phunni Posted May 3, 2003 Report Share Posted May 3, 2003 OK - I'm seriously considering putting gentoo on my system, just to try it out. To be honest, I'm not certain I'm really ready, but I figured I'd give it a go and see if I learn anything on the way. I have some questions though: 1) stage 1 tarball is apparently for bootstrapping - so what's that then? :? 2) Which stage should I start at - the site says 3 for the first time, but I want quite a lean system so I'm thinking maybe 2. I have recompiled a kernel before to a bootable(if not perfect) stage so I'm not a complete newbie by any means. I read an article by a newbie about how he installed from stage 2 with the help of the docs and it all went fairly smoothly. I'd be interested to know anyone's opinions on this 3) Is 1.4_rc4 the way to go, or is there a more stable version? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted May 3, 2003 Report Share Posted May 3, 2003 Hi phunny 1) stage 1 tarball is apparently for bootstrapping - so what's that then? :? Bootstrapphing is installing and compiling what is required to compile the rest of the system. It basically install libraries and compile them twice. I suggest you to read the 'installing Gentoo HowTo' before trying to install it actually. Here it is: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml Description of what the bootstap process is here: Installing from a stage1 takes a lot of time, but the result is a system that has been optimized from the ground up for your specific machine and needs..... bootstrap.sh will build binutils, gcc, gettext, and glibc, rebuilding binutils, gcc, and gettext after glibc. Needless to say, this process takes a while. Once this process completes, your system will be equivalent to a "stage2" system, which means you can now move on to the stage2 instructions 2) Which stage should I start at - the site says 3 for the first time, but I want quite a lean system so I'm thinking maybe 2. I have recompiled a kernel before to a bootable(if not perfect) stage so I'm not a complete newbie by any means. I read an article by a newbie about how he installed from stage 2 with the help of the docs and it all went fairly smoothly. I'd be interested to know anyone's opinions on this Don't care about what the site say. Go stage 1 but read (maybe print because your computer will not really working for 2 days hahahah) the doc before. Anyway there is one extra command to start from stage 1 instead of stage 2 (sh /usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh) so it worth it ... 3) Is 1.4_rc4 the way to go, or is there a more stable version? Gentoo works in Stable and Unstable tree. There is a variable in /etc/make.conf to tell to the compiler if you want to test unstable stuff or not. Go stable (ie don't look for the variable in /etc/make.conf.. this is stable by default). The distro is VERY stable even if it says 1.4rc4. They are in RC process since about a year so don't care about that. SO: 1) read the doc 2) Look the Gentoo forum for optimization flags.. or look here: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml (USE) http://www.freehackers.org/gentoo/gccflags.../flag_gcc3.html (safe CFLAGS) http://www.freehackers.org/gentoo/gccflags...ag_gcc3opt.html (not so safe CFLAGS) 3) Compile HTH HAVE FUN !! MOTtS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 3, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 3, 2003 OK - I'm slightly confused about something. My CD writer is broken so I have simply downloaded the stage 1 tarball (do I also need the others as well?), but the instructions say to resize partitions in order to install gentoo. Now I am quite happy to lose my Mandrake system for now - everything I need is backed up, so if this fails I can reinstall Mandrake without any problems :wink: BUT, if I format my partitions, I will lose my tarball that I downloaded AND I will no way of putting it back on the system as my network config will be lost. If, however, I don't reformat the partitions, I get the impression from the docs that my old mandrake system will still be there as well as the gentoo stuff. Someone - please free me from my confusion! I am pretty confident about the install after this stage Edit: ok - I've seen that I do only need one tarball, so that answers one question. I guess i'm beginning to wonder if I can format my partitions one at a time and copy the extracted tarball across - although at some point I will lose my cd command - so I will still be unable to actually get to the tarball :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted May 4, 2003 Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 phunni ..... some things that helped me. while you still have a running mandrake ...do lsmod .. and keep a copy of those modules that you are using. It will help you later on when you're building your kernel. also keep a copy of your XF86Config-4 .. you will change it a bit (the fonts section) with gentoo, but it makes life alot easier when you have a good working config. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted May 4, 2003 Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 OK - I'm slightly confused about something. My CD writer is broken so I have simply downloaded the stage 1 tarball (do I also need the others as well?), You have to download the LiveCD. This is a .iso image. Well, you know how to burn it ;-) (well, ask one of your friend to burn it for you if you cd is broken .. it's only 50Meg). Boot from it. It already contains Tarball#1 in /mnt/gentoo if you want to start from it. If you want to start from a different stage, you can download it now and put it on a spare partition or get it when you booted off the LiveCD (with LYNX, a text web browser). READ THE DOC !! .. because once you boot the LiveCD, you are left in a shell .. so you gotta know what you have to do man ! http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml .. sorry for that but you really have to read it man (that's the basic) Have phun .. lucky you. I think I'm gonna reinstall .. just for the fun :mystismiles: MOttS EDIT: I'm with Paul. Keep a copy (on a floppy for instance) of lilo.conf, X config file, fstab, etc.. .. because you have to write them from scratch with Gentoo so having a copy is REALLY kiewl. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 4, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 This is soooo frustrating! I have finally managed to get hold of a CD with the installation on it. But my PC won't boot of the CD, even if I tell it to in BIOS I have run fdisk /mbr but I am now just told - missing operating system. I cannot find a boot floppy image anywhere (and I refuse to re-install mandrake purely for a boot floppy) I really want to try and install gentoo- but so far I can't even begin! Any thought anyone? I'm on the verge of giving up on the basis that it's too difficult to even start the install Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 5, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 5, 2003 OK - progress report for anyone who might be interested. I managed to find a boot loader that fitted on a floppy and was able to use this to boot from the CD. So far so good. My machine is currently bootstrapping and I'm looking forward to continuing the process and getting a nice, lean gentoo system. I do still have one question in anticipation of installing X: I want to use fluxbox as my window manager and don't really want to install KDE or gnome. I realise, hoever, than many applications depend on a t least one of these. how do I install on only the basic libraries? I assume that with KDE it's a case of only installing kde-base, is there an equivalent for gnome? Also, does it make any difference, performance wise, which I include in my USE flags? