[gentoo-dev] Installation Gotchas

["Bruce A. Locke" <blocke@shivan.org>]

Hello...

I did my first non-vmware (aka on real hardware) install of Gentoo and was
wondering about the following:

- If DMA is going to be on by default in the kernel would it be possible to
include hdparm on the cd image so people with harddrives, etc that have
issues with DMA can turn it off after the cd boots?  I had to create a 10mb
partition and untar the hdparm package because the HD would freak out with
DMA turned on under lightload. (Yes I know, old cheap harddrive)

- Where are the kernel messages displayed once the cd has booted?  I checked
all the vt's and failed to see any of the DMA related kernel messages,
etc... would it be possible to redirect these messages to a VC to people
could use it for troubleshooting?

- On the cd image there are symlinks for zcat, gunzip, etc but no symlinks
for bzcat, bzunip2, etc

- Wget doesn't seem to be in the sys tarball...  not a big problem but I was
just wondering if it was an oversight

- The dhcp package is missing the needed directory /var/state/dhcp... the
directory should be created empty so dhclient can place the dhcp lease info,
etc in it

- The default dhcp package configuation points to various config files as
being under /etc, not /etc/dhcp

- The default kernel lacks either CONFIG_PACKET or CONFIG_FILTER which is
needed for dhclient.  I compiled a kernel myself and it works now but is
there any reason why one of those options is not compiled into the default
kernel?

- If you do a "make install" in the kernel source tree thats part of the
kernel source package, the makefile tries to play with /etc/lilo.conf (which
doesn't exist) and places the kernel image in the / (root) directory instead
of under /boot.  Also I don't see a System.map anywhere.  Is it still needed
for lsof on Linux w/ 2.4.x?

- I had to do some voodoo to get the most recent version of portage to work.
I did a ebuild merge on the most recent version, unmerged it, untar'd the
old version back, then remerged the most recent version and it started
working while after the original merge it was busted... go figure....

I have the box up and running with DHCP... I'm going to make a custom
version of the eth network template for DHCP and will probably submit it to
the list for the mailing list archive, etc.

Thanks for all your help so far...

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce A. Locke
blocke@shivan.org