[gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Jim Hatfield]

The machine I posted about earlier (GRUB GRUB GRUB...) is dead.
It hung booting the 2005.0 CD, and if I booted a DriveImage CD
with a DOS partition, every key on the keyboard was echoed ^A.
Ah well.

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. Nice, but not helpful in logging in. And of 
course sshd isn't enabled by default. No matter, I reboot off the
CD, mount everything, do the chroot thing and add sshd to the default
runlevel, reboot and I can get in remotely.

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

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.



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Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

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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Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Daniel Drake]

Jim Hatfield wrote:
> 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.

We are writing documentation on this at the moment. With manual configuration,
build everything into the kernel unless you have a reason *not* to. Build ALSA
(sound) as modules, since the ALSA utilities work better with modules.

Daniel
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Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Allan Gottlieb]

At Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:58:42 +0100 Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Jim Hatfield wrote:
>> 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.
>
> We are writing documentation on this at the moment. With manual configuration,
> build everything into the kernel unless you have a reason *not* to. Build ALSA
> (sound) as modules, since the ALSA utilities work better with modules.

*Very* interesting.  Please let us know when the documentation is
 available.  I have build everything into the kernel (including alsa)
 and so far it is working well, but I haven't stressed audio.  What
 problems should I be looking for and do you advise rebuilding the
 kernel with alsa as modules even if we don't experience trouble with
 everything built in?  (I should have said all but nvidia built in).

allan
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Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Daniel Drake]

Allan Gottlieb wrote:
> *Very* interesting.  Please let us know when the documentation is
>  available.  I have build everything into the kernel (including alsa)
>  and so far it is working well, but I haven't stressed audio.  What
>  problems should I be looking for and do you advise rebuilding the
>  kernel with alsa as modules even if we don't experience trouble with
>  everything built in?  (I should have said all but nvidia built in).

It's fine to build ALSA into the kernel if you are happy to configure it,
which usually isn't too much hassle anyway.

The reasoning behind compiling ALSA as modules is that it then gives you the
option of using 'alsaconf'.

alsaconf is a great little utility, which, providing you have built the
modules, will configure pretty much any sound card for you, set up the system
for autoloading the relevant modules and saving/restoring volume, and unmuting
the channels.

I came across it when i was attempting to get an ISA sound card going in an
old computer. It just didn't work when built into the kernel or loading the
module manually. I discovered alsaconf, which did some weird probing, and 20
secs later informed me of 4 cryptic parameters that were needed to pass to the
module in order to find the sound card, as well as doing everything else I
described above.

Recently at work, I built *all* alsa drivers as modules, and proceeded to test
30-40 sound cards that we had lying around. ALSA supported every one of them
that wasn't so broken that it stopped the PC booting, and alsaconf made it
dead easy even with the older PCI cards and the ISA ones too.

So, the advantage of building ALSA modules is that you can use alsaconf, which
in most cases makes initial configuration a little bit simpler, and in some
cases is a complete lifesaver.

You might be interested in our recently revamped ALSA guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

And also, if you are interested in the upcoming kernel config doc, then you
can add yourself to the CC list on http://bugs.gentoo.org/94955

Daniel
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Re: [gentoo-user] Interesting install experience

[Allan Gottlieb]

At Thu, 14 Jul 2005 20:33:23 +0100 Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Allan Gottlieb wrote:
>> *Very* interesting.  Please let us know when the documentation is
>>  available.  I have build everything into the kernel (including alsa)
>>  and so far it is working well, but I haven't stressed audio.  What
>>  problems should I be looking for and do you advise rebuilding the
>>  kernel with alsa as modules even if we don't experience trouble with
>>  everything built in?  (I should have said all but nvidia built in).
>
> It's fine to build ALSA into the kernel if you are happy to configure it,
> which usually isn't too much hassle anyway.
>
> The reasoning behind compiling ALSA as modules is that it then gives you the
> option of using 'alsaconf'.
>
> alsaconf is a great little utility, which, providing you have built the
> modules, will configure pretty much any sound card for you, set up the system
> for autoloading the relevant modules and saving/restoring volume, and unmuting
> the channels.
>
> I came across it when i was attempting to get an ISA sound card going in an
> old computer. It just didn't work when built into the kernel or loading the
> module manually. I discovered alsaconf, which did some weird probing, and 20
> secs later informed me of 4 cryptic parameters that were needed to pass to the
> module in order to find the sound card, as well as doing everything else I
> described above.
>
> Recently at work, I built *all* alsa drivers as modules, and proceeded to test
> 30-40 sound cards that we had lying around. ALSA supported every one of them
> that wasn't so broken that it stopped the PC booting, and alsaconf made it
> dead easy even with the older PCI cards and the ISA ones too.
>
> So, the advantage of building ALSA modules is that you can use alsaconf, which
> in most cases makes initial configuration a little bit simpler, and in some
> cases is a complete lifesaver.

thank you for the lucid explanation.

> You might be interested in our recently revamped ALSA guide:
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/alsa-guide.xml

It is indeed much improved since I last used it.

> And also, if you are interested in the upcoming kernel config doc, then you
> can add yourself to the CC list on http://bugs.gentoo.org/94955

Done.

Thanks again,
allan
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