Installing Gentoo on a OQO Model 01

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

I received my OQO in the mail today and the first thing I want to do is take WinXP off and put Gentoo on. I have an external DVD writer that can connect to USB or Firewire as the OQO doesn't have an internal optical drive. The OQO does support booting from USB optical drives. When I boot the 1.4 or 2005.0 livecd, I can choose my kernel (gentoo or gentoo-nofb) and it starts to load like it normally would, but stops with error messages:

Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/cdroms/*
Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/ide/cd/*
Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/sr0
Attempting to mount CD:- /newroot/dev/sd*
No bootable medium found. Waiting for new devices...

Could not find CD to boot, something else needed!
mount: Mounting /newroot/dev on /dev failed: No such file or directory
...
...
Determining root device...
The root block device is unspecified or not detected.
Please specify a device too boot, or "shell" for a shell...
boot() :: <blinking cursor>

I've tried /dev/hda through /dev/hdd and /dev/sda through /dev/sdd and it still doesn't pick up my cdrom even though it originally boots off it. I don't know how I can go on with my installation from here.

adaptr · Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 10:53 pm Post subject:

a. some info on what an "OQO" is might come in handy.
b. you must tell the system to look at USB drives at startup:

allucid · Veteran Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 1314 Location: atlanta

This is an OQO. A little expensive (I think close to $900), but cool. There is a little info here about installing linux on it.

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

http://www.oqo.com It's a ultra-personal computer with a 1GHz Transmeta processor that uses x86 instructions. It's really just a pocket computer. Handtops.com has an article about putting SuSe on it so it's possible to get linux on there. I did "gentoo -doscsi" and I still get the same problems. I downloaded an old 1.2 version and it finished booting but doesn't load any modules so now I have to figure out what kind of hardware is in this thing.

I just tried loading knoppix 3.7 and the CD gets recognized and starts booting but doesn't get too far:

Scanning for USB/Firewire devices... Done
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.

prozacgod · Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 12:39 pm Post subject: Installing gentoo on your oQo

emjaybee, I think I saw around here a gentoo boot image that was available for usb thumb drives, that image might look for its root partition/image a little more inteligently - if there isn't or you can't find it let me know and I'll try to cook one up. Another thing is, do you see your cdrom drive being detected during the boot process?

If so, you can try appending "cdroot=/dev/whatever" to the boot prompt (like this)

gentoo cdroot=/dev/sda1

if none of this helps at all try looking at 'lspci', it could be that the usb controller on this thing is very specific, not one of the generics that is in every machine - but perhaps one that does client/host or whatever - in that case neither gentoo, nor knoppix has a kernel compiled for that.

I haven't confirmed my last suspicion but this article seems to be incorporating some deviousness to boot knoppix - if you can get knoppix to boot using that method, you could ssh into the device, and post some lsmod/lspci information..

here is the article http://www.geekspeed.net/~beetle/archives/2005/03/booting_auditor.html

have fun, keep working on it - btw I'm very jealous I've want one of those things since before they came out !
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emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

Making some progress installing Gentoo on the OQO. I have the Universal CD going so I can get a base system up and then tweak the wireless and get the system updated. I'm up to the part of compiling a kernel. I've done this on plenty of other machines, but I'm getting errors on the OQO that I've never seen before. I've tried stock kernels from kernel.org 2.6.7 2.6.10 and 2.6.11.2 and I get random Input/output errors on various files. I have plenty of disk space, and I did e2fsck on the partitions to make sure everything was clean. I emerged genkernel to help out but to no avail.

The kernel on the universal cd boots the system and detects hardware, so is there a way to copy that over to work on my system? Are there any other options or suggestions?

prozacgod · Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2005 7:01 am Post subject: reaclng the manual...

ok this isn`t the usual rtfm post. i think i read in the docs that there is a simple command to generate a live-ish kernel. if you are desperate you should be able to copy the /dev/conflg off of the llve disc. uish i could give you more - but i`m currently using my modded xbox and a really crappy browser. (which explains the mostly meaningless punctuatauaton)
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ben_dash · Apprentice Joined: 12 Aug 2003 Posts: 239

Just curious, did you ever get it working?
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emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

The answer is to get a fan and point it at the OQO while it's doing anything processor intensive. The errors were because it would overheat. Once you get your base system installed you can emerge longrun to throttle the CPU. I tend to run the OQO at 1GHz and scale it down to 667MHz when I emerge big programs before I sleep. I don't know why they'd set the CPU to be able to go a full GHz if it overheats after awhile, but this is the best suggestion I've come up with. I've been running Gentoo on the OQO for the last 5 or 6 months and it works well for me.

kaplana · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

Do you have WiFi working under Gentoo as well?

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

WiFi works great. The OQO uses an Atmel chip and instructions and drivers can be found here:

ftp://ftp.oqo.com/unsupported/linux/OQOLinux.html

This is a page made by an OQO employee.

kaplana · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

Thanks. Great.

One more question - did you install Java (e.g., J2SE, J2ME/CDC, etc.)?

Thanks again.

Alan

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

Yes. I have blackdown-jdk and blackdown-jre installed on my system.

kaplana · n00b Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

This might be naive questions, but ...

1. Did you install Linux on the model 01 or 01+ ?

2. Any preference between Ubuntu and Gentoo? (I realize this is a Gentoo forum,
so maybe the answer to this is obvious.

)

Thanks.

emjaybee · n00b Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 57

I have an 01. The only thing the 01+ has that might make running Gentoo different is USB 2.0 instead of the 01's USB 1.1. The more RAM and bigger hard drive of the 01+ shouldn't change anything.

Ubuntu is very popular right now, but between rpm, deb, and portage for package management, I prefer portage. Plus with portage I get the opportunity to optimize packages as I install them. We have all this great new hardware these days, why use something that was designed for a 486?

Hydraulix · Guru Joined: 12 Dec 2003 Posts: 447

Can you post a picture of Gentoo running on the OQO? Since Sharp decided to make another $800.00 dictionary (sl-c3200)

I'm thinking of getting the OQO. Also could you tell me what works and what doesn't work?

Thanks.
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ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1191 Location: Austria

sorry for bumping that very old topic - but I got me such an oqo lately. I'm running into problems with the actual kernel regarding the wifi device. Anyone some hint about that?

Rei
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