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I have a Dell PowerEdge 1300 that has uses an aic7xxx scsi controller and
the live cd is choking on it. There are several posts on the Gentoo forums
from people having similar problems. One of the followups talks about
starting a redhat install and letting it detect all the hardware and then
downloading the stage1 tarball and continuing on with the regular gentoo
install. Does this sound legit and if so could someone explain how it
works?

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 20:47:55 -0800, CM wrote:

> I have a Dell PowerEdge 1300 that has uses an aic7xxx scsi controller and
> the live cd is choking on it. There are several posts on the Gentoo forums
> from people having similar problems. One of the followups talks about
> starting a redhat install and letting it detect all the hardware and then
> downloading the stage1 tarball and continuing on with the regular gentoo
> install. Does this sound legit and if so could someone explain how it
> works?


Tried using Knoppix yet to see if it will boot and then do the install
from there.
http://www.knoppix.org/

My current system has a newer promise IDE controller that both the live cd
and Knoppix would not recognize. I ended up doing a small Red Hat install
then install Gentoo from there. I shared the used /boot partition and Grub
was already install with the Red hat install. After I was done turned
the Red Hat install into my swap partition.

On 2003-10-29, gazing longingly at the horizon,
CM <cmize@goiter.com>
felt a deep, passionate desire to let the following be known:

> [..] starting a redhat install and letting it detect all the
> hardware and then downloading the stage1 tarball and continuing on
> with the regular gentoo install. Does this sound legit and if so
> could someone explain how it works?

Given the chroot method that gentoo uses for installation, you can
pretty much set up the base system from any environment that gives you
some basic access to the disk where you aim to place the os.

In theory, a red hat "rescue prompt" would do, consider it just like
the gentoo live cd and work from there following the regular install
docs. A knoppix boot cd should do as well. Theoretically.

A small installation of any other linux distribution will work for
sure, but then you'd have to clean up the partition(s) used by that
afterwards. Using grub as the boot loader will keep things flexible
enough if you for some reason need to switch back and forth between
the two until your gentoo installation is working perfectly.

Installing from a bootable cd like knoppix is probably your best bet,
all things considered, assuming that it can deal with your hardware.

hth.

--
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Perth ---> *
11:13:00 up 23 days, 20:15, 7 users, load average: 2.14, 2.08, 2.02
$ cat /dev/bollocks Registered Linux user #261729
evolve efficient initiatives

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 04:47:55, CM <cmize@goiter.com> wrote:

> I have a Dell PowerEdge 1300 that has uses an aic7xxx scsi controller and
> the live cd is choking on it. There are several posts on the Gentoo forums
> from people having similar problems. One of the followups talks about
> starting a redhat install and letting it detect all the hardware and then
> downloading the stage1 tarball and continuing on with the regular gentoo
> install. Does this sound legit and if so could someone explain how it
> works?

I haven't tried the RedHat install route, but I am doing something
very similar as I type. I am installing Gentoo while booted from a
LNX-BBC "live CD". Here are the notes I wrote describing the
process....

------ begin -----

This is yet another method to install Gentoo on hardware which doesn't
readily support booting from a CD. It is a variation on the
alternative
installation methods document on the Gentoo web site and it is
probably a
good idea to read that document in conjunction with this one.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml

In addition, it is necessary to read the standard x86 installation
guide
as I don't bother to repeat stuff which is well-documented therein.

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml

My objective was to install Gentoo linux on my ancient (1998)
all-SCSI.
system. It has dual 233 MHz Pentium-MMX CPUs, 384 Mb of RAM, two
Adaptec
AIC78xx SCSI host adaptors supporting three 18 Gb hard drives with a
fair
bit of space on each, a magneto-optical drive and three CD-ROM/RW
drives.
The video adaptor is a Matrox Millennium II driving a 53 cm monitor
capable of
1600x1200 at 85 Hz.

This system has trouble booting from many modern CDs. The older style
of
bootable CD which loads a diskette image works fine but the modern "no
floppy emulation" type CDs do not.

I tried the "Smart Boot Manager" option listed in the alternative
instal-
lation guide but SBM doesn't handle SCSI CD-ROM drives at all so that
was
a blind alley.

