentoo can learn about updates in a networless machine, that is, unless you do it manually.

Second, distfiles can be created manually, no problem. Make sure that root and portage groups have write permissions on it. In distfiles is where all the source tarballs are stored, and you need to put the tarballs listed in the emerge command in that directory to be able to emerge them in a networkless machine.

I have no experience with ntfs drives under linux, all I can say is that I avoid them, so they never gave trouble

I would really think about using a distro that is more suited for use without network. But that's just me.

[battletroll]

May I correct myself: when I boot using the AMD64 liveCD... Open Office doesn't work here too!!!
I think i got confused with another livecd (i'm trying a lot of distros right now)

if i try to run from prompt, quits with the same error message: "libXext.so.6 missing or doesn't exist" (calc, impress, etc. - they all show the same and quit).

So I guess it's nothing to do with my instalation...
I'll check the MD5 sums of the original ISO file, perhaps it was damaged and that's the reason - though i'm almost sure the download went smooth and fine... still... I googled this error and saw it's more or less common, specially with most recent version of OO (don't know why yet).

Any ideas on why it may be happening to me?

On the other hand, i was able (after a lot of errors and 2 reinstalls) to update my portage tree without an internet connection, using the process described at the wiki - 6thpink, you were right: i first had to update my portage tree, after that emerge -fup world DID give me links i needed to download (which i'll have to download at an internet coffee one of these days...)
By the way, the process isn't very clear in the wiki, perhaps i'll have to edit in order to clarify it - that way my experience may'll be useful to somebody else.

I'd like to know what i'm missing to have OO running... thanks in advance for any idea.
C ya!

[i92guboj]

May I correct myself: when I boot using the AMD64 liveCD... Open Office doesn't work here too!!!
if i try to run from prompt, quits with the same error message: "libXext.so.6 missing or doesn't exist" (calc, impress, etc. - they all show the same and quit).

libXext is a piece of the Xorg server, and it should have been emerged along with it, unless you are doing strange things. Just try to emerge libXext -1 if it is not installed. But it is not a package you should need to emerge by hand if you properly installed xorg...

[jburns]

The 32 bit version of libXext is supplied by app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-xlibs.

[battletroll]

hi, thanks for the answers!
I can't understand something: what strange things am i doing? i've just installed and reinstalled and reinstalled again gentoo from the amd64 livecd, always using a networkless installation, so i'm stuck with the precompiled packages it has (there's no way i can emerge anything, at least not yet, until i get internet access at home - i'm still struggling to get gentoo work without internet connection)

what really pisses me off is: why doesn't it just work when booting from the livecd? can anybody else just give it a try, please? i'm starting to get mad on this - i can understand if i'm doing some gruesome mistake when installing, both from the gtk+ installer and from the command line one, but... what about OO not running from the livecd also?

this kind of disks are supposed to give you a preview of how things will be like once everything is installed in your hard drive...

i'd really like someone else to try to run OO from the latest amd64 livecd, if it's a bug then it should be corrected, if it's something with my machyine or my cd then i'll know for noone else will have this problem.