Gentoo adventures

[XMEN Gambit]

Last year I bought an Athlon64. Those of you at the LAN may remember seeing the rig. Great.

Well, I want to use a 64-bit OS with it, right? That's what it's for. I'm still not quite ready to go to Windows64, as it's not quite ready IMO. Well, turns out neither are the varieties of Linux that I've tried, at least so far, and for what I want. Some of them are pretty close, but now I've discovered a new problem.

The system hangs at random points when running Gnome or KDE. Haven't tried other window managers yet. Evidence across the net seems to point at X-windows, both XFree86 and the new X.org fork, but it's very difficult to nail down evidence because of the variety of hardware and software configurations. It's difficult to repeat the problem the same way on what should be an identical system, too. To add to that, it may be that more than one bug is being chased here.

So, I have decided to finally try Gentoo Linux. If you don't know Gentoo, it's main feature is twofold. One is a cool BSD ports-like repository system. The other is that you compile darn near everything yourself, on your own system, with your own optimizations and so on that you set. And you can recompile the whole shebang pretty easily at any time. (It just may not be speedy...) It does lead to excellent performance, usually, since everything is tuned just right.

So, I have installed Gentoo. That is, I have a system that will boot off the hard drive, connect to the internet, and give me a nice command line to play with. Next step is a GUI.

For a day or two, I couldn't boot! I thought that my Gentoo installation was somehow all broken. And I might have blown up my MBR and needed to get out the Windows disk so I could boot back into the MS world. But fortunately I was able to determine the real problem - an extra word in my grub menu.lst file - that was affecting all my OSes. Some config change in the Gentoo install broke the Ubuntu-installed grub I'd been using. (Grub is a very nice bootloader, BTW. Miles ahead of LILO!)

I have encountered some odd issues, but the Gentoo project is one of the best-documented I've ever seen. There's a quick-install guide, but the real installation manual is a 100-page detailed guide for every step of the way. Tells you what to type and why, as well as a few alternatives, so it's pretty nice. My goal here was not to just install another Linux distro but to gain a better understanding of the process.

Got it!

If I was going to delve any deeper, there's only two more steps down that road, after that I'm off the map into "write my own" land. The first is Slackware, though it's become a lot friendlier recently. The second is Linux From Scratch.

However, Gentoo is really not that bad if you're patient. If you do exactly what these detailed instructions recommend, things should go very smoothly and you'll have a nice working system. Part of my problem was the little deviations I made along the way. But that's what makes it fun, isn't it? I'll see if the mysterious crash reoccurs...


Meanwhile, I've tried these distros recently:

I can recommend SimplyMEPIS Linux if you want a distro that "just works." It's 32-bit only right now, though, and they seem to have trouble with the whole "community" thing, and perhaps don't really love the concept of the GPL as much as they should. But if you don't care about all that software philosophy stuff, it's very nice. And zero cost.

Ubuntu is maturing rapidly. It has a huge, loyal, helpful fanbase and developer community, and it's easy to install (though not brain-dead) and use. There are some things it isn't very good at yet, though they're working hard on it.

SuSE is pretty nice, though I think it's slower than it should be. Pretty polished, lots of tools. The free version leaves out some multimedia stuff that the pay version includes, so some of that you'll still have to configure/install yourself. It's certainly one you could show your boss.

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

Couldn't you echo all the stuff that goes on to track down where the problems are? Maybe write a script to do it to a text file, then when it gets to a certain size, you close it and start a new one?

You should be able to set your boot loader up to start the script first thing. Then see exactly what goes where and when. Maybe even get a stack trace going to see what memory stuff is going on.

There are a couple of tools out there to test for memory leaks too. Those might help.


Personally, I've got the urge to try an optimized Gentoo. But it won't happen till I get my new harddrive working.

[XMEN Gambit]

I've checked the logs, and they're not much help. I'm hoping that if it reoccurs with the gentoo installation that I'll have trimmed enough fat to narrow the search area to something reasonable. And I can also add trace messages or whatever where needed in the source, even the X.org stuff, to help, without fear of breaking something, since I built it all to begin with.