One of the methods suggested in the alternative installation guide is
to
install Gentoo from an existing linux distribution. Knoppix is
suggested
but the .iso file for that is larger than 650 Mb and would not fit on
any
of my CDs. I scoured the linux distributions trying to find one which
would boot, somehow, on my system. I found two which came close:

1. DamnSmallLinux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org)
2. LNX-BBC (http://www.lnx-bbc.org)

There may be others but these two have the advantage of being small.

The DamnSmallLinux CD actually booted on my system but I didn't find
it as
functional for my purposes as the LNX-BBC distribution. For a start,
DSL
doesn't support all the newer journalling file systems.

For me the LNX-BBC CD wouldn't boot directly but it did offer an easy
work-
around by providing the tools to make a boot floppy, either from
another
linux system or from a DOS or Windows system. The extra functionality
of
this system with its very thorough hardware detection made it my
bootstrap
linux system of choice. A secondary advantage of the LNX-BBC
distribution
is that it is designed to be a system rescue/maintenance tool so is a
very
useful thing in its own right.

With multiple hard drives I chose to split the installation
directories.
I put /usr on the first disk, /boot and / on the second disk and the
swap
partition on the third. Here are the steps that I took, written as a
sort
of user guide.



GENTOO INSTALL FROM LNX-BBC LINUX
=================================

1. Download and burn the .iso file from http://www.lnx-bbc.org

2. Try booting from the LNX-BBC CD. If that works then you could
probably
boot from the Gentoo CD but skip to step 5 anyway, otherwise ...

3. Find another linux, Windows or DOS computer with a floppy and a
CD-ROM
drive. Load the CD, mounting it if necessary and change to the
root
directory of the CD.

Examples:
linux: mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom

Win2K: r:

Obviously you'll have to substitute the correct device name and
mount
point (linux) or drive letter (Windows, DOS).

4. Load a defect-free floppy disk into the drive. Use the commands

dd if=lnx.img of=/dev/fd0
or
cd rawrite
rawrite2 ..\lnx.img a:

for linux and DOS/WinXX respectively. If you are an incurable
mouse-
clicker then on Windows NT, 2000 and XP the rawwritewin program
can be
run from Windows Explorer. It presents a notebook with fields to
be
filled in. Rawwritewin.exe seems to be nothing more than a simple
GUI
front end for rawrite2.

Run rawrite2 with no parameters to see other options. I just used
the
format shown above.

At this point you should have a bootable floppy which loads a
linux
kernel that will scan your hardware and locate the CD.

5. The splash screen presents a few screen format options. Choose
one
that makes you happy. I chose the highest resolution but it isn't
necessary.

LNX-BBC will bootstrap itself and scan your hardware. It will
mount
every partition that it can see and handle, including NTFS, HPFS,
JFS,
FAT, FAT32, ext2, ext3, reiserfs and probably some others. They
will
all be mounted as read-only.

There are no man pages but it is really worth running the "help"
command and reading selected items, starting with the first.

6. Read section 6 of the Gentoo x86 installation guide.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml

For my partitioning tasks I used cfdisk rather than fdisk but that
is
a matter of choice. I did:

cfdisk /dev/sda
cfdisk /dev/sdb
cfdisk /dev/sdc

for my three SCSI drives. If you have IDE drives then they'll
have
names like /dev/hda and /dev/hdb. I believe USB drives are also
supported and that they have different names again but I don't
know
the pattern.

Spread over the three 18 Gb disks were several existing partitions
for
running OS/2 and Windows 2000. However on each disk there was a
fair
bit of contiguous free space available so I could distribute my
Gentoo
linux installation over more than one disk. In particular, I
could put
the swap partition on its own drive.

I set up a large logical partition on /dev/sda. This was to
eventually
house the /usr heirarchy. I made a small (80 Mb) primary
partition at
the start of /dev/sdb and a larger, logical one on the same drive.
The
small partition would eventually become /boot and the larger one
would
be /. On /dev/sdc I made a 512 Mb logical partition for the
swapper.

/dev/sda5 maps to /usr
/dev/sdb1 maps to /boot
/dev/sdb5 maps to /
/dev/sdc5 swap

If you only have one hard drive then follow the recommendations
given
in the Gentoo x86 installation guide.

It will probably be necessary to reboot at this point. The
preferred
method is to use the "reboot" command but the good old
Ctrl/Alt/DEL
chord should work. In any case resume with step 5 in this
document and
use fdisk or cfdisk to check that you got your partitioning
correct.

