Initial Setup

I'm sorry, but FreeBSD again. Five minutes into Gentoo and it's already spitting error messages at me about port overlays, masked packages, updating configuration files for emerge, it just went on and on. All I wanted was 915resolution for my widescreen monitor and it says "Masked package" when I try to install it. Well that's cool, but I need it for X. Why is it even masked in the first place? I never had this problem with FreeBSD, the port worked and everyone was happy. If they knew it wasn't going to work, it wasn't in the ports in the first place.

In order to continue from there, I had to manually edit a file that approved 915resolution so that I could install it. Is a question too difficult? Portage can't just say, "This package is not fully supported, are you sure you want to install it?"

Sound. Alsa blows. Here's my sound setup on FreeBSD.

kldload snd_hda

The sound works perfectly at this point. Multiple programs can play sound at once and I'm happy. On Gentoo, I emerged the alsa-plugin, attempted to setup dmixer, kept screwing around with it until I eventually got sound working. Okay, but now every time I try and play more than one sound, the second program won't play. What is this? My soundcard /dev/dsp is already in use? What should I do now? Setup a ~/.asoundrc? Is it so hard to just make a sound system that can play more than one sound by default? The solution for this problem sucks anyways, I have to type aoss in front of every application that uses sound just so it can share the soundcard when I run them.

FreeBSD's startup applications are easier to set too. Basically if I want Apache2 on startup, I add the line

apache2_enable="YES"

to /etc/rc.conf and everyone is happy. Usually the port tells you to add this to your rc.conf after it is done installing, so there are no problems. The Gentoo alternative is

rc-update add apache2 default

and it doesn't even flow well with how Gentoo is setup. Why the change of heart? Gentoo decided that in order for me to install an application that was masked, I had to manually edit a configuration file. Now if I want to add a program to startup, I don't edit a file, I run a program that does it for me. Well what the hell, either make me edit the files, or have a program that handles it for me.

For licensing reasons beyond my knowledge, installing Java on Gentoo is a lot faster than FreeBSD, because FreeBSD requires a manual sign in to the Sun website to fetch the source, while Gentoo just grabs it for you. That only applies to Java, but it was noticeably faster and less hectic to install Java on Gentoo.