I had the painful task of installing Gentoo Linux on a machine with bleeding edge hardware recently. This particular machine (A P4, 3.2Ghz) had Serial ATA (SATA) drives and the Gentoo Live CD (2.4.22 kernel) wouldn't boot. It hung after attempting to recognise the drive.
There is plenty of discussion on this in the Gentoo forums but it was difficult to find a solid answer. I tried the 2.6 kernel experimental live CD but that also hung on booting.
Thankfully I had some Fedora CD's handy. Booting off the first Fedora CD I went into 'linux rescue'. Fedora (a modified 2.4.22 kernel) was able to boot fine and recognised all the hardware. I used that rescue linux as the base to follow the stage 1 Gentoo instructions. I didn't have 'mirrorselect' so manually set the mirror to 'ftp.nz.debian.org' where I got fantastically fast download times.
But after getting past stage 3 by compiling everything and rebooting that machine still hung. This was using the linux 2.6 kernel (gentoo-dev-sources). I went back to 2.4.22 (gentoo-sources) and it failed to boot past Grub due to a VFS related kernel panic. It couldn't find the 'root=' specified disk partition.
Back to the drawing board. Eventually I solved it. I had to ensure that I had a particular kernel setting enabled under the ATA /IDE options, and another one under the SCSI options (enable SATA support. Obvious really but I didn't expect it under SCSI). I also had to build in support for the IBM PIIX chip into the kernel rather than a loadable module - that was a dead in path for a couple of boots!
After all that pain though the machine flies (Alas, it's a work machine, not a home machine). I wanted a light window manager so I went for openbox with the Rox session manager. This is the same as on the Zaurus X11 ROM and I've grown to like it.
12:36:59 AM 
|
