First Installation help needed- at wit's end.

wrc1944

OK- After several attempts at installing Gentoo over the last 9 months, I'm trying again, determined to succeed this time. I'm on dialup. I have very good hardware (self-built), and a lot of experience in Mandrake, compilimg kernels and software, rebuilding srpms,installing OS's, optimizing, partitioning disks, etc. In other words, I'm not a total newbie, and deal with command line editors OK.

I have a spare 9GB drive and box to work on. I've installed a minimal Mandrake 9.1 with boot, root, and swap. I prefer to dual boot, with Gentoo sharing boot and swap, preferably using lilo. 2GB to Mandrake, the rest for Gentoo. I've read and reseached the forums and all the install docs, and printed them out.

Everything I've seen on setting up the ppp connection is either outdated, meaning it refers to older versions of Gentoo, or doesn't work, at least for me.

Basically, my plan is to use kppp in Mandrake temporarily to fill up portage/distfiles, after getting a base install. I've read all the posts about dual-booting, etc, etc. (I've run dual-boot windows/linux for a year). I've tried single booting Gentoo, and failed at that too. Yesterday, I got as far as emerge sync- of course I have no connection, and had to leave out the ethernet steps, and various other things, so I'm stuck. Things like /etc/profile seem to be empty, or missing. If I had an ethernet connection, I'm sure I could follow the install doc and it would make sense, but us ppp users run into all kinds of trouble, as we have to adapt and/or leave things out, or make things up as we go into uncharted territory with no official documentation.

So, I did the minimal MDK install on the 9GB drive, and am ready to try it that way. I have the full rc2 600MB GRP athlon-xp cd, and the new rc4 basic iso (burnt to cd), and the stage 3 rc4 tarball downloaded. I'd rather use the new rc4, but if it's easier to use the rc2 GRP, I'll go for that first, just to get a working Gentoo system running.

I need a 1,2,3, etc. procedure to follow, with either the objective being a dual boot with Gentoo on it's own partition sharing a boot and swap with MDK, or a Gentoo stand alone install on the drive. I've read every post on these subjects for months, and still have not solved it. Nothing seems to lead me to a successful install. I'm still amazed and disappointed that the developers refuse to put in another optional explanation (like between step 5.8 and 6- call it 5.9-whatever) once and for all telling people how to get a ppp connection established during the first part of the install. Not doing so leads to hundreds of hours of frustration for tens of thousands of potential Gentoo users. There should be an Official dial-up procedure explained in just as good of detail as the ethernet setup. Then non-guru type users can get a base install with dialup, and then download the major programs at another high-speed location, burn to cd, and transfer them to portage/distfiles, and then emerge.

Better yet, just release a one cd minimal version that installs without requiring any internet connection at all, and then people could get into Gentoo and gradually rebuild the system as was intended, even with dialup.

Anyway, any advice about how to proceed is greatly appreciated. No need to go into too much detail- a good basic outline would probably suffice, however, with enough detail so that I don't get lost.

Thanks much,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

jlg · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2003 4:27 am Post subject:

Why don't you boot into your mandrake, establish your ppp connection then install your gentoo from there instead of installing from the gentoo cd?

wrc1944 · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2003 6:07 am Post subject:

Hmmmm. I don't understand. If you only have dialup, isn't the idea to use a cd first to get a basic install, and then get all the big packages and put them into /portage/distfiles, and then emerge?

Seems impossible to install exclusively through an online ppp connection at 56k. It would take weeks. I can do a few big downloads in 5-6 hour sessions at most, as I'm sharing the line with my family. It would be hard enough, even with cable or dsl.

I need a procedure where I can get a base bootable install on my hard drive from one of the cd's, and preferably get my Gentoo ppp connection running, and then add on from there. As of yet, I've been uable to do so, as the install docs and forums, while clear to a Gentoo expert dealing with an ethernet connection, don't really explain enough, and/or are outdated so it's hard to apply them to new Gentoo versions, or ppp connections. I don't see any reason why one can't get ppp connected instead of ethernet- it's just that it's not explained how it's done, in terms of Gentoo. It's like we've been totally left out of the loop. How hard can it be to add a little additional section in the install doc explaining this?

