Starting to get kinda fed up with problems... (n00b @ linux)

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

Hi...

I decided to try out Gentoo and I follow the excellent guide provided at gentoos homepage. I choose stages 3 and everything worked out fine. Untill reboot-time.

I got to the grub prompt and the damned thing freezes. I looked it up and found out that my laptop (HP pavilion ze4400) is kinda picky. I corrected the problem and there it went passed the grub prompt. All the prboblems out of the world I thought... but no. Here came the next problem.

It froze once more later on. I looked it up and found out what it was. Not you'd think that I didn't have to take more problems, but I did get one more.

Its like its freezes totally when I'm trying to "enter". It asks me for my login name (i did make an account earlier in the guide) but nothing happens when I'm writing anything. I'm using a Swedish keyboard so I'm guessing that could be it?? So here's my question... I cant seem to find the answer on this forum nor do I know what to do next. So any ideas on what to do?? Change the layout on the keyboard? I didnt think that it would matter that much really but now its more like the whole thing freezes up. I can still see the curson blinking on the screen but I can't write anything.... so any ideas on what to do?

Thank you for your time!

Roderik · n00b Joined: 06 Jun 2002 Posts: 55 Location: Belgium

the choice is yours, eighter you want to try your hand at gentoo, spend many hours reading these fora and the docs and have a system you like, you build and you'll never want anything else.

Or you try fedora, and have a (quite nice) working system in 30 minutes.

if you do want to stick with it, i guess the problem is your kernel, when i first tried gentoo long long ago i had to do and redo my kernel a LOT of times untill it worked as it should. I suggest you boot from the live cd, go into the chroot and recompile a kernel with genkernel that will make sure at least the default is compiled correctly.

if you think the keymap of your keyboard is wrong try it from the livecd, in /usr/share/keymaps/i386/ you can find the correct one and put it in /etc/rc.conf and/or try it with the loadkeys command from the livecd.
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mastergoon · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:22 am Post subject:

try lilo, it uses a different place in memory than grub, and perhaps grub is pissing off your laptop

bammbamm808 · Guru Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 548 Location: Hawaii

No you just think you're starting to get fed up. And you'll reach new levels of fed up periodically. If you persevere, and once you're gotten a certain degree of background knowledge and get used to the paradigm, it gets better pretty quickly and you'll be over the hump. I've found it worth it several times over and it just keeps getting better and better. Stick with it and consider it a long-term plan.
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cirofren · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 7:53 am Post subject:

There are few people who don't get fed up when they install something like Gentoo. Different computers have different problems and it can be hard.
When I first started Linux I hated it (won't say which distro, I don't want to start a flame war, for me Linux is all about choice) and have never used that distro again.
I've installed Gentoo on three out of the five systems I've ever owned, and Linux on all of them. For my Laptop (which I'm writing this from) it took me over two weeks to get my system fully working.
But I stuck with it, and the outcome is that I love Gentoo, so much in fact that I haven't used Windows in months, like many out there once I got it configured I realised that for me (and it might not be the same for you) Gentoo was all I needed, and it fulfilled my needs perfectly.

But as it's been said, if Gentoo really is giving you trouble and you don't have the time to spend however long fixing it, then use something Like Fedora or Mandrake, personally I prefer Mandrake over the two, but they are probably the two easiest OSs to set up. (I haven't done any OS installs or even used a Mac for seven years, so I could be wrong with that last bit.)

But if you do stick with Gentoo, you'll have a great system, and a great community to support you. Not to mention portage.

Visseroth · Apprentice Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 291 Location: Idaho

I'll tell ya this. If you hate MS and you want to go the way of the Pinguin (Spelled right?), many people are with you, and installing to a laptop can be the most dificult tasks to take under. BUT!! when you get it installed you'll be quite up to date on how to install and trouble shoot linux!!!

cirofren · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:12 pm Post subject:

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

I'll answer some of your replies below...

cirofren · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:19 pm Post subject:

Can you post your grub.conf and /etc/fstab please?

Also, what is different with your keyboard? Is it possible to obtain a US/International keyboard and take the easy way out?

Heh, sorry, I thought this was a discussion and you were getting help in other threads. I would have asked for that stuff before otherwise.

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

subodh · n00b Joined: 24 Apr 2003 Posts: 31 Location: UK

/etc/fstab is a file, not a drectory, trying to cd to fstab or any other file will always give you such an error. for second error permission denied, when you issue ./fstab, you are trying to excute the file program fstab. Again fstab is not a program file, error permission denied is correct.

You need to issue following command.

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

Ahhh ok... thank you for the information!

Here's the fstab thing:

cirofren · Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2004 9:04 pm Post subject:

Just a quick comment before I head off (I'll look at it more later today).

Your root partition is /dev/hda3 yet you have /dev/ram0 in your grub.conf? Are you sure you're getting further with this?
Try adding a second entry to your grub file that looks the same as the most working one but with /dev/hda3 instead of ram0 and boot from that. Unless of course there is a good reason you've got ram0 as root.

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

cirofren · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 12:57 am Post subject:

Are you trying to mount a compressed ram disk image on /dev/ram0 and run your root filesystem from there?
Or have you installed Gentoo onto /dev/hda3?

If you haven't installed Gentoo to /dev/ram0 I'd imagine you'd have a hard time of booting from there. I however could be wrong and you could be doing something more advanced than I'm aware of. Why did you change from hda3 to ram0?

Also, did you compile your kernel with Genkernel? I've heard that it can cause such errors.
If you did you might want to recompile your kernel by hand, don't worry it's pretty easy and there are plenty of guides around, the Gentoo install guide covers almost everything you need.
Also, don't forget that you don't need to do a reinstall, just boot the live CD, mount everything, chroot into /mnt/gentoo and recompile.

Of course if you already compiled it by hand that probably won't help at all.

Edit0:
Make sure you've selected "IDE disk support" and your lowlevel IDE type in the kernel config.
Or if your using SATA the proper options. Also, I think if you are using SATA you might have to use /dev/sda or whatever.

Edit1:
Make sure you have devfs support and mount devfs at boot in your kernel as well.

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

cirofren · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 8:27 am Post subject:

Alright, my advice would be to roll your own kernel and see where that gets you.
Despite what some may tell you it's actually very, very easy. I was actually shocked at how easy it was the first time I ever did it, from what I had heard it sounded like a trial by fire when it was really no harder than the rest of the install.

Something from the manual:

Corp.Nobbs · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 1:29 pm Post subject:

Before you try cirofren's suggestion, try setting grub.conf to this just to see..

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

Sorry for the delay in my reply...

I was going to look my settings in the grub file. And ALL(!) the settings seems to have dissappeard. I've opened the file lots of times and now everything is gone. I have absolutly NO explanation for whats happened. This this make any kind of sence? Looks like everything has been set to default. rc.conf is just as it was when I started to change it. (=all default values)

Now to my seconds question... do I have to do it all over?

cirofren · Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2004 11:55 pm Post subject:

It's very strange for such a thing to happen, unless you updated everything with emerge -u world and had it auto-overwrite config files.
Are you sure you're looking in the right place?
Also, I'm assuming that as you can't boot your system you're making all these changes from the Gentoo LiveCD or Knoppix, is this correct?

ZooR · n00b Joined: 07 Mar 2004 Posts: 8

cirofren · Posted: Wed Mar 10, 2004 2:40 am Post subject:

Okay, set everything to what it should be in /etc/fstab and grub.conf based on the posts in this thread and what you know about yous system and see if you can boot. If not follow the instructions for compiling the kernel.