7. Create the file systems

Follow the guidelines in the main installation document. The
commands
may be a little different. I did the following

mkreiserfs /dev/sda5
mkreiserfs /dev/sdb5
mke2fs -j /dev/sdb1
mkswap /dev/sdc5
swapon /dev/sdc5


8. Set up networking. Usually that is just a matter of running

trivial-net-setup

and supplying the correct values. If you have problems then read
the
section in the "help" system. For me the program detected and
used my
3Com 3C905c card with no problems but if you have an ISA network
adaptor
then it may be necessary to invoke some of the incantations
described
in "help".

For my system I used manual configuration to enable adaptor eth0

IP address: 192.168.47.1
Netmask 255.255.255.0
Router 192.168.47.254
Nameserver none (defaults to router, i.e. 192.168.47.254)

Those values work for me because I'm behind a small NAT
Router/Firewall
and that box has the IP addresses of the real nameserver. If you
have
a different arrangement then you should try DHCP first. If that
doesn't
work then you can try the manual method like I did but you'll plug
in
your own correct values for each field. Note that the router and
nameserver just happen to be on the same box in my setup but they
perform quite different functions.

8: Mount the installation partitions

Unmount the partitions you want to use from the /mnt/rw/discs
heirarchy.
In my case it was

umount /mnt/rw/discs/disc0/part5
umount /mnt/rw/discs/disc1/part1
umount /mnt/rw/discs/disc1/part5

The linux swap partition created earlier does not need to be
mounted.

To be as close as possible to the x86 install configuration I made
a
new mount point in the /mnt/rw heirarchy and mounted the
partitions
established in step 5. Yours will almost certainly be different
so
don't follow my example exactly.

cd /mnt/rw
mkdir gentoo
mount /dev/sdb5 gentoo
cd gentoo
mkdir usr
mkdir boot
mount /dev/sda5 usr
mount /dev/sdb1 boot

Checking with mount shows

...
/dev/sdb5 on /mnt/rw/gentoo type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/rw/gentoo/boot type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb5 on /mnt/rw/gentoo/usr type reiserfs (rw)

which is correct for my setup.

9: Download the stage tarball.

I started with stage 1. "pwd" shows that I am in /mnt/rw/gentoo
which
is the right place. If that is not your current directory then

cd /mnt/rw/gentoo

Apart from this slight difference, follow sections 8.1 and 8.2 of
the
x86 install guide to load the tarball and unpack it. What I did
was:

links http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu/releases/x86/1.4/stages
(Select the x86 directory)
(Select and download stage1-x86-1.4-xxxxxxxx.tar.bz2)
('q'uit from links)
tar -xvjpf stage1*.tar.bz2

10: Switch to the new filesystem

Read section 8.6 of the x86 installation guide but be aware that
there
is no need to do anything with /proc at this stage; it is already
mounted.

"pwd" should still show /mnt/rw/gentoo.

The chroot procedure is straightforward ...

cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/resolv.conf
chroot . /bin/bash
usr/sbin/env-update
source /etc/profile

11. Setting up mirror sites

Section 8 of the x86 installation guide describes the use of
mirrorselect
for choosing mirror sites. Of course mirrorselect is not relevant
to
the LNX-BBC linux distribution and so is not provided.

If you are installing from a "Live Installation CD" then it
possible
that the next phase can be completed with no mirrors defined but
last
time I looked there were broken URLs in the build scripts and if
they
haven't been fixed then your build will fail with no simple
mechanism
to restart other than from the beginning. Setting up mirrors is
probably a good idea.

One possibility is to build mirrorselect. A suggested method is

emerge mirrorselect

but that is going to take a long time and is probably vulnerable
to any
broken links so it may not work.

Another method is to add the GENTOO_MIRRORS to /etc/make.conf by
hand.
A list of mirrors is on the Gentoo website:

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/mirrors.xml

I used nano to add the line

GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://adelie/polymtl.ca/
ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo"

to the end of /etc/make.conf. Note that the entire list of
mirrors
is enclosed in quotes and that individual mirrors are separated by
a
space. It is probably a good idea to have at least two mirror
sites
in the list and to choose ones which are geographically "close" to
your
location, at least on the same continent.

12. Building the system

The rest of the process is exactly the same as documented in the
x86
installation guide, section 9 onwards.

----- end -----




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