14 replies to this topic

[AdvMutant]

Hey all.
I just got a netbook for Christmas. It's something I don't regret - a beautiful Asus Eee PC 1015 PEM... It's not the Dell Inspiron Duo that I wanted, but it does have an amazingly comfortable keyboard and a dual-core processor. It also comes with Win7 Starter.

Well, I was gonna install Linux on it, but I had some errors. At first, I didn't understand why won't BIOS boot from my memory stick - I was sure it's considered a removable device but it detected it as a hard drive. Then I booted PartedMagic, partitioned my drive, and tried to install Gentoo[with PartedMagic]. Everything went smoothly until I needed to compile the Kernel. I left it compiling and went to a VB5 course graduation party[lol I didn't learn anything new in the entire course, the teacher was so bad she got fired. The good side is that we're gonna study Java :c-biggrin:]. When I was bach I was surprised to find an error - something that has to do with a bzImage, if I remember correctly. I tried again and it didn't work, same result.

Do you guys know what can be the cause of the error, and the solution? I must say that I used genkernel - the command I used was "genkernel all".

Thanks, Mike.

[Alexander]

Hi, the errors can range greatly for each system - can you provide a photo or sample of the error displayed?

[AdvMutant]

Well, not now. I'm gonna try it again very soon - I'll post the result.
-EDIT-
I've just finished installing Gentoo. I've used the gentoo-hardened sources[designed for servers, lol] and configured it manually this time. I'm pretty sure I enabled a ton of garbage that I'll never use, but at least it works. Almost. I have LILO dual-booting Win7 Starter and Gentoo[normal+rescue mode], both boot normally. My no. 1 problem right now is networking - it just won't work. The live cd[MicroSD card, actually] detected the USB cable I used but the final OS does not, even after copying the needed DNS info. The network isn't deteted by /sbin/ifconfig. I don't really need a USB network connection but I do need a wireless one, with either WLAN or bluetooth. Can anyone point me to a guide that will help me fix it?

Thanks...

Edited by AdvMutant, 31 December 2010 - 09:56 AM.

[AxleCage]

First I would advise against using hardened kernel for everyday use. I would suggest to install the gentoo-source kernel and go through and enable what you want and what you don't want. If you never done it before it may seem confusing, but gentoo provides enough documentation that should help you along the way.

Just an fyi if you do plan to reinstall gentoo I would suggest to make sure to pay attention to what filesystems you use when partitioning your drives as ext2 is not enabled automatically in gentoo kernel and that is what the guide will tell you to use for boot. If you do not enable it you will not be able to boot. And you will need to make sure to emerge the compression that you plan to use for the kernel if you plan to not use default setting as you will receive errors for the bzImage when trying to compile and you will not be able to boot.

Now back to your second questions, without your wireless card information I can not be of much help. Your card may be supported or it may not. You may need to use ndiswrapper and you may not. If you are using a broadcom I believe they finally released proprietary driver that you would be able to emerge from portage, but would need network access(hopefully you can use cat5 for time being?). If you have one of the other cards I don't know much about them, but knowing what card you have I could try and point you in the right direction. So just let me know and i'll try and help. I have not used gentoo in awhile, as I have switched to Sabayon(gentoo based, overlayed of portage and entrophy). But I have a buddy that can help me, help you as he is a gentoo guru.

The USB cable will work out of box most of the time, but you have to enable it in the kernel. I forget exactly where it is located in kernel, but its under networking and will say usb support or something like that.

If you want to try to use gentoo sourcekernel i would emerge it and 'cd /usr/src/linux' 'make menuconfig' (then configure kernel how you like) then 'make && make modules_install'

Edit:

Also try to do a iwconfig and see if any of them show a wireless connection. If so you can always do a 'ifconig wlan0 up' replace 0 with whatever is displayed.

[AdvMutant]

lol I forgot about this thread :lol:

Yes, I'm using a Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter according to Windows Device Manager. I searched elsewhere[can't remember where] and got the same suggestion - using iwconfig. There are two ports, lo and eth0. It says no wireless extension available or something for both. I'm pretty sure it's just a missing driver, I'll check it out soon. Thanks.

[Alexander]

Oh I did not see the edit!

Broadcom has a unified driver which should work on Linux, it is a normally nasty to install driver which most laptops use.
Broadcom.com - 802.11 Linux STA driver

I had gotten in to work after this. Also note, if this does not work you can download the Windows version of your driver, and install it (quite easilly) with ndiswrapper, which will essentially emulate your wireless network capabilities even though your card is not supported, you just need the drivers and *.inf.

[AdvMutant]

Well, I've just finished placing the installation files in place and chrooting. I extracted the driver's archive and tried running "make clean" with no luck. I get something like the following -

/lib/modules/2.6.36-gentoo-r5/build: No such file or directory. Stop.

[all] Error 2

According to readme.txt, it's because of the lack of needed packages. I need some build-essential linux-headers or something. Will the commands for Ubuntu work with "emerge" instead of "apt-get install"?

[Alexander]

Try "emerge build-essential", and you need to make the driver before you can optionally clean its build directory.

[AdvMutant]

Hey, I've just tried running "emerge --sync" but it fails to connect to the internet. I'm not using proxy or passwords to protect my internet connection, just a regular USB(instead of ethernet, I don't have a spare cable) network. Both ping and internet browsing work.

[Alexander]

What is the error displayed? Can you also ping distfiles.gentoo.org?

[AdvMutant]

Well, I won't have time to try again next week as I'm trying to build a Linux cluster. I'll report as soon as I will.

[AdvMutant]

I just tried again and got the same error, but that's because I made the same mistake - not copying the DNS info. It seems to work fine now.
Thanks anyway :)