elfs | Lain's down again...

Well, 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....