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted May 5, 2003 Report Share Posted May 5, 2003 OK - progress report for anyone who might be interested. I managed to find a boot loader that fitted on a floppy and was able to use this to boot from the CD. So far so good. My machine is currently bootstrapping and I'm looking forward to continuing the process and getting a nice, lean gentoo system. YIHA! I do still have one question in anticipation of installing X: I want to use fluxbox as my window manager and don't really want to install KDE or gnome. I realise, hoever, than many applications depend on a t least one of these. how do I install on only the basic libraries? I assume that with KDE it's a case of only installing kde-base, is there an equivalent for gnome? Also, does it make any difference, performance wise, which I include in my USE flags? Don't know if you read what I suggested you to read about USE variables but 'gnome' and 'kde' are there by default (look /etc/make.profile/make.defaults). So if you DON'T want to install anything about that you have to write '-kde -gnome' in /etc/make.conf. If you write that, I don't think the system will install anything about those DE exept what may be REALLY required (maybe kde-base or libgnome). But before installing fluxbox, do a 'emerge -p fluxbox'. It is going to list you all the packages that will be compiled. Take a look at them and filter out what you don't need via the USE variables. If you want me to help you, do a 'emerge -p fluxbox > fluxbox.package' and post it here (?). You may also look at /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc for a description of ALL USE variables. NOte that if you don't have access to another computer, you can press CTRL-ALT-F2 while the system is compiling and login as root. There you can read what you want .. even surf the web with LYNX ;-) Good luck! MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 5, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 5, 2003 OK - completed basic install - not so difficult! Problem is that I did reinstall Mandrake in order to try to create a boot disk and I forgot to format /mbr - whoops so, now when I go to reboot, I get the mandrake lilo menu with no option to boot my new kernel (labelled gentoo) and then something about linuxebda too big How can I fix this? Please don't tell me I must start again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MottS Posted May 5, 2003 Report Share Posted May 5, 2003 Well, I'm not sure where you are but anyway. Assuming you configured and installed a kernel (whatever version) and installed lilo, you can boot cd1 of Mandrake, press F1 to get more options and type 'rescue'. You'll see 5-6 options. One of them is 'go to console'. Select it. At the console, mount the partition where your installed that Gentoo kernel. mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdXY /mnt/whatever .. well you know how to do that right? Now chroot to that partition chroot /mnt/whatever /bin/bash env-update source /etc/profile Now you can modify lilo.conf and run it (well, type 'lilo -v') and reboot. You should see a basic text lilo prompt asking you which OS to boot (if you have set lilo to ask). Hope this work MOttS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 6, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2003 OK - managed to sort out the lilo problem. (Didn't work from within mandrake, but if I booted with the gentoo CD it was fine) - thanks for the inspiration When I booted for the first time, there where some error messages, but I didn't get a chance to really look at them in any detail - is there a log of the startup messages? I have already looked in /var/log and I can't find anything there. It will be difficult to solve any problems if I can't see the errors! Stll, progress has been made - I can at least boot into a basic gentoo system, albeit one that doesn't work very well! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qnr Posted May 6, 2003 Report Share Posted May 6, 2003 dmesg is what you're looking for, just pipe it to a pager dmesg | less Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 6, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2003 can't see any errors from dmesg - I think the errors are occuring after this, while starting services, mounting drives etc... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted May 6, 2003 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2003 Making real progress now - got samba up and running nicely. I rebooted to see if I could catch some of the errors they seemed to be around two areas: 1) mounted file systems - one error that I did catch was that not all local filesystems were mounted, although everything seems fine to me. I will post my /etc/fstab at the bottom of this post 2) my eth0 is not being started. I can easily fix this after startup by simply loading the appropriate module (tulip) I'm surprised this doesn't happen at startup though - how can I fix this? Here is my /etc/fstab: /dev/hda1 /boot ext3 noauto,noatime 1 1 /dev/hda3 / reiserfs noatime 0 0 /dev/hda2 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy is08859-15 user proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for # POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following # line to /etc/fstab should take care of this: # (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will use almost no # memory if not populated with files) tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 Also, I'm not sure how to include my floppy in this - I've got everything except which fs type it should be :wink: Any help with this would be appreciated. One last thing (sorry this is so long with so many questions but...) I backed up my X config files (XF86Config and XF86Config-4) but I forget where I got them from will simply copying them back to the appropriate place sort out my X config for me? I'm using exactly the same hardware as I was under mandrake Again, sorry there i so much in this post, but I'm learning loads and getting confused about things at the same time! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted May 6, 2003 Report Share Posted May 6, 2003 1. floppy add: /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy fat noauto,user 0 0 2. X /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 :-) are you using nvidia ??? if so have emerge'd nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel ? about the boot problems .. dmesg | less might give some more ideas of whats going wrong ... also remeber /boot doesn't get mounted at boot (and it shouldn't) It takes 3-4 kernel compilations before I get the hardware working just right don't be afraid to cd /usr/src/linux make menuconfig && make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install then mount /boot and copy the new bzImage I have the original bzImage that I first build plus I have built a new kernel (coz I have forgotten something) a few more times since then I now name my kernels bzImage-{month}{day}{year} example: bzImage-05062003 ... just so I don't forget which one I should be using :blush: then you can add entries into grub.conf or lilo.conf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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