gentoo on ia64

martin.kleinschmidt · n00b Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 19

I am trying to get a working gentoo on an itanium machine.
Worked mostly well, but I had a few problems.
I just wanted to shre my solutions:

1) gcc 3.3.2 does not compile. I don't know how to set ACCEPT_KEYWORDS during bootstrap, so I just changed ~ia64 to ia64 in gcc-3.3.3.ebuild. worked.

2) same for procps.

3) when compiling the kernel, you should "make vmlinuz" instead of "make bzImage"!

4) ypbind and yp-tools:
No ebuild has ia64 or ~ia64 in it, therefore i just tried and added ia64 to
net-nds/ypbind-1.11-r1
and to
net-nds/yp-tools-2.7
It compiles and runs just fine!
someone should add at least ~ia64 there!?

And one question in the end: is there a forum dedicated to gentoo on ia64, or some other place to meet other ia64 users?

martin.kleinschmidt · n00b Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 19

I successfully installed
net-nds/ypbind-1.11-r1
net-nds/yp-tools-2.7
app-sci/molden-3.9
dev-util/ddd-3.3.7
on ia64.
filed a bug report for them and asked to include ~ia64 in KEYWORDS

Onyx_RE2 · n00b Joined: 09 Jun 2004 Posts: 1 Location: New York, NY

Hi,
I too am interested in pursuing Gentoo on the ia64 platform. If anyone's noticed, WinXP 64 bit is a joke, HP-UX 11i is a bit too cumbersome as a desktop OS (worse for OpenVMS 8.1), most othe Linux Distro's for ia64 (Red Hat and SuSE) are not flexible enough (and are not free).
Can anyone with ia64 Linux experience (Gentoo or otherwise) start posting their adventures?
Thanks!!

martin.kleinschmidt · n00b Joined: 19 Oct 2003 Posts: 19

Shiryou · Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2004 9:52 am Post subject:

Well, i had to use a poor mandrake install to get somewhere past the efi bit in order to get Gentoo going i the first palce but now it seems ok i think. Im getting there. Just need to do the kernel and then move on to swapping mandrake for gentoo.

Kloeri · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 144

I'm joining the ia64 team real soon now (tm) and hope to bring a little more momentum to this platform. That said there's a couple of things you guys can do to help:

1. Submit bugs on https://bugs.gentoo.org whenever you see something that needs keywording or otherwise fixing.

2. Join the team

The ia64 team is very small currently and could use your help. If you're interested please come talk to me in #gentoo-bugs on irc.freenode.net and let me know how you might be able to help.

Regards,
Bryan Østergaard

Shiryou · Posted: Tue Jul 27, 2004 9:23 am Post subject:

I'll certainly post any bugs i find although im having a real problem with Kernel compilation. Using the vanilla 2.6.7 kernel is taking years upon years to compile. Annoyingly the kernel uncompresses and then..... the system just hangs. No messages or anything. Im wondering what it could be. Can someone please post their kernel number and .config file here for me please? Im using an old itanium 1 with 2 processors.

guitou · Guru Joined: 02 Oct 2003 Posts: 534 Location: France

I gave a try to 2.6.??? kernel a few months ago, but I had many many errors after booting the system, so I sticked to ia64-sources for my own.
And for vanilla-sources, I believe they miss some ia64 specific patches : you would better download an ia64-kernel from kernel.org, if you want to give 2.6.* a try.

@++

Shiryou · Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:54 am Post subject:

Ah! This might have helped a fair bit. Guess i should have looked for such sources. Nevermind, my m8 now has the itanium we fished out of the skip. Probably best this way. Back on good old duron for file serving with Gentoo. Cheers for the headsup though. I'll let my buddy know.

rotlicht · n00b Joined: 25 Nov 2005 Posts: 25

Currently I'm also compiling gentoo on an ia64 system. But I have to say that there were severeal traps to avoid.
The main problem I had was with the installation of the elilo.
The 2005.1 cd seems to set the $loop variable.
If I now tried to start elilo for installation purposes and if I don't copy the vmlinux.gz into my root directory and set the $loop variable to ",loop"
elilo won't install.
Ok so far to this trap.
Another one is the partitioning of the hard disks. I had to partition this to Win95 VFAT with cfdisk. Not to efi gpt or efi fat.
If you do the last things you corrupt your partition tables.
Until now I installed xorg but it won't run.
I'm using the standard xorg.conf.example and changed the driver section vga to ati because I'm using the ATi Rage XL card.
But the x-server fails.

It's also strange that the frambuffer support doesn't work in the kernel.

So far till now