Adventures in Gentoo

So, I ran into some troubles with the running of bootstrap.sh. I keep getting Oops’s and kernel panics all the time. I searched the Gentoo forums, and found recommendations to check the ram.

I hope against hope, keep reading to try and find another explanation (all the while knowing in my gut that it’s actually the RAM that’s at fault) and eventually give up and run MEMTEST86. 45000+ errors in a single pass. Not good.

I emailed NCIX to request an RMA, and they obliged. I guess I’ll have to wait a little bit before continuing my Gentoo fun.

Flashed the bios - everything went swimmingly.

Next step - install Gentoo. Or die trying.

I popped in the Gentoo CD that I’d created earlier and booted it up. Unfortunately flashing the bios reset the boot options that I’d set up so it booted off of the hard drive instead of the CD. I rebooted, set the option in the bios to boot off of the CDRom first, and rebooted again. This time, everything seemed to come up properly.

At the “boot:” prompt, this time I typed:

# gentoo doscsi

because I read somewhere that the gentoo installer treats sata like scsi or something. Well, that didn’t work, it hung up when scanning for the sata_sis module or something. Reboot and try again. This looks like it is going to be a lot of work.

# gentoo

this time. Doesn’t look like it picked up the SATA hard drive. More drastic measures are required.

#modprobe sata_via

There - now I can see my hard drive (/dev/sda)

Next step is the networking. Apparently the network card wasn’t installed. Several places suggested that the via-rhine module would work, but it didn’t. Eventually I did:

#modprobe via-velocity

and had network - woo hoo! Almost. Still have to get an ip:

#dhcpcd eth0

Now we’re cooking. I can ping www.google.ca.

Now I have to fdisk my hard drive to set up the partitions. I’ll document my decisions here - keep in mind that I’m dealing with a 200 Gb drive, so I’ve deliberately oversized all the partitions (sometimes ridiculously)

/dev/sda1 -> /boot - 100Megs
/dev/sda2 -> swap - 2Gigs
/dev/sda3 -> /home - 20 Gigs
/dev/sda4 -> Extended
/dev/sda5 -> /var - 5 Gigs
/dev/sda6 -> /usr - 10 Gigs
/dev/sda7 -> / - 5 Gigs
/dev/sda8 -> Future home of MythTV recordings

Now I have to make the filesystems:

#mke2fs -j /dev/sda1
#mke2fs -j /dev/sda3
#mke2fs -j /dev/sda5
#mke2fs -j /dev/sda6
#mke2fs -j /dev/sda7
#mkfs.jfs /dev/sda8

do the swap partition next -

#mkswap /dev/sda2
#swapon /dev/sda2

Now make the mountpoints and mount the filesystems:

#mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/gentoo
#mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot
#mkdir /mnt/gentoo/home
#mkdir /mnt/gentoo/var
#mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr

#mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
#mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo/home
#mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/gentoo/var
#mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/gentoo/usr

Now I have to unpack the stage 1 tarball:

#tar -xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages/stage1-amd64-2004.3.tar.bz2

Then the portage snapshot:

#tar -xvjf /mnt/cdrom/snapshots/portage-20041022.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr

That takes some time - Portage is really big.

I edit /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf to reflect these:

CFLAGS=”-march=athlon64 -pipe -O2″
MAKEOPTS=”-j2″

Run mirrorselect to set fast mirrors:

#mirrorselect -a -s4 -o |grep ‘GENTOO_MIRRORS=’ >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

This takes a while too.

In the meanwhile, I switched to the second console (Ctrl+Alt+F2) and finished up some other stuff that needs to be done before I start compiling. Copy the DNS stuff over:

# cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf

Mount the proc filesystem:

# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

Now that the mirror list is done, I can chroot to /mnt/gentoo and rebuild the environment variables:

# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
# env-update
# source /etc/profile

I think it’s getting a little late, and syncing portage will take a while, so I’m going to call it a night after issuing one last command :

#emerge –sync

So far it’s been fairly painless…

At this point, I have hit a brief roadblock. I want to flash the bios of my motherboard so that it supports my RAM in dual channel mode at it’s full speed - currently the motherboard recognizes it as DDR333, when in reality it’s DDR400. I successfully downloaded the bios flash utility from Soltek but it requires a boot floppy.

After I found a blank floppy, I realized that the laptop has no floppy drive, which kind of complicates things. Fortunately, I can boot from CD, so I found Bart’s boot CD methods, and am in the process of burning a bootable CD containing my bios update utility and updated bios.

Wish me luck!

Placeholder for the first night’s travails.

I started out wanting to use KnoppMyth, but the more I read about it, the more problems that I had with it.

First, I want to host this website on the server too, and KnoppMyth doesn’t seem to be that easy to keep secure. It’s intended to be run completely behind a firewall, isolated from most/all outside connections. I’m sure it would be fine, but I’d like a distro that’s easier to update.

Eventually, I decided to check out Gentoo Linux because it seems to be one of the more BSD-like distros out there. I also really like the idea of Portage, which is very comfortable to me (coming from running this server on OpenBSD for a while now)

There are also lots of howtos for Gentoo, and everything seems pretty simple to do. Overall, Gentoo looks like it’ll be a lot of fun to set up, and easy to configure. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve got AMD64 support fairly well advanced either.

Initially, I was going to just use KnoppMyth, which has a lot of really good information on their Wiki. They have suggested hardware, so I went to NCIX and built/ordered a PC based on their recommendations.

Two things happened though. First, my credit card payment was rejected because we’d recently moved, and hadn’t changed our address with the CC company, so the billing address I’d given them didn’t match up. At the same time, I saw an article speculating that the Athlon XP is nearing the end of the road. I decided that I’d actually do a little more research and see what kind of system I could build, that wouldn’t already be obsolete.

Here’s what I wound up with:

Antec Sonata case - quiet with a good 380W power supply

SOLTEK K8TPRO-939 motherboard - onboard audio (S/PDIF in and out) lots of expandability for extra drives

AMD Athlon 64 - 3200+ - lots of power for what I need, and at a good price point.

ASUS V9520-X/TD GEFORCE FX 5200 video card. Decent price, heatsink cooled (no noisy fan) and plenty fast enough for my needs. Also good driver support for Linux.

200Gb Seagate Barracuda SATA - I wanted a native SATA drive(ie not an IDE drive with a SATA controller board on it,) and this fit the bill.

2×512Mb Samsung PC3200 RAM. I debated myself on spending more on RAM, but supposedly this RAM works, and Samsung isn’t exactly a small player in the RAM business.

Hauppauge PVR-250 purchased gently used from a friend.

MyBlaster Serial to control the satellite receiver

I plan to track how I got my AMD64 Gentoo MythTV system created - all the obstacles I ran into and how I overcame them. I will also link to any resources that I come across along the way. Hopefully it’ll help me out, and maybe someone else will find this site and find it useful.