Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Hans-Werner Hilse <hilse@web.de>]

Hi,

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:27:49 +0100
Jim Hatfield <subscriber@insignia.com> wrote:

> So I just installed another machine, using the 2005.0 CD and using
> the new instructions. It has a Matrox G400 so I added support for
> that in the kernel. This may have been a mistake.
> 
> Everything is fine until I reboot, when after the GRUB screen and
> kernel selection, the screen goes black with lots of pretty blue
> squares all over it.

This may be due to the framebuffer chosing a wrong mode for the kind of
monitor you have. You can set the resolution and frame rate on the
kernel command line. This should be documented in /usr/src/linux/
Documentation/fb/... (don't have it here atm)

> I guess I will rebuild the kernel with Matrox support removed and
> see if that fixes.

This will probably work, too :-)

> BTW, what is the received wistom wrt building things into the
> kernel or building them as modules? As well as the G400 I have
> an Intel NIC and a VIA sound card, and this time round chose to
> build them in, though before I built them as modules. I'm not 
> clear as to the pros and cons.

If the hardware is builtin, and you don't have problems with somewhat
random hardware enumeration (i.e., multiple NICs getting different
devices on each boot), there's little reason to build the drivers as
modules. OTOH, probing a module triggers (if it loads successfully) a
hotplug event, which is not the case during bootup (AFAIK, at least
there are no hotplug scripts available at that moment). So if you chose
to compile them into the kernel, you need to e.g. have "net.eth0" in
the runlevel configuration for "boot" or "default". If you're probing
them as modules, that will trigger hotplug and this should take care of
running the respective start script. If you intend to run a common
kernel on multiple machines, it may be wiser to compile some drivers to
modules, but for e.g. PCI devices this shouldn't matter a lot, you only
will save some RAM on machines that don't need the driver (compiled
into the kernel).

Sound is another matter: The kernel ALSA isn't always the latest
version. So it's best to only configure sound support but no ALSA or
OSS and then later "emerge alsa-driver".

Then there are drivers that have their own code base only. In most
cases it's much more complicated to integrate them into the kernel
sources than to compile them as external modules.


-hwh
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