And, it's not clearly explained in the forums (I've read the posts) precisely how to use a Mandrake/Gentoo setup with only dialup- at least I can make little sense out of it. The posts always leave something out, assume you already know what to do at cerain points, or appear contradictory to a Gentoo novice.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

slartibartfasz · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2003 6:26 am Post subject:

u can install by using another running linux - for details on this look at the alternative installation guide, chapter 3

unfortunatly i dont have a ppp conection - if u get yours to work, perhaps u can post a guide here - might be included in the docs, if it is good

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jlg · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2003 12:05 pm Post subject:

What I mean is you don't boot with a gentoo cd to do the install. you boot into your mandrake to do the gentoo install. Connect your ppp conection in mandrake. Then follow the installation instructions starting at step 6 or 7 depending if your partitions are ready or not. When you get to 8.1: Downloading Required Stages insert a cd with stage3 on it instead of downloading it.

I was looking over the install instruction to refer you to the right step # since I haven't use the instruction in a long time and realized that the install instructions already point you to this doc: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=43025

wrc1944 · Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:38 am Post subject:

jlg,
I've read those items at the link you gave many times. The problem is they assume one already knows a lot of gentoo procedures, whereas the install doc for ethernet setups gives an exact sequence of precise commands to use. However, I'll read them again, and see if I can get more out of them this time.

Anyway, here's where I'm at right now. I have my 9GB drive partitions as follows, with an empty "/gentoo partition. I did this with the MDK partitioning tool on the installation, and have lilo as the boot manager, since I'm familiar with that. (I allotted 160MB for /boot, as I experiment with lots of kernels).

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6 1.6G 805M 804M 51% / reiserfs
/dev/hda1 160M 2.5M 149M 2% /boot ext2
/dev/hda7 6.0G 33M 5.9G 1% /gentoo reiserfs

Plus a 700MB swap partition, and 384MB ram on an Abit KT7/Duron1300

Would the correct procedure be to now simply extract a stage3 rc4 tarball into my /gentoo partition, and pick up the install doc at step 8.3, after signing on with the MDK kppp? I assume since all my partitions will already be mounted and active, I skip step 7- correct?

If so, I'm still not sure how to set up all necessary commands to get this functioning so I can get the portage tree, because everything in the install doc is referring to a normal ethernet setup.

I need a little guidance about how to adapt the remaining steps using the above scenario- things like "be sure and do this or that at this point," or "change this command to xxx command. I'm very unclear on how MDK and kppp are going to interact with /gentoo during the gentoo install, and how chroot is going to work. Will I be able to use kde to assist me while building gentoo- if so , how is that done?

Since I'm already booted to MDK, do I skip step 14 timezone?

As I review the remaining steps, I'm seeing stuff that doesn't seem to relate to my ppp setup, and it gets very confusing as to what is needed, and what is not. For instance, wouldn't I skip step 23 bootloader entirely, and just edit my MDK lilo after copying my gentoo kernel to /boot?

Thanks,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

wrc1944 · Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2003 6:42 am Post subject:

It's been four days since I posted the questions above, and so far no responses- I sure could use some advice before I attempt this again. Am I on the correct path here, or is this way off base? Isn't there anyone out there who can point out any errors I'm about to make, and enlighten me as to what I need to do?

Thanks,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2003 12:57 pm Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2003 4:34 pm Post subject:

Puggy,
Thanks much for the info- I appreciate you taking time to respond. I'll study it carefully. However, I'm still unclear on many points. Many others recommend using another distro to install from as the best way, and since I know MDK, I assumed that would work best for me.

I don't understand about what you've said about my /gentoo partition. That was what others said to do- create a separate /gentoo partition, and install to that from MDK.Am I understanding you correctly when you say to instead create /gentoo NOT as a separate partition, but simply a directory inside MDK's root?
If I do this, how am I going to avoid having to share ~/home? Most of what I've read advises not to share gentoo ~/home with another distro.

I don't understand your following statement:
"You extract the tarball into /mnt/gentoo which is where your / partition is mounted. You've still got to mount / and /boot and swapon your swap drives as you haven't got them mounted, you've only created them."
When I boot MDK, all the partitions, including /gentoo (with an extracted stage3 tarball), are already mounted. Why would they need to be mounted again if they already are? I thought the objective is to share /boot and swap, and not create new ones for gentoo. Sorry if I'm not getting this.

