[Sheflug] Help with xorg and gentoo

["Wonkey Donkey" <wonkey_donkey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm posting purely as an interest right now.

I am looking at a hardware upgrade near to xmas or the new year. An Intel 
Core2Duo and probably a Bad Axe /Bad Axe 2 mobo, or one of the Asus 
Workstation boards.

My favourite Linux of choice right now is Gentoo, despite the recent 
problems with lots of circular dependencies, failing ebuilds and such like. 
With a little patience and effort, it is still a very good distro.

But, what I would like to do is see if there are any Gentoo guru's and also 
Xorg guru's on the list, who could help me fine tune my /etc/make.conf and 
my xorg.conf.

I won't post what I am using in this actual message; but I am convinced that 
the /etc/make.conf USE flags are at least partly responsible for the 
circular dependencies, and I have seen various opinions on the USE flags; 
some say less is more, others say include everything you think you might 
need.

As for the xorg.conf, well the basis of the one I am using now is from an 
old Dell laptop I used to own about 3 or 4 years ago. I have simply kept the 
file and modified the bits I knew needed changing.

I went to one of the online modeline generators, and input the specs from my 
monitor manual to try and make sure I was getting the correct timings etc, 
and they came back with a message that the frequencies and all were out of 
range. Yet I know those frequencies work in windows, so the monitor is 
capable of delivering them.

Then, finally, there is the fonts section. As a rule, I generally emerge all 
of the european based font files, and add the path for each of them; and I 
have no problem enabling anti-aliasing too. But when I load certain 
websites, the fonts still look all wrong, or totally unreadable. In some 
cases, its like Helvetica is used for the entire web page, and as we know, 
Helvetica doesnt render particularly well. Possibly something to do with 
font substitution and aliasing. I have followed the Gentoo fonts guide; 
disabling bindist to get bci and such, but Im still not convinced I am 
getting the best appearance. And Im of the feeling that the fonts guide is 
out of date anyway, as the USE flags it mentions are different to those 
available in the local files and the web lists.

So, if there is anbody who can help in these areas, I would much appreciate 
it. I will be using the same monitor and similar graphics card, so hopefully 
i can get a tweaked xorg.conf sorted beforehand. Likewise in /etc/make.conf, 
its only the USE flags that need sorting. The rest of it, as far as I know 
works fine and should only need the -march changing.

I can post the existing make.conf and xorg.conf as a starting point if 
anybody is willing to take a look. I would also be interested in seeing what 
conf files other people are using, if its not too much trouble.

Regards.

Steve. 



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