Xorg on Gentoo

K

Kryyll

Guest
So in my spare time I created a Virtualbox of Gentoo. Everything went smoothly, but I'm having issues configuring Xorg properly. I have it installed but when I run starts it says that there is no screen. I believe this is a video driver issue but I am unsure how to fix this. Also, are there special USE flags and video drivers that I need to use in Virtualbox?

Any ideas?
 


UPDATE: I figured it out! Yay! This thread is now pointless :)
 
How'd you figure it out? Coincidentally, I'm downloading Gentoo to try on a VM at the moment :). I'll be using VMWare though, but always good to be prepared in case I hit the same or similar issue.
 
First, make sure you have the driver 'virtualbox' in your make.conf file for your video card. Then just try to install Xorg. If there are issues, like what I had, take a look at the /etc/portage/package.use file. If it isn't there already you need to add 'x11-base/xorg-server udev' to it. I recommend using the echo command for that, makes things easier and you don't have to use a text editor.

Now, try to install it again. You might need more dependencies or whatever but I didn't luckily. If it installs correctly, try and start it with a 'startx' command. You may or may not get an error saying it cannot find a screen, if so, take a look at the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file(look at this no matter what problem occurs!). Look through it and it will tell you what the problems are. Then just install the things that it is complaining about.

Thats the entire process I took to get Xorg working. Also, when you get it running you will only have like 3 terminals that you can't do anything with, you need to install TWM (and Xclock just for fun!) to actually be able to use the plain Xorg environment.
 
If you're having the 'no screen found' error, you will need to install a bunch of little things like vesa and fbdev and I think a virtualbox one.
 
Did running gentoo in a VM convince you enough to run it as your main linux distro operating system?
 
I probably would if I wasn't in school. It a seriously awesome system and I really enjoy running it. The only issues are that it takes forever to install software and it breaks like every other day. There breaks are usually really easy fixes and probably wouldn't happen as much on real hardware.
 
It used to break for me when I was new to it years ago but now its been stable over the years since I'm more comfortable with its package manager (portage). Takes a little getting used to when you're used to debian,ubuntu or others.
 
I have not ever used that distro, what does it compare to out of the more popular ones?
 
It's an Arch based distro. I put it on my "newly" build desktop just to see if it would get all the drivers and things but I liked it and kept it. It's sorta like how Ubuntu is to Debian. Except rolling release and better in my opinion.
 
You know back in the day when I started out with Linux we didn't have so many choices, you went to a computer bookstore and purchased a linux magazine with free cd's of linux installations or just a 6 pack cd set. Today with the internet there are so many choices.
 
I'm actually writing a research paper on GNU/Linux and I got a book from the library and it had a bunch of CDs in the back it was like Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, SuSE, and some others. It was neat.
 

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