This is my first posting on these here notebook forums. Thus I think it appropriate that I'll start off on the right foot by posting something constructive. I haven't actually gotten my hands on the laptop yet; I'll start off by posting preliminary thoughts and such. Also, questions/comments and requests for explanations are generally welcome.
Gentoo on the Asus Z70VA (refresh)
About Myself:
I consider myself, if not an "old hand" at Linux, then at least a veteran. My dad, actually, started me on it some five or so years ago; these days, he comes to me for troubleshooting
. I've done Mandrake and Redhat (pre-FC), but my distribution of current choice is, evidently, Gentoo. My desktop (Athlon 2800+) dual-boots WinXP and Gentoo, my sister's old box (Celeron 466) dual-booted Win98 SE and Gentoo, the new box which I built for my sister (Athlon 2800+) boots exclusively Gentoo, and my dad's old work laptop (Thinkpad T23) I've converted into a 'net kiosk for my mom, booting Gentoo exclusively. All these are my work, thus I've had quite a bit of experience with Linux over a decently diverse array of commodity hardware. And now, I'm planning to dual-boot WinXP and Gentoo on my incoming Asus Z70VA.
Hardware Choice:
The hardware configuration is as follows: (shameless endorsement: c9tech)
1.86 GHz Pentium-M (533 FSB)
Intel 915 chipset, ATI Mobility x700
1 GB (2x512) DDR2-533 RAM
60 GB, 8MB cache HD (5400 RPM)
DVD-RW/CD-RW combo drive (dual-layer)
Intel 2200-series B/G wireless adapter
Integrated Bluetooth
So what's the rationale behind this purchase? Initially, I was tempted by the AMD Turion laptops, being 64-bit and all (and an AMD fanboy myself). However, after considering power consumption and the general reputation of the Pentium-M series as being both powerful and power-miserly, I was convinced to go Intel. The decision then was between the Z70VA series and the Z71V. I was actually leaning toward buying the Z71V, with the nVidia graphics chip, as (1) it had (arguably) the performance advantage and (2) nVidia has the better reputation for drivers for Linux. But the Z71V was IMO butt-fugly, so I stuck with the Z70VA. As to the wireless chipset, I was looking for something that was supported by wpa_supplicant, as I use WPA security on our wireless network at home instead of the easily-crackable WEP. The Intel B/G 2200-series fits the bill, but the A/B/G 2900-series does not. Thus I went with the 2200. Besides, the limiting factor in almost all wireless network usage isn't the pipe to the access point, it's the pipe from the access point to the Internet beyond. The Bluetooth option is there because Bluetooth wireless mice are damn useful, and also because I like the challenge of getting hardware to work properly.
Gentoo Installation:
The thing is, the laptop hasn't actually arrived yet. However, since I do all my Gentoo installs from stage1, I'm thinking: why have to wait 2-3 days for compiling after the hardware arrives, when I could just as easily start compiling what I can now and shave a day or so off of the installation time? Thus that is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start the stage1 and stage2 compiles now, on my sister's box (because, being not overclocked, it's that much more stable). Naturally, I'm already running Linux on this compile box.
If you're following along in the Gentoo handbook, what I'm basically doing is skipping down to the "Installing the Gentoo Installation Files" section. After creating a folder somewhere on a partition with a good chunk of free space, I download the stage1 and portage-snapshot tarballs into the folder, unpack them, copy over the /etc/resolv.conf, and chroot to the directory. I tweak my /etc/make.conf, and do my stage1 and stage2 compiles as per the handbook. Thus by the time the laptop arrives, I should have a system at stage2 ready; all I have to do is copy over the entire root directory tree, taking care to preserve times and permissions, and run the stage3 install from there.
This would be also a good time to mention my usage of screen. It's useful because I am in the habit of running an SSH server at home and logging in occasionally throughout the day from the university. screen is like a sandbox; basically, I start the compile process going inside this "box", and I can "detach" and "reattach" to it throughout the day to take a peek inside and see how it's doing. It's useful for long processes that you want to check on occasionally.
Right then, that's done. And while I was at it, I did the stage3 compiles as well because, come to think of it, there's no reason why I should have to wait for xfce/Xorg/kernel to compile either. So with all that done, the task at hand is to copy over the entire root directory tree to my virgin hard drive.
Step one is to partition and format the hard drive, which is easy with cfdisk and the appropriate mkfs tool. Needless to say, I'm doing this by booting from the Gentoo liveCD. Then on my remote computer, I zip everything up from the root directory:
I mount my new root partition somewhere (typically /mnt/gentoo), then I copy everything over using the tool of choice, which in my case was by sftp, and extract in my new root partition, taking care to preserve permissions:
and voila, I have a semi-functional system.
I say semi-functional, because I've yet to set up a bootloader. My bootloader of choice is lilo. The basic procedure is to chroot to your new root, edit /etc/lilo.conf appropriately, then run lilo. However, lilo requires functional /proc and /dev filesystems! To do that, first I clear out the "new" /proc and /dev, in case I accidentally copied it over from the old computer. Note above that I mounted my "new root" at /mnt/gentoo, so the paths reflect this:
. Then I mount them, using what is provided by my liveCD environment:
With this done, I can chroot in, install the kernel into /boot (if I have not already done so), and run lilo to install the bootloader:
Please note that in most cases, the kernel install script will run lilo for you, so the last call to lilo is not necessary.
