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A couple of Gentoo questions

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pejsaboy

Member
Joined
May 1, 2005
Location
nor-cal
My wife finally got all of her pictures out of storage on my old laptop, so it's now free for me to do with it what I will :) I figure it's a good time to go ahead and get back to tinkering in linux since it isn't doing anything else. To be honest, I don't think it's been fired up in 3-4 months before today. Anyhow, it doesn't have a built-in wireless card since it's 6 years old, and at this point I'm not sure I want to spend the money on one for it. If the battery is still good enough to handle internet surfing and playing music for a decent amount of time I'll think about it, but mainly this is going to be an 'educational toy.'

Anyhow, I used gentoo for a couple months about a year ago, but it was setup for me and afterwards I really didn't do much as far as installing anything or tweaking with stuff. What I'd like to do is plug it in to my router and sit there long enough to get it setup, and then be able to disconnect and move to wherever in the house once it's finished downloading and let it work on compiling. Is this possible?

If I can't do that, or maybe even if I can, I had one other idea that might be nice- Boot into a livecd [whether knoppix or a gentoo based one, not so important], and use a terminal to install gentoo while still leaving myself with internet usability. Not that I can't walk into the next room and look at the handbook on my desktop computer, but it would be more convenient to go through it as I'm installing it on the same computer. Can this be done, and more importantly, can it be done easily? Not that I'm against a challenge, but if it ends up being too much work I'll just walk back and forth. Small steps here :)
 
I've got a couple cardbus 802.11g cards in classies that I'm quite sure have Linux-compatible chipsets.

Anyway, for installing without a network. Boot the Gentoo installcd while the laptop is networked. You don't even really need your desktop for the handbook. Once it is booted and networked, hit alt-f2 to move to the second vt.
Code:
links -g -driver fb http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?full=1
You can leave out the "-driver fb" part if it fails to load that way, but you'll be text-only without images. You can scroll up and down by page with the arrow keys, or you can use ctrl+b and ctrl+v for scrolling down/up by a few lines (I think those are the right keys, I haven't used links in a while). Anyway, go through the manual and read which packages you need to install before rebooting. You can download them all before installing with a command like
Code:
emerge --sync
emerge -Df grub vixie-cron syslog-ng slocate gentoo-sources alsa-tools alsa-utils genkernel
Not sure if I got all those package names right, but emerge -Df for "deep" fetch is what you want. Then, following the manual, when you install a package, it will use the already downloaded package and dependencies. You can add as many as you want to that list, such as kdebase-startkde, mozilla-firefox, amarok, etc.
 
Don't use the liveCD. I've heard some pretty bad things about it. Get the minimal CD and do it from scratch.

Also do you know what kind of processor it has? Take a look at this website for some safe CFLAGS: http://gentoo-wiki.com/CFLAGS

BTW expect the setup to take like a week probably (this is setup to your liking not just the install). You sound like you have a little gentoo experience.

For me I LOVE gentoo. It just took a while to get it the way I like it. It went something like tihs
Day 1: Install kernel and system + GNOME
Day 2: Install basic programs like firefox/thunderbird
Day 3: Emerge OpenOffice.org (took 7 hours)
Day 4: Get sound working
Day 5: Get printer working
ect.....

BTW if you want to be able to use your computer for doing stuff while compiling (once you get a GUI up) put this setting in your make.conf file

#Sets portage to lowest priority
PORTAGE_NICENESS=19

That will tell portage to run at the very lowest priority. My system still lags some when I am compiling but it's not terrible.

Last thing, don't walk back and forth. Bring the laptop in the same room w/ the desktop so you can look directly at the handbook. You don't want to be going back and forth because you might forget a command or mistype it (some are caps sensitive). You don't want to make a mistake and botch the whole thing because you messed up because you were going from room to room.
 
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....and then be able to disconnect and move to wherever in the house once it's finished downloading and let it work on compiling. Is this possible?

Add the below line to your /etc/make.conf it will tell portage to go get the rest of the packages, while its compiling, as opposed to fetch, build, fetch, build....

