[gentoo-dev] bug reports & impressions on first gentoo install

[Mark Henderson]

Hi Gentoo Team,

I just completed my first gentoo install over the weekend, and have a 
few comments (or bug reports) that might make it easier for others in 
future. I realise that Gentoo is pre version 1, but of course it can't 
hurt to point out things that might be needed to get us there (if others 
agree).

1) Documentation
    ----------------
Firstly let me say that the standard of the documentation is excellent.
However, I ran into a few problems with http://www.gentoo.org/doc/build.html

a) many of the important notes and comments appear beneath the code 
listing they refer to, as apposed to before. This makes it too easy to 
only see them after running the commands in question (I got caught when 
compiling the kernel, and had to redo this when I read further down 
about items such as devfs that had to be included). This is easily 
fixed, and I'd be happy to take it on.
b) I think some of the notes and code listings might be slightly out of 
sync with the current build process. (e.g. fstab - code listing 25 - 
refers to /dev/hda1, dev/hda2, etc, while the fstab the build process 
created for me has "/dev/BOOT", "dev/ROOT", "/dev/SWAP". I left this as 
is, assuming it was a devfs way of doing things. I could be wrong though!)
c) The default "fstab" provided seems to assuming the use of ReiserFS 
for the boot and root partitions. This seems to be out of date, and is 
certainly confusing. I've used ext2 for /boot and ext3 for / and it 
would have been _very_ helpful to have the correct parameters included 
for each file system, allowing me to simply uncomment what I need. 
Something along the lines of:

    # Uncomment appropriate line, depending on required filesystem
    #/dev/BOOT     /boot    ext2        parameters????   1 1
    #/dev/BOOT     /boot    ext3        parameters????   1 1
    #/dev/BOOT     /boot    reisferfs   parameters????   1 1

    #/dev/ROOT     /           ext2        parameters????   1 1
    #/dev/ROOT     /           ext3        parameters????   1 1
    #/dev/ROOT     /           reisferfs   parameters????   1 1

d) Code listing 29: what is recommended - compiling network driver as 
module or not? This could be dealt w/ in the section on compiling the 
kernel, and could therefore be potentially made redundant
e) Code listing 32 seems to be redundant, as the same command is run in 
30 or 31.
f) Code lsiting 36 should comment out the NT Workstation option in the 
sample grub conf, and make it more clear that it is for people 
dual-booting. Once again, I got caught here with the naming of the file, 
only reading the note that followed after creating the file (but was 
able to rename it, of course).

2) Bootstrap
    ----------
a) I bootstrapped over a 56k modem, and it would have made a huge 
difference to the time taken if the required files could have been 
downloaded in the background while compilation continued in the 
forground, rather than having things happen in serial.
b) No mention was made regarding using mirrors in the documention for 
the bootstrap process, although I've now discovered this would have been 
possible (but would not have helped me in particular).

3) Errors
     ------
a) In code listing 37 I was not able to "umount /mnt/gentoo" as it said 
it was busy

4) Using Gentoo
    --------------
These comments might be due to my not being a Linux guru just yet, but 
anyway...

a) The SSH host keys had not been created, although SSH seemed to be 
installed. After consulting the man page, I fugured out how to create 
them, and was then able to start SSH and log into the box via SSH. I 
subsequently discovered by chance that there is a script 
("/etc/init.d/ssh") that would have created these keys for me. Should 
this not have been done as part of the installation process? (or at 
least documented?).
b) Packages such as SSH, Apache, MySQL, etc, that I have installed using 
emerge (sshd was already installed) do not start automatically when the 
machine reboots. I have also noticed that there is not inet.d or xinet.d 
installed by default. It's likely that this is all the desired 
behaviour, but coming from Redhat, it has me slight confused.
c) I'm getting some error messages during the boot process, but they 
scroll off the screen before I can see them, and I can't find them in 
any log files (I installed metalog).

Well, that's it for now. I hope some of this has been useful. I'm 
looking forward to getting to know Gentoo and its community better.

Cheers,
Mark