Basic Gentoo Problems
 

Ok, so I have been wanted to get a gentoo install for quite some time now, and have just managed to get around to it. I know this is capable of some serious stuff, but as it stands I have a half-arse distro that is doing more annoying me than working. My laptop has had many different distros on it from debian-suse, and gentoo has apparently come into a bit of problem with the way things are done around here. I have managed to build everything without noticing that my /proc/bus/usb is totally absent. My usb mouse lights up when it is plugged in, but I simply cannot access it. In order to issue the startx command I have to incorporate a mouse into the xf86config, but unfortunately this does not want to work. I have no serial ports, and while I have a touchpad I cannot for the life of me find out what it is called on the machine. I am fairly certain I have tried everything in the kernel configuration, and any help would be appreciated. Also, when I am in terminal (where I always am) and I view something longer than the screen size I am simply screwed because there is no way for me to scroll up and see what was missed. Help here would be appreciated as well.

Thanks,
J

Gentoo Installation guide gives you all the details on how to install Gentoo. About your mouse. Try recompiling the kernel, useing DrOzz's guide for kernel compiling. Use a newer kernel (like 2.6.9) and it will surely support your mouse. Another problem with mice is that you might have USB legacy turned on in your BIOS. Turn it off, fixed my problems with mouse in FC2.

For the text going out of your screen, try pipeing it to less viewer, like this:

cat file.txt | less

(see the | character, it is called pipe an it redirects the output of the command to another command.)

Or for ascii files, you can use less to view them.

You can also use less to combine it with ls command like this:

ls -la | less (and thus getting a scrollable output of the ls command)

Good luck!

I managed to get both my mice to work which let me do that whole GUI business and thus fix my text issues. Now I have to find some way to get my /proc/bus/usb path seeing as gentoo is kind enough to tell me that I lack one. Any help would be nice, although I may figure this out sooner or later, sooner would be best.

Thanks,
J

Can't help you there :(

i treat gentoo as LFS with package management... its kick ASS package management... but its if you do somthing wrong building it,,, its gonna get built wrong, they dont call it the second hardest distro to install for nothing ;)

Here's what i do with gentoo..
recompile the kernel WITHOUT devfs support the gentoo handbook says you need it, ignore it, its old and llame, instead, compile with the new improved "udev" support... after you boot, you will get errors about not having devfs in the kernel... ignore it and "emerge udev" poooof... thats that problem gone.

make sure you have "usb" in your use flags, i think usb should be on my default, but adding it doesnt to any harm. also, make sure you have libusb installed "emerge libusb".
make sure you have the correct USB drivers compiled into the kernel, and either load them in the modules auto load script, and add the modules script to the boot scripts with rc-update.... OR if you are feeling lazy, emerge hotplug and add that to the init scripts.

ok, so now things have begun to work but there are still issues which i cannot resolve. One being my pcmcia. When i boot it says that there is not slot detected, although i have the necessary things built into my kernel. Also it says that it cannot detect my sound drivers, and i am wondering what needs to be emerged for such. One last problem being that I am dual-booting and everytime I select the windows option I am returned back to my grub bootloader, wtf? If anyone could give me some advice I would be very appreciative.

Thanks,
J

are you using the hotplug bootscript ?
the hotplug script will auto-detect pcmcia provided all the drivers were included in the kernel compile (either into the kernel or as modules)

as for the grub not booting windows, seems like you accidently specified grub as the bootable windows disk.. and so its calling itself recurivly ?

post your drive partiton structure, and your /boot/grub/menu.conf and we will take a look.

ohh, and also, when you say some things are starting to work, what did you do ? unless you say otherwise, we can only assume you chose to follow all advice that was given ?

I have taken the advice up until this point and now under my 2.6.9 kernel I am running into problems w/ PCMCIA. My usb became there when I updated my kernel, and the devfs went away when I emerged udev. There is a period of time at startup when I cant see what is going on, but that's neither here nor there. When I do regain the ability to see what is going on I recieve the message:

cardmnger : no sockets found. Check to see if the correct modules are loaded into the kernel. Or something along those lines.

And still no sound drivers although that is not overly important at this time.

Here is my drive partition structure:

/dev/hda1 * 1 125 62968+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 46731 71111 12288024 c FAT32
/dev/hda3 126 1118 500472 82 swap
/dev/hda4 1119 46730 22988448 83 Linux

and my grub.conf

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

title=Gentoo Linux 2.6.9
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.9 root=/dev/hda4

title=Gentoo Linux 2.4.25-r1
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.5.25-gentoo-r1 root=/dev/hda4

Title=Windows XP
root (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Hotplug doesn't work like it used to, it only detects things as they are plugged in. To get all the necessary modules plugged at boot, you have to emerge "coldplug"! Really.

I had a printer that would not work after I upgraded hotplug to the latest version. Since I added coldplug it works again, though I have added the necessary modules to the list in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and removed coldplug from my init scripts (rc-update -d coldplug).

my suggestion with gentoo is to chuck it .. it's not worth the grief one has to go through.
wonder what most folks mean when they are talking about speed .. I don't think for most of the users it will be visible .. I think one can potentially get the same adv. by compiling your gdm and wdm

Gento is faster, if you compare that you are running only the services you want to run. Also smaller, if you consider, that you install only what you want to install. Offcourse, if you are a big GURU, then you can have any distro do this. However, if you are new to Linux, all the other distros will install a bunch of useless programs to your harddisk, not to mention services, that run in the background. But the best thing about Gentoo is the package manager, which makes installs a joy :)