Help a noob put gentoo on an IBM NetVista 2200

machinelou · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

At the moment, I have a NetVista2200 successfully booting some flavor of debian. The distro comes with a pre-compiled kernel (2.4) and I have a copy of the kernel configuration file. As far as I know, the processor is a cyrix. The current distribution doesn't include any development tools

My long term goal is to turn this into a car computer that plays mp3s off on a compactflash card (currently a 5gig microdrive) and off of USB thumbsticks and transfer files over a network (maybe wireless). To do this, I am imagining a minimum gentoo which would include development tools (gcc, make, portage, etc...), openssh, alsa, mpd, and maybe udev, and maybe a 2.6 kernel. One reason why this install is somewhat challenging (for me anyway) is that I can't boot off of anything other than the compact flash. I'm not entirely sure how to install gentoo without booting off of an install cd so here's my plan.

I'm going to mount the compact flash on my existing gentoo desktop system and extract a stage tarball and a portage tarball onto the compact flash and chroot onto it. Here's my question:

When I select the stage tarball, what architecture do I choose?

Do I have to recompile a new kernel (obvious I do if I want 2.6 but will portage and the programs in the stage tarball work with the existing 2.4 kernel?

Thanks!

GordSki · Guru Joined: 18 Oct 2004 Posts: 329

I'm pretty sure that the Cyrix is an x86 Pentium style processor. So I think your looking at an x86 tarball and i586 as the march for GCC.

G.

Redhatter · Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:37 am Post subject:

It depends on the exact chip you've got... I have an IBM/Cyrix 486 DX4/100MHz chip here... that quite obviously won't run Pentium code.

Then there's the VIA Cyrix 3, which AFAIK, are i686-compatable (not sure there...).
cat /proc/cpuinfo should answer some of these questions... on my dual-PIII box here, I get:

machinelou · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

Thanks for your help!

At the moment, I've got a stage3 x86 tarball on the flashcard and the latest portage tarball on there as well. This flash card is currently mounted on my desktop computer (a pentium 4). I have a question about the next step before chrooting. The gentoo handbook says to do the following:

Redhatter · Posted: Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:50 am Post subject:

It's also already mounted when you boot the LiveCD. Difference? Zilch. :-)

I'm not sure what you mean by "using information from the kernel that has booted from a Pentium-4". /proc contains things like process information (hence the name) which is required for tools like ps and killall. It also contains status information like currently mounted filesystems (/proc/mounts), ethernet adaptor configurations, etc...

You should be able to proceed as if booting from a LiveCD. The fact that the host system is a P4 is irrelevant. The only place which is P4-specific is /proc/config.gz - which stores the kernel .config used to build the kernel. This file may be ignored -- I'm not sure if genkernel pays any attention to it (I don't use it, I roll kernels by hand). I have in the past, built environments for Pentium II and below, systems, inside a chroot on my Dual PIII desktop, with no ill effects. :-)

BTW: This isn't cross-compilation -- Cross-compilation is compiling between different architectures ... i.e. an x86 host compiling for a MIPS target, or a Sparc host compiling for a PA-RISC target. Not x86 compiling for x86. ;-)

_________________
Stuart Longland (a.k.a Redhatter, VK4MSL)
I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere...

Gentoo/MIPS Cobalt developer, Mozilla herd member.

machinelou · Apprentice Joined: 05 Apr 2003 Posts: 267

Thanks RedHatter, thats clears things up.

Evangelion · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 7:36 pm Post subject: