2004.0 Universal install

[CedricVonck]

Ok, this was the tenth time I tried to install Gentoo.
My first experiences were with the 1.4 version.
I have then switched over to the current one.

I have printed the userguide (much improved).
I have read it 5 times.
I have did everything like they said.
I did not stepped out the bounds.

Result:
A system wich has no ifconfig, ping /bin/bash, it barfs on errors of tty.
It barely boots, has not much commands..

Could anyone please provide with detailed instructions that will work .

Or can anyone point to a site,posts and so?

1 thing I have seen when I did the env-update in the chroot
Caching service dependencies instead regeneration ld.so cache.

My hardware: 20 G IDE vmware disk
Layout /dev/hda1 = boot ext2
/dev/hda2 = swap
/dev/hda3 = root ext3
Nic = pcnet32 (Amd Pcnet)

If anyone can point me in the rigth direction, I would appreciate it....

Thanks & regards,
Cedric

BTW, I am not a total n00b => I can Install & recompile freebsd 5.2.1 and install Solaris 10.

[diastelo]

Ok, let's see.

Ifconfig belongs to net-tools, and ping belongs to iputils. Search for these with emerge. If they're not installed, installing them should fix that much. If they are installed, that points to a problem with your path, which may also be connected to your problem with bash.

So. If bash is installed (and I imagine it has to be, but you never know), try running both of the following commands:

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env-update
source /etc/profile

You mentioned you had run the first command, but I don't know if you've run the second as well. And of course, if bash isn't installed, that definitely should be, unless you want to try an alternative shell.

The last few things you've mentioned seem far more interesting (in the not so nice sort of way). What sort of tty errors are you getting? What is going wrong while booting?

[CedricVonck]

What kind of errors?
Cannot reserve 4096 bytes for /dev/tty (8 or so times).

It booted (for once) normally without a kernel panic or grub configuration errors.

I can normally boot. (in /bin/sh)

When I tried to edit /etc/passwd => this is not found in /etc (but I could log in with root)

/bin/bash was not installed
The same for vi, cat, su and numerous others commands were gone.

So, instead of fixing a broken install can you give an entire set of instructions to make Gentoo working?

Thanx for responding.
Regards,
Cedric Vonck

[diastelo]

I'm assuming you used the massive Gentoo Install Handbook? If so, try the more abbreviated version: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86 ... nstall.xml.

Check the above install guide and compare it to the Gentoo Install Handbook. I am reluctant to retype the install guide here, because I feel that the Gentoo Doc people have done a much better job than I could, but I can try to answer any questions you might have. If you had a checklist you were following, I could see if you missed anything.

It sounds like something got skipped somewhere in the middle, or performed too soon or too late. The new install guide is wordy enough that it is easy to get lost in it and miss a few steps, and when you've read something a few times, I've found you tend to read what you expect, not what is actually written. One simple trick I use when following guides like that is to circle or highlight steps I've completed and cross out lines that don't apply to me. You might find that to be a waste of a perfectly good highlighter.

Hope this helps.

[CedricVonck]

Now you mention it, I have copied the stage3 x86 tarball and portage snapshot to the hd, and when I came to the emerge vanilla-sources2.4.24 kernel, emerge did drop out (I don't wich error). therefore I loaded, I did emerge sync, solving the problems.

Regards,
Cedric

[YopWongSapn]

Cedric, which stage(s) did you try to install from? You've obviously tried stage3, but did you try stages 1&2 as well? Sometimes those tarballs can be a bit screwy, so you may also want to try dowloading your stage from a different mirror.

Now you mention it, I have copied the stage3 x86 tarball and portage snapshot to the hd, and when I came to the emerge vanilla-sources2.4.24 kernel, emerge did drop out (I don't wich error). therefore I loaded, I did emerge sync, solving the problems.

Did you remember to emerge sync after copying the snapshot to the hd? I've also had issues when I skip that step.

One more thing...my experiences with the 2004.0 livecd have been less than pleasing. Have you tried using the 1.4 install disc?

[CedricVonck]

- I installed Stage3-x86-200402 (what is on the Universal CD).

- emerge sync => did it.

- Yes, Like I mentioned before, I tried to install that Release (stage3, and GRP) about 10 times.
The installation of that version were even worse than this one
And yes I did set my Use, Cxx, C flags..

- Yes I did try (in version 1.4) a stage 1 and 2 install on real hardware and on VMware hardware.

Regards,
Cedric

BTW, I have nothing against Gentoo, I will probably look elsewhere,
Can anybody recommend me a decent version Linux (not mandrake and no slackware and no debian) or unix?

[CedricVonck]

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Te "attempt to access beyond end of device" happens when it is asking for things past 4096.

This the error I am getting.

[edebont]

If you have never worked with linux/unix before SuSE is a good distribution to start. Gentoo is great if you have a bit more experience, want to use the latest versions of software and keep everything in your own hands.

[Convex]

i would probably be able to help you. i have installed with VMware with a number of distros. first of all why did you make the drive so large to start. you can always add more space later. i started with 4 gb and only less than 3 are taken up. have you installed using VMware with a 20gb virtual drive before?? 20gb just doesnt make sense. if you are filling up that much space in VMware, you should just install on a regular drive. VMware isn't the greatest at compiling, or downloading large files. recalling my previous installs, i think i had a problem with stage3 and vmware. I just started install fresh. in fact i am i using a stage2 install in VMware to write this, so it does work, but there are many quirks. I used RedHat at first, but i hated it after i had a mouse install problem. i would stick with gentoo. you can pm or email if you want help after you solve this problem. as i do not know that much about this error.

i wouldn't reccomend another distro unless you feel like gentoo is too advanced, which it shouldn't feel like.

[CedricVonck]

If you have never worked with linux/unix before SuSE is a good distribution to start. Gentoo is great if you have a bit more experience, want to use the latest versions of software and keep everything in your own hands.

Thanx for the nfo!

[CedricVonck]

i would probably be able to help you. i have installed with VMware with a number of distros. first of all why did you make the drive so large to start. you can always add more space later. i started with 4 gb and only less than 3 are taken up. have you installed using VMware with a 20gb virtual drive before?? 20gb just doesnt make sense. if you are filling up that much space in VMware, you should just install on a regular drive. VMware isn't the greatest at compiling, or downloading large files. recalling my previous installs, i think i had a problem with stage3 and vmware. I just started install fresh. in fact i am i using a stage2 install in VMware to write this, so it does work, but there are many quirks. I used RedHat at first, but i hated it after i had a mouse install problem. i would stick with gentoo. you can pm or email if you want help after you solve this problem. as i do not know that much about this error.

i wouldn't reccomend another distro unless you feel like gentoo is too advanced, which it shouldn't feel like.

Thank you! I am trying yat (yet another time)...
I will append a larger ramdisk in my grub.conf.

Regards,

[CedricVonck]

BTW, I am currently looking also in how to make a fork of an existing linux or build one myself?

Anyone good links?

[Convex]

woah fork off a distro or build your own, that is going to be some work. i know of a linux from scratch for building your very own distro. http://www.linuxfromscratch.org try that out if you really want to. never have tried it, but thought about after my stint with RedHat fedora.

[CedricVonck]

Ok this time everything did install like a breeze... just added the ramdisk_size to the kernel boot options.

now the rest => external login via putty?? anyone?

[diastelo]

To set up ssh, you should add sshd to the default or boot run level with:

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rc-update add sshd default

Then you should run:

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/etc/init.d/sshd start

After that, every time you reboot, your computer will be able to accept incoming ssh connections from programs such at putty.

[Joseph_M]

Hi Cedric
How you been? I understand the frustration level myself. What I did to get Gentoo up and running, after only three failures is to keep an exact log of what I needed to do. I will include this log at the end of this message.

I did not use any of the livecd's from gentoo as they seem to have beed created with a 2.44 boot image and that will not work on any of my four systems. So I used a live slackware cd and installed from a stage 2 tarball. I first tried the knoppix live cd but didn't like the way it did it's mounting of exsiting partitions so I scrapped it for the slackware version. If you want to use the live slackware cd here is the url: http://slax.linux-live.org/

If you use the liveslak cd onething that will help a lot is to unmount any existing hard drive partition, the slak cd will automount them, then from fdisk setup the partitions that you will use for gentoo. I used space for my home partition, set up a gig for swap and the rest went to /. At this point the live slak cd has no swap partition. You need to run mkswap with the device name, read the man page, then do a swapon, again read the man page. This will make the live slack cd very happy and your life easyer.

Here is are my notes as to what I did to install from a stage 2 tar ball. It takes a few days of running to compile everything. Thats why I installed gentoo so I could have a snappy system. So set your use flag correctly and add the directories for protage in your /etc/make.conf file. Don't forget to copy over the resolv.conf file also.

My Notes::


After partioning and creating filesystems
mount and unpacking stage2 tarball.




# mkdir /mnt/gentoo/proc
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc





# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
# env-update
Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
# source /etc/profile



Code Listing 4: Updating Portage
# emerge sync
(In case you are unable to use rsync, use "emerge-webrsync" which
downloads and installs a portage snapshot for you)
# emerge-webrsync

configure the USE flag
A full description on the available USE flags can be found on your system in /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc.


