Installing Gentoo Linux from LiveDVD on Dell Dimension V350

[Shining Arcanine]

As some people here might know from my other threads, I have been planning to do upgrades to my home network, setup a file server and basically overhaul the entire thing so everything is on Linux except for the media center components that require Windows for reasons beyond my control.

Anyway, I ordered a VGA cable so I could connect my old Dell Dimension V350 to my monitor in order to prepare it to run headlessly. I received that today.

My Dell Dimension V350's specifications are:

350MHz Intel Pentium II Processor
384MB of 133MHz SDRAM
Intel 440BX chipset
Samsung SM-352B Combo Drive
Western Digital 320GB 7200RPM PATA Caviar Drive
Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM PATA Caviar Drive
Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller
ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 NIC
ATI 3D Rage Pro integrated graphics card
Yamaha YMF-724 integrated sound card

I put my copy of the Gentoo LiveDVD into the combo drive and started the computer. I was hit by the following bug:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/252635

I applied the workaround described there by booting with gentoo noload=pata_qdi and things appeared to load, although roughly 45 minutes later the system seemed to be frozen/still-loading-KDE. I then tried booting with gentoo-nofb nox noload=pata_qdi and that enabled me to get to a command prompt. It seemed to take an abnormally long amount of time to mount stuff on a tmpfs, but I now have a command prompt. I do not think that I will be able to install Gentoo on this machine over night because I do not plan to sleep with it (or anything else remotely similar in decibel level to a vacuum cleaner) in the same room as me, so I will probably have it start compiling software tomorrow morning and let it run while I am away during the day.

I saw the following error message during the boot-up sequence:

[Mike Hunt]

Have you tried using the SystemRescueCd

[Shining Arcanine]

No, I have not. I could try that tomorrow morning. Should I expect it to differ from the Gentoo 10.1 LiveDVD in terms of driver support?

[Mike Hunt]

That may very well be the case, not sure though. But I sould think that it would certainly be worth the effort to give it a try.

[Shining Arcanine]

[Shining Arcanine]

My sysresccd did not have "ERROR: cannot start nfsmount because as rpc.statd could not start" and also did slightly better with my network card, as it listed an IPv4 IP. Unfortunately, it was a 169 address that indicated that it did not successfully get an IP address from DHCP. I will try a different cable to see if that changes things.

Anyway, it still is not seeing my hard drives. It seems that it does not have a driver for my controller. :/

Edit: I checked the Linux kernel configuration. Theoretically, "PROMISE PDC202{68|69|70|71|75|76|77} support" under "ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support (DEPRECATED)" under "Device Drivers" should make Linux work with my controller card, but it does not seem like support for that is compiled into the kernel. Doing gunzip -c /proc/config.gz | grep 202 yielded CONFIG_PATA_PDC2027X=m, which I believe does not support my controller card.

Edit: It seems that does support my controller card according to the Linux kernel configuration help information. I just need to figure out what I need to modprobe to make things work.

Edit: According to lsmod | grep pdc, this module is already loaded in memory.

[Shining Arcanine]

Okay, it seems that I had a bad cat5e cable. The NIC is now working and can connect to the internet.

Sysresccd still cannot see my hard drives, but there has been some indication in the past that the cable is bad, so I am going to assume that the cable is bad and replace it too.

Edit: I now have things in a configuration that works. I switched to the original 40-pin IDE cable and connected the drives with it to the motherboard, which did not work at first. I had the jumpers removed from the drives in the past because the default had been cable select without the jumpers. I could not find the jumpers I had removed from the drives, but I had two old SATA drives with jumpers in them so I removed their jumpers to put their jumpers into the IDE drives. I configured the IDE drives as master and slave with the jumpers and now things work, although they are on a 40-pin IDE cable and they are connected to the system board's IDE controller, which seems less than optimal, but I will do some fiddling with things later to see if I can improve the situation.

Edit: I just reformatted my 200GB drive with a 32MB boot partition, a 16GB swap partition (I have space to burn) and the remaining space as the root partition. Both the boot and root partitions are formatted ext4 with huge_file, ndir_link and extra_isize disabled. I am not sure if that was the best idea, but I do not need nanosecond precision on my desktop, there is no way that 2TB files are going to be stored on this machine and I think that the 32000 subdirectory limit is fine.