Code:
FEATURES="parallel-fetch"
 
What I'd like to do is plug it in to my router and sit there long enough to get it setup, and then be able to disconnect and move to wherever in the house once it's finished downloading and let it work on compiling. Is this possible?

use the --fetchonly option, it will download all the needed source code including dependencies to /usr/portage like normal, it just wont compile anything, when thats all done take your laptop to the other room, and run the same command minus the --fetchonly option and you will notice each package as 0kb next to it, meaning nothing to download because all files are stored locally. and it will begin to compile
Code:
emerge --fetchonly <ebuild/s>
emerge --ask --verbose <ebuild/s>


If I can't do that, or maybe even if I can, I had one other idea that might be nice- Boot into a livecd [whether knoppix or a gentoo based one, not so important], and use a terminal to install gentoo while still leaving myself with internet usability. Not that I can't walk into the next room and look at the handbook on my desktop computer, but it would be more convenient to go through it as I'm installing it on the same computer. Can this be done, and more importantly, can it be done easily? Not that I'm against a challenge, but if it ends up being too much work I'll just walk back and forth. Small steps here :)

you can use any linux livecd to install gentoo the most recommended is systemresucecd its gentoo based is updated regularly with good hardware support it also supports most file systems including reiser4.

also remember with the gentoo cd and most others they have links, so you can just alt+f1 to a new console and load up the handbook from there if you use the all in one printable version you can still view the whole handbook once you disconnect the laptop from the internet, since you loaded the whole handbook as one page
 
Well, got some good suggestions so far. I wasn't actually wanting to install FROM a livecd, let's see... Use the livecd as a basic environment to work from, and then maybe mount the gentoo installcd .iso in a terminal and install from that. Make sense? Probably not...

TalRW- much as I'd like to have the laptop in the same room with my desktop, I have no wired connection in that room anymore. Maybe I'll move my wife's desktop in behind me for handbook usage. I know she won't let me use her laptop ;) And yes, it's a 2.0 Celeron processor. I'd have to dig a bit more to find out anything more specific than that, I'm not even sure if it's a mobile version or not. Or for that matter, if there even was a mobile version at that point. That was before I knew anything [really] about computers, and my first chip was an AMD a couple years later.

Anyway, I'm gone for the day but I'll be back investigating tonight. I'll probably look for those cardbus adapters in the classies, too, petteyg.
 
I tried the LiveCD and LiveDVD, and I couldn't install from it.
The Live disks had problems copying the install files and using them. however when I installed from teh minimal it worked perfectly.
 
Well, got some good suggestions so far. I wasn't actually wanting to install FROM a livecd, let's see... Use the livecd as a basic environment to work from, and then maybe mount the gentoo installcd .iso in a terminal and install from that. Make sense? Probably not...

use one or the other not both, the minimal cd gives you a minimal work environment just what you need no extras every thing is done from the cli
the livecd give you a Desktop enviroment with all the toppings at the expense of ram/cpu usage
if you choose the gentoo livecd avoid the gtk-installer and use the command line the gtk installer is still young and very buggy


use the command lspci to see what hardware you are running
my output as an example:

Code:
lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:05.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:06.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:12.0 SATA controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 Non-Raid-5 SATA
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI0)
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI1)
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI2)
00:13.3 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI3)
00:13.4 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB (OHCI4)
00:13.5 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 USB Controller (EHCI)
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 SMBus (rev 13)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 IDE
00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 Azalia
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 PCI to LPC Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc SB600 PCI to PCI Bridge
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS485 [Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP]
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 01)
08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
08:01.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
08:01.1 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device 0843 (rev 01)
 
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To figure out more informatino about your CPU run this command

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Post the results here.
 
aright, I booted up an old knoppix disc just to check out what exactly I'm working with here, and this is what I've got.

cat /proc/cpuinfo gives me:
Code:
processor:0
vendor_id:GenuineIntel
cpu family:15
model:2
model name:Mobile Intel (R) Celeron (R) CPU 2.00GHZ
stepping:7
cpu MHZ:1994.019
cache size:256 KB
fdiv_bug:no
hlt_bug:no
f00f_bug:no
coma_bug:no
fpu:yes
fpu_exception:yes
cpuid level:2
wp:yes
flags:fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clfl ush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe cid
bogomips:3948.54

lspci
Code:
Host Bridge:ATI Technologies Inc RS200/RS200M AGP Bridge [IGP 340M] (rev 02)
PCI bridge:ATI Tech Inc PCI Bridge [IGP 340M]
USB Controller: ALi Corp USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
Multimedia Audio Controller: ALi Corp M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
ISA Bridge: ALi Corp M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
Modem: ALi Corp M5457 AC '97 Modem Controller
CardBus bridge: 02 Micro, Inc OZ6912 Cardbus Controller
IDE interface: ALi Corp M5229 IDE (rev c4)
Bridge: ALi Corp M7101 Power Mgmt Controller [PMU]
Ethernet controller: Natl Semiconductor Corp DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
VGA compatible controller: ATI Tech Inc Radeon IGP 340M
I left out the PCI addresses and abbreviated some of the crap from lspci. Not even sure why I typed all that out rather than just plugging the laptop into the router, actually.... :\
 
yea remember most of the lspci you will need that when configuring you kernel lsmod can help there too, unless you prefer genkernel which just loads everything

also note the mmx sse sse2 in your cpu flag line, since you know your cpu supports it i would add that to my make.conf as USE="mmx sse sse2" the handbook will bring up USE flags at some point so wait till then and see what you want to do.

if you get stuck or have an questions along the way just post here plenty of folks to nudge you along
 
I'll keep that stuff in mind. Probably be next weekend before I get back to this though, I tend to get little computer time during the week :)
 
Hmm, 6 years old... 2002... probably something like a Pentium M with 256-512mb RAM. That's not too bad. That was around the time the athlon xp t-breds were king iirc.


