Juju

I just spent the better part of the weekend trying to get Gentoo installed on my new-ish computer. I wanted to try out a good 64bit OS. (WindowsXP64 beta being a nightmare) I primarily use Mandrake at work, but I read Mandrake wasn't that great on amd64. (note: I like Mandrake, so sue me. I wouldn't exactly call myself a linux guru, but I have been using it for over 10 years (woah, has it been that long) since the days of downloading slackware disks off a BBS) Fedora installed relatively easily, but I wasn't too impressed with it. I'd played with Gentoo in the past and I really missed it, unfortunately despite Gentoo's awesome documentation I had a hell of a time getting it to install on this system (the LiveCD didn't detect the sata hard drive or the onboard nic). Right now I'm sitting happily in a super fast (glxgears running at a whopping 13,900 fps! -that wasn't a typo) slick Gnome desktop while emerge --update world compiles in the background. I wanted to write it all down for my own records before I forget what I had to do to get it working. Here's a basic rundown of my system:

MSI K8N Neo Platinum Motherboard (NFORCE3-250) AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Western Digital 10,000RPM 74gig Serial ATA (WDC WD740GD-00FL) nVIDIA GeForce 6800 1gig ram

First, we'll get the install to see the drives, etc and get the right kernel options going...

The first two major problems were getting the damn thing to see the hard drives and the nic. The modules required are satanv and forcedeth (for the nic). However Gentoo wasn't smart enough to do that automatically. Most resources I found said to just run "modprobe satanv" and "modprobe forcedeth", however these commands would just lock up. Finally I found that when you boot the livecd you have to type "gentoo noapic" at the boot prompt. Once I did that, I was able to load those modules with modprobe.

So then I went about installing Gentoo, decided to use the universal live cd and just go with a stage3 install so I wouldn't have to compile everything. The next mistake I made was using the genkernal option to compile my kernel. Doing that means linux will not be able to see the sata drive because you have to compile the sata_nv into the kernel and not as a module. So you have to compile the kernel manually and enable the following options (into the kernal not as modules, I decided to compile the nic in as well, but that could be a module if you want):

cd /usr/src/linux mv .config .config-old make clean make menuconfig

Device Drivers ->

SCSI device support -> SCSI low level drivers -> < *> Serial ATA (SATA) support < *> NVIDIA SATA support

Networking support -> [*] Network device support Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) -> < *> Reverse Engineered nForce Ethernet support (EXPERIMENTAL)

Turn on sound card support, but don't enable anything under Advanced Linux Sound Architecture or Open Sound System. (we'll be using gentoo's alsa-driver package later)

Sound -> Sound card support

I haven't actually tried this with anything yet, but the board has it...

IEEE 1394 (FireWire) support -> < *> IEEE 1394 (FireWire) support

I haven't been able to get the fancy frame buffer console working though, I keep getting vesafb0 error -6 even though I enabled the following...

Graphics support -> < *> VESA VGA graphics support Console display driver support ---> [*] Video mode selection support < *> Framebuffer Console support

Apparently Gentoo complains unless you enable devfs under...

File systems -> Pseudo filesystems -> [*] /dev file system support (OBSOLETE)

Also make sure you have ext2 and ext3 enabled, but I think that was on by default and I removed reiserfs. I'm pretty sure that was everything. Finally, compile your kernel. (one nice thing about doing your kernel manually is that it compiles a LOT faster then genkernel since you're only doing the bare minimum, boots faster too)

make && make modules_install mount /boot (note: I decided to go with basic suggestion of having a seperate boot partition) cp arch/x86_64/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-2.6.9-custom vim /boot/grub/grub.conf (can't believe base gentoo doesn't come with vim, so emerge vim first, stupid nano)

Put the following in grub.conf, note! the noapic option. Here's my partition scheme:

/dev/sda1 = windows xp /dev/sda2 = /boot /dev/sda3 = swap /dev/sda4 = /

default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo 2.6.9
root (hd0,1)
kernel /kernel-2.6.9-custom root=/dev/sda4 noapic

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Next, we'll get that sweet Geforce 6800 working with xorg-x11...

This was a lot easier, but I still ran into a hell of a problem getting the damn acceleration working. I also found a neat thread on the forums that increased my glxgears fps test from about 8,000 fps to almost 14,000.

emerge nvidia-kernel emerge nvidia-glx

Add a line that says "nvidia" to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6. And run "modules-update". Then run "modprobe nvidia".

Edit /etc/modules.d/nvidia and uncomment the line that says: options nvidia NVregEnableAGPSBA=1 NVregEnableAGPFW=1

xorgconfig made an xorg.conf that loaded fine, but glxinfo would complain about "Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual". Turns out it requires you to add a DefaultDepth of at least 16 in the Screen section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here's a snip of the changed settings I made and what I did to get the scroll wheel on my intellimouse to work:

Section "Device" Identifier "Card0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "nVidia Corporation" BoardName "Unknown Board" BusID "PCI:1:0:0"

Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" Option "Buttons" "5" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection

Now to get sound working...

I basically just followed the Gentoo alsa docs. The built in sound on this motherboard is an intel8x0.

In /etc/make.conf add alsa and oss to your USE. Also add a line that says: ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0"

emerge alsa-driver emerge alsa-oss emerge alsa-utils

Add the following two lines to /etc/modules.d/alsa:

alias snd-card-0 snd-intel8x0 alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

Run the following commands:

rc-update add alsasound boot /etc/init.d/alsasound start amixer set Master 100 unmute amixer set PCM 100 unmute amixer set Center 100 unmute amixer set Surround 100 unmute