gentoo
 

so on thursday i started my attempt at installing gentoo on my toshiba portege 7140 laptop. its an older but reliable laptop and i thought i would toss gentoo on to help me in my wardriving persuits. so i managed to make it all the way through the installation steps. but when i booted into gentoo as opposed to the livecd, the os was unable to find my nic. so it was reccomended that i recompile my kernel with the e100 module integrated. so i do that, only changing one thing on the kernel. it takes like 2 hours to compile, actually freexing the first time i did it. and i get an error message.

ERROR: failed to compile the "modules" target...

while ihave this error, i have experianced the comp locking up if the screen is allowed to go to sleep. the screen will go black and ill use an arrow key to bring back the screen, about half the time results in the caps light flashing and no response.
so needless to say im gettin a little frustrated. this is day 3 on this project, and i feel like my old win 2k build was much more stable than this.


ok, that was my rant. anybody else have asimilar horror stories?

My first Gentoo install a little over a year ago was pure torture. I had used Linux for about two years, so I wasn'ta total newbie but I had an awful time getting my network and X to work. After 3 or 4 days I gave up on it and went back to Suse for awhile. Since then I've installed it about three times, and it gets easier and easier. I still have some problems getting gensplash working, and getting my usb stick working, but I wouldn't trade Gentoo for anything.

did you compile your kernel by hand or genkernel?
I hate genkernel, it really needs to be redone somewhat IMO
roll your own kernel from the start my friend it's the man's way :P

that error seems a bit odd...what source you using?

also if you compiled the driver into the kernel...that should not be the module that's failing you...since it's not a module...

oh man...but some of the horror stories I have from installation...
I was such a newb ricer. I had some crazy aggressive CFLAGS couldn't understand why my system was unstable, and ran ~x86
those were crazy days....taught me so much

(now run amd64 (mostly) stable with decent CFLAGS)

Try installing Fedora. It ships with a ton of drivers, which is really handy for computers with weird hardware (i.e. laptops). Gentoo is not, from what I understand, a distro that you want if you're just interested in tossing it on your computer and having it work 100% right away.

I stared out with a Slackware distribution of Linux 1.2.13. At the time there was no loadable module support. If you so much as got a new printer, you had to recompile the kernel. Got a lot of great experience from that, such as "don't forget to enable ELF support". ;)

Now that I run and administer a bunch of Linux servers for a living, I've come to appreciate having everyting Just Work. Oddball NIC? No problem, Fedora probably has drivers for it already. Need to update the boxes? ssh into everything, do an "up2date -i", make sure nothing's broken, get on with life.

don't have time for a real indepth post, but 1) Linux and Gentoo especially can be difficult to install on laptops and 2) if you're using Gentoo you need to be open to failure and learning from failure. If you're not, that's fine, but you'll be better off with a different distro.

well all im glad to see that im not the only one to have problems with gentoo. i am using the 2.4.26-gentoo-r13 kernel, as that was what was reccomended by their documentatio n. also i did do a genkernel install. i think im going to wipe the drive and start anew with a kernel with only the things i need. i am writing a list up of all the drivers i need to just get the damn thing to work, then ill build the kernel with just that and after i have a stable working gentoo i will go and add things like a gui and such. I have been using fedora for about a year now and that install went like butter. im still running core one actually, but its just my router/firewall. all in all i was really frustrated with my laptop when i started that rant. thanks all for listning.

Kind of off topic, but what advantages, if any are there to sticking with a 2.4 kernel, especially now that 2.6 kernels have been out for almost a year now? I guess I am surprised to see that Gentoo's regular kernel is a 2.4 while the 2.6 series is still the "development" kernel.

yeah I couldn't tell you. I don't know why it still lists 2.4 either. I've been using 2.6 for awhile now.

I'm a Linux n00b, but I tried a few different distros recently, including Gentoo and Fedora. I discovered after installation that Gentoo was not the best place to start despite the rave reviews by its loyal fanbase. Anyway, long story short - when I set up Fedora, I set it up with the 2.6.n (don't remember off-hand) kernel. There were problems with that version of the kernel that require you to run cd burning apps (I was using k3b) as root. So far as I have been able to determine, the problem has not yet been corrected.

Sounds like you need to try a distro a bit more your speed, not give up and use W2k. Throw SuSE or Fedora on there and get everything working, then use your experience there to get Gentoo working.

Plus, laptops have always been a bit rough to get Linux working on. Proprietary hardware, obscure mobile chipsets, and weird video cards are all the kinds of things that make Linux hard to get working properly.