Gentoo on a laptop

This page contains additional information for installing Gentoo on a laptop computer.

Networking

• It's highly recommended to install the NetworkManager (it will be pulled as a dependency by emerging knetworkmanager) as it allows to easily connect to networks through a GUI. You can change networks easily.

Touchpad

• To support the touchpad the kernel should be configured with PS/2 mouse support and INPUT_DEVICES in /etc/make.conf should contain "synaptics".
• The xorg.conf file should have the following section:

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver         "synaptics"
    Identifier "TouchPad"
    Option         "SendCoreEvents"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto-dev"
    Option         "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

• Link on the Gentoo wiki.

Battery

• To install a base KDE applet to monitor your battery, emerge klaptopdaemon. This will add a new control panel in Control Center, and will start the applet (KLaptop).
• You don't need to start the acpi daemon (acpid) to have the battery monitor working.
• If you have a recent kernel (like 2.6.28), you need to build the deprecated /proc/acpi files and directories, else klaptopdaemon won't work. This will probably be fixed in future versions of KDE (as userspace programs will move to the new ACPI APIs). You don't need the deprecated APM drivers.