Hey everyone, remember me? I'm the one with the horrible issues with RAID. Well, yesterday afternoon, I finally succumb to the pressure, and I killed the RAID in my system. And thus, here is my story of a successful install sans RAID on my 8890.
So yesterday afternoon, I finally got fed up with windows. It committed suicide YET AGAIN after I installed a new wifi card, with constant STOP errors every few minutes. The advantage of having RAID no longer outweighed my deprivation of Linux. Hence, I borrowed my friend's external drive and backed up my files. That being done, I open my computer, and flipped the fateful switches.
***NOTE TO ALL: if you intend to kill RAID, make sure you destroy the array first in the bios screen! Just flipping the switches makes a very confused computer with screwed up boot sectors! After a bit of trouble with the boot sectors still thinking it's in RAID mode and a few flip backs, I got it all cleaned off. Popped in the Knoppix CD, and would you look at that! The hard drives finally worked!!!
I cfdisked my disk as such: 15 gb NTFS windows partition, 15gb Linux extended (hde5 /boot ::: hde6 swap ::: hde7 / ::: hde8 /home), 30 gb FAT32 file storage. Then on my other 60gb drive, I made one big Reiserfs partition, intending linux to be my primary OS. Since I couldn't really keep my friend's drive for too long, I connected it in knoppix, and recopied all my files back to the reiserfs partition. After that lengthy process, I installed windows again just for dual boot capability (Always install windows first! otherwise windows will be greedy and overwrite your linux booter)
After windows finished installing, I booted back into Knoppix to begin my Gentoo install. Prepared my linux drives, formatted them, mounted, then extracted the stage3 file (yes, I'm a pansie, but I couldn't wait any longer). From there, I emerge gentoo-dev-sources and nabbed the 2.6.8 kernel. I decided to let genkernel do a bit of configuration for me this time, because my last few kernels had hardware that didn't work. However, I compiled it myself after genkernel did the kernel config so I could have more control over the boot. Some more notes:
- Remember to configure the processor architecture- genkernel didn't do that properly
- DO NOT use vesafb-tng or whatever that thing is called! It garbles my display, and the framebuffer stops working!
- for the /dev filesystem, genkernel didn't automatically mount at boot, so that was a botched kernel attempt.
After I got my custom-genkernel running with grub, I realized that nothing was really working. My Logitech MX700 mouse didn't work, none of my usb storage things would work even though they were in the kernel. It seems that I STILL botched up my kernel, so I decided, the heck with it and I let it use full genkernel, with initrd and everything. I also added hotplug. After this, all my USB gadgets came to life, and I had a mouse! A few more emerges, and I'm running KDE with gentoo! (yes, I used GRP... that's how impatient I was)
First problem to solve in KDE: sound wasn't working. Although all the alsa modules are now in the kernel, be sure to emerge alsa-utils and /etc/init.d/alsasound start, because the devices in /dev are not created. Also, don't forget to unmute everything with alsamixer!
Second problem: the ati driver. After emerge ati-driver and fglrxconfig, I examined the dmesg log and found that the module fglrx couldn't load because of an unknown symbol, for some odd reason. Thus, I did emerge ati-driver again, and this time the fglrx driver loaded fine and fglrxinfo said I was running ATI opengl. Be sure to cp the XF86config-4 file generated by fglrxconfig to xorg.conf, because the config names have changed places! Also don't forget the opengl-update ati.
So, here I am, typing this message on a brand new Linux 8890 system! Everything seems to be working, I even have the temperature from /proc/acpi/thermal-zone/THM0/temperature. I have yet to figure out xawtv, but the bttv driver is working for my tv tuner.
One question before I leave- when I boot up my 8890, there's a long time where it just says "Detecting". Is there any way to expedite this process? It's making my boot time much longer than it should be...
So yesterday afternoon, I finally got fed up with windows. It committed suicide YET AGAIN after I installed a new wifi card, with constant STOP errors every few minutes. The advantage of having RAID no longer outweighed my deprivation of Linux. Hence, I borrowed my friend's external drive and backed up my files. That being done, I open my computer, and flipped the fateful switches.
***NOTE TO ALL: if you intend to kill RAID, make sure you destroy the array first in the bios screen! Just flipping the switches makes a very confused computer with screwed up boot sectors! After a bit of trouble with the boot sectors still thinking it's in RAID mode and a few flip backs, I got it all cleaned off. Popped in the Knoppix CD, and would you look at that! The hard drives finally worked!!!
I cfdisked my disk as such: 15 gb NTFS windows partition, 15gb Linux extended (hde5 /boot ::: hde6 swap ::: hde7 / ::: hde8 /home), 30 gb FAT32 file storage. Then on my other 60gb drive, I made one big Reiserfs partition, intending linux to be my primary OS. Since I couldn't really keep my friend's drive for too long, I connected it in knoppix, and recopied all my files back to the reiserfs partition. After that lengthy process, I installed windows again just for dual boot capability (Always install windows first! otherwise windows will be greedy and overwrite your linux booter)
After windows finished installing, I booted back into Knoppix to begin my Gentoo install. Prepared my linux drives, formatted them, mounted, then extracted the stage3 file (yes, I'm a pansie, but I couldn't wait any longer). From there, I emerge gentoo-dev-sources and nabbed the 2.6.8 kernel. I decided to let genkernel do a bit of configuration for me this time, because my last few kernels had hardware that didn't work. However, I compiled it myself after genkernel did the kernel config so I could have more control over the boot. Some more notes:
- Remember to configure the processor architecture- genkernel didn't do that properly
- DO NOT use vesafb-tng or whatever that thing is called! It garbles my display, and the framebuffer stops working!
- for the /dev filesystem, genkernel didn't automatically mount at boot, so that was a botched kernel attempt.
After I got my custom-genkernel running with grub, I realized that nothing was really working. My Logitech MX700 mouse didn't work, none of my usb storage things would work even though they were in the kernel. It seems that I STILL botched up my kernel, so I decided, the heck with it and I let it use full genkernel, with initrd and everything. I also added hotplug. After this, all my USB gadgets came to life, and I had a mouse! A few more emerges, and I'm running KDE with gentoo! (yes, I used GRP... that's how impatient I was)
First problem to solve in KDE: sound wasn't working. Although all the alsa modules are now in the kernel, be sure to emerge alsa-utils and /etc/init.d/alsasound start, because the devices in /dev are not created. Also, don't forget to unmute everything with alsamixer!
Second problem: the ati driver. After emerge ati-driver and fglrxconfig, I examined the dmesg log and found that the module fglrx couldn't load because of an unknown symbol, for some odd reason. Thus, I did emerge ati-driver again, and this time the fglrx driver loaded fine and fglrxinfo said I was running ATI opengl. Be sure to cp the XF86config-4 file generated by fglrxconfig to xorg.conf, because the config names have changed places! Also don't forget the opengl-update ati.
So, here I am, typing this message on a brand new Linux 8890 system! Everything seems to be working, I even have the temperature from /proc/acpi/thermal-zone/THM0/temperature. I have yet to figure out xawtv, but the bttv driver is working for my tv tuner.
One question before I leave- when I boot up my 8890, there's a long time where it just says "Detecting". Is there any way to expedite this process? It's making my boot time much longer than it should be...
