Success
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…