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

[Grant Goodyear]

> Firstly let me say that the standard of the documentation is excellent.

Thanks!  

> 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.

Didn't anybody ever tell you to read the documentation all-the-way-
through first?  *Grin*  Less flippantly, I think most of the Note/
Important/Warning blocks are placed correctly -- one generally wants
to put notes after the bare-bones commands.

> 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

I'll let drobbins make that decision.  I did update the docs to 
accurately reflect the current fstab, however.  Thanks!

> 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

We don't make a recommendation; it depends on the needs/desires of
the users.

> e) Code listing 32 seems to be redundant, as the same command is run in
> 30 or 31.

Yep.  Thanks.  I've zapped it.

> 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).

Note about dual booting added.

> 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.

We're working on this functionality.  For the moment you can do 
"emerge --fetchonly"; see "emerge --help" (I _really_ need to update
our portage man pages one of these days.)

> 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).

True.  I'm not quite sure what to say about it, however. Nonetheless,
I've added a note about make.globals to the docs.

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

Fixed.

> 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?).

Nope.  Running the start-up script will create the host keys, but people
may have their own way of doing things, so host keys are _not_ created
at installation.  

> 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.

That behaviour is, indeed, by design.  We try to turn on as little as
possible by default, thereby minimizing security risks.

> 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).

We don't really have a good way of capturing error info.  Such a huge
amount of info is generated during bootstrap + emerge system that
it doesn't seem useful to try to dump all of that into a log.

Welcome to Gentoo!

-g2boojum-
-- 
___________________________________________________________________
|     Grant Goodyear                  |  The Secrets of Physics:   |
|     Dept. of Chemistry - Clemson U  |1. Add zero.                |
|     Clemson, SC  29634              |2. Multiply by one.         |
|-------------------------------------|3. Expand in a Taylor series|
|e-mail: goodyea@×××××××.edu          |4. Integrate by parts.      |
|www:g2.ces.clemson.edu/~grant        |5. Fourier transform.       |
|                                     |6. Add auxiliary variables  |
|_____________________________________|____________________________|