Lain's down again...
Jun. 22nd, 2004 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWell, I finally got fed up with the performance bug in the window manager for Lain, so I tried to repair it and, no surprise, screwed it up badly enough that I had to do a reinstall. I should learn not to mess with RedHat.
Anyway, since I'm doing a re-install, I decided to try the new Gentoo. I am not reassured when it fails to find my network card. I am even less reassured when it crashes trying to instantiate pcmcia from the command line. I get the boot CD running and discover that the module dependencies are for the wrong kernel. When I apply the correct module dependencies, it tells me that the pcmcia module has unresolved symbols. It turns out my pcmcia network card is a common chip with a pcmcia wrapper, and since depmod is broken I don't know which kernel module has instructions for the chip. With my two favorite tools, find and grep, I locate a file with the symbol in question, and load it, then the wrapper. Success!
I run through the common installation routine, which is much more involved than it is for RedHat. This is really the installation for geeks. I'm going with the Stage 3 install, which is the wimpiest of them all.
I actually get all the way to the end of the install and reboot without a problem, only to learn that I can't log in. A small bug in the security operations lists my laptop's keyboard as not a valid login terminal. My fault. I fix it, adding the laptop keyboard to the list of secure TTY's (duh), and viola', I'm in.
Then, I discover that I can't find the CDROM. What the? I go into the device tree and it's not there. In fact, there's not a whole lot there. Getting an odd sensation, I look up the process table.
DAMN. Gentoo runs devfs. And it's not working correctly. I can't find the CDROM at all. And it's not something I can remove; the whole system is build around that kludgy dynamic device allocator. Oh, well. I'll have to figure it out. In the meantime, I have an unuseable laptop. Grr....
Anyway, since I'm doing a re-install, I decided to try the new Gentoo. I am not reassured when it fails to find my network card. I am even less reassured when it crashes trying to instantiate pcmcia from the command line. I get the boot CD running and discover that the module dependencies are for the wrong kernel. When I apply the correct module dependencies, it tells me that the pcmcia module has unresolved symbols. It turns out my pcmcia network card is a common chip with a pcmcia wrapper, and since depmod is broken I don't know which kernel module has instructions for the chip. With my two favorite tools, find and grep, I locate a file with the symbol in question, and load it, then the wrapper. Success!
I run through the common installation routine, which is much more involved than it is for RedHat. This is really the installation for geeks. I'm going with the Stage 3 install, which is the wimpiest of them all.
I actually get all the way to the end of the install and reboot without a problem, only to learn that I can't log in. A small bug in the security operations lists my laptop's keyboard as not a valid login terminal. My fault. I fix it, adding the laptop keyboard to the list of secure TTY's (duh), and viola', I'm in.
Then, I discover that I can't find the CDROM. What the? I go into the device tree and it's not there. In fact, there's not a whole lot there. Getting an odd sensation, I look up the process table.
DAMN. Gentoo runs devfs. And it's not working correctly. I can't find the CDROM at all. And it's not something I can remove; the whole system is build around that kludgy dynamic device allocator. Oh, well. I'll have to figure it out. In the meantime, I have an unuseable laptop. Grr....
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That bit me in the ass the first time I played with Gentoo as well.
Date: 2004-06-22 10:36 am (UTC)And alternatively, you can always 'mknod' individual devices into the /dev tree, even with devfs running and mounted. If it would help, I can pull apart the 'makedevices' script from a slackware CD and upload that somewhere convenient for you to download and add to the startup scripts for Gentoo?
no subject
Date: 2004-06-22 12:51 pm (UTC)source distro
Date: 2004-06-22 05:45 pm (UTC)