The 5680/8890 Gentoo Thread

Hello everyone.

As soon as exams are over in two days, I am taking the plunge into the world of Gentoo Linux. I have been doing some research before I start and since the 5680, as well as the 8890, have new and somewhat unique hardware, I wanted to start an info thread for those who have installed or have been planning to install Gentoo on their wonderful machines (I know theres a few people in both groups). Anything pertaining specifically to our hardware set-up, etc., is welcome.

To start things off, although I havent started the actual installation, I have booted the 1.4 LiveCD to fiddle with it a bit and have discovered the following:

First off, being of an aging version of 2.4.20, the SMP kernel has an issue with the frame buffer and RAM amounts of above 840MB; it will work, but you won't see anything because youre screen will go blank. To fix this, add a "mem=840M" option to the boot command.

Secondly, the SMP kernel has another issue of being unable to detect/use the Realtek 8169 NICs in our machines. No matter what I tried (modprobing r8169, etc), I couldnt get it to work. Thus, I came to the conclusion that I would simply have to go through the installation with the standard, non-SMP kernel; not a big problem, really. The standard kernel works fine (just press enter at the boot prompt; if you add a few options to suit your needs and find that the NIC isnt automatically detected, 'modprobe r8169' and it will be right up and working).

On a slightly separate subject, I have successfully used PartitionMagic 8 to resize one partition, move another, and resize and move a third, in order to accomodate my Gentoo installation with 10GB of space as suggested by a few friends who have gone through the process. The app worked wonders. I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth the process was.

Finally, on the notion of doing research, I have found the Gentoo Forums (http://forums.gentoo.org) very informative, even if some things didnt apply to my hardware.

Well, I guess now we just need others' input. Thanks in advance. Hope this thread becomes informative enough to be useful.

Mikhail

Thanks for the reply, Randy.

I chose Gentoo for pretty much the exact same reason: to learn. As of right now, I dont care much for actually using Linux (although I have experienced its power many times before ). If I did, I would have went with Mandrake or something like that. Instead, I want to actually install the thing myself, learn how everything works, and have full control over my system.

As for the purpose of this thread, thanks for offering the help. It will be much needed pretty soon. Check back often . Meanwhile, I guess I was asking for any specific troubles you had during your install, if you remember.

Thanks again.... Patiently waiting for others' input.

Cheers.

Mikhail

Thank you for clearing stuff up for some, Dirtboy. Nice little intro for those that are curious

Regarding the NIC, it was r8169 that it sometimes detected automatically or I modprobed manually under the non-SMP kernel on the LiveCD (2.4.21). The SMP kernel wouldnt work with r8169 NOR 8139too.

P.S. Randy, you reminded me. I dont know if I've mentioned this but I was planning to compile a genkernel-ed 2.4.xx so I at least have a working system and then do a 2.6.xx the second time around. Are there any particular unworked out bugs in the T11 that could affect all the initial installation-related stuff? Also, what are some issues, other than ALSA, that crop up when switching back and forth between the 2.4 and 2.6 series kernels?

Thats great; another person added to our informative persons list

Thanks for the heads-up, Bratag.

Thanks for the response, Darkless!

If you read the thread, I mentioned a couple of things:

1) I am about to start the install and I am planning to do a genkernel-ed 2.4.23 first so I get the system up and running and then do the 2.6 kernel afterwards.

2) I "managed" to get the 8169 to work on the LiveCD 1.4 (2.4.21 Vanilla or 2.4.20 SMP). Basically, it only works under the vanilla kernel (either automatically or with 'modprobe r8169'). I couldnt get it to work at all with the SMP kernel. Oh well.

3) Thanks for the note. I've been doing lots of research lately.

...

I've seen the first two projects and am very excited about them. My friend running Gentoo on his machine mentioned that the ndiswrapper right now is only good if you have good signal quality. Im upstairs so I dont know how well it will work. I will give it a try once I have the system up and running, nevertheless (I will have to go through the install in the basement; that reminds me: if I use 'emerge --fetchonly [package]', do I just 'emerge [package]' afterwards? Will it automatically see that the stuff is already downloaded?). I presume that the third project isnt for the Broadcom/Linksys Wireless-G cards, is it?

Again, thanks for the input. Furthermore, thanks to everyone for their great info! The quest continues...

Mikhail

Hello everyone. Thought I'd post some updates on my Gentoo progress.

As of right now, I have the base system set up, as per the guide (I skipped ati-drivers, though, since they depend on both X and KDE which I will be setting up a bit later - they will take forever). Everything went pretty smooth. I even got the 2.6.0 stable gentoo-dev-sources release which appeared right before I was starting the kernel section . I set up the kernel manually with the stuff that I knew about so its pretty plain right now. I will be doing more tweeking later.

Couple of things; notes as well as questions:

1) When I ran grub for the first time after emerging - the time where it does its ioprobe thing - it looped endlessly with errors trying to communicate with the floppy drive. Since the floppy wasnt there and I couldnt get around the problem in simpler way, I rebooted, swapping the second battery for the floppy drive. Grub worked and I set everything up properly (BTW, I used the dual boot setup using the method mentioned in the FAQs on forums.gentoo.org; all my linux partitions are in the Win95 extended block XP created but they work fine; I made the little dummy boot file for XP's NTLoader to find and call Grub through on hda7). After that, I just swapped the battery back in and its been working well. I dont know - maybe I'll have to swap in the floppy drive again if I upgrade grub, etc.