[Shining Arcanine]

I have an update. I am installing Gentoo Linux via the sysrescue CD over ssh during my classes. Things are going well, but I am curious about one thing.

I assume I should choose "default/linux/x86/10.0/server" over the default profile "default/linux/x86/10.0". What is the difference between "default/linux/x86/10.0" and "default/linux/x86/10.0/server"? I am not sure what this is doing and there is not much documentation that I can find on this topic.

Also, I plan for this to be a file server, vpn server and private portage mirror, does anyone have any suggestions on what USE flags I should use?

[Mike Hunt]

Generally, the profile provides a reasonable set of USE flags. It's a convenience.
I use the desktop profile because it's appropriate, and most USE flags that I need for KDE4 are provided by the profile. It makes things much simpler.

One way to see what the profiles actually do is to set one and run emerge --info then try another profile. Choose the one that best suits your needs.

[Shining Arcanine]

I have another update. It seems that GCC 4.3.4 keeps having errors whenever I try to compile something. For example, if I try to compile the kernel, it will quit with "gcc: Internal error: Segmentation fault (program cc1)" an hour or two later. I tried compiling GCC 4.4.3, but that had an issue a few hours into the compilation as well. Googling it seemed to indicate that no one has ever had that problem before, so I am thinking it is some issue with my setup. I tried changing the system profile to the default and I am trying compiling GCC 4.4.3 again, but I think some sort of hardware issue is causing this because I can see no reason why a properly functioning system would have these issues.

If it fails again, I am going to try memtest, although I think it could be an issue somewhere between the south bridge and the hard drives; one reason why I suspect that is the cause is because I mounted a tmpfs filesystem to portage that was 12GB in size (I have a 16GB swap partition) and the GCC compilation failed citing a lack of space. I unmounted it and tried again, which lead to the other failure I cited above.

[Jaglover]

350MHz Intel Pentium II Processor
384MB of 133MHz SDRAM

I'd use distcc in pump mode.

[Mike Hunt]

...and even if you do manage to get KDE4 compiled eventually, which would surprise me really, it's unlikely to run very well with so little ram and CPU power. Something like FVWM would be a far better choice, in my opinion.

[Raptor85]

I have a few machines similarly spec'd and XFCE4 runs beautifully on them, I'd suggest that over kde4

[Shining Arcanine]

[sera]

[Shining Arcanine]

I have an update/. I first tried compiling the Linux kernel, which failed, so I assumed that the GCC version was too old, so I tried compiling GCC, which also failed.

Here is the tail of the build log:

[Jaglover]

I've hard time following this.

Why you think gcc is too old to build kernel?

[Shining Arcanine]

[Jaglover]

Things are a little different on "senior" hardware. Compiling puts alot of stress on components. And weird things start happening. Some semi-retired transistor in some microchip suddenly won't close properly, for instance. And errors start creeping in. Internal compiler error you said. I installed Gentoo on an AMD K-6 450 MHz once. After getting a bunch of compiler problems and segfaults I underclocked it. Down to 400 MHz, RAM to 90 MHz. And Gentoo installed.
In general, if you get a compiler error, and you try again, and the same compilation builds or errors out in some other place - that's the hardware giving up.

[Shining Arcanine]

[Shining Arcanine]

I tried reducing my system's load and now System RescueCD fails to get an IP address from DHCP. I had issues with DHCP previously, but this is the first time where I cannot get it to work. I am declaring this system a lost cause; I will not dissemble it, take the parts I can still use (the nic, optical drive, hard drives, ram and processor) and throw out the parts that I cannot use (the case, motherboard, floppy drive, PSU, case fan, etcetera).

[Shining Arcanine]

Okay, my uncle's old PC apparently had several parts (memory, hard drives, PSU, optical drive, graphics card) removed. If I used parts from my Dell Dimension V350 to replace the missing parts, I would still be short a PSU and a graphics card. At this point, I think I am approaching the cost of buying a new computer, so I am looking at my options.

I started a new thread about this in the hardware forum:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-819551.html