[gentoo-dev] Bug report, Portage question, No sources included

[Justin Vander Ziel]

The following were included with a message that I e-mailed directly to Daniel Robbins and he asked me to post.

BUG report in order of (percieved) importance (Gentoo 1.0rc3 ISO image).
1. the modprobe line in the modules init file in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ does not
parse the entire line which it should do especially for the alsa-sound
module. I fixed the line that reads "modprobe ${1}" to read "modprobe ${*}"
and that seems to have fixed it for me; my alsa-sound modules load now.
** this one has already been fixed in the CVS tree by Daniel according to his response.

2. dependency check in the alsa-libs package requires kernel  >2.4.0-test11
which will obviously not work with the recommended and included configuration.

3. the automount daemon dies as soon as it is loaded. 
the error message from /var/log/daemon.log is:
    "lookup(file):cannot open parse modules sun (/usr/lib/autofs//parse_sun.so: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory)"

* I was unable to locate the parse_sun.so file anywhere on my system.
* the autofs4 daemon requires the alias "alias autofs autofs4" to be in the modules.conf according to Jeremy Fitzhardings' readme in the autofs download page (see http://www.goop.org/~jeremy/autofs ). However inserting the alias did not fix the above problem for me assuming for some strange reason that the missing file complaint was misguided. There is a newer daemon package version autofs-4.0.0pre9.tar.gz in the above directory which I hope to try out.

Question about Portage, et al.
After having read through some comparisons of the various software management options here http://kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/ , here http://vip.hpnc.com/~cbbrowne/linuxsysconfig.html and finally in the freshmeat article I feel like I have at least a general idea of where Portage is going. I have a couple of questions I am hoping someone in this list would answer for me
* I have a slow dialup connection and I often download the software I need at work where I have a T1 and either carry it home on a Syquest 200Mb cartridge or burn a CD for myself there (which is how I got Gentoo in the first place). I'm not sure I am ever going to want to rsync my distro because I don't see a way of determining how long it's going to take without running an audit of my system. Any suggestions?
* What is the difference between Portage and e-build? Where does one begin and the other start? I'm familiar with Daniel's article that was posted on IBM about the e-build system (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/bash3.html)
* Perhaps I'm thinking in Microsoft mode here. My question is, is there an uninstall script ready now for ebuild? The autofs included with rc3 seems to be missing the pars_sun.so library file so I wanted to uninstall it and install the later version from the source code. I could list the files from the tbz2 file and do it by hand or I've even considered writing a script to do it for me but this seems to be a logical piece of the puzzle that is missing. (is that why this is called a beta release? B )


>From the Digest Jerry A! <jerry@×××××××.org> wrote:
>Can we please have pcmcia support in the default kernel?  It's a real
>pain having to install off the CD and then build a new kernel, put it on
>floppy and then move to that to the machine in question.  It'll be a
>bigger pain if that laptop ends up being my only working machine. 8(

Unless you're thinking of modules, I think it would be better to include a few kernel variations and the dd command in the boot cd. I thought it was odd that this was omitted anyways. I had to create a boot disk in Windows using rawrite. (well actually, I learned later that I really was able to install grub from the grub prompt on the CD. Since I had never used GRUB and always LILO, this business was all new to me then.)

Thomas Flavel <thomasfl@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
>Glad to see there's finally a mailing list, now I can bug everyone and
>not just Daniel personally... ;)

Ditto for me.

>Hmm, I recall asking if rc3 could have gcc and the kernel source
>available from the boot cd - I see the kernel source code is in the
>packages directory, but I think there may have been a
>mis-communication...

Actually I may be looking in the wrong place, but all that I found in /usr/src/linux were the kernel headers which were installed with sys.tbz2 - but no source code. Actually, I did not find source code ANYWHERE which surprised me given the idea behind this distro to roll your own. Or perhaps I misunderstood and the idea is to UPDATE with source code?? (See my first question) Or perhaps, even worse, I'm more of a newbie than I think.

>I actually meant that gcc be executable from boot.img so that a kernel can be compiled directly from the boot cd
>(onto ramfs presumably, unless you mount anything else) without having to install anything to a hard disk - I for one would find >this very useful, and I'm surprised I haven't seen any other distros do this.

This sounds like a logical extension of the Portage system and a good idea to me, too.

Nuff said, perhaps too much.

Justin Vander Ziel
mailto:zielot@××××××××××.com