It started off ugly, but I found the solutions, so here they are, to hopefully save other people some time.
The Gentoo minimal install image cannot see the harddrive at all. "fdisk -l" only showed /dev/sda, i.e. the USB stick on which unetbootin had installed the minimal install. I've filed bug a report on this... http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292346 Knoppix, on the other hand, could see the hard drive, but wasn't able to drive the RTL8101 network card. I ended up installing under a Knoppix "live CD" on a USB stick. Notes regarding the installation under Knoppix... 1) Get *TWO* USB sticks, one of which has at least 1 gigabyte capacity, and make sure to back up any important data on them. It will all be overwritten. 2) On a machine with a CD or DVD download and burn the microKnoppix ISO. 3) Boot the existing computer from the Knoppix CD/DVD. 4) Plug in a USB stick with at least 1 gig capacity. 5) From a console, execute "flash-knoppix" (without the quotes). That's it. Surprisingly easy. For people who insist on menus, the path is [LXDE --> System Tools --> Install KNOPPIX to flash disk] 6) Unmount and take out the USB stick, and reboot the linux machine. You will need it a lot. 7) Do the following in the exact order. I went around in circles over this one... - insert the bootable USB stick into the ACER netbook. - reboot the ACER while holding down the {F2} key. This will bring you into the BIOS setup. - go into the boot menu and select the item which mentions your USB stick. In my case it was "USB HD" (YES!!!) not "USB KEY". - save changes and boot. This should bring up Knoppix 8) Make sure that the other linux machine is up to date, and do *NOT* clean out the /usr/portage/distfiles directory. 9) Follow the regular Gentoo install instructions with these changes - open 2 terminals after Knoppix boots, and "su -" in both. Later on you'll be able to switch back and forth between chrooted and Knoppix environments - as per http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml - after bootup execute "mkdir /mnt/gentoo" from one of the 2 terms - when setting up for chroot, mount proc system with the command mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc rather than the command given in the install documentation - if Knoppix can't use the network card (as in my case) you'll have to be prepared to download stage3 and portage snapshot files, etc to the other linux machine, and shuttle them over via USB stick. This gets painfull when the instructions tell you to emerge stuff and you don't have a network card. If you followed instructions in step #8, you can shuttle the necessary tarballs over from the other machine's distfiles directory to the Acer's distfiles directory. 10) If you're going to be running "make menuconfig" manually *EXIT AND SAVE YOUR WORK EVERY FEW MINUTES*!!! I cannot emphasize this enough. There is some magic combination of keypress and dragging my fingers on the touchpad, which kills the terminal you're working in. Of course you end up losing the entries you've made. Save early and save often. Here are the "make menuconfig" paths for installing working hard drive and network card drivers... Device Drivers Serial ATA (prod) and Parallel ATA (experimental) drivers ATA SFF support Intel SCH PATA support Device Drivers Network Device support Ethernet (1000 mbit support) Realtek 8169 gigabit ethernet support It's now booting properly and seeing the internet. The install is done on GMT time, and then I set to local time. Since I'm in EST timezone (5 hours behind GMT), it complains on bootup about certain config files having dates in the future. That will disappear in a few hours. It's close to finishing an update. Next is "emerge system" to be followed by "emerge world". -- Walter Dnes <[email protected]>