Os may be useful, depending on the size of your hard drive and how much ram you have. Os optimizes code for size. This is very useful if you have a very small hard drive or very little ram. While it removes some speed optimizations versus O2 (or O3), it can be faster if using the optimized code means swapping to disk constantly. I doubt a hard disk from that era would be too small for Gentoo... I'd expect that to be around a 20 GB HD roughly, which is plenty. A gentoo install can easily be done with O2 in 6GB, and you could probably get it down to 2GB if you really wanted to. Most of mine run around 8-10GB and I install KDE, Gnome, Compiz-fusion, OpenOffice, Gnome Office, GIMP, a good amount of media stuff, etc.

If you have 512MB+ of RAM, I'd go -O2 over -Os. If you are 256MB or lower, I'd go with -Os (assuming you have plenty of HD space).

I also do tend to have relatively small installs as I keep the portage, src, and doc directories shared on the file server and I use the file server for all my own files. If my computer blew up tomorrow it wouldn't matter much in terms of data loss. Everything is on the file server (which I'm currently implementing a backup system for, probably going to use BackupPC, the pooling feature is really cool...)
 
MRD, -Os has massive effects depending on CPU cache size, not RAM/HD, at least not AFAIK. Use -O2 on a CPU with 256K cache and then switch everything to -Os and the speed boost due to code fitting in cache will amaze you :) I've run Gentoo on a Via C3 before, and anything but -Os actually slowed things down.
 
Yep, bought it in 2002. Since this thread is going more in-depth than I figured, here's some more numbers :)

Mobile Celeron 2.0 with 256kb cache, 768Mb RAM, and 120Gb hard drive. Came with an 80, but that died a couple years ago. Definitely plenty of hard drive space. The video can be setup to share between 8 and 128 Mb of system RAM, but since I won't be doing any gaming I'll just set it to probably 32 unless I find some need for more. It does have a dvd/cd-burner though, so I might use it for watching dvd's since I can't seem to get any time on the TV.

About the only thing I haven't decided on yet [that I can think of] is which WM/DE I'm going to start with. I've used kde and e16 [even in combination with each other at one point], but I've got a feeling there's probably a better option. Ideally I want something that's light on resources, but highly customizable both in appearance and features. I know that's probably asking a lot, but I try to start out minimalistic so that when I get something how I like it it isn't a bloated hog.
 
Well, it depends what apps you'll be using. If you look at some comparisons between KDE and other DEs, KDE can use significantly lower resources if you're using apps like Koffice, amaroK, Konqueror, Kopete, etc., as they all share the same libraries. If you use a DM like Fluxbox, but then load up a bunch of non-similar apps (OpenOffice, Opera, Pidgin, XMMS), it can use a lot more total memory than KDE, due to needing to load many libraries. If you think you'll be using a lot of K apps, then going with KDE, even if the DM itself uses a bit more memory, is a good idea since many apps sharing the libraries reduces needed resources.
 
Put this in your make.conf file if you are using 32 bit

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=prescott -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

and if you are using 64 bit:
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

If you like gnome you could try xfice.
 
MRD, -Os has massive effects depending on CPU cache size, not RAM/HD, at least not AFAIK. Use -O2 on a CPU with 256K cache and then switch everything to -Os and the speed boost due to code fitting in cache will amaze you :) I've run Gentoo on a Via C3 before, and anything but -Os actually slowed things down.

I disagree with this. I would never consider using -Os on that machine. It's far too powerful.

and if you are using 64 bit:

That cpu doesn't support 64 bit, so don't try. =P

That laptop is actually more than powerful enough to run Linux. You won't have any problems at all with that. I've run Gentoo on FAR weaker machines (I built Gentoo once on a P1, that was the lowest I've gone, and it actually ran quite well).
 
Well, maybe I'll test to see which one is faster for this particular chip. Maybe. How rough is it to change from one to another once the system is setup, just a file edit, or a file edit and then a lot of recompiling?
 
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