Gentoo on the Asus Z70VA (refresh)
About Myself:
I consider myself, if not an "old hand" at Linux, then at least a veteran. My dad, actually, started me on it some five or so years ago; these days, he comes to me for troubleshooting
. I've done Mandrake and Redhat (pre-FC), but my distribution of current choice is, evidently, Gentoo. My desktop (Athlon 2800+) dual-boots WinXP and Gentoo, my sister's old box (Celeron 466) dual-booted Win98 SE and Gentoo, the new box which I built for my sister (Athlon 2800+) boots exclusively Gentoo, and my dad's old work laptop (Thinkpad T23) I've converted into a 'net kiosk for my mom, booting Gentoo exclusively. All these are my work, thus I've had quite a bit of experience with Linux over a decently diverse array of commodity hardware. And now, I'm planning to dual-boot WinXP and Gentoo on my incoming Asus Z70VA.Hardware Choice:
The hardware configuration is as follows: (shameless endorsement: c9tech)
1.86 GHz Pentium-M (533 FSB)
Intel 915 chipset, ATI Mobility x700
1 GB (2x512) DDR2-533 RAM
60 GB, 8MB cache HD (5400 RPM)
DVD-RW/CD-RW combo drive (dual-layer)
Intel 2200-series B/G wireless adapter
Integrated Bluetooth
So what's the rationale behind this purchase? Initially, I was tempted by the AMD Turion laptops, being 64-bit and all (and an AMD fanboy myself). However, after considering power consumption and the general reputation of the Pentium-M series as being both powerful and power-miserly, I was convinced to go Intel. The decision then was between the Z70VA series and the Z71V. I was actually leaning toward buying the Z71V, with the nVidia graphics chip, as (1) it had (arguably) the performance advantage and (2) nVidia has the better reputation for drivers for Linux. But the Z71V was IMO butt-fugly, so I stuck with the Z70VA. As to the wireless chipset, I was looking for something that was supported by wpa_supplicant, as I use WPA security on our wireless network at home instead of the easily-crackable WEP. The Intel B/G 2200-series fits the bill, but the A/B/G 2900-series does not. Thus I went with the 2200. Besides, the limiting factor in almost all wireless network usage isn't the pipe to the access point, it's the pipe from the access point to the Internet beyond. The Bluetooth option is there because Bluetooth wireless mice are damn useful, and also because I like the challenge of getting hardware to work properly
.Gentoo Installation:
The thing is, the laptop hasn't actually arrived yet. However, since I do all my Gentoo installs from stage1, I'm thinking: why have to wait 2-3 days for compiling after the hardware arrives, when I could just as easily start compiling what I can now and shave a day or so off of the installation time? Thus that is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start the stage1 and stage2 compiles now, on my sister's box (because, being not overclocked, it's that much more stable). Naturally, I'm already running Linux on this compile box.
If you're following along in the Gentoo handbook, what I'm basically doing is skipping down to the "Installing the Gentoo Installation Files" section. After creating a folder somewhere on a partition with a good chunk of free space, I download the stage1 and portage-snapshot tarballs into the folder, unpack them, copy over the /etc/resolv.conf, and chroot to the directory. I tweak my /etc/make.conf, and do my stage1 and stage2 compiles as per the handbook. Thus by the time the laptop arrives, I should have a system at stage2 ready; all I have to do is copy over the entire root directory tree, taking care to preserve times and permissions, and run the stage3 install from there.
This would be also a good time to mention my usage of screen. It's useful because I am in the habit of running an SSH server at home and logging in occasionally throughout the day from the university. screen is like a sandbox; basically, I start the compile process going inside this "box", and I can "detach" and "reattach" to it throughout the day to take a peek inside and see how it's doing. It's useful for long processes that you want to check on occasionally.
Right then, that's done. And while I was at it, I did the stage3 compiles as well because, come to think of it, there's no reason why I should have to wait for xfce/Xorg/kernel to compile either. So with all that done, the task at hand is to copy over the entire root directory tree to my virgin hard drive.
Step one is to partition and format the hard drive, which is easy with cfdisk and the appropriate mkfs tool. Needless to say, I'm doing this by booting from the Gentoo liveCD. Then on my remote computer, I zip everything up from the root directory:
Code:
tar -czf root.tar.gz *
Code:
tar -xzpf root.tar.gz
I say semi-functional, because I've yet to set up a bootloader. My bootloader of choice is lilo. The basic procedure is to chroot to your new root, edit /etc/lilo.conf appropriately, then run lilo. However, lilo requires functional /proc and /dev filesystems! To do that, first I clear out the "new" /proc and /dev, in case I accidentally copied it over from the old computer. Note above that I mounted my "new root" at /mnt/gentoo, so the paths reflect this:
Code:
rm -fr /mnt/gentoo/proc/* rm -fr /mnt/gentoo/dev/*
Code:
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc mount -o bind -t devfs /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
Code:
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash etc-update source /etc/profile cd /usr/src/linux make install lilo