Do I boot to MDK, sign on to the internet, and then chroot to /gentoo, and then proceed?

Wouldn't doing emerge -uf world download all kinds of packages I don't need or want?

There's also countless other possible points where it's so far impossible to figure out how to proceed. At every point I run up against different or conflicting opinions and different options. How can one know what's correct, and what's not?

I've got a knoppix cd, and have read all the posts on doing it that way.That really sounds like a good way, however, in my MDK install, I've got all the gentoo posts on installing with ppp, etc. I've saved from the forum and other places over months of researching this to refer to. If I only use a knoppix cd, all that would be unavailable. I'm lost enough as it is.

I like the idea of wiping the drive and doing a Gentoo only install, but I tried the live cd for this, and was unable to get cfdisk or fdisk to function correctly, and I've used them many times before and never had problems. (perhaps a faulty Gentoo live cd?). I had to partition from the MDK cd1 install disk, but then was unable to get an internet connection esablished to proceed further when I booted from the Gentoo live.

Can I boot to MDK, and still use a live cd instead of a cd with a tarball copied to it? If so, How does that work?

It still boils down to not having an official step by step install doc with the exact commands for a "ppp only" connection available, that can be printed out. Without that, it just gets hopelessly confusing for a first time "want-to-be" Gentoo user. Until somebody who has done it successfully before actually writes out a definitive step by step guide, including everything, I guess most ppp users will never be able figure it out. We need a guide explaining how to do it from the live cd, or a different distro, in precise detail- just like the regular install doc is written out for people with high-speed connections. Also desperately needed is a comprehensive reference list of gentoo commands. Lacking these things, trying to install Gentoo on ppp, and after trying to make sense out of hundreds of forum posts is becoming an exercise in futility.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

Neje · n00b Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 71 Location: Netherlands

Hi,
Apologies in advance for this lengthy post, much of it is already said by puggy too.

About /gentoo, gentoo should have its own partition, not a directory. The / on one partition is unrelated to the / on the other partition. So /dev/hda6 (in your example) will be the / of your Mandrake installation, and /dev/hda7 the / of your Gentoo installation. You may tell Mandrake to see /dev/hda7 as /gentoo (in MDK's fstab), that's ok, but Gentoo should see /dev/hda7 (in Gentoo's fstab) as / . I hope I'm making sense.

You said: "Do I boot to MDK, sign on to the internet, and then chroot to /gentoo, and then proceed?" Almost. You should partition your drive and create filesystems from Mandrake, you obviously know how to do that, then mount /dev/hda7 to /mnt/gentoo (or /gentoo, but I recommend /mnt/gentoo), and mount /dev/hda1 to /mnt/gentoo/boot (or /gentoo/boot). Maybe Mandrake automatically mounted them somewhere else, I suggest you unmount them then and mount them to /mnt/gentoo and /mnt/gentoo/boot, to avoid confusion.

Then, copy over and extract the stage3 tarball in the /mnt/gentoo directory (you already have it?). Then, you basically start with Code Listing 8.3 of the install guide. If Mandrake automatically swapon'ed your swap partition, fine, if it didn't, no problem, you have enough RAM to get through the install without swap, I think.

What you may skip until later (if I'm not mistaken, somebody correct me if I'm wrong) is Code listing 13.1, that updates all the packages that came out of the stage 3 tarball. You can always do that later. By the way, emerge -uf world will fetch updates for the packages you have and their dependencies (also depends on your USE flags in your /etc/make.conf), always use the -p switch with emerge first to see what you're getting yourself into. And don't worry about /dev/hda7, if you mess up the install, you can always start over if you keep your stage3 tarball somewhere safe.

So, per code listing,
3.1-6.20 Skip all, networking works through Mandrake, you should partition your drive in Mandrake too.
7.1 Probably done by Mandrake, skip.
7.2 Don't skip (see above).
8.1 You have the tarball, on the cd/harddrive, just get it into /mnt/gentoo if you haven't already.
8.2 Do this.
8.3 Do this, although if it behaves funny, I think you might skip source /etc/profile, not too sure though.
9.1 Do this (sorry)
10 Do this
11.1-13.1 Skip
14.1 Do this
15.1-15.4 Do this (sorry again)
15.5-15.7 Put off until later.
16.1 Not you.
16.2 Do this.
16.3 Not you.
17.1-20.1 Do this.
21 This is your Gentoo ppp configuration. I don't know what you need to put in /etc/conf.d/net, but this must be covered in the forums.
22 Do this
23.1-24.1 Modify your Mandrake bootloader instead if you like.
25.1 Do this.

