Good evening,
I went through the trouble of typing a long detailed question regarding Gentoo and my 5680, but I wasn't quite satisfied with what I typed so I clicked the back button. At that point my question was gone. =( It's been a day; I think I'm over it now.
I have been a member of this forum for a few months now. I have popped my head in a few times to poke my nose around and read this and that and the goings on of my fellow 5680 owners. It wasn't until last week that I read through this section of the forum and decided to have a go at Linux. After reading about the functionality and customizability (is that a word!?!?
) for specifically my system I chose Gentoo.
First step: Acquire Gentoo. I found this to be the easiest aspect of the process so far. Follow the links on the Gentoo site and you're golden.
Part 2: Boot LiveCD and proceed with installation. This was pretty easy too until I got to the installation part.
Strictly following the Gentoo installation guide (yeah right =Þ) on their webpage I copied and untarred all the necessary software.
III. Lame firewall; working around emerge. The biggest, most time consuming aspect of the installation. Yes even moreso that compiling. Background: I am currently overseas for the military and they have a really lame firewall setup. I have DHCP enabled and that works just fine. I can access the local base webpage and I have actually gotten through to Yahoo (somehow, lol
) and MSN once or twice. I continuously get a 'No route to host' prompt. So, a slight set back. Due to my inexperience with Linux and the stupid Registry file for XP that the proxy server sends out I have not been able to setup my 5680 properly for internet access.
I have worked around this by using a 64mb Lexar usbkey (definitely got a workout moving back and forth between two computers) to transfer the files that emerge was asking for. If only there was a way to know which files to download and copy over BEFORE. Some of these files really pissed me off when, after umount(ing) /dev/sda1, downloading, copying, mount(ing) /dev/sda1, cp /mnt/usbkey/distfiles/foo-x.x.x.tar.bz2 /usr/portage/distiles, emerge system, and the size of the file is only 34k or something lame like that. (I did start copying over multiple files after guessing which were necessary from emerge --pretend system.) Anyhoo, got through all that FINALLY.
The fourth step in my madness to get Gentoo installed and working properly: Configuring the Kernel and installing Grub. This step went over fairly smoothly, at first. I decided to go with the latest and greatest 2.6.3 kernel. Now, I pretty much don't know anything about Linux in comparison to most of you, but I thought I'd go out on a limb with the latest gentoo-dev-source. Going through the kernel configuration tool I slowly went through all the different settings trying to hit the HELP button as much as I could on the parts I wasn't quite sure of or that the Gentoo installation guide didn't specify.
**I think I set something up incorrectly here and this is the root of my problem
Grub was kind of a pain in the butt, but I finally got it working successfuly. I have installed Gentoo on the second HD in my 5680 and Grub wasn't too keen on it at first. I have learned that setting Grub up from the installation is the INCORRECT way when installing it on the second HD. I assume that because I installed Grub and set it up for the second HD, when boot time came around it was set it use (hd1), but instead, it placed my second HD on (hd0) which had it all out of whack. After deciphering through the garble on the Grub bootloader screen, I finally got things changed around so that Gentoo would actually load. Instead of using root (hd1,5) and kernel (hd1,0)/kernel-2.6.3 root=/dev/hdd6 vga=795 from Grub inside Gentoo and the installation phase I had to change it to root (hd0,5) and kernel (hd0,0)/kernel-2.6.3 root=/dev/hdd6 vga=795
Finally time to boot my Gentoo.
here goes, yay yay yay; it starts loading
ACK!
VFS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or hdd6
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on hdd6
alright, WTF is wrong with it? is there something i'm missing or that I have forgotten to do? here is a basic rundown of my fstab:
/dev/hdd1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hdd5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdd6 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/hdd7 /usr ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/hdd9 /home ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/hdd10 /var ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/usbkey ext2 noauto,noatime 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
If anyone can help a newbie out that would be great. Thanks in advance.
Paul
d00d! 7h15 9uy r0xx0rz
700 b4d h3'5 41i3n\/\/4r3
7h15 9uy r0xx0rz m0r3!!!
[ !! ]
io
