Installation

I installed a stage3 i686 version of Gentoo, following the install guide. Before I installed the Kernel (after chrooting), I upgraded GCC to 3.4 instead of 3.3, as 3.4 supports optimisations for celeron-m (pentium-m). Do this with 'emerge gcc', then revdep-rebuild (see the gentoo site for more information on upgrading gcc).

Once GCC was upgraded, I set the CFLAGS to be as optimised as I dared:

CFLAGS="-march=pentium-m -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"

Kernel

Not much to say for the kernel, except enable every ATI related driver (but just use modules for video drivers), 8139too for networking, pentium-m processor type and various desktop optimisations. You can download my .config here for linux-2.6.15-gentoo-r1. There are a few modules compiled that dont need to be in there, but I am too lazy to go through and pull them out for such minor gains.

Post-Kernel

After rebooting, I did and emerge system and an emerge world to make sure everything was up to date and compiled with the optimal settings. I built X, KDE and some other desktop software (and went to sleep as it took about 10 hours). The network driver is a bit funky, but putting acpi=nopci on the kernel boot line allowed it to work perfectly.

Graphics Card

This was the most painful part of the installation, but I hate installing X windows with a passion. According to Toshiba, the graphics card is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. After some googling, I got the binary drivers direct from ATI, specifically 8.21.7. The ATI installer failed the first time, so I took some advice from the Gentoo ATI Howto:

'If you want to use ATI's internal agpgart support instead of the Linux kernel one, the agpgart driver and the chip set specific driver (in your kernel configuration) must be built as modules or not at all.'

Doing this fixed the problem, and I was able to install the drivers. The next step was getting X to work, and I found a good Xorg.conf pre-made by someone here at ubuntu's forums. I modified it to remove their synaptics mouse module, and changed the keyboard layout to UK.

At this stage X worked, but the machine would hang if I tried to kill it, stop it or restart it. Doh! After reading through a lot of websites, I figured out that the agpgart, ati_agp and drm kernel modules must be installed/running to get the driver to work correctly. (thanks http://occom.no-ip.biz/r4000.html!). I quickly noticed that there was no longer any hardware acceleration whatsoever, and opengl ran at a crawl, making mplayer run very poorly which was no good. After some digging I came across this great site. Basically, extract the ATI source with "sh ati-8.21.7-installer-blah.run --extract ati" and then edit firegl_public.c (for me it was in a different location - ./common/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/firegl_public.c Editing this file by removing the #if and #endif around the WARNING WARNING WARNING line made the driver work (woohoo!). Make sure that agpgart, ati_agp and drm kernel modules are NOT installed, and then you can build and install the patched driver using "./ati-installer 8.21.7 --install" and it should work fine. I get 1200 fps in glxgears now which is a bit more tolerable than the 150 I was getting before, and opengl video mode works great for mplayer again. You can download my xorg.conf here. If you have any comments on this, feel free to contact me. Note, my xorg relies on synaptics being installed, so make sure you have /dev/psaux compatibility in your kernel and emerge synaptics.

By now X was working without any problems. I had huge, ugly fonts, but a quick modification in the KDE control centre to change all font sizes to 8 made things look more attractive and that was X set up.

Sound Card

With video working, it was time to get sound up and running so I could start watching cartoons again. Simply:

emerge alsa-utils
/etc/init.d/alsasound start
alsamixer      # (to unmute PCM, master, etc)

rc-update add alsasound default

Optimisations

once all was built (including portage compiles), some desktop-friendly hdparm options were added to /etc/conf.d/hdparm to make the machine a little bit more responsive:

hda_args="-a32 -c1 -u1 -S12 -M254 -A1"
cdrom0_args="-d1"

Mplayer

FYI, my ~/.mplayer/config file contains:

ao=arts vo=gl monitoraspect=16:10

Software

As a side note, here is the software I tend to install for a desktop system: gaim (IM)
thunderbird (mail)
amarok (music)
mplayer (video)
kmplayer (video)
smartmontools (test HDD for failures)
gimp (graphics)
imagemagick (graphics)
mozilla-firefox (web)
mplayer plugin (web)
flash plugin (web)
inkscape (graphics)
telnet-bsd (net tool)
ogle (dvd player)
k3b (cd/dvd burning)
azureus (bittorrent)
zip (compression)
unrar (compression)
par2cmdline (archive recovery)
sudo (admin util)
iptables (admin util)
webmin (admin util)
openoffice (office suite)
ethereal (packet sniffer)
ncftp (ftp client)
gftp (ftp client)
klibido (news client)
nessus (check for security problems)
and various emulators for consoles for playing games (eg; epsxe for playstation)

Conclusion

It took about 14 hours to get a basic system up and running (plus 8 hours of sleeping through compilation). OpenOffice took a loooong time to compile after that so you might want to just get the binary for that if you are impatient! It all seems pretty good now though, and much nicer than the dell inspiron 8600c that it is replacing. Toshiba feel like they have more quality than the mass-produced dell systems. The ATI graphics card was a total pain to set up though, and the next time I buy a laptop or graphics card then I will make sure it is NVIDIA.