[gentoo-amd64] Re: Fwd: [install] emerge gentoo-sources fails

[Duncan]

"Martin Herrman" <martin@×××××××.nl> posted
40bb8d3b0810201037q75b3cb5dkaf16b5a6a5f5dd73@××××××××××.com, excerpted
below, on  Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:37:15 +0200:

> I came up with the idea that maybe burning the iso image to CD has
> failed, so I downloaded the iso again and... discovered that I was using
> 2008.0 instead of 2008.0-r1.. So I downloaded the latest one, burned it
> on CD and started the install again. Emerging the kernel sources now
> works :-)

Hmm...  I hadn't thought of a bad ISO image or burn.  I guess I take it 
for granted that people verify the md5 and/or gpg sig.  I know I always 
do on such downloads.  (Portage of course verifies ebuilds and tarballs, 
tho AFAIK not the eclasses or profiles.)

I'm glad the -r1 worked for you, tho.  FWIW, since Gentooers generally 
incrementally update, those LiveCDs and stages don't always get as well 
tested as they should.  Particularly the LiveCDs, since people can 
install from other Linux instead (as I did, back in 2004).

FWIW, I'm going to be doing an install of my own pretty soon.  AA1 (Acer 
Aspire One) netbook.  But I plan to create an image on my main machine 
(dual dual-core Opteron, 8 gigs RAM, 4-way kernel/md RAID, yada yada, 
obviously the one I want to compile on compared to the puny netbook) and 
more or less just copy it over.  So I'll be using a LiveCD (actually 
LiveThumbdrive) of some sort, maybe Gentoo's maybe something else, to do 
the partitioning and copying, but build the stuff to copy from x86 stages 
on my existing amd64 machine, in a 32-bit chroot.

Once that (relatively mild) challenge is conquered, I'm /contemplating/ 
(but haven't really looked into yet) a /real/ challenge, cross-compiling 
Gentoo to run on my Linksys WRT54GL router (200 MHz mipsel, 4 meg flash, 
16 meg ram, tho there's a hardware mod to add an sdcard for several gigs 
of (removable) storage that I'm looking at), currently running OpenWrt.  
OpenWrt is nice and has a lot of flexibility... but it has been /years/ 
since I used that sort of init system, and I just like the idea of having 
Gentoo on it. =:^)  Obviously, that'd be a cross-compile from my main 
machine as well, tho equally obviously, it'd be a /much/ slimmed down 
version I actually installed, and I'd not be worried about compiling 
everything and its brother to run on it, narrowing the challenge a bit.

> I have used slackware, redhat, mandrake and debian before (in that
> order) and about 2 years ago switched to Ubuntu because it was so easy
> to use. But it's also bloated (it is even hard to compile your own
> kernel) and that's why I started to use Gentoo 2 months ago on my
> notebook. I liked it (compared to FreeBSD: that ports system is
> documented so badly..)!

Interesting.  There's a BSD guy on my ISP's (Cox) newsgroups that keeps 
telling me how much better they are.  Philosophically I'm a copyleft guy, 
so the BSDs don't so interest me, but it's interesting to hear the other 
side of the story after seeing his pro-BSD comments for so long.  FWIW, 
there's a Gentoo/FBSD alternative if you're interested in that sort of 
thing.  It's basically Gentoo's ebuild system on a FBSD kernel.  AFAIK, 
you can either go GNU userspace and just run the FBSD kernel, or run 
mainly FBSD, but with the prefix portage and packages and its basic GNU 
dependencies (bash, and there may be other GNU dependencies as well, I'm 
not sure) as an alternative packaging system, not replacing the main FBSD 
system.  There are similar Gentoo-prefix ports in various stages of 
maturity for OSX and I believe OpenSolaris, among others.

> I plan to compile my own kernel (as I did years ago before using
> ubuntu), but are currently using genkernel to have my system at least
> running well. When install is finished, I will configure the kernel on
> my own.

That makes sense.  When I did it, I just figured why go to the trouble of 
figuring out genkernel, when I already knew how to do my own kernels, so 
that's what I did, bypassed genkernel entirely, and did my own kernel.  
For the first year or so tho, I continued to use the Mandrake lilo 
bootloader (binary simply copied over to my Gentoo install), as grub 
wasn't yet popular when I started on Mandrake and I didn't learn it until 
some time after I was on Gentoo, but lilo wasn't yet available on Gentoo 
64-bit.

Gentoo's nice for those that like to tweak and don't like the bloat of 
most binary distributions but want the packages the thin ones don't 
have.  But the first install to a system (even if it's your second or 
more system with Gentoo) can be a monster!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman