Installing GCC3.1, Gnome 2 on Sony VAIO PCG-C1XS

[johnnyb]

I've been in the RedHat world for sometime and lately come to realize that there were certain things missing in my computing life -- compiling stuff, hand-tuning, bleeding-edge versions of software.

So here I am putting Gentoo on my VAIO. First of all, I didn't have a bootable CD-ROM. I did, however, have working Winblows 98 and Linux partitions. What I decided to do was wipe out the Windows partition and put a 100MB "boot" partition in it's place at the beginning of the hard drive. (Erasing Winblows sure felt good!) I simply copied kernel, rescue.gz and stage1-ix86-1.3b.tbz2 to the new partition and booted it using a grub floppy. (Even now that same partition is /boot and those files comprise a "resue" option in the grub boot menu.) Otherwise I followed the installation instructions normally. I was able to build stage 2 and stage 3 without any problems. Getting PCMCIA networking up was fun -- I finally figured out to build the kernel (without PCMCIA drivers), then emerge pcmcia-cs, rc-update add pcmcia default, add pcmcia_core, i82365 and ds to modules.autoload. I also have a wireless network card that I'll try to get working soon. I then unmasked gnome2, emerge gnome, configured X and set xsession=gnome in rc.conf. Poof! I have Gnome2 running. I'm now building Mozilla. My current goal is Evolution with Palm (Clie-USB) support. Don't be fooled -- it hasn't been as easy as it sounds. BTW, the picturebook is a 400Mhz PII with 128MB RAM so compiles take quite a bit of time.

If anyone else is running Gentoo on a VAIO (esp. C1XS) I'd love to share info!

I'd like to extend my thanks to the Gentoo developers!

[StuckInAFridge]

i'm in the process of compiling everything as i type.

the C1XS is amazing, but a bit screwy to configure.
_________________
"Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another."
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[gustafson]

Hey, I just acquired one of these old laptops. Did you get it up and running gentoo?