Code Listing 10: Downloading the necessary sources
# cd /usr/portage
# scripts/bootstrap.sh -f <-- to get the sources first
or
# scripts/bootstrap.sh to download and compile in one operation or after getting sources



Code Listing 12: Reinitialize environment variables
# source /etc/profile



Code Listing 14: Fetching the sources
# emerge --fetchonly system <-- to get the sources first then compile
# emerge system <-- to do in one step or after fetching sources

<<<<< this point ends section 6 ... Move on to configuring the kernel >>>>>>>


7. Configuring the Kernel



7.a. Timezone
You first need to select your timezone so that your system knows where it is located. Look for your timezone in /usr/share/zoneinfo, then make a symlink to /etc/localtime using ln:

# ls /usr/share/zoneinfo
(Suppose you want to use GMT)
# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime

Now we need to install the kernel source from this list:

For x86-based systems we have, amongst other kernels,
vanilla-sources (the default kernel source as developed by the linux-kernel developers), gentoo-sources (kernel source patched with performance-enhancing features),
gentoo-dev-sources (kernel v2.6 source patched with performance-enhancing features and stability improvements),
xfs-sources (kernel source with the latest XFS support),
gs-sources (kernel source patched for server usage),
gaming-sources (kernel source patched for optimal gaming performance),
development-sources (vanilla 2.6 kernel source), ...


Code Listing 2: Installing a kernel source
# emerge =vanilla-sources-2.4.24 <-- I used emerge =gentoo-dev-sources

go to /usr/src and check that the link for linux points to the corret directory.

You then need to configure the kernel
# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

Don't foget to do this stuff:

Code Listing 6: Selecting experimental code/drivers
Code maturity level options --->
[*] Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers


Now go to File Systems and select support for the filesystems you use. Don't compile them as modules, otherwise your Gentoo system will not be able to mount your partitions. Also select Virtual memory, /proc file system, /dev file system + Automatically mount at boot:


Code Listing 7: Selecting necessary file systems
File systems --->
[*] Virtual memory file system support (former shm fs)
[*] /proc file system support
[*] /dev file system support (EXPERIMENTAL)
[*] Automatically mount at boot

(Deselect the following unless you have a 2.6 kernel)
[ ] /dev/pts file system for Unix98 PTYs

(Select one or more of the following options as needed by your system)
<*> Reiserfs support
<*> Ext3 journalling file system support
<*> JFS filesystem support
<*> Second extended fs support
<*> XFS filesystem support
Note: Users of a 2.6 kernel will find some of the mentioned options under Pseudo filesystems which is a subpart of File systems.



If you are using PPPoE to connect to the Internet or you are using a dial-up modem, you will need the following options in the kernel:
Code Listing 8: Selecting PPPoE necessary drivers
Network device support --->
<*> PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
<*> PPP support for async serial ports
<*> PPP support for sync tty ports


Note: Users of a 2.6 kernel will find the mentioned options under Networking support which is a subpart of Device Drivers.

The two compression options won't harm but are not definitely needed, neither does the PPP over Ethernet option, that might only be used by rp-pppoe when configured to do kernel mode PPPoE.

Note: Users of a 2.6 kernel will find the mentioned options under Device Drivers.
If you require it, don't forget to include support in the kernel for your ethernet card.

<<<<<<<<<<<<< end of section 7 begin section 8 .. Configuring the system >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


We need to setup the /etc/fstab file.
It must have these two lines:

none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

Also make sure that you setup for the device and filesystem that you have created
during partitioning and filesystem creatation.

Setup network.
put host name in /etc/hostname
and domainname in /etc/domainname

Now add the domainname script to the default runlevel:
# rc-update add domainname default

/* check to see if this worked after system is up, it didn't for me and I had to hack the script to get my domainname set */


Configure the network by changing /etc/conf.d/net
read the file it has good comments.

then commit changes to system with:
# rc-update add net.eth0 default

If you have more then one interface then read docs at:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/h ... t=1&chap=8





AT this point you should read /etc/rc.conf it has good comments but I left mine alone. Can always change it latter.

<<<<<<<<<<<<< end sec 8 begin section 9 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
install boot loader. I use grub

Code Listing 1: Installing GRUB
(For the x86 architecture:)
# emerge --usepkg grub

(For the AMD64 architecture:)
# emerge --usepkg grub-static
# cp -Rpv /usr/share/grub/i386-pc/* /boot/grub



Code Listing 2: Starting the GRUB shell
# grub

Code Listing 3: Installing GRUB in the MBR

grub> root (hd0,0) (Specify where your /boot partition resides)
grub> setup (hd0) (Install GRUB in the MBR)
grub> quit (Exit the GRUB shell)



Now we setup grub conf file, /boot/grub/grub.conf:
Make sure all files are correctly noted. If bzImage is in /boot then say /boot. If bzImage is in a partition
that is marked as root then say /bzImage
GET YOUR PATHS RIGHT FOR GRUB!!!!!!!!!!


<<<<<<<<<<<< end sec 9 begin sec 10 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
install system tools

10.a. System Logger
Gentoo offers several system loggers to choose from. There are sysklogd, which is the traditional set of system logging daemons, msyslog, a flexible system logger with a modularized design, syslog-ng, an advanced system logger, and metalog which is a highly-configurable system logger.

my choice:
# emerge syslog-ng
# rc-update add syslog-ng default


10.b. Optional: Cron Daemon
Gentoo offers three possible cron daemons: dcron, fcron and vixie-cron. Installing one of them is similar to installing a system logger. However, dcron and fcron require an extra configuration command, namely crontab /etc/crontab. If you don't know what to choose, use vixie-cron.

my choice:
# emerge vixie-cron
# rc-update add vixie-cron default
(Only if you have chosen dcron or fcron) # crontab /etc/crontab

If you did not use an ext type file system read: 10.c. File System Tools

also if you need pppoe read: 10.d. Optional: Networking Tools

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< end 10 on to 11 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


set root password with
#passwd


Adding a User for Daily Use
# useradd <user name> -m -G users,wheel,audio -s /bin/bash
# passwd <user name>
Password: (Enter the password for <user name>)
Re-enter password: (Re-enter the password to verify)


READDDDDDY
11.b. Reboot and Enjoy
Congratulations! Your Gentoo system is now ready. Exit the chrooted environment and unmount all mounted partitions. Then type in that one magical command you have been waiting for: reboot.

Code Listing 4: Rebooting the system
# exit
# cd /
# umount /mnt/gentoo/boot /mnt/gentoo/proc /mnt/gentoo
# reboot

[CedricVonck]

Thank you very much to you all!

@joseph: omg what a list! I will definetely print this one & keep this one!

@diastelo: also many thanx I will keep this aside also!

Everything is installed fine (under vmware + tools)
I even emerged xfree (with the pakage option) => instead of installing a package it downloaded the source and it compiled the source 3+ hours time. Strange I will look into it the evening...

[Joseph_M]

No problem Cedric. Would you do me a favor and check something on your system. One of the things that I am having problems with, most likely a lack of understanding on my part, is with the domain name. In the notes and in docs it says to put your domain name in /etc/domainname. Something like this: echo "local.net" > /etc/domainname then run env-update add domainname default. Well I did this but when I run the domainname command I get (none). This means that my machine has a host name but no domainname. Would you be so kind as to run domainname from a shell and post back what you get?

Thanks
Joseph

[YopWongSapn]

run env-update add domainname default

Should be

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# rc-update add domainname default

[CedricVonck]

No problem Cedric. Would you do me a favor and check something on your system. One of the things that I am having problems with, most likely a lack of understanding on my part, is with the domain name. In the notes and in docs it says to put your domain name in /etc/domainname. Something like this: echo "local.net" > /etc/domainname then run env-update add domainname default. Well I did this but when I run the domainname command I get (none). This means that my machine has a host name but no domainname. Would you be so kind as to run domainname from a shell and post back what you get?

Thanks
Joseph

dear,

I will check this tomorrow evening => I have to restore a vm for this install.

I have NOT set a domain name, but you must do it, you did it right.

Check with rc-status (in the default runlevel) wich options are added to this runlevel. For the network part, I did modify only the /etc/conf.d/net,
I choose dchp for eth0 (iface_eth0), rc-update add net.eth0 default,
and I edited also the /etc/modules.autoload./kernel-<version>,
I simply added pcnet32 (under vmware).

If you don't now your eth0 device => dmesg | more => search for ifcon or 3 something (realtek => starts with 351 or something like it).

Your original question: I you are on a L(ocal) LAN. you really don't need it,
check also that the machine (gentoo) is on the same submet as the rest of the other computers (255.255.255.0 => for 192.168.2.1)

localdomain.net => I really don't know if this is allowed.
Try it without the .net (?)

See that your router's ip is /etc/resolv.conf (like 192.168.2.1) :>default gateway.

If you want to "log in" remotely check my thread.
Btw, when I install FreeBsd @ home, I don't set a domain name.

Regards,
Cedric

PS. Do a uname -a