Installing Gentoo on a Dell D430

mcewenzach79 · n00b Joined: 08 Nov 2024 Posts: 1

I've been trying to install gentoo on a Dell D430 laptop, I watched video tutorials to install and tried to follow the steps to install gentoo, but it keeps redirecting me to "error: unknown filesystem." I bought an installation CD on eBay and have tried to install it using the konsole from there, but the version of Gentoo on it is version 13 (forgot the kernel version at the time of writing). I downloaded and untarred the installation folder. Does anyone know what version the Dell D430 needs? (mine has an Intel Centrino processor).

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Nov 09, 2024 1:36 am Post subject:

I'm guessing here. Error:unknown filesystem sounds like a grub error, meaning that you seem to be pointing your kernel image to a filesystem that grub doesn't understand.

Your Dell D430 appears to be using a Core2 Duo CPU, and thus can run 64-bit. However the amount of RAM you have may dictate what you can reliably run. I did not have much luck with 2GiB on 64-bit as it would hit swap too quickly.

You're better off downloading a fresh copy from www.gentoo.org else you may be stuck updating stuff that has moved on since Gentoo is a rolling release.
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bstaletic · Guru Joined: 05 Apr 2014 Posts: 394

Back in 2016, I was using gentoo on a 2GB RAM laptop. It was tough. So much so that I decided to go without Xorg completely and just live in the linux terminal.

As for the specific problem @mcewenzach79 is facing...
First, why order a gentoo install CD off eBay? Who knows how out of date that is.
But also, what is erroring with "unknown filesystem"? The bootloader? If you can't tell, share a picture. What filesystem are you trying to use? Hopefully not NTFS or FAT.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Nov 10, 2024 12:16 am Post subject:

I still have a Pentium-M with 1.5GiB and an Atom N270 with 2GiB RAM. Since they only run 32-bit, both actually work okay with 2GiB. However I was trying to install on a 2GiB Core2 Duo laptop, and that was miserable. Switching it to 32-bit, it was now tolerable, however, not sure how much longer things like Firefox will be supported in 32-bit...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?