Installing Gentoo onto an old Toshiba laptop.

creighto

Booting from USB works fine, but the only working bootable usb stick I have right now complains that the Intel Atom processor looks like a i686 32 bit processor, and the stick kernel is 64 bit. My attempt to put RescueCD onto a usb stick seems to have failed, because it won't boot.

This old laptop only has one gig of memory, and the drive size is yet unknown. So sticking with 32 bit arch isn't a problem for me. I've since learned that Gentoo is the basis for ChromeOS, and considering how well my daughter's new chromebook works for her, I'm now thinking that I'd like to set up my laptop so that one account starts Chromium and runs as a chromebook while another account starts into BlackboxWM for anything else I'd like to do.

So my first question is, what should I do to get started here? My company laptop doesn't permit writing any data out to USB storage, so I can't make a new boot usb image with that. I do have an iMac at home, but trying to use that to create the first RescueCD USB didn't work; so I'm not sure that attempting that again is a fruitful path.

It's kind of a strange chicken & egg problem, I have all this computer gear but it seems that none of it is useful until one is useful.

skellr · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 12:21 am Post subject:

Another option is PXE. Debian still has a network boot install.

They don't have a public TFTP server anymore, so you'll need to set one up. Maybe your iMac has a TFTP server daemon waiting to be used for something?

creighto · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 12:51 am Post subject:

Thanks for the suggestion, but I managed to get a programmer at my company to cut me a bootable usb, and he chose Fedora 27. Which installed fine, but runs really slowly. My next step is to cut a couple of my own bootable usb sticks so that I can build Gentoo without interruption. Does anyone have suggestions about how I go about that next step? I've been told that SystemRescueCD is a Gentoo rescue disk that I can start from, but does any one know of a step by step I can refer to in order to make, and then verify, such a boot usb disk? I imagine that I could muddle through if I had too, but in this day an age, I'm sure that there is a howto somewhere.

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

Go back to the system rescue CD. Use their from Linux install and it should work flawlessly. I always have one on hand for whatever.

EDIT: Just use Fedora to install Gentoo. The KISS principle in action.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

skellr · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:08 am Post subject:

creighto · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:12 am Post subject:

creighto · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:13 am Post subject:

John R. Graham · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:25 am Post subject:

skellr · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:34 am Post subject:

[quote="creighto"]

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

skellr · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:41 am Post subject:

P.Kosunen · Guru Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 309 Location: Finland

creighto · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 9:05 pm Post subject:

Woohoo! I got mediainstaller to write both a SystemRescueCD iso and the minimal_install iso to two thumbdrives. It took over an hour to do both operations, because Fedora was *so SLOW* on this old laptop; but it seems to have been successful. I rebooted the laptop with the minimal_install drive inserted and am currently running Memtest.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2018 11:33 pm Post subject:

creighto,

That sounds like a USB 1 data rate issue.
If you really only have USB 1, booting from USB will be painfully slow.
That will encourage you to only do it once. :)

Normality will be restored once you can boot from the HDD.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

creighto · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:04 am Post subject:

The laptop is USB2, and it's definitely a Fedora 27 issue. It seems to use a lot of resident memory, which I don't have, and swaps to the swap partition constantly. This Atom process is a single core at 1.6 Ghz, not exactly bleeding edge of anything; but I suppose that was the whole point of rebranding the Pentium II as an energy efficient processor. At the moment, I've chroot'ed and am currently stuck in the "emerge -sync" as the little guy chugs through it all. Up to the "M"'s as I now look. Looking ahead to the next section, it talks about "profiles"; and I'm wondering if a profile exists for a lightweight laptop, and/or a profile for a straight X-server system without all the eye-candy add-ons such as Qt? Can I still function entirely without such libraries? Would Chromium require them?

creighto · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:41 am Post subject:

Emerge is presently chugging along compiling a set of libraries required for the profile I chose. I chose #4, the plain desktop, because I was guessing that the older profiles would be lighter overall compared to the ..gnome .kde or ..hardened profiles. If I'm way off base here, someone please let me know, so I can change the profile before I get too far along. I have moved the laptop into a secure room going forward, because my 5 year old managed to reboot it while I was brushing her brothers' teeth. Recovering from that wasn't as time consuming as I feared, but I didn't want it to happen again. It's nice to be able to pick up an entire computer system while it's compiling and simply move it to another room before plugging it back in. I still can't figure out how old this laptop is, but it must be pretty old, as it use NiCad battery chemisty; and I thought that all laptops moved to lithium-ion a decade ago...

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:07 am Post subject:

creighto,

When you get to build it, dmidecode will give you some indications as to the age of your system.

creighto · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:01 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:07 pm Post subject:

creighto,

Its safe. I use ctrl-c.

You are going to switch to the /17.0/ profile sometime. It may as well be sooner rather than later.
Do read the news item

creighto · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:16 pm Post subject:

I killed it with control-c, and now I'm curious as to what the differences between that and control-x are.

Anyway, I've killed it, switched the profile to #13 (the 17.0/desktop(stable) according to my emerge) and now emerge is busy calculating dependencies. That will take a bit, I'm sure.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:35 pm Post subject:

creighto,

Follow the news item. You must do the toolchain bits first in the right order.
You can save some time later with the --exclude option. There is no point in building the toolchain bits that you did at the start.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

creighto · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:45 pm Post subject:

I think I get what you're saying here. The minimal-install.iso hasn't been updated with the compiler executables to match the .17 profiles; so I will need to do that myself before continuing with the process in the handbook. Otherwise I will have to do it twice anyway. Is this correct?

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

The stage may or may not be on the new profile, but best not to assume since that path leads to misery.

I generally recommend recompiling everything anyway so you are not wasting time here.
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 9:17 pm Post subject:

creighto,

Correct. LIke The Doctor says, I rebuild everything optimised to my target system too.

Even if the stage tarball you started from was built with the /17.0/ profiles, by building things after selecting a /13.0/ profile, you got yourself in a mess.
Its possible to look at logs and backtrack but its probably faster and better for your install to rebuild everything.

My build everything habit is probably a bad habit I developed a long time a go in the days of the stage1 install.
That's no longer an option.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

creighto · Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2018 3:39 am Post subject: