Help a noob put gentoo on an IBM NetVista 2200

Message

machinelou · Post by **machinelou** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 4:13 pm

At the moment, I have a NetVista2200 successfully booting some flavor of debian. The distro comes with a pre-compiled kernel (2.4) and I have a copy of the kernel configuration file. As far as I know, the processor is a cyrix. The current distribution doesn't include any development tools

My long term goal is to turn this into a car computer that plays mp3s off on a compactflash card (currently a 5gig microdrive) and off of USB thumbsticks and transfer files over a network (maybe wireless). To do this, I am imagining a minimum gentoo which would include development tools (gcc, make, portage, etc...), openssh, alsa, mpd, and maybe udev, and maybe a 2.6 kernel. One reason why this install is somewhat challenging (for me anyway) is that I can't boot off of anything other than the compact flash. I'm not entirely sure how to install gentoo without booting off of an install cd so here's my plan.

I'm going to mount the compact flash on my existing gentoo desktop system and extract a stage tarball and a portage tarball onto the compact flash and chroot onto it. Here's my question:

When I select the stage tarball, what architecture do I choose?

Do I have to recompile a new kernel (obvious I do if I want 2.6 but will portage and the programs in the stage tarball work with the existing 2.4 kernel?

Thanks!

GordSki · Post by **GordSki** » Fri Mar 10, 2006 4:39 pm

I'm pretty sure that the Cyrix is an x86 Pentium style processor. So I think your looking at an x86 tarball and i586 as the march for GCC.

G.

Redhatter · Post by **Redhatter** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:37 am

It depends on the exact chip you've got... I have an IBM/Cyrix 486 DX4/100MHz chip here... that quite obviously won't run Pentium code.

Then there's the VIA Cyrix 3, which AFAIK, are i686-compatable (not sure there...).
cat /proc/cpuinfo should answer some of these questions... on my dual-PIII box here, I get:

Code: Select all

stuartl@beast /tmp/music $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 8
model name      : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping        : 10
cpu MHz         : 1004.548
...

Note the cpu family field. If I do the same on my bedside machine:

Code: Select all

james ~ # cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 5
model           : 4
model name      : Pentium MMX
stepping        : 3
cpu MHz         : 165.817
...

That will assist you in picking a stage3 tarball. If in doubt, just grab the "generic" x86 tarball... as you'll end up replacing each of the binaries as you update the system anyways.

machinelou · Post by **machinelou** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 4:15 pm

Thanks for your help!

At the moment, I've got a stage3 x86 tarball on the flashcard and the latest portage tarball on there as well. This flash card is currently mounted on my desktop computer (a pentium 4). I have a question about the next step before chrooting. The gentoo handbook says to do the following:

Mounting the /proc and /dev Filesystems

Mount the /proc filesystem on /mnt/gentoo/proc to allow the installation to use the kernel-provided information within the chrooted environment, and then mount-bind the /dev filesystem.

Code Listing 4: Mounting /proc and /dev

# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

However, I think this assumes that proc isn't already mounted. But mine is (because I've booted using my desktop gentoo install, but I'm trying to install gentoo onto a flash card).

So, if I were to ignore this step, it seems like the next steps would be using information from the kernel that has booted from a Pentium-4 (which would be bad because I need it to think it's compiling for the cyrix) but if I unmount proc and remount it using the proc contained on the flashcard then it seems like processes that are current running in the background (xwindows, etc...) will break because they won't have access to the "right" proc. What do I do?

This is clearly pushing the envelope of what I know about linux and cross-compiliation. Any advice you could offer would be extremely helpful. Thank you

Redhatter · Post by **Redhatter** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:50 am

It's also already mounted when you boot the LiveCD. Difference? Zilch.

I'm not sure what you mean by "using information from the kernel that has booted from a Pentium-4". /proc contains things like process information (hence the name) which is required for tools like ps and killall. It also contains status information like currently mounted filesystems (/proc/mounts), ethernet adaptor configurations, etc...

You should be able to proceed as if booting from a LiveCD. The fact that the host system is a P4 is irrelevant. The only place which is P4-specific is /proc/config.gz - which stores the kernel .config used to build the kernel. This file may be ignored -- I'm not sure if genkernel pays any attention to it (I don't use it, I roll kernels by hand). I have in the past, built environments for Pentium II and below, systems, inside a chroot on my Dual PIII desktop, with no ill effects.

BTW: This isn't cross-compilation -- Cross-compilation is compiling between different architectures ... i.e. an x86 host compiling for a MIPS target, or a Sparc host compiling for a PA-RISC target. Not x86 compiling for x86.

machinelou · Post by **machinelou** » Sun Mar 12, 2006 1:36 pm

Thanks RedHatter, thats clears things up.

Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 7:36 pm

Redhatter wrote:Then there's the VIA Cyrix 3, which AFAIK, are i686-compatable (not sure there...).

IIRC it's not 100% Pentium-compatible (maybe something like 98-99% compatible), so safest thing would be to target i386 and not i686