local installfest which distro? - Page 3

i'm glad you got it working.

don't bother paying the money for a book. the man pages are great sources of information, as well as HOWTO's on places like linux.org, and of course forums like this one. the information is free and available; why pay for it? i've never paid for or read a linux book in my life; everything i learned was through experience, and looking up anything i didn't know - thank goodness for google...

.Whoa, I check back and xiphux shows up. Heheheh. He does tell the truth, though. Linux is so diverse it con only be documented in a medium as volatile as the WWW.

Kudos to you getting it installed! I only suggested ~x86 since that is what I run with almost the same hardware and haven't had a hitch. Incidently, I have a Prostar 8854.

Wish I had found these forums before I had purchased, but so far i am loving the Clevo arch. And of course, I am loving Gentoo.

In short, xiphux is telling you the God's honest truth about ~x86. I forgot to mention that sometimes there are problems. I haven't had any that I haven't been able to script away, but thats why we have forums in the first place, right?

i've found that the problems come mostly from switching from stable to unstable or vice versa - especially when it comes to system packages which depend heavily on each other. if you installed a system from scratch with "~x86", you probably wouldn't notice many problems, because they are built and depend on each other correctly - i've done it and only had a couple packages fail.

but that's for a desktop system where stability is not vital. if you were deploying gentoo in a production environment where server and system downtime could be damaging, then you would absolutely have to stick to the stable tree.

on that note, i remember back in the day when there was no such thing as a stable vs unstable tree, and portage was so small that you could easily install everything in the tree. that was the real bleeding edge, and it was one of the main reasons why i chose gentoo.

oops, i'm starting to sound like an old man now...

lirc is independent of X, you don't have to edit XF86config. (unless you want to use the remote as a mouse, which i imagine would be pretty awkward in practice. if you're far enough to need to use the remote to mouse, how can you see the screen?)

one thing to note:
when i tested the remote, some of the buttons gave the remote name as "AVerMedia TVCapture 98." but other buttons gave the name as something different. (it was very similar - "Avermedia *something* 98," i think) but i only tried and mapped a couple buttons to xmms, because i don't watch tv. just make sure you map it with the exact name it gives for the button.

just follow the instructions at www.lirc.org and you'll probably be fine. although i remember that a certain part of the documentation (i don't remeber which) was kind of awkward and thin, but you can just ask here if you need help. the lirc homepage even has premade lircd.conf files for specific remotes - i just grabbed the right one and it worked fine.

another thing - for some reason, you have to use the newest version of lirc, 0.6.6. i don't remember why, but 0.6.5 doesn't work. 0.6.6 is marked unstable in portage, but i ran it and there was nothing wrong with it.

gentoo sources aren't bad, but you may want to think about using a kernel more specialized for what you do/ want from linux. (e.g. gaming sources if you game primarily, ck-sources for responsiveness, WOLK for features, etc.) for example, i rarely play games, but i'm always doing a whole bunch of crap on the desktop - i usually fill up at least four virtual desktops with windows. so responsiveness and batch scheduling are important for me, ergo i use ck-sources.

but of course, use whatever kernel you like. actually, now that i think about it, you may want to start with gentoo-sources first, and later move to a more appropriate kernel.

I'm glad that i could help you. i like helping people with linux.

Just read through all of the posts in this thread about gentoo and I am starting to get really pumped. Now, my question is, well, ok, it starts off with some statements. On the gentoo site, it lists that latest build as being 1.4rc4, released in April. But, it seems like there should be a newer version than that (a lot seems to change in 2 months), and there appears to be a lot of stable updates after the release of 1.4rc4. So, just to make sure I am getting the correct version, so I just dl the 1.4rc4 iso and then does it update the packages later (i.e. do I go through and update the packages later) or, is there a way to build an iso from the latest cvs stable sources?

Also, thanks for all of the info that you guys have contributed so far. You have already answered a lot of my questions.