[XMEN Gambit]

Well, so far, so good. I'm running KDE now, with Konqeror, Konsole, Kontrol, and Kicker, and that's about it. No lockups thus far. Next step is installing the nVidia drivers for graphics and sound. At last I can read the instructions online while I'm following them! I'll need to build Firefox, and get Wine working correctly. That'll be a first for me right there.


BTW - don't ever just "emerge KDE-meta" unless you don't need your comp for a while. Just the minimalist subset I'm working with now has taken me roughly six solid hours of compile time on my Athlon64, and there are LOTS more packages to be had.

[XMEN Gambit]

So far, so good.

Had to get to the testing branch to get an nVidia glx driver that is compatible with kernel 2.6.12, but it works. Can now take full advantage of my 6800. 1600x1200, with the goodies, and glxgears runs as expected.
Don't have sound yet, but I'm working on that. KDE uses the aRts system, which I'm not very familiar with. I know ALSA is working, though, because I tested from the command line. WINE is somewhere still down the list.

I'll have to work out a way around the fact that some things are only 32-bit right now, like a good flash player and several multimedia codecs. Probably have to create a 32-bit chroot sub-system. Worked for Flash at least, on my Ubuntu install.

*edit*
Sound working. Graphics working. Me really liking Gentoo so far! A few issues, but nothing that a little research, mostly on the Gentoo forums, hasn't solved yet.

Downside: I changed a USE variable (which is basically a compiler option), and shifted to the testing branch as noted above. So I'm updating and recompiling everything I've got now, which isn't that much (122 packages), and lemme tell ya, it takes some time. Ack.

Upside: No lockups. Been using 100% CPU for hours doing that recompile. I'm in the GUI, browsing around the web, tweaking little configs here and there, and such, all with nVidia graphics driver and sound working. w00t! I'll have to install some serious games here after a while, like AA and UT2k4, and see how well they hold up.
I'm also using the full 64-bit power of my CPU.

[XMEN Gambit]

Augh!

Something is wrong with my Linux filesystem. It won't mount now. Not sure what caused the trouble - I believe I shut it down properly last night. Grr.

The funny thing is, the way to boot my machine was using GRUB which sat on the Linux ext3 partition. Since that won't mount properly, GRUB can't read the menu file. So I have to type in the commands to do it, manually, at the GRUB prompt. What's even more funny is that I remembered how. At least enough to get the job done. I know. You're all shocked.

Now I have to figure out how to repair the stupid thing, OR reformat the partition and start my Gentoo adventures all over again. Sigh.

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

Ah well. Look at it this way, at least you know what steps to do for the next time.

But I think that you'll be okay with what you have if you can set up your boot record.

One question though, are you sure you are trying to mount the proper device?

[XMEN Gambit]

Well, I thought I was... I've got it fixed now. (whew) Wasn't as bad as I thought it might have been. Here's the deal:

I had edited my menu.lst file (used by grub to produce the menu) when my system was last working and apparently saved it improperly - it had been overwritten with a default, empty config. I have now restored a backup. I have no idea how I would/could have saved it "improperly" as I'm certainly no stranger to loading, editing, and saving configuration files of all types with a variety of editors.

When I was remembering the commands to type into the blank grub, I directed it to the wrong version of the kernel. I keep a couple versions floating around for various purposes, and got confused. Doh! If I'd picked the right one everything would've been fine.

When I tried to mount the ext3 filesystem after booting from a liveCD, I DID use an incorrect partition number. I was using sda1 which is my Windows part, instead of sda2 which is my main linux part. Obvously mount and fsck and mke2fs and all the other utilities would be freaked by looking at a windows part! THIS is the mistake I really should not have made, since I did look at a partition table in and amongst these efforts. I guess my only excuse is that it was past my bedtime. I thought of this when I was driving home tonight, mentally going through what I did and what I might have to do for repairs. When I booted the liveCD and mounted with the correct partition number, it just *poof* worked. First thing I did was run an fsck -f. No errors found though, so I was able to remount it and recover my menu.lst, and everything's peachy.

Now, I hope my surround sound receiver is as easy to fix.