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simulacrum
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 30 Nov 2002
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Location: St Paul, MN

PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 7:12 am    Post subject: Misc install problems Reply with quote

As a background, I've been using Slackware for the past several years and am pretty familiar with Linux. I've heard a lot of good things about Gentoo, and decided to give it a try, but have ran into problem after problem. I'm not willing to give up that easily, so I'm here for your help. I'm accustomed to doing everything myself, ie: get the source, compile and configure. The emerge system that Gentoo uses is new to me, so I'm a bit aprehensive letting it do everything for me.

I've gone through the installation and now have a working base system, not without troubles of course. I did have problems with Grub, which I've resolved. I've used vanilla-sources, gentoo-sources, and I've also downloaded kernel 2.4.19, all with the same results as described below. Currently, I'm having problems getting my mouse and video card working.

I have a Microsoft USB Intellimouse. Now, I've configured this mouse numerous times with various distributions and I know how to do this. I've got USB HID support and Mouse support in Input Core enabled in the kernel. tail -f /var/log/messages shows the kernel noticing when I unplug and plug the mouse in. Everything looks good. When I cat /dev/input/mice, no dice. I tried recreating the device via "mknod /dev/input/mice2 c 13 63" with the same results. Now, were the kernel not seeing the mouse, if I were to cat the device, it would say there was no such device. But it's not saying anything. It just sits there as if I were not moving the mouse. When I cat the mouse, it should return garbage when I move the mouse around.

I have a Geforce II MX. Again, I've configured this a number of times. I configured X, emerged nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel. Both suceed without error. Edited XF86Config to change the driver to nvidia. startx errors with no screens found. If I edit XF86Config driver line to "nv" X starts fine.

Any input on these problems would be appreciated. I'd really like to give Gentoo a try, everything I've read is good and what I've seen of it looks great, but I need to get over these hurdles before I can really get anywhere. Thanks again. (Wow, this turned into a long post..)
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metalhedd
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Joined: 30 May 2002
Posts: 692
Location: Ontario Canada

PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 8:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

well, it definitely sounds like you know what you're doing. as far as the mouse goes, I'm not too familiar with USB Devices, but it sounds to me like your solution (mknod etc etc.) is a solution for a system without devfs. gentoo uses devfs which creates the devices from a config file /etc/devfsd.conf i believe. so the problem may lie in that file, but again, ive never messed with it before, and I've never used a USB Mouse before, so I'm not the one to ask really... :) now, as far as your gf2mx, I dont thi nk i've ever seen a post on these forusm where someone couldn't get it to work, and theres alot of geforce owners here. so its probably something silly. check the modelines etc. maybe you can post your XF86Config in here too, and the X error log.

I know I wasn't too much help, but there were no other replies and I just felt like being helpful... if you post those files I can try to be more helpful with the GF2MX Situation as I've had a fair bit of experience with them under linux.
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really
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Joined: 27 Aug 2002
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i too had that error acouple of times, when i had my gf2mx. i remeber i fooled around with making a new XF86Config with xf86cfg -textmode ...
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simulacrum
Tux's lil' helper
Tux's lil' helper


Joined: 30 Nov 2002
Posts: 128
Location: St Paul, MN

PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 6:48 pm    Post subject: More info... Reply with quote

I hate huge forum posts, so you can see my XF86Config here. I've been mounting my slack partition and comparing configs and everything looks good. I forgot to get my XF86 error log before booting into windows, but depmod -a revealed NVdriver has unresolved symbols and I have no clue why. I did a make mrproper and recompiled my kernel, then emerged the nvidia driver again. Same thing.

You can see some testing of my mouse here. No luck on that front. I did look into devfsd and it seems like all it does is ensure that the correct device files are present in /dev according to devices.txt, which there are. Can anyone explain why this is necessary? I know slack runs a script at install to either copy or create the files, which it seems devfsd does. Once this is done, there shouldn't be any maintenance necessary.

After not getting any closer to a solution, I'm beginning to think that my Gentoo install is just hosed. I've never specified compiler flags and am wondering if that is the root of my problems. My make.conf is here. Yes, I do have a pentium 3. ;) If it turns out this is the problem, that somehow the optimizations screwed me from the get go, then Gentoo will have to wait, I just don't have the time to do that over again. Getting too close to the end of the semester. Thanks again guys.
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really
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 7:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

your make.conf is fine :)
i see BusID in your XF86COnfig why? it was not needed when i had such a card.
lsmod tells you if you have the module loaded :p
if not, due to unresolved symbols, i would emerge unmerge both nvidia-kernel and then nvidia-glx , emerge unmerge <your running kernelversion> and then rm -rf /lib/modules/versionnameofkernel and then reemerge it and install it, then emerge nvidia-kernel and glx.
and boot up the new kernel and load the modules modprobe nvidia; startx
opengl-update if you want to make sure x will user nvidias gl.
i have no clue aout usb-devices, so i cant help you with that. buuut as someone mentioned check your /dev/devfsd.conf and look if /dev/input/mice is a simlink somewhere or if it has a symlink to iit from somewhere......
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rac
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 30, 2002 8:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you could post which symbols were listed as unresolved, that might be helpful. If it's SMP stuff, and you've got a uniprocessor machine, try turning SMP support off in your kernel. If you have multiple kernel source trees, make sure that the /usr/src/linux symlink is pointing to the right one at the time you emerge nvidia-kernel. The most detailed USB mouse reference I'm aware of on the forums is Vlad's USB Mouse and Keyboard How-To.
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simulacrum
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 7:00 am    Post subject: Last ditch effort Reply with quote

Modprobe NVdriver returns this. Looking at it made me a bit suspicious something was wrong with devfsd, so here is my devfsd.conf. Again, any help is welcome.
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rac
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 7:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's a lot of really basic symbols unresolved. It almost looks like you've got a really stale kernel in /boot. Any chance that the default Gentoo setup of leaving /boot unmounted (noauto in fstab) bit you, and you copied newly compiled kernels into the /boot directory of your root filesystem instead of the /boot partition?
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simulacrum
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 30 Nov 2002
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Location: St Paul, MN

PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2002 1:08 am    Post subject: That was it! Reply with quote

Boy, do I ever feel dumb after that. I'm not accustomed to a seperate boot partition, and that was it. The funny thing is that I ran into the same problem with Grub, where I had to mount /boot explicitly. Everything is fixed. Mouse and video card working perfectly of course. I'm just in the process of emerging everything I need, so I should be good to go. Thanks for everyone's input, I think you've got a Slackware convert on your hands!

:D
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