Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo on a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook

[Joshua Murphy]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@××××××.info> wrote:
>
> On Mar 4, 2012 12:54 AM, "Grant" <emailgrant@×××××.com> wrote:
>>
>> >>> I just received the new Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook and I'm trying to
>> >>> install Gentoo but I can't get install-amd64-minimal-20120223.iso to
>> >>> boot via a USB key.
>> >>
>> >> Have you tested your boot USB keys on another machine?
>> >
>> > Gentoo is installed but I can't get my USB->ethernet adapter to bring
>> > up an eth0 (or any other) interface.  It works if I boot the Kubuntu
>> > USB key.  I've definitely built the correct driver into the kernel
>> > (mcs7380).  I'm going through an emerge world right now to bring
>> > everything up to date.  Is there anything else I might need to do?
>> >
>> > - Grant
>>
>> I enabled some more kernel options under USB Network Adapters and it's
>> working now.  The install is about done but there were a few
>> peculiarities:
>>
>> 1. fdisk won't let me specify a start block before 2048 even though I
>> deleted all partitions.
>>
>
> That's normal. It's a long story, but Windows Vista and Windows 7 expects
> the first partition to start at sector 2048.
>
> You can force a lower number by toggling "DOS compatibility"; this should
> let you start the first partition as low as sector 63.
>
> HOWEVER, make sure that all partitions begin at multiples of 8 (e.g., 64,
> 72, 80, and so on); this will save you a lot of grief if it happens that the
> hard disk you're using has 4KiB-sectors. [1]

<snip the rest>

From what I recall of looking at that toy's specs, it's running on an
SSD, so it becomes even more important, performance-wise, to have
things aligned properly so any one write doesn't cause two full erase
blocks to be cycled. The 1MB alignment is, if I recall, a balance
Microsoft struck as the midpoint between multiple hardware vendors to
work well on any of them... raid arrays, SSDs, advanced format hard
drives with 4k sectors on-disk, etc.

-- 
Poison [BLX]
Joshua M. Murphy