I hope this helps you.
Good luck,
Neje

wrc1944 · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2003 2:05 am Post subject:

Thanks Neje!

I'll carefully study your post and try and implement it. As I understand this, you're method differs from Puggy's in that I keep my /gentoo partition, and not do as he says (put /gentoo as a directory under MDK's root)?

Why would Puggy suggest that if it's incorrect- or are there two correct ways to get to the same place,i.e., a working dual-boot setup?

Thanks again,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2003 2:12 am Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2003 9:44 am Post subject:

Puggy,
I appreciate all this, but I'm getting more and more confused.

Neje says:
"About /gentoo, gentoo should have its own partition, not a directory. The / on one partition is unrelated to the / on the other partition. So /dev/hda6 (in your example) will be the / of your Mandrake installation, and /dev/hda7 the / of your Gentoo installation."

This means to me they are supposed to be in completely different partitions in separate locations on the hard drive, just as I've always understood partitions for years.

In "The Gentoo Linux alternative installation method HOWTO
3.Installing Gentoo from an existing Linux distribution,"
they clearly refer to creating an entirely different physical partition (as I have done) to install Gentoo into.

I'm still not understanding what you are talking about- you seem to be contradicting the above instructions, and saying create a directory called /gentoo under MDK's root, and completely forget about (or delete) any actual physical "/gentoo" partition like I have already created. This seems to imply I should install both MDK and Gentoo on the same root physical partition,which I can't understand. Every other dual-boot setup I've run is on totally different groups of partitions.

As an example, here's my present fstab on another dual-boot machine I have.

/dev/hda10 / reiserfs notail 1 1
/dev/hdb5 /backup reiserfs notail 1 2
/dev/hda9 /boot reiserfs notail 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda8 /home ext3 defaults 1 2
none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=vfat,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hda7 /mnt/win_f vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda12 /tmp reiserfs notail 1 2
/dev/hda11 swap swap defaults 0 0

As you see, my windowsXP partitions are in one group, and MDK is in another, completely isolated on the hard disk from each other. When I refer to /gentoo, I mean /dev/hda7 (not the hda7 in the example fstab table just above, but on the other box whose partition table I wrote out at the top of this thread)

On my test box, which I formatted as I described up top in this thread, I've tried to install gentoo both ways- dual boot, and completely wiping the drive of everything, and using the live cd. Nothing works correctly. I can wipe it again and partition it in any manner required- that's not the problem. I've never overcome the other obstacles mentioned above.

I'm presently in the 10th hour of downloading the rc4 live cd stage 3 cd, so if the md5sum checks out, I'll burn it and try that. I still don't know how to set up the ppp connection without MDK installed- that's where I got stopped before, many times. No ppp instruction or advice has worked for me so far, so I'm not optimistic this is ever going to work.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

Neje · n00b Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 71 Location: Netherlands

It's just a misunderstanding. You understand partitions correctly. Puggy does not try to suggest you put a /gentoo directory on /dev/hda6 and install Gentoo on the same partition as Mandrake.

When you laid out your partition table earlier on, Puggy saw

/dev/hda6 1.6G 805M 804M 51% / reiserfs
/dev/hda1 160M 2.5M 149M 2% /boot ext2
/dev/hda7 6.0G 33M 5.9G 1% /gentoo reiserfs

and thought /dev/hda6 was going to be the root of your Gentoo install, and /dev/hda7 therefore an unneccessary partition, which you could get rid of to gain more space. That's what created the misunderstanding.

I disagree with puggy about wiping your Mandrake. 1.6 GB of drive space isn't much to sacrifice for a working system (with working Internet!) you can fall back on. If you have Gentoo working, you can always wipe Mandrake off your disk later, mount /dev/hda6 as /var/tmp or whatever.

Good luck whatever you decide,
Neje

wrc1944 · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 12:10 am Post subject:

Many thanks to Nege and Puggy. I think I'm getting a better understanding thanks to all your help.

