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Gentoo Tips

Using Gentoo as the distribution (maker) of choice has led to some situations that afforded deep digging within various sources to solve some problems which I might not be the only one suffering from. So I share my expirience here.

1. Running out of space (during emerge)
2. Using a SoundBlaster 4.1 Digital

1. Running out of space (during emerge)

If you continuously watch your free space during an emerge, you see that portage uses /var/tmp/portage for a working directory. While compiling XFree86, I was close to running out of space on my partition and managed to solve it by suspending the emerge, moving and relinking some directories and resuming. Here is how, assuming you are just emerging PACKAGE:

• Suspend the emerge by sending the make process a stop signal. Use process table tools like ps or top to get the process ID and then send signal 19 with kill -19. This will also stop all compilers as the stop signal affects the whole process hierarchy.
• Locate the big directory under /var/tmp/portage/PACKAGE which would relief you from the space problem, move it to another partition and place a symlink using ln -s.
  Note that you can not do this on open files, so check carefully that your stopped processes do not have open filehandles on this directory or choose another one. The tool lsof (list of open files) comes in handy - run it and grep for your directory name.
• Resume the ebuild by sending the same process a continue signal using kill -18. The emerge should resume and the compiling continue.
• After the emerge, restore the old situation if emerge did not clean up the whole stuff. Generally, it is safe to completely erase /var/tmp/portage/*

2. Using a SoundBlaster 4.1 Digital

As one missleading posting in the offical forums of creative says, you can use emu10k1 as a driver. This is not true!

Check the output of the command lspci -v. It will show your devices hooked to the pci bus and reveal the card mentioned in the title as:

02:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI (rev 04)
        Subsystem: Ensoniq: Unknown device 8001
        Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 7
        I/O ports at b400 [size=64]
        Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2

The base address (first token) may be different for you but the controller information matters. It reveals a Ensoniq 5880 with a unknown subdevice.

As recommended by gentoo, I use an alsa driver and did the setup according to their ALSA-guide. As a driver however you should choose ens1371 which is just what this card needs. And do not forget to unmute the channels....