A Penguin in the Orchard

Gentoo Blogcast

As promised, I’ve started the Gentoo install for the upcoming review. There’s a world of difference between the SuSE install of a few weeks ago and this one. Gentoo is clearly intended for Linux power users.

The install starts from the CD. It probes the devices, looking specifically for a Network Interface Card. It found mine, a 3Com 3C905TX with no problem. Given that Gentoo is based on the BSD Ports system, this connection is crucial to the installation. The installer provided me with instructions for loading the 3c95x module and configuring the network. The network was up and running in just a few minutes.

Then I moved on to creating the partition table using fdisk. Again, it’s familiar territory, so I didn’t have any problem creating a partition table with a /, /boot, swap, and /home structure. I then created ResiderFS filesystems on these partitions, and ran mkswap for the swap partition. Finally, I created /mnt/gentoo, /mnt/gentoo/boot and /mnt/gentoo/home mount points, mounted the appropriate filesystems on the mount points and turned on swap. So far, so good.

At that point, I discovered a hole in the online installation instructions. (It is nice to have a functional machine sitting next to one your installing on.) The instructions for finding the stage 1 tarball online are wrong, period. I sniffed around my newly mounted directories and found a text install howto that provided the right instructions. After mounting the CD-ROM correctly, I was able to unzip and untar the stage 1 tarball without further problem.

Then I ran smack into the solution for one of the problems I had with the initial install attempt. My bad. I missed three lines of the instructions:

mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc
cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

I’m not even sure how I got as far as I did before. It proves you can clearly know just enough to be dangerous.

I also completely configured the make.conf file. I left it pretty much intact the last time, short of uncommenting the lines that suited my architecture. The USE directive in the make.conf file allows you to specify libraries, video types, sound, desktop managers, and much more. It means I’ll end up with a completely tailored system. I’m not sure how useful that will be for the review, but it sure is fun knowing I’m creating this monster. If you should do a Gentoo install, pay close attention to the options for the USE directive. They’re listed in their entirety online.

After configuring the make.conf file, it’s on to bootstrapping the system. That’s where we’re at right now. From the Gentoo site:

Now, it’s time to start the “bootstrap” process. This process takes about two hours on my 1200Mhz AMD Athlon system. During this time, the extracted build image will be prepped for compiling the rest ofthe system. The GNU compiler suite will be built, as well as the GNU C library. These are time consuming builds and make up the bulk of the bootstrap process.

I’m installing on a machine with a 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird, so my results will clearly vary. Everything is coming in from the ‘net, too, which can occasionally prove to be a bottleneck. I’ve restarted the process once already when it appeared that the connection to ibiblio had gone dead.

More later …