So after my initial three-hour fiasco of getting my mouse to work, Gentoo Linux is running in a stable manner on my system. My graphics card, input devices and external drives are all working wonderfully – the ntfs-3g package properly enabled support for my main user account to read and write files off NTFS partitions. Owing in no small part to my OCZ Vertex SSD, the XFCE desktop appears in half a second once I’m logged in.
There’s one remaining issue I have to sort out before I could consider Gentoo a reasonable environment – getting Windows networking up and running. Snow Leopard and Ubuntu have always been acceptable in this matter, but there doesn’t appear to be an XFCE-ish “Network Neighborhood” application readily available. Taking a quick search, it appears that this set of instructions for CIFS should solve my issues, at least from the command line.
More details (and some screenshots) coming as I transition to full-time use over this weekend…
Windows networking on Fedora wasn’t too fun to get working, either. Samba was a little messed, so I had to re-install… and then for some reason it’s blocked by default in the firewall rules.
Worked out of the box in Debian. I just told the installer to add Samba and that my domain was MSHOME, and I didn’t have a problem from there.
There’s a network neighbourhood app called gigolo, another panel plugin basically. I suppose its main purpose is to provide this functionality to Xfce4. But you will know that by now, one year later, or not?