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Well, I got Gentoo installed without benefit of an Internet connection.
The live CD did very well, although the AMD64 live CD is apparently
missing the portage directory. I didn't know how to make a dialup
connection on install to get the folder so I moved down to the x86 LCD and
it went ok.

At the end of the process, I did a genkernel default compile and a basic
GRUB installation. Before I rebooted I checked the /boot and /boot/grub
directories to make sure that I had something that might possibly boot.
They looked just about like any other Linux - a normal image and grub.conf
file.

Rebooted just fine, except for some kernel modules or hardware that are
missing - something for later when I will make a custom kernel.

But.... When I look in /boot now, it is empty! Nothing.

So how am I booting with an empty /boot directory. Obviously grub knows
to look somewhere for the proper info, but what moved it? A locate search
for grub.conf only comes up with a man page.

I am lost and don't want to continue till I understand this.

Anybody?

Bill Davis

On 2004-01-17, Bill Davis <BillD@omniforgetit.com> wrote:
> Well, I got Gentoo installed without benefit of an Internet connection.
> The live CD did very well, although the AMD64 live CD is apparently
> missing the portage directory. I didn't know how to make a dialup
> connection on install to get the folder so I moved down to the x86 LCD and
> it went ok.
>
> At the end of the process, I did a genkernel default compile and a basic
> GRUB installation. Before I rebooted I checked the /boot and /boot/grub
> directories to make sure that I had something that might possibly boot.
> They looked just about like any other Linux - a normal image and grub.conf
> file.
>
> Rebooted just fine, except for some kernel modules or hardware that are
> missing - something for later when I will make a custom kernel.
>
> But.... When I look in /boot now, it is empty! Nothing.
>
> So how am I booting with an empty /boot directory. Obviously grub knows
> to look somewhere for the proper info, but what moved it? A locate search
> for grub.conf only comes up with a man page.
>
> I am lost and don't want to continue till I understand this.
>
> Anybody?
>
> Bill Davis

The default /etc/fstab doesn't mount /boot automatically. If you need to
do something with /boot, mount it:

$ mount /boot

This is a feature, not a bug -- it's intended to keep people from
accidentally losing their /boot due to carelessness or filesystem
corruption, since generally you're not writing to /boot often. You can
remove noauto from the /boot line in fstab if you'd prefer to have it
automatically mounted.

--
Jon Portnoy
avenj/irc.freenode.net #gentoo, irc.oftc.net #cola
Opinions expressed are my own, not those of Gentoo Linux or any
other entity I am associated with unless stated otherwise.

> The default /etc/fstab doesn't mount /boot automatically. If you need to
> do something with /boot, mount it:
>
> $ mount /boot
>
> This is a feature, not a bug -- it's intended to keep people from
> accidentally losing their /boot due to carelessness or filesystem
> corruption, since generally you're not writing to /boot often. You can
> remove noauto from the /boot line in fstab if you'd prefer to have it
> automatically mounted.

Thanks for the education. Have been using RH all along and it always
mounted /boot so I didn't even remember that /boot was on a separate
partition. Always before just made /boot and forgot about what it
actually does. Makes total since now.

I am really having fun with Gentoo so far, but all my experience is on
Distros that do stuff automatically and that I am having to do manually
now. Makes for a different experience, but now I realise that this is the
way that I should have learned Linux to begin with.

Thanks again
Bill Davis

Captains log; stardate Saturday 17 January 2004 11:13 am, Lieutenant Bill Davis reported that.......

> I am really having fun with Gentoo so far, but all my experience is on
> Distros that do stuff automatically and that I am having to do manually
> now. Makes for a different experience, but now I realise that this is the
> way that I should have learned Linux to begin with.
>
> Thanks again
> Bill Davis

I agree, Gentoo is the type of Distro most people should atleast LEARN on, even if they don't stay
with it. I started with RedHat about two and a half years ago (with 7.2) on a secondary machine,
and followed all the way up to 9.0 (Buying a copy of 7.3, 8.0 came with the RH bible, and got a
year of the RHN to get RH9 faster) and then switched to gentoo in the early spring of 03 when I
finally got fed up with the way RedHat hacks and crippling alot of their software (using unstable
packages and hacking them to get them to work, mucking with the way KDE and Gnome look a la MSFT,
moving file locations et al, and I finally jumped into gentoo (I tried a few others in between but
never found one to suit). What initially kept me with Gentoo was Portage.

