I am attempting my first gentoo install to reside with FC3 and XP.

The first time I went through, doing a stage 3 install and making my own kernel, everything seemed to work ok untill i rebooted, grub looked very wierd, really garbled, and I couldn't boot anything from it, FC, XP, or gentoo, and I couldn't read the error because of the way it was garbled. so I decided to just start over.

This time, I decided to use genkernel since everything seems to work ok from the liveCD. I am not sure of all of the options I have to have, but I do know some that I need and some that I don't for sure. So I did and made adjustments to what I knew for sure I needed, and removing what I knew for sure that I did not need. Once finished in menuconfig, it says "Compiling bzImage" or something similar and just sits there.

Now i know it would take longer to compile this time, but my custom one toke less than 30 minutes. I let the genkernel sit there for over an hour and a half and it still just sat there with the same message.

How long should a genkernel take? Perhaps I could try my own kernel again? I could try to see what I needed, but there is no lspci nor /proc/pci.

The whole portage system and emerge really intrigues me, and I thought that I finally had enough knowledge to try it out. Maybe I was wrong...

I had to hard reboot and get back into windows, but I should be able to boot the liveCD and chroot to start where I left off.

Any suggestions are welcome, and if this thread is more appropriate in another forum, I would ask a mod to please move it.

Thanks

-Nathan

How fast is your machine? Intel or AMD?

Genkernel compiles almost everything (as a module) so that it works near-universally. I could imagine it may take quite a while.

The garbled grub thing is VERY likely due to a line in /boot/grub/grub.conf that reads something like
but you don't actually have an image there (wrong partition perhaps). Try commenting or editing that line.

It's an athlon xp running at 1725MHz (i think thats equivilent to a 2100+)

I think you are right about the splash, that was my first guess. It was as the /boot is on hdb1, but I also had problems with emerge where it would go through 3 servers, trying each one 5 times and failing, before getting to one that worked, albeit slowly.

I think the original time there were also problems emerging ati-drivers because of the server problem, so I skipped the part about mirrorselect when going through the second time.

I can't edit those lines because they aren't there anymore since i started over.

an `emerge sync` may solve the server issue. The list of available servers on the livecd may not be completely current. I've had that problem a few times when first starting up.

Also, of course, ping www.google.com to be sure that eth0 is actually set up.

Well, I guess I will try again, I found another Handbook from Gentoo that uses the networkless installation and the GRP.

I was wondering how to use the precompiled packages, but the original guide I had didn't say. I will try this. I want to get a gentoo system up and running without taking a long time to compile everything.

I think I am correct in assuming that I can use this method to get a system up and running fairly quickly with Firefox and a DM already compiled, then I can slowly update these packages and compile them myself. Right now I am looking for a speed increase, it doesn't have to be the fastest though, so thats why I think the GRP might be the better way to go.

even with GRP, you'll still need to compile your kernel... but yeah, it took me about 3 days to compile my basic system, and then another full day to compile OpenOffice.org. GRP is nice for that. You can also purchase a FULL dvd GRP set of ALL available packages on their site for a pretty decent price.