As previously noted, I got a neat Asus eee Box… but the thing comes with Windows XP Home and I want to use it as replacement for my e-mail & web server.
So, what I decided to do is installing Ubuntu Server edition on it – my selection was based on existing documentation and how active the forums are, and I think currently Ubuntu is better supported from this point of view than Arch (not to mention Gentoo).
There are some issues to fix, before we go on. First, we don’t have framebuffer and a lousy resolution at the moment; second, the dhcp does not work at startup (there is an error message about no dhcp client being installed, although dhcpcd is there); finally, I think it’s better to rebuild the whole toolchain before we go on.
First, I created a file /etc/portage/package.use:
sys-libs/glibc userlocales
mail-mta/ssmtp mailwrapper
Especially the first one is important in order do downsize glibc compliation / installation time.
Now, I found a post on the Gentoo forums on the dhcp-stuff; it says to re-emerge baselayout. As I am going to re-emerge my whole system anyway, baselayout should be included.
So, first sync the tree and then emerge system; however, as I already configured X into my USE flags, it want’s to emerge the X server already, for which I don’t have time at the moment. So, I issue
USE="-X" emerge -auD --newuse system
which gives a list of 76 packages to merge – what I do of course (and note that baselayout is one of them). This takes a looooooong while… but noticeable shorter than on the old box – the difference between a Core2Duo and a Pentium 4…
We have to update the /etc/conf.d/clock file, it now looks like this:
CLOCK="local"
TIMEZONE="Europe/Zurich"
CLOCK_OPTS=""
Just to be sure that everything is ok, I run a revdep-rebuild after that (to do so, I need to emerge gentoolkit first). Nothing has to be done, so I reboot – horray! dhcp is now working.
Next thing to do is emerge some important stuff:
Now, we can set the EDITOR variable in /etc/rc.conf to /usr/bin/vim (finally!)
For sudo to work, we use visudo (as root) and uncomment the lines
Defaults editor=/usr/bin/vim, !env_editor
%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
Next thing is to configure fbsplash; there is a nice wiki article (on which I contributed at some time in the past…) on that which we follow step by step. (The only deviation is that we set VESA default mode to 1280×1024@60; also, I selected the Gentoo theme, not the livecd theme)
The lines for Gentoo in my grub.conf look now like this:
title=Gentoo Linux (Kernel 2.6.19-r5)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.19-gentoo-r5 root=/dev/sda6 video=vesafb:ywrap,mttr,1280x1024@60 splash=verbose,theme:gentoo CONSOLE="/dev/tty1 quiet
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/fbsplash-gentoo.1280x1024
Finally, we tweak the file /etc/conf.d/rc and change the following line:
RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="yes"
Finally, another reboot: apart from the atl1 module, which again failed to load, everything ok and a nice gentoo theme is in place. After using modules-update force and reinstalling atl1, everything works again.
OK – we are now almost ready for installing X and KDE. But first, we do everything needed to have the system correctly up and running. This includes:
Writing /etc/env.d/02locale:
LANG="de_CH.UTF-8"
Also, we change the file /etc/man.conf, we alter the NROFF line:
NROFF /usr/bin/nforr -mandoc -c
(This is for full UTF-8 support, as described in this handbook doc)
We then enable GPM, as described in this handbook entry (we also make all the suggested changes to /etc/conf.d/gpm).
We now turn our attention to power management; we emerge acpid, cpufrequtils and cpufreqd. Latter fails, as some dependency (lm_sensors) need specific kernel options to be set; so we recompile the kernel again with these options added:
Device Drivers -->
I2C support -->
<*> I2C support
I2C Hardware Bus support -->
Intel 82801 (ICH)
Hardware Monitoring support -->
<*> Hardware Monitoring support
Windownd W83627EHF
(This post helped a lot!)
Then, we recompile the kernel, add the modules i2c-i801 and w83627ehf to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 and reboot (as specified in the post, the W83627 module does not load correctly – so I remove it again from the autoload-file).
Finally, we now emerge cpufreqd, and configure it as given in the handbook entry.
We can add this to the default runlevel, but there is a wiki-page on CPU Frequency Scaling as well. I can’t start /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils, there is an error:
Beim Einstellen ist ein Fehler aufgetreten. Typische Fehlerquellen sind:
- nicht ausreichende Rechte (Administrator)
- der Regler ist nicht verfügbar bzw. nicht geladen
- die angegebene Taktik ist inkorrekt
- eine spezifische Frequenz wurde angegeben, aber der Regler 'userspace'
kann entweder hardwarebedingt nicht genutzt werden oder ist nicht geladen.
I will investigate later on this.
TO-DO before X:
Now, what is missing for next time is some stuff on harddisk monitoring (wiki entry on SMART and on hddtemp , also we have to add some entry in /etc/fstab for the cdrom. I want my multicard-reader to be working; also, I have to configure ALSA…. still something to do for next time!
Well – some basic linux files are around, let’s get started.
First, I needed to create the distfiles directory in portage and mount the appropriate partition:
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles
mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles
Now, we can continue with chapter 6 of the handbook.
We first add some mirrors to make.conf (note that there is an error in the handbook – for adding the mirrors to /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf – instead of /etc/make.conf – the line should be
mirrorselect -i -o >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf
(add the -o).
We now copy resolv.conf, mount /proc and /dev and finally enter the chroot – as given in the handbook.
(Note: I won’t finish the installation today; the following commands need to be re-issued after each reboot:
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage
mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage/distfiles
cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update
source /etc/profile
export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"
This as long as we are not able to boot Gentoo directly)
Now, update the portage tree Then, update portage, as there is a new version available (note that this updates several other packages,too).
The profile already points to 2006.1 (which is currently the most recent profile) – so, there is no need to change.
