Installing Gentoo with Intel N-7260 Wireless chips

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Hello,

I'm currently trying to install a gentoo on my new laptop, a Sony VAIO SV-P1321C5E.
I've already windows 8 installed and do not really want to get ride of it right now.

I'm booting from a gentoo liveusb that I've made according to the gentoo documentation, the kernel is a 3.8.13 kernel.

The probleme I have is about my wireless network.

I've downloaded the ucode iwlwifi-7260-ucode-22.0.7.0.tgz (from http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/iwlwifi) but, according to the site, it's only valid for 3.10+

Is there any gentoo live image with such a kernel (>= 3.10) ?

I haven't really understand how those ucode are working ? What is the module name ? iwlagn ?
So, once I will have my gentoo live cd booted, with a kernel 3.10+, the only thing I need to do is to copy the *.ucode file in /lib/firmware and do a:
modprobe iwlagn (iwlwifi, others, ???)

Thank you for any advises that comes into your mind

Clad in Sky · l33t Joined: 04 May 2007 Posts: 887 Location: Germany

The module is named iwlwifi.
Have you tried the Gentoo livecd already? Perhaps it works with kernel 3.8, too.
For installing Gentoo you can choose any linux that has the same bitness (32 or 64) as your desired installation and that allows you to use "chroot".
So you can use linux mint, ubuntu or Suse live cds.
A favourite amongst Gentooers is the SystemRescueCD, which is based on Gentoo (http://www.sysresccd.org/).But it seems to come with a 3.8 kernel, too.
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Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

I've tried the 'install-amd64-minimal-2013????.iso' (not sure of the date ... but it was a 3.8.13 kernel)
And yes I've tried to install the ucode on the 3.8 kernel, but it does not seem to work.
I will download the last install-amd64-minimal-20131010.iso first, and redo my USB bootable device and try again.
I try again the ucode installation process, and I will come back to you. Perhaps I've made something wrong as it's the really first time I should do this kind of stuff for a gentoo installation.

Thank for the reply

I will surely post some others question on this thread later

Jaglover · Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2013 1:27 pm Post subject:

SystemRescueCD alternative kernel is 3.10.
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Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Hello,

I then tried SystemRescueCD and it works just fine. I load the iwlwifi module, the lspci command show the right info:

01:00:00 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 6b)

But I do not see any interface in /sys/class/net excep "l0" ?

Loading the module is not enougth in order to have a new "wlan0" (or any other name) here ?

Any idea ? Help ? thanks

Jaglover · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2013 1:05 pm Post subject:

Look at dmesg, probably firmware is not loaded.
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Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Hello

How may I know that firmware is loaded or not ?

The last line of my dmesg are :

<.... SCSCI STUFF ...>
cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for linux, in-tree:d
Copyright(c) 2003-2013 Inter Corporation

Jaglover · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2013 1:22 pm Post subject:

Try grepping dmesg for firmware, below is what I get in my laptop

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Thanks ...
It's seem then that the firmware is not loaded.

Hum ... Will try to remove and reload the kernel module ...
Any other way to get it loader ?

Thanks for yor help

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Could not achieve to have the ucode loaded !
Is there a way to tell explicitly the ucode to load with a kernel module ?

lspci -k does not show any kernel module associated to my Network Controller:

01:00:00 Network Controller: Interl Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev 6b)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-N 7260

If I ran a modinfo:
modinfo iwlwifi
...
firmware: iwlwifi-7260-7.ucode
...

And the ucode is in the /lib/firmware directory
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 682892 Sep 18 17:13 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-7.ucode

May I install gentoo without network ??

Thanks

Jaglover · Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:15 pm Post subject:

You need to download stage-3 tarball and kernel sources to get a working base system.
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Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Ok thanks ... let's do that with the last kernel dev source then.
thank all

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Ok .. i've tried to compile the kernel 3.11 in order to see if firmware will be loaded or not, but it does not seem to compile when chroot to tha /mnt/gentoo with a stage3 tar ball untar.
Compilation failed with: bc not found ! (when trying to BC kernel/timeconst.h)

Does someone know which option in the kernel I should disable in order to compile it or not ?

Otherwise, I will try to download bc and try to compile it ...

Thank for any aswner

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

Hello,

back again on this subject, still I do not succeed in installing gentoo on my laptop:

Electromaniac · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2011 Posts: 27

Have you included support for JBD and JBD2, also make sure that your boot partition is also ext4 (not ext2 or ext3), if it is, check if you have added support for them too.
Then, you can generate grub configuration grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.conf (or grub2-mkconfig if you have grub2)
I have also GPT disk and works fine for me.

Gojita02 · n00b Joined: 12 Jun 2013 Posts: 19

YOUPI !!!! I'm now able to boot !!!!!!!!!

Do not ask what I've changed in my kernel, I do not know. But I've tried to add as many things as 'build-in' instead of 'module' (such as ahci, SSD driver,etc)

But now .... I do not have any keyboard!

Could you help me ? What kind of option should I add ? Where are the keyboard option in the kernel configuration menu ?

Please, do not ask for any dmesg stuff :lol:

Thank for any help