Tip for installing on Alpha

[RedHerring]

I've just finished installing Gentoo on an Compaq Alpha ES40 and found and worked around a problem with during the bootstrap from stage1 to stage2; I thought I'd share this workaround with any other Gentoo Alpha users. (Of course, I will fully admit that I might have done something wrong which caused the problems with the bootstrap...)

First, I started with the most recent (at the time) LiveCD for Alpha:
gentoo-alpha-2004.0-20040313.iso. This booted fine, detected all of my hardware -- a perfect start. I then worked through the install docs (which, by the way, are the best by far of any Linux distro I've used; docs for many OpenSource projects usually -- with all considerable due respect for the developers -- suck, but gentoo seems to be an exception). I used the stage1 tarball that seemed to go with the LiveCD I was using: stage1-alpha-20040313.tar.bz2. However, part way through the bootstrap process, the installation died with lots of errors about a missing /dev/null. At first I thought something weird had happened and that my root partition had been corrupted, so I started over from scratch: I encountered the same problem with this second attempt.

Examination of the stage1-alpha-20040313.tar.bz2 tarball shows that it does not contain /dev.

I searched around and found the experimental stage1 tarball: stage1-alpha-1.4-r1.tbz2, released last autumn. This tarball contained /dev, but crashed with what looked like source errors early in the bootstrap process (apologies: I did not take note of what the errors were).

In the end I used both tarballs: I started from scratch again and, when I got to the point in the installation when I was supposed to extract the stage1 tarball, I first extracted the experimental tarball (stage1-alpha-1.4-r1.tbz2 - the one with a viable /dev but broken otherwise) and then I extracted the more up-to-date tarball (stage1-alpha-20040313.tar.bz2 - no /dev). The bootstrap process completed without a hitch after that.

Hope this is helpful.
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#include <cunning_sig.h>

[AS2100]

Hi,

After untaring the stage* tarball then do

> touch /mnt/gentoo/dev/null

It worked for me.

Matthew