There seems to exist a cycle of installing Gentoo, having it around for awhile, something breaks and I feel like I don’t have the time so I’ll try out the latest Ubuntu…a few weeks later I’ll reinstall Gentoo.

Now let me clarify on point, I’m referring to Gentoo as a desktop. I have 2 servers which have always had Gentoo installed on them and probably always will.

I realized that my main problem with Gentoo is usually graphics related in someway. Either my graphics break and I need to do a bunch of troubleshooting, finally getting something working or it has to do with endless configuration.

I think the documentation on the Gentoo-wiki has gone downhill for sometime. There just doesn’t seem to be enough manpower to update items. I’ve tried in vain to get NetworkManager integrated into the system so that it can connect before I login but alas, it never works. I would love to contribute more to Gentoo, help with documentation and such but I’m not quite done with school yet and my willpower to write wiki documents usually doesn’t last very long.

I’ve also realized half the fun of a Gentoo system is that installation procedure for me, I love reinstalling from scratch and having a squeaky clean system. If anyone is reading this you’ve probably realized that I’m beyond mortal help as most people loath installing Gentoo.

Currently my main desktop still has Gentoo on it but I’ve installed Lubuntu on my netbook. I was just tired of fucking with freedesktop.org to view my own partitions or trying to get Network Manager working in fluxbox (and saving the configuration files, automatically connecting and such) or having LibreOffice and Skype randomly crash for no reason.

I might put Gentoo back on my netbook someday but for now Lubuntu is fine. I had first tried Xubuntu but after updating the system, turning off some unneeded boot services, the boot time was 1 minute and 20 seconds. Lubuntu boots in about 50 seconds (my netbook has a harddrive not a SSD) so it is something of a booting dog.

One last complaint about Gentoo is the speed of portage. When I first booted my working Gentoo box a few months ago, I asked it to emerge -pv something, within 1 second i had my detailed results. After installing a bunch of packages and adding packages.mask, unmask,use my performance was now more like a minute later I’d get my results. I understand that I’ve added many more dependencies for the system to check but a fucking minute? It reminds me of going back to 2005 when searching the portage tree with -s was rediculous and everyone installed some sort of program that would cache all of the data to allow for quick searching (yes the devs have fixed this sometime back in 2007 or 2008 I think)

Alright enough ranting. Arch Linux. I have yet to try it but I’m intrigued by reading through the installation document. It could be a very interesting distribution, and I’ll probably try it out sometime after this weekend.

Who knows the future? I very well could end up becoming involved in Gentoo a lot more, fixing problems and documenting on the wiki. I’m almost done with my double degree, I’ve put my 2 weeks in a my job and in just 7 weeks I’ll be going over to Germany for a month to work on my Deutsch. When I get back I’ll be a graduate without a job (by choice).

First of some history : I bought the eee-1000 (not H or HA) for my wife’s birthday, she didn’t like the pre-installed xandros so we blew it off and put ubuntu-eee on it. Boot times were slow and she didn’t like it too much. She asked if  I’d help her put Gentoo on it.

Lets get down to it. The specs.Newegg described it as “ASUS Eee PC 1000 40G – Fine Ebony NetBook Intel Atom 10.0″ Wide SVGA 1GB Memory 40GB SSD “

Don’t be fooled though, it has an 8 GB SSD and a 32GB Flash drive.

1. Specs:

• Intel atom processor N270 2.6GHz

• Wireless card Ralink RA2860    Works great**
  • see network section, needs third party drivers
• Integrated SD card works great
• 1GB of ram, expandable to 2 GB, works fine
• Screen resolution of 1024×600, works fine with no extra configuration needed in xorg.conf
• SSD hard drive and flash drives works fine
  • I have / on the SSD drive and /home on the Flash drive
  • make sure to add elevator=noop to your kernel boot parameters in your grub.conf

• Webcam
  • in progress
• bluetooth
  • in progress
• SD cardslot
  • works fine

Installation

• Funtoo?
  • My choice to use the funtoo image is because I don’t want to compile so much when I install. The funtoo pentium4 image is ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ so I get a prebuilt system that’s the latest for my needs, emerging packages on the eee-pc does take sometime. I do however use a standard portage snapshot.
• Suspend? Hibernate? Not for me.
  • I’ve never cared much for suspend or hibernate as they ususally cause random problems and since I’m using funtoo by default, I’m using openrc which helps decrease boot times. I also use fluxbox with wbar for an app launcher and conky for some system monitoring, my boot times from cold boot are 10s, which is quick enough for me.

