local installfest which distro? - Page 4

that works, but make sure you set up your boot manager with the option to boot your windows partition - don't want to be stuck with a partition you can't get into, it sucks when that happens.

... and pray that you don't lose data while moving partitions. moving is dangerous, especially if you happen to have a power outage during the operation.

also, if you're adding a partition at the beginning, make sure you note the changes in partition numbers.

the wireless card, i believe, works with the module orinoco_pci. (modprobe orinoco_pci) i can't say for sure because i don't have mine set up - i have no wireless network to test it on. and you need wireless support in your kernel, too.

... now that i think about it, i think gentoo automatically detects your network card and sets that module to be compiled right into the kernel. (which is a good thing, especially with such a net-oriented distro as gentoo) so you may not even have to modprobe 8139too. (you still have to manually do the wireless card, though.)

hmm, it does look like everything is loaded

I did an insmod prism2_pci and it said it was already loaded and I also did a modprobe prism2_pci. Still, it doesn't seem to want to use the card. I guess that I will just have to install gentoo tomorrow when I can use a my ethernet port.

it may be a pcmcia-to-pci bridge, try using pcmcia-cs.

sorry, i don't know much about wireless networking. but perhaps these threads will help:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=33354

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=26716

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=54403

Joy. I am now compiling the kernel. The tutorial said that it took about 2 hours on a 1.2 ghz proc, so lets see if my ~3.066 proc can blow that time away :-D.

Thanks for all of the help so far, and get prepared for the second wave of questions.

To celebrate, here is a banana on me

[edit]Just a quick note to others, don't get too agressive with you compiler optimizations (at least with the kernel). If you do, there is a very good chance that the build will fail. (at least it did for me the first few times)

questions? bring them on!
i'm glad to help.

it takes me around 10-15 minutes to do a kernel. (same processor as yours)

i use -march=pentium4 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -falign-functions=4 -fprefetch-loop-arrays -maccumulate-outgoing-args for CFLAGS and -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe for HOSTCFLAGS without trouble, which is pretty aggressive for a kernel.

(taken from the gcc3.1 optimizations patch that comes with the gentoo-sources, and applied to my own kernel)

Oops, when I said kernel, I ment bootstrap. Anyways, what sources did you use for the kernel...gentoo, vanilla, or something else. Well, seeing your optimizations, I feel that I was agressive enough with my second batch, so I am going to do it again (man this is a long process, hehe).

i use ck-sources (Con Kolivas's kernel patchset), with a couple other manually applied patches like cryptoapi, ntfs2.1.0, etc. but that's because batch O(1) scheduling and variable jiffies are important to me.

i wouldn't use the livecd kernel. if you think about it, the livecd kernel has to have support for just about everything - so that the cd can really be 'live' and booted from almost any computer. that's a whole lot of unnecessary bloat.

i use ide-scsi emulation to use my cd burner - it works fine. the 2.0 alpha versions of cdtools have support for atapi burning, but i didn't bother. it's not worth switching since mine works fine already as scsi. there is also a masked version of cdrtools in portage which has the dvd-r burning patch applied to it, but i haven't tested it yet - i don't have the money for blank dvd-r's.

Ok, my next question relates to the kernel sources. Let's say a choose the namehere sources for my kernel. Would there be any conflict with then applying patches to that kernel that were (I don't want to say designed, so let's try this) made to work with the vanilla source? Just courious.

it's possible it would work, but unlikely. the developers who package the sources create their own patches. i mean, not all the patches are going to fit together with each other smoothly, so they sometimes have to manually fix it up so it works right. then they diff the new sources vs the old sources and create patches. (either that, or they modify the patch themselves) one patch conflict i can think of off the top of my head is grsecurity and cryptoapi - the gentoo-sources have a custom generated cryptoapi patch to take in the grsecurity changes beforehand, or else patching would fail. plus the code in the sources themselves before patching is a lot different - that's why they're different ebuilds, after all.

well, try it if you want. but expect to see some rejected hunks - unless you feel like editing the kernel code and fixing those hunks by hand.

since that is the case, my next question is, how easy is it to change kernel sources from one to another.

