So, now I have a bootable system, but starting in text mode is not very useful for normal day activity, so I continued following the guides final steps creating a user.
Then I emerged app-editors/vim (I really missed vim in the chroot system) and sys-apps/etckeeper to keep track of my changes in /etc.
Next is to install a desktop environment. I’m choosing XFCE, so I followed the guide here.
Using the instructions to start xfce didn’t work though, because I have apparently not installed xorg yet. I found the Gentoo guide for Xorg here. There, I determined that I need to find out the video card. I have a built in intel graphics card I am using. I found the Gentoo guide for this.
I added the debug and dri USE flags in /etc/portage/make.conf.
!!!Note:I later found out, that the USE flags are optional, and that you should choose the ones you want. So debug was really not useful for me, because all packages were recompiled with that flag.
There are some USE flags that are not showing in emerge --info that I added:
dri3 sna uxa xvmc
I added this line in the /etc/portage/package.use/intel:
x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel dri3 sna uxa xvmc
After running the command
emerge --ask --changed-use --deep @world
During that, I ran into some strange error complaining about “econf failed” and perl module not being found. From this forum question, I tried the solution perl-cleaner --all, and that did the trick.
I added my user to the video group.
I chose the classical way of configuring Xorg, and emerged the x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel package.
Now, startx works, and starts xfce4, as specified in the file ~/.xinitrc.
Next, I also want a login manager. So I installed slim according to the instructions in the Xfce guide.
When logging in, it didn’t work though. Only an empty black screen was displayed. I looked at the log in /var/log/slim.log/ and saw some complaints about dbus not running. So I looked in the Slim guide, and added dbus to the default run level with the command:
rc-update add dbus default
Now, I can log in and it starts up the Xfce-environment.
But, the keyboard layout is default, and I want a Swedish dvorak layout, so I searched and found this thread saying that you need to configure that in Xorg. I looked in the Xorg wiki and added the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf with the content
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "system-keyboard"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
Option "XkbLayout" "se"
Option "XkbModel" "kinesis"
Option "XkbVariant" "dvorak"
EndSection
Now, it works like a charm.
Next stop is installing some useful programs, like a web browser. I will cover this in the next part of my journey.