Gentoo Hardware Success Stories

cajzell · Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 7:56 pm Post subject: Gentoo Hardware Success Stories

Hello,

I am in the the process of buying a new computer and my colleagues are giving me all kinds of advices. The problem is, I want it to run gentoo and want to be sure there won't be too much hassle getting it going. So, I was wondering if there is any resource where successful gentoo-installations are archived, something like "www.linux-tested.com", but targeted at gentoo?

(For example, I am now considering the following items:

Searching the forums, I find most often trouble reports(which is only natural), but maybe there are people who has gotten it to work easily with the latest Live-CD and probably they won't write a success report.)

syrrus · Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:32 pm Post subject:

Well for desktop hardware your not going to find much in terms of an archive of working hardware. Mainly because most people here run some slick custom machines with a ton of mix and match hardware. There however is a good collection of laptop success stories but when it comes down to SOHO hardware, your going to be hard pressed to find much of anything. I suggest that you just build in your mind the machine that you think would be best to suite your needs. Then check the gentoo forums for horror stories or success stories if your lucky, and adjust your selection from there.
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Gates Closed,
Windows Broken,
I Found the Source;
And It Was Open.

berkowski · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 134

My advice to add to everything else you've been told is go through your hardware with a fine toothed comb Get your chipsets off your MB - get the ide controller, the sata controller, the onboard audio, video, etc. Then check out your kernel sources and check if they're supported. If they are you shouldn't have a problem.

I've never looked at that linux-tested site until now, but it doesn't look helpful at all. It gives compatibility at the highest level: Does this particular dell sysetem work with Redhat? With Mandrake? Why does it work with redhat and NOT mandrake? Fact checking yourself before you buy the hardware'll save you many headaches :wink:

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Current Screenie

unixpenguin2004 · Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 8:47 pm Post subject: Gentoo Prebuilt

Hello. I've prebuilt a generic i686 build of Gentoo 2005.0 with things like Xorg, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Kde 3.4.0, Gnome 2.10, Xine, Wine, Amarok, Kplayer, Kmplayer, Mplayer, Karamba, Vmware 5, Cedega, and a lot of other things. What I did was build it on the machine in my signature, a quad processor system, rebooted the machine after around 36-40 hours of building, onto the Gentoo minimal livecd, tar up the biggest pieces say opt, usr/portage, usr/src, and put them on a remote computer with sftp. Then I deleted those directories that I tarred up, along with the tars that I uploaded, then I tarred up the root, uploaded it, and shut off the machine. I then stuck the same livecd in a 1.1ghz athlon system with 640mb ram and a geforce mx 440 card, made the partitions, formatted, grabbed the tars, put them in the correct places, extracted root.tar first then opt then portage and src, then chrooted into the environment after deleting the tars, edited the network files, the fstab, the xorg.conf, etc, then made a kernel for the machine, the lilo.conf, then ran the bootloader umounted whatever I had mounted, rebooted and I had a fully functional Gentoo system.

Now I have a very stable, almost 100% portable build of everything you'd ever need for a desktop or otherwise.

Machines tested/to be tested with the build:

4x 550MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon (2MB)/1GB/18.2GB/ATI/Intel Eight-Way Server Board
1.1GHz Amd Athlon (Duron)/640MB/160GB/MX440SE/ECS K7S5A
2.4GHz Intel Celeron (P4 Core)/512MB/160GB/SIS/SIS Motherboard
Maybe others.

Now that I know my tarring and building are successful, stable, and portable, I will start building Gentoo 2005.0 for two other architectures I have maybe all 3 if I get the time. UltraSparc, Mips, and PowerPC. I will have to build on the actual machines and because I only have one of each of those architectures, so the builds are only useful as backup, but is worth the time in my opinion.

700MHz G3/256MB/20G/ATI/iBook2 System
2x 400MHz UltraSparc II (2MB)/512MB/9.1GB/Creator3D/Ultra2 System
1x 175MHz R10K Mips (1MB)/128MB/2x4GB/Impact 10K/SGI Indigo 2 System

Tell me if you want more details.

My e-mail is penguin@shadowdev.org if you'd like a copy of my generic builds for your system. I will charge for media and electric costs only, and depending on the demand will start donating directly to Gentoo if possible. Thank you for reading this.

I posted this as a response because I have substantial confidence that my build would work on your machine with the steps above. The hardware you have is easy to setup in comparison with my multi-architecture environment for instance. Nvidia is the best supported GPU on Linux currently, Pentium 4's, even Prescotts are backwards compatible and rarely from experience break a Gentoo build or fail to build for that matter. I've installed Gentoo from stage 1 on a Sager 3.4GHz 775 socket laptop with 1GB ram and a 16x Pci-Express Geforce 6800. Although most of the bells and whistles didn't work, I was able to pull around 16000 frames per second with Glxgears, run Kde 3.3.2, etc. This was a few months ago. The newer 2.6.11 kernels have PCI-Express support directly, so bandwidth allocation is a certainty.
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Compaq Proliant 8500R (7U Rackmount Form)
4x 550MHz Intel Pentium III (2MB L2)
1GB PC-100 SD-Ram
Compaq SmartArray RAID Controller
Compaq Dual 10/100 Ethernet
18.2GB Compaq Ultra2 Hotplug SCSI
Gentoo 2005.0 1.4.16 (Vanilla 2.6.11.9)