[gentoo-user] Re: excess x11 drivers

[Harry Putnam]

"Jorge Peixoto de Morais Neto" <please.no.spam.here@×××××.com> writes:

> I am not only concerned about the problem reported in this thread; I
> also want to give opinion on his larger "update a very outdated
> system" task.

Just for the record... I seem to have gotten things under control and
did set VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia".

I ran into a problem somewhere in the compile of the x11 drivers that
brought up where some file (I didn't keep the name) was not available
in the most recent kernel sources.

Rather than keep pounding away, I backed off to 
uname -r
 2.6.25-gentoo-r9

I didn't test any of the releases in between, since I was pretty sure
something in the ...25 series would work since my last kernel (prior
to updating to ...27* was ..25-r6.

Those sources appear to supply everthing needed.  I also discovered
that none of the kernel based NVIDIA modules were necessary.

And finally as advised here in another thread recently I ran
--depclean after successful update @system @world and many of those
x11-drivers were dumped.

Now I get a clean slate there:

$ eix -Ic |grep x11-driver
[I] x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers      [...]
[I] x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev    [...]
[I] x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard [...]
[I] x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse    [...]

And X works fine.

I don't tax a video card much in my usage of linux.  It's my main
desktop but my  semi-professional video-editing is all done on windowsXP
machines for access to the first rate adobe tools.

Opening the occasional graphics file in mail is about it on my gentoo
desktop. 

Many thanks to all for the generous help.

I guess I'll have to take the final step and setup some cron based
update method that happens a lot more frequently...