On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:50:15 +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote:

> I didn't say anything about my hardware.  The main hiccough, installing
> gentoo, has been the ath5k module, which was at one time, I think,
> ath_pci. Newer kernels may support this out of the box, in a gentoo
> install.  Beside that, dual monitors are working with the nvidia
> drivers.

Ath5k works reasonably well, I've bee using it on this Eee Pc for a while.

> Another problem, a MAJOR problem, has been a recent marriage of pata and
> sata drives, all as scsi, /dev/sdX.  With Gentoo, say a year or so ago,
> I had no problem with mixing four drives, two sata and two pata.  Ubuntu
> wasn't able to differentiate, and even on a recent install I was forced
> to edit grub.conf (or grub.lst) before the system could boot off the
> right drive.  Former /dev/hda became /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 was
> recognized as /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3.  UUID numbers were confusing and I
> then blamed Ubuntu for moving ahead too quickly.  I lost a bunch of
> archived material due to that issue.  More recently, I see that Sabayon
> is also using UUID numbers in fstab.  Still, I am now reluctant every
> time I try to upgrade or install.

UUIDs are good for automated installers as they provide a level of
independence of device numbers. For manual install like Gentoo, you are
better off using filesystem labels. You can make sure they are unique and
they make fstab a lot easier to read.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Borg -- James Borg -- licensed to assimilate.