One question- should I go ahead and change the mount point for hda7 to /mnt/gentoo to keep with the install docs terminology? Or, am I still misunderstanding. I obviously need the least amount of complications possible.

In Mandrake, under root, there is a mnt directory where the cdrom, floppy, and all my windows partitions are shown, and accessable. cdrom and floppy are locked (but accessable to user through desktop icons and supermount), but all windows partitions are accessable to user from that mnt directory.
If I created a /gentoo directory there in the mnt directory, is that what Puggy was talking about, and would that refernce my actual /gentoo partition? Maybe the MDK way of doing things is making this seem so complicated to me.

In my current setup, should hda6 and hda7 be changed to a primary partitions, and wouldn't they become hda2 and hda3? Or does that matter, and I can just leave them as is?

Thanks,
wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 7:20 am Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 9:20 am Post subject:

Puggy,
I was planning on booting to MDK, going into the DiskDrake partitioning tool, and simply changing the mountpoint of hda7 from /gentoo to /mnt/gentoo, and making it and the present MDK / hda6 primary. Would this be advisable?

In the install doc, section 6.6, it says that all Linux primary partitions are always numbered hda1,2,3,and 4, and that hda5 and above are reserved for logical. That's why I assumed if I changed my hda7 and hda6 to primary partitions, that's what would happen. Is that incorrect?

When I've rearranged partition schemes with any tool before, it renumbers everything when rewriting the table.

But if it doesn't matter in Linux if they are primary or not, then I guess there's no need to change them. I was just trying to make eveything l set up conform to the install doc format examples as much as possible to avoid confusion (which I have plenty of!).

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 10:53 am Post subject:

wrc1944 · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 11:43 am Post subject:

Puggy,
Well, I'm now even more confused.

As I understand it (and have used it), MDK DiskDrake is a complete partitioning tool, and it sets mount points and labels for each individual partition on the hard drive, no matter what type it is, or what operating system is on it. The mount points aren't just abstract labels, but actually refer to actual physical partitions. Everything is laid out in a gui, just like in Partition Magic. (I also have used fdisk and cfdisk many many times, so I know what I'm doing without the gui too.)

How can the install doc be incorrect about such a basic thing as hda1-4 being reserved for primary partitions? If it's wrong about that, that makes one think it's incorrect about other things too.

I don't see how this can't have a bearing on Gentoo, when I'm creating a separate partition for Gentoo, and sharing /boot and swap with MDK. If you're dual-booting and installing Gentoo from your MDK installation and internet connection, don't you need a separate Gentoo partition with it's own root? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying.

Everything I've read says that in this case, it's easier to just use the existing MDK lilo, and not even deal with a Gentoo grub setup.

This is getting hopelessly confusing. While everyone who has written the hundreds of posts and "how-tos" on this I've read may indeed know what they are doing and talking about, when you try and make sense out of all of them and arrive are a procedure that will work on your system, it just doesn't work. It all appears as a contradictory conglomeration of incomplete procedures, that assume you already know about the details that are being left out.

I'm close to tossing in the towel on Gentoo, until somebody writes a definitive document in as much detail as the regular Gentoo install doc for high-speed users that deals with this type of installation.

At this point, it would seem much easier just to weed out and recompile the entire MDK distro for athlon-xp from the source rpms, and get an optimized system in that manner.

Thanks for the help, though- I do appreciate everybody who has tried to offer advice and instructions.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003 12:10 pm Post subject:

Neje · n00b Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 71 Location: Netherlands

wrc1944,
You are really too easily confused ;-)

, especially since what you assume to be true is often close enough to the truth.

There's really no need to be confused, from what I read I think you are more experienced at Linux than I was when I first installed Gentoo (it was actually the second distro I installed, after putting Red Hat 6.2 on an old pc, but that doesn't count, I just clicked all the default options, really).

Your confusion about partitions and partition naming comes from the way Mandrake hides the way they work. Let's say you have /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda7. On /dev/hda6, you have Mandrake installed. On /dev/hda7, you have a Gentoo install. You can tell Mandrake (in its fstab) to automatically mount /dev/hda7 as /mnt/gentoo. Then, when in Mandrake, you can type

wrc1944 · Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2003 6:32 am Post subject:

SUCCESS!

