Well, here it is... The start of my gentoo installation saga. You may have seen bits of this before.
The installfest: installed base system. Compiled kernel about 3 times. Had some random freezes. got gnome, evolution, firefox and some other apps installed. Retrieved mail and some config settings from my backup cd. Didn't get ati-drivers working correctly, but I did have them installed. Just before I left I decided to reconnect my windows XP hdd and ended up with a system which booted into XP off either hdd - nooooooooo. I had changed my fstab and grub.conf to what I thought were the right values, but obviously they weren't... I made sure I had the live cd and packages cd before I left to help me get back into Gentoo. I went home, and now, no matter what hdd I booted off, I got "System disk error" - not good. I wanted to watch a DVD, so eventually I reconnected my Debian hdd and watched it from there - after trying the winxp mbr fix and some more fiddling with grub. Next day. Lots more fiddling and undoing previous fiddling and carefully checking everything in the fstab and grub.conf. Eventually got everything to work by following the instructions... Previously I had had Grub installed on my Debian hdd (hdb) and was booting off that into windows or Debian. The same config didn't work for Gentoo and I ended up installing grub into the MBR of the windows drive (hda) and everything was happy. Now, to get onto the net... Oops, forgot to install a dialer and there is none on the packages cd. Set up flatmates mac to do nat and IP forwarding and download dialer via network connection. (I have done this before, so I already had the scripts set up on the mac) I got wvdial and set it up, and then discovered the modem lights panel applet and decided I wanted to use that, so I emerged pppconfig (which I used to use on Debian) which has seperate scripts for on and off and set it up, with some permissions fun along the way - This is where the "ls - l /etc > dirlist" on my backup cd was very helpful as it showed which files needed to be in the dialup group. Still getting random freezes in the console and x regularly (requires hard reboot). Also got the ati-drivers going somewhere along the line. - ~3600 fps in glx_gears. Lots of googling trying to find cause of crashes. Applied the following patches/modifications to the kernel. (Last night was a bit of a disaster to start with as hdb4 (root partition had reached the maximal mount card and the pc would freeze while it was fscking. Booting off the live cd and manually fscking it reset the mount count and allowed me to boot and apply the patches) drivers/video/vesafb.c commented out lines which limit the video memory to 16MB (I have 128) include/asm/page.h increased vmalloc space to 192MB (To provide room for the extra video memory addressing space required) (fixes found at http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php? s=39425eedb5f8f399fbc956f965959a13&threadid=33736241&perpage=30&pagenumber=1) applied this patch for the lockup issues (2.6.5-r1 version) http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=169004 recompiled and installed the kernel. rebooted. Seemed to be running ok... (mouse was really jerky, but I think this was due to me swapping for another mouse after pc had started (I put a very basic ps2 mouse in to allow me a pointer in x when I booted off the live CD (needed to download e-mail with patch link) and my intellimouse explorer wasn't working) Turned off PC and had tea, followed by playing cards. Turned PC on this morning and mouse was fine. Turned it off again and went to work. I forgot about sound. I got that working with Alsa without to many issues - I may have recompiled kernel with appropriate modules for my sound chipset. I am using the kernel modules, rather than the standalone ones. Next: peripherals (cd writer, camera and card reader and possibly gamepad) I think the cd writer probably already works, just haven't tried it and the rest shouldn't be too difficult.
