Acer Aspire 5755G - 06 - Useflags

I'm using awesome as window manager and decided to not go for a KDE or Gnome profile.
I went for a plain amd64 profile because I prefer to enable useflags instead of disabling them. navi lia # eselect profile list Available profile symlink targets: [1] default/linux/amd64/10.0 * [2] default/linux/amd64/10.0/selinux [3] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop [4] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/gnome [5] default/linux/amd64/10.0/desktop/kde [6] default/linux/amd64/10.0/developer [7] default/linux/amd64/10.0/no-multilib [8] default/linux/amd64/10.0/server [9] hardened/linux/amd64 [10] hardened/linux/amd64/selinux [11] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib [12] hardened/linux/amd64/no-multilib/selinux

I've also disabled flags I really never need as first step of my useflag configuration.
You can see all active useflags in the output of emerge --info. #all permanent disabled useflags USE_DISABLE="-qt4 -accessibility -plasma -joystick -caps" These useflags needs some tweaking later when installing a basic qt environment to work with some qt tools.
The tweaks will be done in /etc/portage/package.use.

Have a look at /proc/cpuinfo for all flag you need to fully support your cpu. flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dts tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid There aren't useflags for all features, but some can be activated.

Here are the global useflags I've set: USE="${USE_DISABLE} threads vdpau acpi vim-syntax mmx sse sse2 ssse3 sse4 sse4_1 alsa jack dbus truetype X png cjk gtk opengl"

threads:
The core i7 supports threading, so we activate it of course.

vdpau:
That's a feature of Nvidia cards. It allows to offload some CPU processing to the GPU. It's still experimental though but I never had troubles with this useflag.

acpi:
Power Management for your laptop. This useflag is essential for a long life of your battery.

mmx, sse, sse2, sse4 and sse4_1:
These are the cpu useflags to enable support for your hardware.

alsa, jack:
Global alsa and jack support. We want to listen to some music, right?

dbus:
This useflag isn't set in non desktop profiles, so we enable it here manually.

truetype:
We need some global truetype support for xorg. It's also not set in non desktop profiles.

X:
To build the tools with X support and GUIs if available.

png, jpeg, jpeg2k, tiff:
Add the needed image formats here. I've decided to go only with a global png support. Jpeg is enables for some tools in my /etc/portage/package.use file.

cjk:
Support for asian languages. Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Skip it if you don't need support for them.

gtk:
Global gtk support. I'm using almost only gtk tools.

opengl:
Linux 3d support. Yes I want it.

There's still the nls flag if you built your system for other languages than english. It's native language support.

So far so good. I can play games, listen to music, watch videos and do regular tasks with these settings and the system stays small and smooth.