After struggling for 9 months, I was finally able to instal Gentoo from Mandrake (my first and current distro) with 56k. Many people helped and gave great advice, but special thanks to Nege and Puggy on this last go-around for bearing with me, and clarifying the points which had eluded me for so long. After reviewing everything, and grasping these final points, I planned out my modified install procedure, and had no serious problems- everything basically went straight-forward as advertised.

Basically, atfer pulling together everything I'd learned from many sources, I did a very basic /boot, /, swap MDK 9.1 install, including a /mnt/gentoo partition. I then entered a shell, chrooted, and built Gentoo with xfree and kde from a stage3 rc4 tarball there, sharing /boot and swap with MDK, and eventually using the existing MDK lilo. That seemed simplest. I had full use of MDK (and all the gentoo docs), the superuser konqueror file manager, and kppp dialer at all times. I then on the first reboot automatically came up to a lilo screen, and booted to a familiar kde 3.1.2 desktop, configured kppp as usual, and was online in Gentoo in seconds!

Portage and emerge are fantastic! I now need to add some apps, and basically learn my way around a source-based distro, and do some tuning/editing/configuring of my Gentoo setup.

If anybody wishes, I will write out a more detailed step-by-step of how I finally got here. It took 4 days, and kde took 26 hours to emerge from a emerge -f and saving all the packages in distfiles. (is that long kde compile time normal?) This box isn't super fast like my other 2 main boxes, but decent (Abit KT7-RAID, 9.GB drive, Duron 1300Mhz with Athlon-xp architecture, 384MB ram, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, SB128 sound card).

I used these optflags, with no problems so far:
CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -falign-functions=16 -falign-labels=1 -falign-loops=16 -falign-jumps=16 -mfpmath=sse -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fprefetch-loop-arrays -fforce-addr"

Now that I've got my first Gentoo install under my belt, next time I'll be able to expand (perhaps stage one), and get my full normal Linux OS partition setup going.

Again, thanks for all the help!

I'm sure I'll be back with lots of questions as I explore Gentoo's way of doing things- I really only know rpm distros, and that is also pretty limited.

wrc1944 (Robert Crawford)

P.S.- Neje, you are correct- I was making it far too complicated in my own mind. When I just went for it armed with the new knowledge from you and Puggy, it turned out being not that difficult at all. Once I realized I could copy the MDK resolv.config file into Gentoo, I was finally able to receive packets, and then I was off and installing just like the install doc describes- it was actually working!
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11

puggy · Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2003 8:00 am Post subject:

Neje · n00b Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 71 Location: Netherlands

wrc1944, I'm very glad to hear you succeeded. Good luck with your Gentoo install.

Puggy, thanks for the tip, if I spent more time logged in I would've noticed the edit button ;-)

I usually don't have problems other people haven't experienced yet, so most of my problems are solved by searching.
_________________
"It's some kind of electronic computer."
- Tin Tin, Thunderbirds

wrc1944 · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 8:25 pm Post subject:

Nege and Puggy:

Hmmmm. Just booted 2.6.0-test1. My old problem with either serial drivers enabled and internet, but with horrible file manager problems, or no serial and internet and perfect behavior otherwise seems to be gone. I'm online right now on 2.6.0-test1. I thought I was home free!

But not so fast.

My normal kde 3.1.2 desktop came up, but I can't open a shell- the shell comes up with another dialog box on it saying "Unable to open a suitable terminal device. Click OK, and the shell box disappears. Either from taskbar, or in the K menu.

I'm stumped- any ideas.

Wait- just tried to open a kde superuser file manager window, and typed my password, and got a dialog box saying:

The program su is not found!
Make sure your PATH is set correctly

Fine, but I can't open a terminal or use kde gui superuser file manager to edit! And that's assuming I could even figure out what to change. I'm really weak on these basic type things.

I'll reboot into gentoo-sources and see if it still happens- I'd hate to have messed up my new Gentoo installation after such a rough time using dialup.

wrc1944
_________________
Main box- AsRock x370 Gaming K4
Ryzen 7 3700x, 3.6GHz, 16GB GSkill Flare DDR4 3200mhz
Samsung SATA 1000GB, Radeon HD R7 350 2GB DDR5
OpenRC Gentoo ~amd64 plasma, glibc-2.36-r7, gcc-13.2.1_p20230304
kernel-6.8.4 USE=experimental python3_11