War Journal 002: Breaking Gentoo on a Centrino

the war is going badly.

i had a near perfect gentoo system. sure i haven' t had time to play with the wlan stuff. though i had the kernel modules compiled for it. work stuff had me occupied leaving no spare time to play with the wlan stuff.

i sync'd with the gentoo servers this morning (well morning in my timezone). then ran emerge to update portage then executed an emerge world (to update the system). no big problem right? very simple. i did the same thing the day before for my home machine to work so that while i was doing loads of stuff, it was compiling behind me. not a problem, mission accomplished like it should be.

well i brought the notebook with me to a meeting just across the street at the country waffle. leaving it on the table beside me, compiling (i carried it while running thereby not missing a beat as my people and i waited for our morning meet). all is well the meeting completed and as we were paying the bill, i peaked at the machine and it failed to compile one packaged thereby killing portage. no problem--- i forgot the exact package it should still be in the notebook (linux reiserfs partition, i rebooted in frustration to windows). but since we were done i said i ought to just shut it down. and since the battery was running low, it wasn't a problem. i executed a halt on the terminal (i was root on gnome) and the system shut down fine.

we walked backed to the office and upon returning to my little piece of the kingdom, plugged it to the wall socket and continued. oh my was I wrong! the network wouldn't go up! i quickly searched /var/log/message did something happen to my lan? no, the ethernet card was running properly. network connections from two other workstations on my cube were all right. what went wrong, i asked myself, frantic.

iproute2 error. no ip. somehow my network couldn't go up. what was wrong? i briefly recalled that i ran an etc-update and picked -5 (over write) oh oh. clock was set to utc--- i always edit it to "local" net.eth0 is pointed to net.lo oh oh. but my net.eth1 is present. oh oh. i goofed.

in my haste, i somehow overwrote my configurations. no big problem right? simply cp net.eth1 to net.eth0 because they were essentially the same thing... and edit /etc/conf.d/net to reflect that eth0 is dhcp... but nada. i did that. nada.

i recompiled the kernel--- i was going to do it anyway because i fetched 2.6.14-rc2 but haven't had the time to compile. i copied my .config, and item by item after executing a make menufconfig checked the kernel. cool. everything in proper order and i ran make && make modules && make modules_install && make install.

rebooting, it was still the same. i was going crazy. it was time to go to google and search. apparently someone already had a similar problem--- gentoo wouldn't bring up the network. i had left my case of cds at home--- purposely thinking i didn't need the livecd. so i fetched one, a simple 60mb download, burned it and booted to gentoo.

the googled page suggested to chroot to the gentoo system and emerge net-tools. i did. rebooted.
nothing. nada. everything else is working properly. i don't know why the machine is broke. i need to hit myself in the head. it might have been the etc-update--- i did something stupid in haste.

i will be backing up my files and burining them to disc tonight. good thing i still have windows and still can do some work done before i get a change to rebuild gentoo on my centrino.

lesson # 1 in gentoo--- don't do anything in haste.

War Journal 001 - Emerging a Centrino

I've decided to chronicle my experiences on building Gentoo Linux on my centrino notebook. Gentoo is a powerful linux distribution. It lets you build the entire system from scratch. almost every single app you'd want, built on source with your own flavour. Thus no two system will be exactly the same and gives you the flexibility to do what you want with it.

There are of course some discussions--- how good, performance wise is tweaking a system? though we won't go to that in this series because it is immaterial i think. The power of Gentoo's portage system is to let you build the system you'll need and want. no more googling (don't you love the sound of that word?) for packages. ok thats not entirely true, there will be loads of googling and quick trips to gentoo's package page to search for the right package or a simple ls on /usr/portage will get you loads of available packages. think of it as building your own car while the other distros have already packaged a working vehicle for you.

to execute, on the commandline, it will be a simple matter to evoke: emerge

you can also do: emerge --search

as with apt (if you're a debian user), you can simply just fetch packages before deciding to install.

if you want to determine what exactly will portage install on your system this will do: emerge --pretend

you could tweak your system on your /etc by editing the file make.conf where you can set your compile settings, c flags and use desc and others.

when i started building on my centrino-based notebook, i decided to go and install vlos 1.2. why not go through with generic gentoo? well i figured to save time in building from scratch X and gnome. My amd64 machine of course was built from gentoo. everything from partitioning gnome was built from sources. and its a great piece of software.

but at 1.5ghz and only 256MB RAM, i figured it would take forever to compile the entire system. well i was wrong, it still took me forever to get the ball rolling. Vlos failed to run gnome properly, dropping me to plain vanila X, even the window manager wasn't working properly. so, i executed: emerged --deep gnome-light so that i can get a gui to work, this after all is a desktop machine.

when i got gnome-light to work properly on Vlos' kernel, i downloaded new kernel sources: emerge gentoo-sources so i can get 2.6.14-gentoo-r1 (i've downloaded r2 now but haven't installed it). i had to go through all the trouble of fetching the module init tools which apparently wasn't included with the vlos stuff before i could boot properly on the gentoo-sources.

so now i have kernel running just the packages i want. my style is to rarely build modules, prefering to have the things i need on my kernel. after all i know exactly what this machine has and its capabilities. some people prefer to load modules. me, i like everything loaded already.

rebooting and getting basic stuff to work done, i was still experiencing problems with gnome background. i would have to execute the gnome-backgrounds-settings app every time i log into gnome. pardon my inexperience with gnome's settings. years of being spoiled running redhat/suse/debian/ubuntu--- one takes forgranted that all these things just work. but that was one of the reasons why i wanted gentoo--- learn inside out how a linux machine works properly.

getting basic stuff to work was all right--- gaim is enabled as well as firefox (i got two versions--- the emerged firefox from the portage tree and the rc2 on my home directory, its the latter i use.) stuff like open office (vlos installed oo1.4, i think that was) i decided to unmerge and get oo2 sources. it took a good chunk of 15 hours (including download of packages) to build and install. thats an experience i'd rather not have.

java and eclipse, i got both the portage tree and the 1.5 sdk from sun and installed eclipse from the tarballs of eclipse's site.

another reason why this was because of some personal and work projects--- i needed a mobile linux system to compliment my linux setups at home and in the office. this was the answer.

there is still a good deal of stuff to build--- ffmpeg, darwin streaming server and many more stuff to do as well as to build full gnome, and of course centrino wifi stuff and other networking essentials.

it takes forever just to get a setup to be exactly what one wants and loads of time and effort and equal amounts of headache but its well worth it in the end. thats the power of gentoo, at least for me.