[edit]Also, I might have missed the link/post, but where is a good place to find information about installing gentoo from stage1. The install guide on www.gentoo.org looks like it starts at stage3, and I checked the rest of their guides and couldn't find anythign.
Thanks again for everyones input.

with gentoo, version numbers are a little more vague. during the install, you rsync and download the current portage tree and use that to install - so your packages would be the same as any other up-to-date gentoo user. i normally install with an older cd like 1.2 or even 1.0 or 1.1, because the 1.4 cd had problems detecting the wireless internet card in my 8887 - it would freeze loading orinoco_cs. (i don't know if they fixed this yet) the only packages you would have to update are the ones that came from the stage tarball - so for stage1, probably just a couple packages like portage and python.

the install guide for x86 on the gentoo site starts at the very beginning.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

just a correction:

the module is 8139too, not tooo. i guess that was a typo.

i find that i personally prefer:
hdparm -c3 -m16 -d1 -X69 -u1 -p4 -W0 -B255

-c3 for 32-bit data transfers with sync - sync has a very slight overhead but is safer. -m16 for 16 sector i/o. -d1 for dma, -X69 for UltraDMA 5. -u1 for interrupt unmask, -p4 for pio mode 4.

-B255 to disable the power management. (it's the equivalent of using Intel Application Accelerator in windows to set the drive to Maximum Performance to fix the clicking noise)

-W0 disables the write cache. while this slows performance slightly, it is a lot safer for data - laptop drives flush the cache on reboot/power up, and if your computer was not shut down properly, you would lose this data - almost defeating the point of a journaling filesystem.

your drive _should_ support UDMA5, but check hdparm -I, just in case.

i never use the -k1 flag, just the hdparm startup script. if, for example, something went wrong with the settings, and say unmasking the interrupt gave you severe filesystem corruption (which is rare but possible), or your drive got stuck in a loop because of incorrect settings, it would be a lot harder to recover if the drive stores and defaults to those settings.

mirrorselect is not bad, but it's not as good as testing and choosing a mirror yourself. for example, the fastest mirror for me, http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu, was not even in mirrorselect's list, but i get over 150k/sec from it.

I can usually get 70 K over dsl from servers in Europe. GaTech can give me about 150K, but it only lets me in as anonymous after school hours.

yo dirtboy, im going to tech next year! what year are you?

Ok, my next question deals with disk partitioning. As I was reading through the tutorial I noticed that they said several times that using fdisk will cause everything on the hd to be lost (and for me that would be a very * inf. bad thing). They also recomended the use of ReiserFS for the file system. Well, my first thought was to simply use partition magic. It's very easy to use, has worked well for me in the past, and I already know how to use it well (not that it was that hard to learn ). Anyways, it looks like partition magic is unable to make a ReiserFS partition. So, my question is, does fdisk really erase everything, or just the stuff on the new partitions. Also, if fdisk will clear everything, does cfdisk do that same? Thanks again for all of the info.

cfdisk is just a frontend to fdisk to make it easier to use. fdisk will destroy the data in any partition that you modify.

partition magic supports non-destructive resizing and moving, which fdisk doesn't. although fdisk can destroy your data, partition magic can too if you're not careful. it's not the program, it's the act of modifying your partitions that makes it dangerous.

the partition type for linux (data, that is) will always be the same type - it's probably just listed in partition magic as linux ext2. after you make a partition, you create a particular filesystem _within_ that partition - be it reiserfs, xfs, ext2, ext3, etc. it's just called linux ext2 from the days when that was the only linux filesystem available.

what i _personally_ would end up doing in your situation would be to use partition magic to resize and relocate the existing partition(s), and then use fdisk to create my desired linux partitions in that unallocated space, without touching the other partition(s). but if you're comfortable with partition magic, then by all means, use that. just set the partition type as linux ext2 for whatever filesystem you use. (or linux swap, where appropriate)

Munky: Senior, but at MS State. GaTech is the closest mirror on the backbone

Just one quick question. You said that to enable the ethernet card/port I should use modprobe 8139too. What would be the the modprobe command to enable the internal wireless card that ships with the sagers?

ooooo, ok

ok, I've now run into a wall. When I go to uncompress the stage1 tar.bz2 file, I get the error "tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors". this happens directly after it extracts (or maybe tries to extract) /bin/hostname.

So far, I have tried restarting the laptop, unbzipping it first, then untarring the file, downloading the file from the web first and using the cd version. I checked google and was unable to find anything useful. Any ideas?

[edit] I just read that this problem is probably caused by a problem in you boot partition (which is my winxp partition.). I am going to move all of my partitions down a bit and make a new partiton at the beginning just for booting. I'm doing it right now, but if you see any problems with this idea, just post them here.