Anyways, to make a long story short, when I swapped to Gentoo it was like a whole new (much
brighter) world. Once you relearn things to match gentoo, everything is so much easier, faster,
more stable...well I could keep going on for weeks and still not finish the list....
--
Shan Destromp
---
Sent: Sat, Jan 17, 2004 @ 19.00.36 EST
----
OS: GNU/Linux 2.4.22-gentoo-r4
Processor: AuthenticAMD i686

Captains log; stardate Saturday 17 January 2004 11:13 am, Lieutenant Bill Davis reported that.......

> I am really having fun with Gentoo so far, but all my experience is on
> Distros that do stuff automatically and that I am having to do manually
> now. Makes for a different experience, but now I realise that this is the
> way that I should have learned Linux to begin with.
>
> Thanks again
> Bill Davis

I agree, Gentoo is the type of Distro most people should atleast LEARN on, even if they don't stay
with it. I started with RedHat about two and a half years ago (with 7.2) on a secondary machine,
and followed all the way up to 9.0 (Buying a copy of 7.3, 8.0 came with the RH bible, and got a
year of the RHN to get RH9 faster) and then switched to gentoo in the early spring of 03 when I
finally got fed up with the way RedHat hacks and crippling alot of their software (using unstable
packages and hacking them to get them to work, mucking with the way KDE and Gnome look a la MSFT,
moving file locations et al, and I finally jumped into gentoo (I tried a few others in between but
never found one to suit). What initially kept me with Gentoo was Portage.

Anyways, to make a long story short, when I swapped to Gentoo it was like a whole new (much
brighter) world. Once you relearn things to match gentoo, everything is so much easier, faster,
more stable...well I could keep going on for weeks and still not finish the list....
--
Shan Destromp
---
Sent: Sat, Jan 17, 2004 @ 19.00.36 EST
----
OS: GNU/Linux 2.4.22-gentoo-r4
Processor: AuthenticAMD i686

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 07:39:39 GMT, Shan Destromp wrote:

>Captains log; stardate Saturday 17 January 2004 11:13 am, Lieutenant Bill Davis reported that.......
>
>> I am really having fun with Gentoo so far, but all my experience is on
>> Distros that do stuff automatically and that I am having to do manually
>> now. Makes for a different experience, but now I realise that this is the
>> way that I should have learned Linux to begin with.
>>
>> Thanks again
>> Bill Davis
>
>I agree, Gentoo is the type of Distro most people should atleast LEARN on, even if they don't stay
>with it. I started with RedHat about two and a half years ago (with 7.2) on a secondary machine,
>and followed all the way up to 9.0 (Buying a copy of 7.3, 8.0 came with the RH bible, and got a
>year of the RHN to get RH9 faster) and then switched to gentoo in the early spring of 03 when I
>finally got fed up with the way RedHat hacks and crippling alot of their software (using unstable
>packages and hacking them to get them to work, mucking with the way KDE and Gnome look a la MSFT,
>moving file locations et al, and I finally jumped into gentoo (I tried a few others in between but
>never found one to suit). What initially kept me with Gentoo was Portage.
>
>Anyways, to make a long story short, when I swapped to Gentoo it was like a whole new (much
>brighter) world. Once you relearn things to match gentoo, everything is so much easier, faster,
>more stable...well I could keep going on for weeks and still not finish the list....

I agree, gentoo is great to learn from as you build up from a very minimal
system - you can see the wood for the trees.
I too tried a few distros. Starting with redhat in '97 then went on to suse,
mandrake and debian. I finally stuck with debian for a server distro. It's
easy to maintain, very reliable and you can apply security updates without
fear of things breaking. It is a little conservative for a desktop for my
liking so I use gentoo on my workstation. The 'compiling everything from
source' approach makes it very easy to use sources that are not part of the
distro. That need is becoming less and less but we'll never have everything
available as ebuilds. One thing I have found is it's best to avoid the
heavily patched kernels in portage if you want to use some third party
kernel modules. In my case, the vloopback driver doesn't work with
gentoo-sources. Though that's slightly academic now as I have moved to
vanilla 2.6 and it doesn't work with that either!