Updating your kernel is important if you want to take advantage of new hardware support or bleeding edge features.  Aside from these obvious benefits it also allows you to keep up with security patches, system optimization, and overall stability issues. The first thing you have to do is emerge the latest gentoo-sources package. # emerge [...]

BASH has the ability to execute a command string and replace that string with the output of the command. Or to say it another way, the output of a command will replace the command itself. There are 2 ways to accomplish this. The first is to surround the command with backticks or blockquotes. `command` You [...]

You can identify the path the the controlling terminal device path for your current process in C with the ttyname() system call. This controlling terminal can be a virtual console (/dev/ttyn) or a pseudo-terminal (/dev/pts/n). The ttyname system call takes the following format. char *ttyname(int fd); The stdin, stdout, stderr file descriptors unless redirected are [...]

The default DHCP timeout is nearly 30 seconds on most Gentoo Linux systems. This can be a frustrating on startup if you already have wireless connected but are forced to wait on an unused ethernet interface. On most networks the DHCP timeout can be safely lowered without problems. DHCP can be provided by many different [...]

To run Java code on a Gentoo system you must have a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed. The JRE will install a 32-bit browser plugin, among other things, which is necessary to take advantage of Java applets in Firefox. Before we go any further, it must be noted that this will only work with the [...]