Now, the USE flags – this is a lengthy process and can take some time; here’s the current USE flags I defined for this system:
bash-completion bzip2 cjk crypt ithreads logrotate nptl nptlonly ntfs syslog xfs zip zlibcups curl curlwrappers dbm imap libnotify libwww mysql ncurses nls odbc pcre perl php python readline samba sasl sdl slang ssl unicode xml xsl -apache2acpi apm cdr dga dbus dri dvdr fam fbcon foomaticdb gphoto2 gpm hal hddtemp iee1394 ipod lm_sensors logitech-mouse mmx nvidia opengl ppds scanner sensord sse sse2 svga usbalsa -arts cddb cdparanoia directfb dvd dvdread -esda52 aac aalib asf audiofile css dts dv dvdnav encode exif fame ffmpeg flac gif graphviz gstreamer jpeg jpeg2k lame live mad mikmod mng mp3 mpeg musepack ofx ogg png quicktime real sndfile sox speex subtitles svg theora tiff truetype v4l vcd vidix vorbis win32codex wmf xine xpm xv xvidcairo kde qt3 qt4 X xcomposite -motif -yelpamarok firefox ftp gd gimpprint gmail icons iconv imagemagick imlib jabber java javascript kdm kqemu latex mime -mozilla mplayer nsplugin pdf spell tetex tidy toolbar videos vim vim-syntax webdav xfaceAs I know what will be coming, I’ll ad some other stuff to make.conf:
VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia fbdev"
INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev"
ALSA_CARDS="hda-intel"
LINGUAS="de en"
As said – defining USE-flags is sometimes tiresome – as today…. so I’ll quickly set /etc/locale.gen to
de_CH.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
…and run locale-gen. Then, I copy /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich to /etc/localtime; I emerge the gentoo-sources, and that’s where I will continue tomorrow.
After Windows is now completely up and running, and after I also have updated my BIOS to rel 1202, I started with Linux.
EDIT: After having some problems in the next step, I decided to start all over – and after some feedback on my original disk layout, I decided on the one described below. Also, the original chosen make.conf seemed a little…. to “original”, so I decided for the standard one below.
I downloaded a kernel of truth live-cd, as it has drivers for the attansic L1 ethernet controller included as module atl1.
It turned out that the live cd configured my network interface to eth3 – with this now revealed, the game can start!
As usual, the Gentoo handbook is my main source – at least, for the general guidance. I will note where I use other docs.
Today, we are going to partition and format the rest of the disk. I already blogged about the partition layout of the disk; so at least the partition sizes should be more or less ok. But I will change / to be 100G of size (instead of 50) and create an additional FAT32 in the remaining space of the disk (for easy data transfer between Linux and Windows).
So, we end up in section 4 of the handbook. Using cfdisk, I create the partition table as given:
Name Flags Part Type FS Type Label Size (MB)
sda1 Boot Primary NTFS [^F] 53868.41
sda5 Logical NTFS [^L] 107372.81
sda6 Logical Linux 102396.52
sda7 Logical Linux 2048.10
sda8 Logical Linux 10240.48
sda9 Logical Linux swap 1019.94
sda10 Logical Linux 102396.52
sda11 Logical W95 FAT32 20925.12
(Note that sda1 and sda5 are the existing Windows partitions – I thus created sda6 to sda11).
After writing the partition table to disk, I create the file systems:
mke2fs -j -O dir_index/dev/sda6
mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/sda7
mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/sda8
mkswap /dev/sda9
mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/sda10
mkfs.vfat /dev/sda11
We activate the swap and try to mount root:
swapon /dev/sda9
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/gentoo
Now, we surf to a gentoo mirror (we are now in chapter 5 of the handbook) and download the i686 tarball for stage 3 which we immediately unpack.
As we now have to downloade a portage snapshot, we mount the portage partition:
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage
mount /dev/sda7 /mnt/gentoo/usr/portage
Now, we download the snapshot and unpack it.
The last thing to do to complete chapter 5 is to set some compiler flags in make.conf. Here’s the final make.conf:
ARCH="nocona"
COREFLAGS="-pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CPUFLAGS="-msse3"
CFLAGS="-Os -march=${ARCH} ${CPUFLAGS} ${COREFLAGS}
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
PORTAGE_NICENESS="12"
FEATURES="parallel-fetch distlocks"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
The explanations can be found as follows:
Now, everything is prepared for the next step – chrooting and installing the toolchain! Stay tuned!
Well, here comes the next part – the client installation continues.
Windows has completely updated itself in the meantime (and yes, I can see the whole 400G of the HDD now – I therefore also created a large extended partition sized according to what was left, and created a logical partition partition of 100G in it – for Windows programs).
Oh, and after the windows updates, I installed the latest nVidia forceware (93.71), the sound driver and the motherboard chipset drivers. As I own a logitech keyboard and mouse, I installed the latest iTouch and MouseWare.
BTW, the sound is working now, also on speakers. Will have to check what’s the problem on Linux…
Funny enough, IE did not start when it was updated to IE7. It turned out that it is a common bug as described in the MS knowledge db as article 928427; one could see the IE window for a very short second or so, and then it disappeared again. Luckily, with the given knowledge db article, I could solve this problem.
While at it, I was configuring IE and Mediaplayer – basically tell them that they are not allowed to do too much. And, speaking of security, I installed the free anti-virus AVG (available at www.gridsoft.com) and the free ashampoo firewall (available at www.ashampoo.com)
Now, I removed some Windows components: MSN explorer, Outlook Express and Windows Messenger.
That’s about it – my Windows XP on the new box is up and running now! Time for some games and stuff – but as this is all pretty standard, the first part of this installation instruction is complete. I’ll be back with Linux and Gentoo installation in a few days…
2009, tkhobbes 