Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Willie Wong <wwong@××××××××××××××.edu>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Gigabyte T1028M Install Journal
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:02:14
Message-Id: 20091226125311.GA17463@princeton.edu
1 Hi list,
2
3 Having troubled the list much in the past, I figure one way to
4 contribute is to here list some pit-falls I encountered in getting a
5 working environment set up on my Gigabyte T1028M netbook. I will
6 gradually update this thread as I run into more problems and figure
7 out how to solve them.
8
9 * Installation
10
11 The 1028M, like most netbooks, does not have an optical drive. But the
12 BIOS is capable of booting from USB. So one way of installing Gentoo
13 is to boot from a USB disk running SystemRescueCD, which has enough
14 bells and whistles that the built-in Realtek RTL8101E ethernet jack
15 works. Then one can just follow the Gentoo Handbook to do the install.
16
17 Just for reference (in configuring the kernel), the hardware on my
18 netbook includes
19 - Realtek RTL8101E ethernet
20 - Atheros wireless
21 - The IDE/SATA/PCI/USB chip set is Intel 82801G
22 - VGA is Intel 945 GME
23 - Audio is hda-intel
24 More on other bits of kernel config later.
25
26 If you just want to nuke the pre-installed stuff, then a quick fdisk,
27 untarring the stage-3, and installing the bootloader and kernel is
28 pretty much all you need to get a (re)bootable machine.
29
30 But, as I said before, the computer does not come with optical drive,
31 even though they do include a set of Install CDs in the purchase. The
32 recovery system, like many netbooks, consists of an extra partition on
33 the Hard Drive that boots and re-images the harddrive to factory
34 state. One may want to save that partition for a rainy day.
35
36 To dual boot, I found out the hard way that the partition table is
37 fragile. gparted does a good job resizing the Windows partition. But
38 to re-partition the newly freed space, remember: Windows has a quirky
39 behaviour. If one does not change the entry units to "sectors" in
40 fdisk, the Windows bootloader will crap out the next time you try to
41 boot into Windows.
42
43 The 160G harddrive is big enough to contain a 20G Windows partition +
44 a 4G FAT32 partition I use to copy files between the two boots. The
45 rest (minus the ~1G rescue partition) is dedicated to Gentoo.
46
47 * Drivers for the Kernel
48
49 I use intelfb on the console. The native resolution of the netbook is
50 1024x600-32. The frequency probably doesn't matter that much as it is
51 a LCD display. One should read the Kernel Doc if one needs help with
52 the boot parameters.
53
54 The netbook comes with a touchscreen, which requires the USB
55 Touchscreen support in the Kernel (under Device Drivers -> Input ->
56 Touchscreen). That's right, the built-in eGalax TouchScreen is USB
57 connected. Though I have not quite managed to get it working yet (as a
58 mouse). Not a big deal since I haven't installed X at the moment. I'll
59 deal with that later. At least now with the proper kernel support, I
60 have a device in /dev/input/event6 that registers whatever happens to
61 the touch screen.
62
63 The netbook also (like the eeePC and friends) come with the ElanTech
64 Touchpad for a PS/2 mouse device. Be sure to select the proper kernel
65 support (Device Drivers -> Input -> Mouse -> ... something here...).
66 It is the one for the ElanTech PS/2 support, and hard to miss (though
67 I did on my first time through the configuration).
68
69 Now, if your computer is like mine, just this is not enough to get
70 mouse working. You'd find after booting that dmesg lists no ElanTech
71 devices! This is a known bug! It happens also for eeePC and MSI Winds,
72 that whatever chipset is responsible, is causing a problem that
73 overflows the kbd driver, which causes the mouse driver to not load at
74 boot-time. A workaround is to pass "i8042.noloop=1" as a kernel boot
75 parameter. With this, and with gpm pointed to the proper mouse device
76 (on this box it is /dev/input/mouse1) one gets the pointer on the
77 console. (Useful if you browse the net in links on a console in
78 framebuffer mode.)
79
80 * Console
81
82 I have the console set-up to use unicode. Of course, the available
83 codepages are still limited to basically European glyphs. I emerged
84 "terminus-fonts" and am using ter-v16n in conf.d/consolefont.
85
86 Of side interest, I just found out that lynx now has CJK support. Of
87 course, in the normal console where Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyphs are
88 not available, this doesn't do much. To see CJK on the console, one
89 needs to install a console emulator. In my case, I am mostly
90 interested in Chinese support, so I emerged zhcon. Now, I am not
91 exactly sure if zhcon has UTF-8 support (their webpage suggests yes,
92 but I am still looking to toggle it on). Right now I run zhcon with
93 the locale set to zh_TW.Big5. A downside to this is that when starting
94 lynx, one needs to go to the options (which now shows in Gibberish
95 since lynx by default outputs to UTF-8 which the locale now doesn't
96 parse), and tick the option to set output locale to the environment
97 locale. After hitting submit the text will be all "right" again.
98
99
100 To be continued... (?)
101
102 W
103
104 --
105 If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
106 Sortir en Pantoufles: up 1114 days, 11:07