2) When I configured the kernel for the first time, I didnt include devfs since it was marked as deprecated. However, when I booted the kernel, it told me that I actually needed it. No problems; recompiled the kernel and voila; just weird.

3) Framebuffer doesnt seem to want to behave. I have included it in the kernel (there were a few options) but whenever I send vga=[some code] to the kernel as a boot line, it just gives me a black screen, forcing me to wait until it finishes booting and then rebooting it with Ctrl-Alt-Delete (btw, I like how if you do that, you just reboot the machine; not reset it). I will be playing around with this today and see if I can figure it out. Meanwhile, does anyone have any suggestions regarding this?

4) Since our machines are portables, you never know when you will have a network cable plugged in at boot time. I dont know if this applies to those who use static IP configurations, but with DHCP, the "Bringing eth0 up..." phase of the boot will takes ages (by default) to time out if you dont have a cable plugged in. To fix this, go into your /etc/conf.d/net, find the dhcp_eth0 (or whatever eth#) line, uncomment it and put "-t #" in the arguement, where # stands for the number of seconds you want the machine to time out after when trying to establish an IP, etc.

5) Just to comment on the compile times (EXCLUDING download times; I did "emerge --fetchonly ..." for everything first), bootstrapping took me 2.5 hours (machine specs are in the sig), emerge system took an hour or so and the kernel, although somewhat plain, took only 5 minutes or so.

Well, thats it for now. Plenty more to come, so stay tuned

Mikhail

Well, I might be interpreting emerge -p incorrectly. Basically, along with ati-drivers, it lists a whole bunch of X11 stuff (I just checked the Readme's on ATI's site and they mention X as a requirement). KDE only shows up in the list as a USE tag after one of the dependant packages. Does that mean it will compile automatically along with X and ati-drivers?

I just did a little browsing and am about to reboot to try some things. I dont really care if it looks nice; I just need some real estate . I'm actually sort of disappointed that the vga codes only go up to 1280x1024. Can the codes be extrapolated for higher resolutions?

Thanks Bratag.

No, I didnt have X before and since I would want it anyway, I just emerged ati-drivers. Its sitting upstairs compiling . Hopefully wont take that long (KDE is gonna be the biggie; I'll probably do that tomorrow).

I think you're right about apps just compiling support for certain things if possible. To get rid of the flags, one needs to either put USE="..." at the beginning of the emerge line or actually modify their /etc/make.conf. (I am getting the hang of it )

Yeah, I definitely should be able to set X to the native resolution. What I was referring to was the framebugger ( ) at the console; I need more room. Im still not done messing with it so I cant conclude that I have failed yet.

Thanks guys.

Mikhail

Thanks a bunch, Dirtboy! Emergin' right now

P.S. XFree & Ati-drivers compiled in about an hour and a half. Everything is fine and dandy. Might even let KDE compile today.

P.P.S. For some reason, X doesnt shut down with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Any ideas? It should, according to the config.

Hey everyone. Yet another update:

1) Figured out how to deal with virtual consoles and X; X is simply on VC9 - Ctrl-Alt-F# to get back at straight text VCs and use Alt-F# to shift around terminals once back in there.

2) Installed KDE, bit-by-bit. Works well. Kdebase took about 2-2.5 hours to compile, while other components compiled quicker with kdegraphics and kdemultimedia taking the most time after kdebase. Just had one little annoyance with XMMS: it didnt want to compile normally; I looked on Gentoo Forums and compiled a newer version using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86".

A few questions:

1) For some reason, I cannot su into root from my normal user account. As I remember, I created the normal user account as per the manual, but only adding the user to the standard group "users".

2) Also for some reason, I can't get lspci. Isn't that a system component?! If not, what do I have to emerge?

3) I am confused with ALSA. All I did was compile the kernel with all ALSA items built-in and then, eventually, get X and KDE (which I think had some ALSA-related dependency; alsa-utils, maybe?). Except for the fact that I think I cant use real ALSA in KDE because the compilation gave a warning about ALSA being disabled due to a bug in kdemm, sound works both with audio players alone as well as video players. I actually fiddled with the sound configurations and got cracky sound when I forced the system to use ALSA, instead of auto-detect. Now here are the questions: How can I make the volume settings stay over reboots/sessions? Was I actually supposed to emerge something else to "complete" the set-up of ALSA?

4) Where do I have to mount my "No-Man's-Land" FAT32/VFAT partition in order to let normal users access it? Right now it is automounted in /mnt/common (I didnt know where else to put it ) and only root can access it.

5) Although as of right now ndiswrapper has poor SMP support, I'm gonna give it a shot anyway with my Linksys Wireless-G PCMCIA. Has anyone had any luck? Right now, I have the card initialized (hoepfully) properly (compiled PCMCIA support into the kernel), but I can't continue the set-up until I solve the lspci issue above and get the required device info off the card.

Thats about it for now. Hope I get some answers soon .

Mikhail