First grab yourself a bootcd from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

At this time the gentoo minimal boot cd dosen’t detect enough of the hardware for it to be usefull so that’s why I’m using system rescue cd.

Since the eee-pc doesn’t have a cdrom drive you will need to create a bootable usb stick. Directions are on the site, I won’t discuss them here.

So now we have a bootable usbstick, check the bios for some options, use the right key to force boot the usbstick.

Before you boot up you might want to head over to funtoo.org and grab the latest ~pentium4 stage 3 build and put it on the usbstick. Also you can grab a portage snapshot from somewhere perhaps here . This step isn’t absolutely necessary but it easier now than using the text webbrowser on the bootcd.

I had some trouble getting my usbstick to boot so I disabled both hard drives from the boot list in the BIOS and that helped a lot, just re-enable them later.

• Hard disks
  • I simply partitioned the whole SSD as /dev/sda1. Then I formatted it as ext3. There is a lot out there about journals and wearing down the ssd but its not worth the risk, I think, to not use a journaling fs.
  • I partitioned the whole flashdrive as sdb1 and I formatted it as ext3. Then I mount it as /home  Later in my make.conf I use /home/distfiles as the location for downloaded programs cache for gentoo

continue as your normally would with the install following the gentoo handbook. When it is time to reboot don’t forget to set your root password.

One problem I have run into (and it may be fixed by now) is that since we are using funtoo and it has openrc by default, it seems to fail to setup the /dev properly so before you exit your chroot do the following rc-update add devfs sysinit && rc-update add udev sysinit

Network

wireless

NOTE: As of the linux kernel 2.6.29-rc1 the driver for this wireless card is included in the stageing drivers section, I haven’t tested it yet

There is no opensource driver right now for this card, the card has a good driver from ralink however. Go to this link and grab the latest driver its the link starting with “RT2860PCI/mPCI/PCIe…”Read the readme if you need to but for me, all i needed to do was to edit os/linux/config.mk

and set
'HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y' and 'HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y'

since i run network manager, if you don’t run it then don’t bother.
Now go into the main dir of the drive and do “make” and “make install”. then reboot, modprobe rt2860sta and see if iwconfig lists the link ra0
Network manager can do the rest from there, as I use nm-applet in the system tray to configure the wireless.

wired-network

To get the rj45 port working all you need to do in your kernel config for 2.6.28 is:

set experimental drivers to yes

General setup  —>

(Y)   Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers

Then

-> Device Drivers
│       -> Network device support (NETDEVICES [=y])
│         -> Ethernet (1000 Mbit) (NETDEV_1000 [=y])

Yes to Atheros L1E

Config files

Here are some of the config files I have created on this funtoo laptop. I welcome feedback.

make.conf
FEATURES="parallel-fetch distlocks sandbox userpriv usersandbox"
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-Os -march=prescott -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ "

SYNC=”rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage”
USE=”gtk -gnome -kde -qt3 -qt3support -sqlite -qt4 alsa dvd -cdr wifi ipv6 -berkdb -cups \
X networkmanager samba wireless bz2 xml lzo unicode laptop dri drm rar \
tiff gif png jpeg win32codecs mpeg mp3 mp4 divx libcaca intel opengl \
svg dbus hal -esd -eds -ldap -fam mmx sse v4l2 sse2 ssse3 pni xvid xvmc”
VIDEO_CARDS=”intel vesa”
AUDIO_CARDS=”intel-hd”
LINGUAS=”en_US en”
DISTDIR=”/home/distfiles”
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

A note about my use flags: I am using fluxbox and therefore don’t need kde,qt or gnome, gtk by default. Your intended setup may differ

fstab

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/sdb1 /home ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/sda5 none swap sw 0 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,ro 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

Done

now reboot and enojy your system. I’ll add some software titles that I use later, such as eee-control. Please give me feedback, I intend this article as a starting point and it should change overtime as more gets tested and optimized.

Hardware/software problems

• Beware of the lefthand shiftkey. It is to the right of the uparrow and can prove a challenge when typing

Links

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-714904-highlight-eee+1000.html

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

http://www.funtoo.org/