[Sussex] Installing Gentoo - more questions

[John D.]

On Saturday 13 Dec 2003 8:30 pm, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Firstly, I suggest going on-line and reading this:
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/desktop.xml
>
> .. it's kind of a supplementary guide for getting a desktop system up
> and running post a base Gentoo install.
Ha, a little easier said than done - I'm having to alternate between the 
desktop guide, the installation guide and now IBM'S developerWorks 
Introduction to XFree86 4.x - and apart from getting VVV stressed with this, 
I may be making some progress, though I suspect that this may be 2 steps 
forward, 1 step back.

> > No, I have a generic Geforce 4 m420
>
> Nothing "generic" about it, you'll need the proprietary nvidia drivers.
> Sounds like you have already emerged the nvidia-kernel patch, I'd also
> advise emerging the nvidia-glx package.

I suspect that I may be close to getting X configured. When I try startx now, 
I am getting the nvidia splash screen, and when the "X" cursor appears, it 
moves around, but apart from a very minor colour change, I can't manage to 
make the default background stippled grey colour appear - it doesn't seem to 
matter what I try. The other thing that's obviously not far away, is the 
keyboard - most of the keys seem correct, though I've got "gb" set for the 
keyboard, I haven't managed to work out why I can't get a £ sign, at the 
moment, I'm getting an accented lowercase u.

<snip>
>
> mkdir /mnt/cdrom
>
>  .. a mount point can be a directory anywhere on your system.  Once you
> have this your mount command (including the -t ) should work correctly.

Nope, that didn't work. I found another suggestion that said to try mkdir -p 
/mnt/cdrom which seemed to work

>
> Follow the document I mentioned at the beginning - you need to configure
> X, distros like Red Hat and SuSE do this for you, Debian helps you make
> choices, Gentoo expects you to sort it out for yourself.  This is one of
> the main reasons that building a Gentoo machine will teach you a lot
> about how a Linux system hangs together.

Sorry, I disagree. The tone of the gentoo documentation seems to be rather 
better than a lot of stuff that I've tried to use, but it seems to presume 
more "prior knowledge" than anything else that I've come across - even worse 
than an "IKEA flatpack" :P.

Anyway, the  mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom thing didn't help, but after trying 
the suggestion from last week (sorry whoever posted it, I've lost all my back 
e-mail stuff with all this installing/reformatting/repartitioning) I got a 
slightly different response after trying the mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom 
/mnt/cdrom

it said "No medium found" - which means that even though up to this point I've 
installed everything from my cdrw, I had to use my dvd drive to see what's on 
the disc

So this brings me to one of the latest problems, when I then try the command 
emerge -k kde it starts telling me 

"Calculating dependencies" with the spining | but then stops and tells me
"emerge: there are no masked or unmasked ebuilds to satisfy 
">=sys-apps/bzip2-1.0.2" ".

Surely, if it's the GRP disc that I'm trying to do the emerge from, then it 
would have the dependency files ? But I have no way of working out how to get 
round this (as I don't understand what the hell I'm doing, or why, and have 
to blindly follow the instructions/tutorials etc would/could this be anything 
to do with following instructions for GRP install, and the desktop guide at 
the same time i.e. for GRP I wouldn't have to emerge sync, whereas for the 
desktop instructions I do - and have- ? hence would have to emerge kde to get 
it from the mirror?

Next is a lilo question, I've modified the lilo.conf so it includes the info 
for my mandrake install, so i can just reboot into mandrake, and don't have 
to keep using a floppy (the lilo version is the one from the gentoo install).

If I try /sbin/lilo, it tells me "Fatal: open /boot/kernel-2.4.20-gentoo: No 
such file or directory".

Again, could/would this be to do with /boot no being mounted at boot time, to 
"prevent damage" ? - I've read somewhere that to do anything with /boot I 
have to mount it (or should I change the fstab so it does get mounted at 
boot, or even just mount -a before I try and run lilo?) In fact, would the 
boot have to be mounted to mandrake can get to it (It's common to both mandy 
and gentoo)?

Finally, I can't remember where it popped up or why, but could you enlighten 
me as to what this is/does?

modprobe: Can't locate module /dev/apm_bios

and is it something that I should have in my 
/etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4 to load at boot time ?

Thank you very much for the continued assistance I will be issuing "I.O.U.'s" 
the next time I can make a LUG moot.

regards

John D.