The Source Mage FAQ Collection

This is going to be a table of contents for lots of different Source Mage FAQs.

Here's a first cut at a table of contents for the FAQ. Just playing around with how it might best be organized --ndoss

• added some anchors & links to see how they work - qnr

• Fixed all anchors and links. Now it's time to prune, tidy and reorganize individual FAQs. - iuso

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Short Table of Contents

• Source Mage GNU/Linux

• New to Source Mage

• Differences with Gentoo

• Installation

• Kernel Configuration

• Sorcery

• Grimoire

• Hardware

• Developer

• Security

• Networking

• Usage Glitches

• Web Site

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Long Table of Contents

• Source Mage GNU/Linux

  • How can I contact people involved with SMGL?

  • Why does Sourcemage use so much hard drive space? Is there a way I can stop it from caching?

  • How do optional dependencies work? I remember casting a spell and being prompted for an optional dep, but now even if I cast -r -c, I don't get prompted for that dependency any more.

  • What are the best compile optimizations to pick as default?

  • Where are the mailing lists ?

  • What does cast, dispel, sorcery or gaze do?

  • I have heard some stories from people that compiling takes a long time. Does it really take more than 24 hours to compile X?

  • What should I do in preparation for changing from RedHat Linux to Source Mage?

  • Is there anything I need to change in the BIOS before I install Source Mage?

• New to Source Mage

  • What is Source Mage?

  • What are the advantages of having a source based distribution as opposed to a conventional binary distribution?

  • What is a Grimoire, and what do I cast from it?

  • How are the Source Mage components organized?

• Differences with Gentoo

• Installation

  • At the installer menu I'm seeing just a solid color (the font is the same color as the background), how do I fix this?

  • After booting from the initrd menu the screen goes blank. What should I do?

  • How big should partitions be? Should I make a separate partition to hold the source code?

  • I found that there are no spells currently in the audio directory. What happened to KDEMultimedia?

  • I am trying to setup KDEVELOP and it requires KDEUTILS source in order to create the documentation. Which spell do I CAST to get the source?

  • When installing, at what point do you start compiling?

  • I installed alsa-drivers/lib/utils awhile back, got 0.9.0beta10. This installed with linux-2.4.17, no problem.I later went for a sorcery update and got alsa 0.9.0beta12, and it appears this version requires linux-2.5.5, a development version.

  • I can't get device Y to work in X-windows, can you help?

  • When installing Sourcemage Linux under VMWare, I get the following message: /devices/discs: No such file or directory Error: Expected atleast 6 tokens for --menu, have 4. Use --help to list

  • Why might I need (want) the code in CVS? I can download all spells with

  • I am planning to switch my laptop from RedHat Linux to Source Mage and I was told that it would be easier if I got the kernel parameters from my current installation. How do I do this?

• Kernel Configuration

  • How do I have a module load on start-up?

  • How do I add/remove things from my kernel?

  • How do I get a new or custom kernel after an install?

  • How do I have modules auto-load via kmod?

  • How do I get devfs into the kernel, as it doesn't seem to be in the filesystems category?

  • What about usbdevfs?

• Sorcery

  • How can I have SMGL stop asking to view log reports?

  • What do I do to update sorcery?

  • When I cast something, if the source is downloaded with wget, a bunch of dots are printed instead of the progress bar, why is that?

  • Do you have to be down in runlevel 3 when you cast spells?

  • What happens if you cast a spell while you are running that same application?

  • How do I get sorcery to stop caching source code in /var/spool/sorcery?

  • When I run sorcery update, it errors out saying it cant find the files?

  • How do I get sorcery to _not_ ask me if I want a(n) (optional) depency 50+ times when I cast something (aka # cast kde-profile, spending over an hour)

  • I hit CTRL+C during the middle of a sorcery upgrade. The sorcery upgrade had already deleted a bunch of sorcery files (sorcery, cast, etc...). How do I get them back?

• Grimoire

  • When I install some spells, I have this error "make: *** No rule to make target `termcap', needed by `psmisc'". How can I resolve this problem?

  • How do I create a spell?

  • Does "sorcery system-update" update all installed packages period, or just the ones that are out of date; i.e., a newer version exists in the grimoire?

  • I get the following error when casting alsa-lib version 0.9.0beta12: alsa-driver version 0.9.0beta12 has already been installed. Is there a work around for this?

  • Which developers maintain which sections of the Grimoire?

  • After upgrading mozilla to 1.0rc1 (heard of other version doing this as well), I get the following error: LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/java2/plugin/i386/ns600/libjavaplugin_oji.so [libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: can

• Hardware

  • How do I get Sourcemage to install with DAC960 support?

  • Are there any plans to add hardware detection to Source Mage?

  • How do I make a floppy drive mountable as a regular user but not mount at startup?

• Developer

  • I write programs. If a program I develop is also in the grimoire, how do I install intermediate versions and let the grimoire know?

• Security

  • There is a flaw in zlib that created a large security hole. Is the patch applied in the SMGL distribution, so that we don't have to worry about that issue any more?

• Networking

  • I use DHCP, how can I get that running?

  • How do I setup an NFS share and have a client connect to it?

  • What is NIS and how would I go about implementing it on my network?

• Usage Glitches

  • Can't get glibc 2.3.1 to compile while upgrading from 2.2.x versions?

  • Misc gettext/glibc/gcc issues

  • Why does the DEL key produce a '~'?

  • Why doesn't top work?

  • Why can't I change the kdm background?

  • How do I get my wheelmouse to work in X?

  • Mozilla fonts suck

  • But I want ClearType

  • Only root can play sound!

  • XMMS gives me errors about ALSA: snd_mixer_attach and only works when I'm root

  • Why can't sorcery seem to find spells I know are there?

  • Why won't procps (or another spell) compile?

  • FT_Get_Next_Char especially during gtk+2 compile, but possibly others.

  • Locate segfaults

  • mozilla/Firebird is not loading or segfaults

  • How can I get rid of this NLSPATH error when I run man?

  • My box refuses to boot to runlevel 3! It hangs up after the network script reports success.

  • My GNOME icons are broken

  • My /dev/fd is empty

  • My programs say Fontconfig has an invalid token

  • Symlinks don't work well with installwatch/install logs

• Web Site

  • How do I mirror something on Source Mage?

  • Where is the RSS feed for the latest Source Mage news?