Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Sun, 10 May 2009 18:57:28 +0100, Matt Harrison wrote:
I'm wanting to try gentoo on my eeepc 900, but I'm failing at some very
basic level. I've got an external CD drive attached and booted from the
current i686-2008 minimal cd. Unfortunately this doesn't work with the
wired or wireless network devices so I'm unable to grab the stage3 and
portage tarballs.
That CD is too old, either use one of the snapshots or something like
eexubuntu to install Gentoo.
Ah ok, I had totally forgotten there are the snapshots. I'm getting a
new image that's less than a month old now. Hopefully it will have a
more recent kernel.
I was going to put them on a CD then work on the network stuff later
with a more recent kernel, then I realised that the SSDs in use won't
really like compilations being done (apart from it being achingly slow
on this processor).
SSDs use wear levelling, so they aren't subject to the same write
restrictions as more basic flash devices. But if you're still nervous
about this, point PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a USB or SD device. I've been running
Gentoo on my Eee for a year,running ~x86 so plenty of compiling, and no
noticeable problems with the SD card I use for PORTAGE_TMPDIR.
As for compilation times, I was pleasantly surprised. It's not fast, but
a lot faster than I expected.
You've just about swayed me. I'll use an old usb stick for the
PORTAGE_TMPDIR and maybe use distcc if it seems to help.
The only other thing I was thinking about is: If the appropriate drivers
for this eee900 are indeed in the 2.6.28 series, can you provide
pointers to the locations of necessary options? I have read here and
there that I need to use the athk(?) driver for wireless, and there is
such thing as the eeepc_laptop module, but I have no idea about
configuring a kernel for them.
Much appreciated.
~M
