T20 laptop and kernel 2.6 test 11

[sgtrock]

Hi, all. I'm working on my 5th Gentoo install. This is the first time that I've tried a 2.6 kernel, and it's the first time I've tried putting Gentoo on a laptop. Prior to this, I had Mandrake on it.

I booted my laptop from a Knoppix CD. I was able to create the chroot environment and move into it. From there, I grabbed a stage3 tarball and unpacked it. After that, I followed to the doco clear through to the end without issue.

I had a couple of glitches when I began rebooting (mostly missed options during kernel compile), but I've managed to debug and resolve them all so far. This last one has me stumped, though.

When the laptop boots off the kernel, a bunch of stuff scrolls past, then I see "Unable to open initial console, restarting". At which point, the laptop reboots.

A buddy suggested compiling in support for the Unix98 PTYs as well as framebuffer (he's had trouble with framebuffer on a newer machine). I've done that by adding in the options for "Device Drivers --> Character Devices --> Unix98 PTY support" and "File systems --> Pseudo filesystems --> /dev/pts file system for Unix98 PTYs".

No joy. Same error. Any thoughts on what I might be doing wrong?

[sgtrock]

Further update:

I tried compiling in most of the fonts for framebuffer. No luck, still the same error.

Anyone have any ideas on what I could try? Any info that I could provide that might help someone debug this?

TIA

[george]

I'm running 2.6.0-beta11-r2 on my T20 and it's fine for normal use. I'm chasing down some wrinkles still (which is how I found your post). The relevant parts of my config are:

Code: Select all

#
# Graphics support
#
# CONFIG_FB is not set
# CONFIG_VIDEO_SELECT is not set
                                                                                
#
# Console display driver support
#
CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE=y
# CONFIG_MDA_CONSOLE is not set
CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE=y

#
# Pseudo filesystems
#
CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
CONFIG_PROC_KCORE=y
CONFIG_DEVFS_MOUNT=y
# CONFIG_DEVFS_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_DEVPTS_FS=y
# CONFIG_DEVPTS_FS_XATTR is not set
CONFIG_TMPFS=y
# CONFIG_HUGETLBFS is not set
# CONFIG_HUGETLB_PAGE is not set
CONFIG_RAMFS=y
CONFIG_SUPERMOUNT=y
# CONFIG_SUPERMOUNT_DEBUG is not set

HTH[/code]