Compiling the source code on Gentoo

Some notes on overlay usage

15 March 2008 'x11-drivers/xf86-video-openchrome' ebuild was added to Gentoo Portage. If you don't need openChrome driver from svn or XvMC hardware acceleration for MPlayer, the overlay is useless for you now.

Getting the openChrome Gentoo overlay

Overlay's Git repository is hosted by repo.or.cz. To install the overlay you must have dev-util/git package installed.

The best way to fetch overlay's content is to use a tool called layman. If you have never used it before, please, read a short description. In order to use openChrome overlay with layman you have to edit /etc/layman/layman.cfg:



and create or modify /usr/portage/local/layman/my-list.xml file:



now overlay called "openchrome" should be listed in output. Run to fetch the overlay. Quiet complicated, but you won't have to repeat this steps anymore.

Read layman documentation for notes about updating overlays.


The alternate way of getting the overlay content is using Git by hand:


If you decided not to use layman, here's a way to update overlay:


The advantage of new overlay hosting is updating process, now it is as easy as running one short command.

It is highly recommended to remove any older overlay versions that you installed earlier from tarballs.

Editing /etc/make.conf

USE flag to control openChrome related patches in overlay is now called "openchrome". However "via" is still needed for those ebuilds which are in official portage tree, not it overlay. So, please add

to your /etc/make.conf. VIDEO_CARDS will enable patches and other support for *chromes for the listed ebuilds.

Installing openChrome driver

openChrome driver is installed automatically as a dependency for x11-base/xorg-server, so you should only re-emerge it:


If 'openchrome' is not your current video driver in /etc/xorg.conf, correct it:


Read 'man openchrome' for further information on available driver options. Don't forget to restart X server after the driver update.

If you are upgrading from the previous version of xorg-server (from xorg-server-1.3 to 1.4), you might need to re-emerge other xorg modules if they fail to load; e.g. xf86-input-mouse. Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for details. It is not related to the overlay and every user should know about this from post-emerge portage messages

Installing DRM modules

If you want to use DRI (currently openChrome driver doesn't compile without DRI support), I assume your kernel is newer than 2.6.22. It means that we can use in-kernel DRM modules. Please ensure that your kernel is configured properly:



you can also set this two options to =y.

EXA acceleration

For EXA acceleration to work well, even with xorg-server-1.4 you need some patches. They are all included in the overlay ebuilds. When xorg-server is rebuilt from overlay, to enable EXA acceleration, modify your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

For the changes to take effect you need to restart your X server.

Mesa

As you can read at the 3DStatus? page, the Unichrome DRI driver status is bad. But anyway you can run some 3D programs. Most of the mesa-demos are ok. I can even play Neverwinter Nights but the performance is poor sometimes. Our overlay now doesn't provide any Mesa ebuilds. You should use those from official portage tree. If you really want to get bleeding-edge source and compile it, use ebuilds from x11 Gentoo overlay, however practice shows that it is not needed anymore.

MPlayer

To enable XvMC support in MPlayer it has to be rebuilt with a patch. openChrome overlay already has a ebuild where patch is turned on if you have proper make.conf settings (see article section about make.conf). You just run

After recompiling MPlayer, add the following lines to your ~/.mplayer/config (or /etc/mplayer.conf to have it system-wide)

Don't forget the last comma, it is important because if xvmc can't decode the video mplayer would fallback to default codecs.
VIA XvMC has also a nice support for hardware deinterlacing. If you want it you can add -vo=xvmc:bobdeint when launching mplayer from command line.

Subversion ebuild notice

Overlay has a subversion ebuild for openChrome driver, which is masked by default. If you really want to use it, add

to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file.
Then, to update your package to the latest SVN, just run

Portage will fetch the difference between your old revision and the latest available on openChrome SVN and then perform an update.

Overlay ChangeLog

ChangeLog in this article won't be updated anymore, now to track overlay changes please use Git. For older ChangeLog entries please use wiki's article history.

Contact

If you have gentoo-specific problems compiling some software from the openChrome Gentoo overlay, please contact me first, there is no need to disturb everybody via the openchrome-users mailing list or forum. You can check if it is an overlay-related problem or not by following the steps in official Compiling the source code article. If you can install and run openChrome by hand, then its time to contact me. My name is Andrew. You can mail me: rikz at yandex.ru. My JID: rikz@jabber.ru.

DONT FORGET TO BACKUP ALL YOUR CONFIGS AND OTHER STUFF