Ouch multiple errors on bot up.!

[raid517]

Ok well this was my first mostly sucessful attempt in installing Gentoo - and I'm amazed I even got it to boot. i have learned a lot over this last week. But now when it boots up I get multiple errors about varuous modules or other failing to be loaded. dmesg gives no useful output in this regard, as it doesn't seem to give any kernel messages (you know, when it moves into colour and starts loading components). Unfortunately the messages all scroll past far to fast for me to really see what they are. But mostly from what I can make out they do appear to be about failed modules. On first boot it complained that my etc/modules.conf file didn't exist. So having another identical system with Mandrake on it, with a perfectly working modules.conf I opted to copy that over and see if it helped the problem. It did somewhat as this time I was able to boot fully to a prompt. However I still have a lot of modules failing to load correctly, or more often than not, not at all.

When I manually try to insmod a module I generally get an error message saying "cannot find the kernel version the driver was compiled for." Well as I only have one kernel and compiled it only with the additional support required for my hardware, and as per the instructions on the install docs docs, I really can't make out what its going on about. One clue might be that it did complain on a couple of occasions that my hand made modules conf.file was newer than my lib/modules/2.4.20-gentoo-r5/modules.dep file. Which might be a clue that I messed up the modules.conf file. I confess in this respect I'm not 100% confident I know what I'm doing.

Also I couldn't get my eth0 to start. The modules for it are loaded 8139too and I can connect via the live CD to the net no problem. But for some reason it hangs on bringing up eth0 when I boot from grub.

Here is my net configuration file.

# /etc/conf.d/net:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/net,v 1.7 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $

# Global config file for net.* rc-scripts

# This is basically the ifconfig argument without the ifconfig $iface
#
iface_eth0="192.168.0.2 broadcast 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0"
#iface_eth1="207.170.82.202 broadcast 207.0.255.255 netmask 255.255.0.0"

# For DHCP set iface_eth? to "dhcp"
# For passing options to dhcpcd use dhcpcd_eth?
#
iface_eth0="dhcp"
#dhcpcd_eth0="..."

# For adding aliases to a interface
#
#alias_eth0="192.168.0.3 192.168.0.4"

# NB: The next is only used for aliases.
#
# To add a custom netmask/broadcast address to created aliases,
# uncomment and change accordingly. Leave commented to assign
# defaults for that interface.
#
#broadcast_eth0="192.168.0.255 192.168.0.255"
#netmask_eth0="255.255.255.0 255.255.255.0"


# For setting the default gateway
#
#gateway="eth0/192.168.0.1"

I don't know what all that stuff about IP addresses means. Well at least I know what an IP address is, but in RedHat and Mandrake I never had to tell them where my adsl modem router was, or what the ip addess or anything for it was. All I do know is all connection protocolls are handled directly with my modem router, it has all my passwords and all my logon details for my isp stored on board. I know my IP address is supplied by my ISP each time I connect, and that my DNS (whatever that might be) is server assigned.So pretty much I don't have to deal with that side of things at all. My connection ptotocol is PPoA and I have enabled support for PPP over ATM in the kernel - as well as several other PPP related features. Indeed I believe there was another reference to ATM in the kernel and I am certain I enabled this too.

Can anyone explain to me where I'm going wrong here? I would really like to know as I am keen to learn about Linux and to finally at last begin using Gentoo.

Regards,

Q