Re: [gentoo-user] Seek advice: converting Sabayon to Gentoo ?

[Alan E. Davis]

I didn't say anything about my hardware.  The main hiccough, installing
gentoo, has been the ath5k module, which was at one time, I think, ath_pci.
Newer kernels may support this out of the box, in a gentoo install.  Beside
that, dual monitors are working with the nvidia drivers.

Another problem, a MAJOR problem, has been a recent marriage of pata and
sata drives, all as scsi, /dev/sdX.  With Gentoo, say a year or so ago, I
had no problem with mixing four drives, two sata and two pata.  Ubuntu
wasn't able to differentiate, and even on a recent install I was forced to
edit grub.conf (or grub.lst) before the system could boot off the right
drive.  Former /dev/hda became /dev/sda1, and former /dev/sda1 was
recognized as /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda3.  UUID numbers were confusing and I
then blamed Ubuntu for moving ahead too quickly.  I lost a bunch of archived
material due to that issue.  More recently, I see that Sabayon is also using
UUID numbers in fstab.  Still, I am now reluctant every time I try to
upgrade or install.  My recent attempt to update Ubuntu resulted in,
eventually the loss of my 90GB /home directory.  I will never know what I
lost.  (Yes, I know, should have backed it all up.)  It was my fault again,
but the failure of grub again to recognize the drive on which I had
installed, or the need to shuffle boot priorities.  I am still learning how
all this works.  Sabayon also had the same issue, so I moved partitions and
now have the system booting off of /dev/sda .

All this means I am pleased that sabayon is working, and I am able to treat
it as a gentoo system, without TOO much tweaking.  I think I cannot go back
to Ubuntu, as easy as that was.

That's about the hardware issues.



Alan