My other question is, beakmyn, what did you mean when you said you emerged the gentoo sources later? Did you decide not to use the vanilla sources (i.e. replace them), or what?

when you emerge various sources, they all reside in your /usr/src directory. so you could build a different kernel in each one. and actually, if you wanted, you could put them all in your boot partition/directory and have several grub options, each with a different kernel. (it gets a little cumbersome to deal with multiple /lib/module directories, though - it's not worth it) i have a few different sources in my src directory - gentoo, ck, and development, although i only use ck now. it's just a matter of going into that source directory and building and installing a kernel normally - i could switch to gentoo or dev right now with just a kernel compile, install, and reboot. (of course, if your new kernel is lacking support for something that you need and had in your old kernel, that could cause trouble.)

and after switching kernels, don't forget to change your /usr/src/linux symlink and remerge kernel drivers like alsa-driver and xfree-drm - it seems like a little bit of a hassle, but it gets to be habit pretty quickly.

ok, I've got a strange problem here (at least strange to me). I installed gentoo with the vanilla sources and made a module to support the ethernet jack since I figured I would mainly be using wireless once I got it set up (wireless was compiled into the kernel). Well, right now I have the ethernet port module being auto loaded. So, when linux starts, I log in and type "dhcpcd eth0". Then, just to make sure I have a connection, I ping www.google.com 3 times with "ping -c 3 www.google.com". after that, I ran emerge sync and it downloaded/found 6500 files and then stopped. About 180 sec later it said that I timed out, and after 3 more tries, the same thing happened again. Well, after that, I could no longer ping google and typing dhcpcd eth0 takes a rather long time (no errors reported though), and even then I still can't ping anything.

So, I restarted and this time, it downloaded 7000 something (I think 7200, but can't remember), and the same thing happened again. Any ideas about what is going on?

that's a little strange.

i don't mean to sound condescending, but is everything ok physically? (the light is on for the connection, your router and/or net connection is up, etc? my old laptop had a loose network card that would not be connected to the mainboard when the network cable was angled in a certain direction, so whether the connection was up or not depended on the position of the laptop...)

uh... any syslog messages?

can you try name resolution and ping separately? (e.g. the host command to look up the ip for the name, and then ping that address? to see if it's the network connection itself or something with the name resolution)

dhcpcd eth0 doesn't really do anything if you already have dhcpcd running. (i think... i could be wrong) try either killing dhcpcd and reloading it or 'dhcpcd -k' to release and 'dhcpcd -n' to renew.

i don't think it'll be really different, but try setting up eth0 in /etc/conf.d/net and starting eth0 with '/etc/init.d/net.eth0 start' - that's how i start eth0.

check the output of '/sbin/ifconfig' and '/sbin/route -e' - everything look ok there?

um... try unloading/reloading the module?

i don't know if it's pertinent, or even necessary, but i have extra options enabled in the kernel config under the network card - "Support for uncommon RTL-8139 rev. K (automatic channel equalization)" and "Support for older RTL-8129/8130 boards." They could be completely useless, but they're in my config, if you wanted to try that. (if you don't use them already, that is)

sometimes it's even stupid little things - i know one time when my dns was crawling, it was fixed when i added the loopback and eth0 ip addresses into /etc/hosts. and diablo2 would crawl trying to access the net unless i added an alias for eth0 (10.0.0.0).

uhh... maybe check some of the crap in /proc/net?

are all these rsync attempts going to the same rsync server? it could be that one server.

... somehow, i vaguely remember having a problem like that a long time ago on another computer. try some of those suggestions for now, though, and i'll see what else i can come up with.

Did your wireless connection suddely start up and take control of your internet routing? I have have problems like that having more than one connection up at a time.

Well, the problem was very simple. There was a mistyped ip address in my host file. Still not sure why it was able to connect and then lost the connection afterwords, but oh well. It's fixed now. Thanks again for the help.

Well, I think that I just did the stupidest thing possible. I wasn't paying attention, and when I went to move a file I typed mv file* /* . Well, needless to say, it pretty much overwrote every single file (except for a few that were in use at the time). well, looks like I will be starting from scratch again. At least this time, I know exactly what to do.

ouch.

well, that's a part of learning linux - there aren't really protections against user screw-ups, so you gotta be careful until you get the hang of it. (on that note, you could start out using the -i flag for interactive operations - it'll ask you if you want to do the operation for each file. it'll be safer until you get to the point where you don't need it anymore.)

i remember when i was first learning linux, i only had two partitions: a system partition, and a storage partition for years' worth of important text files, mp3's and ogg's, videos, etc - i thought they would be safer that way. i wanted to create an image of my system partition as a file in the storage partition. so i tried a recommended backup program at the time - mondo rescue - without fully understanding how it worked. i told it to backup into the storage partition, without realizing that it would essentially clone into that partition - so it ended up destroying my storage partition with all my valuable files, and making a clone of my system drive.

... needless to say, i almost killed somebody.