This article is a backup of a thread I posted elsewhere, and partially documents the installation of my Gentoo server.

Click "Comments" to see the whole thread.

So now I have a working Gentoo installation.

I had a bit of bother: After the first reboot of the installation -- after downloading and installing hundreds of megs of stuff, configuring and compiling the kernel and its modules -- my network not only didn't work anymore, but the onboard ethernet was no longer detected.

After trawling the Internets I discovered that my DFI LanParty nForce3 motherboard requires the forcedeth module to be compiled. However, during multiple attempts of remounting and chrooting to my broken installation using the boot-CD I finally killed my kernel and had no idea how to fix it.

So I started all over again -- partitions and all -- the benefit of which is I'm starting to get used to things. But alas! I hit another problem. I thought I'd play it safe and not try configuring the kernel as much as I did first time around -- I thought I'd go with as many defaults as possible, fly with it, then try compiling customised kernels once I'd got a working system. Then I got a kernel panic on boot.

I *think* I fixed that by installing RAID support. Who fucking knows, but the bottom line is that I didn't have to reinstall again -- I just did another make menuconfig and threw in as many options as I could remember doing during my first try, except this time I modularised most things instead of compiling directly into the kernel. Copied the new kernel to /boot, edited my lilo config and restarted to find it worked!

I'm sure this small victory won't last and I'll be tearing my hair out again before long. All good fun, though.

Well I've had another disaster.

"The text-browser links from the installation CD is pretty cool," I thought. "I'll type emerge links to install it." About half an hour later and 71 dependencies later I had second thoughts and wanted to uninstall it. I only want to use this thing as a RAID and LAMP server - I didn't really need links. So I did emerge --unmerge links but that only removes the program; I wanted rid of the mountain of shit that came with it, so I tried emerge --depclean ...

Now ls doesn't even work. Fortunately I can still mount stuff, and I remembered to install USB drivers so I'm backing up my /usr/src/linux/.config file, /etc/make.conf, and the installation tarballs and I'll start over again.

Good learning experience, anyway.

I'm back up and running again from my last escapade.

I do have a quick question if you can help: My keymap is set to UK, but when I press shift+3 to type it I get a ú instead of a £.

I'm not sure if it's a font-problem, because I can still get a £ by typing alt+0156.Quote:You have to set the font the console uses in /etc/conf.d/consolefontThanks. I didn't know what to choose though, so I thought I'd better leave it. The server is now set up with sshd now anyway, and PuTTY does not exhibit the same problem when I use that software on my desktop to login to the server.

Anyway, I'm doing quite well so far I think. I got Samba installed with the SWAT management add-on, RAID5 support is compiled as a module and mdadm is installed for when I bite the bullet and buy a bunch of hard-drives, Perl is installed and a few modules added to run some work-related scripts, and right now I'm installing VLC stripped of all its X-related glory.

All in all, I'm liking the simplicity of a cut-down but highly customisable Linux distro.

It's certainly been a learning experience. I can fire up Ubuntu on my desktop and Fedora on my laptop with a new found sense of familiarity. Learning how to do the network stuff from scratch was very helpful - I hate using the supplied GUI in GNOME to change network settings.

File-systems and partitioning is also much clearer to me now. I'm looking forward to doing the RAID stuff - I'm sure it'll pull a few surprises, but I read that mdadm is pretty hot at getting the process going smoothly.

The VLC installation has borked, though.

VLC is working now (a couple of weeks back, actually.) Portage is great for some things, but it seems downloading the source and compiling it yourself it the best way to get VLC installed without all the X nonsense.

This update is to say I've received my SATA drives this morning and am successfully building a RAID5 configuration using mdadm.

I can't believe how straightforward it's been so far. I forgot to install SATA drivers in my kernel first time around, but it was easy to compile the support as modules instead of directly into the kernel, then get them started with modprobe, and the SATA drives worked! All without rebooting or anything.

I can monitor the building process using cat /proc/mdstat. I have about 4 hours to go, apparently.

I found a great init.d script for automating the creation of RAM disks on boot without losing the data that's in them (so long as you shut down properly. ) Have at it:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=12174

Change this line:To this:To set the default maximum size (K = kilobytes, M = megabytes, G = gigabytes.) Otherwise, half your RAM is used.

Network Attached RAM-drive FTW.

An update for those interested (me, really):

Gentoo Server
I recently ran an emerge --sync to update all my software. This introduced config-file incompatibilities that I resolved manually, but later discovered that Gentoo can take care of simple conflicts using etc-update and its siblings (type man etc-update to read the manual for it.)

SWAT is currently borked (probably because of the emerge --sync) but I can't yet be bothered to fix it. The error is:The server is doing more cool stuff! Here is a list of its main functions:

1. 1.5TB RAID5 file-server (software-based using mdadm.)
2. BitTorrent client with web-based admin (I use TorrentFlux.)
3. VPN functionality, allowing me to login remotely with my Windows-based laptop.
4. No-IP.com account integration (makes the VPN thing more useful.)

Fedora Desktop
I've also installed Fedora Core 6 on a second partition of my Desktop and I'm gradually switching to it. I've managed to get two games to run natively on it (DOOM III and UT2004 -- they both run very well, and there's no fucking diskswapping or slowed-down system after long periods of play!), Skype is installed (GAIM is there by default), Firefox, Amarok, it automounts my shared RAID, and it even autodetected my UPS (although I'll eventually have this task taken over by the server, since it's better to have it controlled from there for obvious reasons.)

The only thing I'm missing from Windows is a decent CDG/MP3 player for my vast collection of karaoke tracks. I've tried installed PyKaraoke but MP3 support is borked (it shows the lyrics fine if I disable music playback.)

I've not switched back to Windows for 48 hours!

I managed to get SWAT working again: I just need to reinstall samba with the doc and swat USE-flags:I also hit problems trying to install the Linux version of UT. I got hold of the required ut-install-436.run file from 3ddownloads. Details of the problems are listed below, but here's how to fix them:The reason for the POSIX flag is because the setup-file was built with an old version of Makeself that used head and tail flags that are now obsolete. The reason for specifying a --target is to squash an error about the trap command. I don't think you need the CDROM variable, but I included it anyway since it was mentioned in the README.

Now to see if the UT installation actually works.

EDIT - There was no sound in UT. I fixed it with this:

Looks like I'll be subjecting myself to reinstalling UT. I've replaced Fedora on my Desktop with Ubuntu Feisty - A much better experience so far.

Here are a few helpful steps for anyone else thinking of doing the same:

1. Your first destination after install should be http://www.getautomatix.com/. Automatix helps you easily install some tricky things like drivers and unsupported applications. Download and install the appropriate .deb package for Feisty. A menu for Automatix will appear under Applications > System Tools.

2. Recommended installations through Automatix: nVidia drivers, GnomeBaker, Skype, Firefox Flash plugin, Firefox Java plugin, Extra Fonts, VirtualBox or VMWare Server, Multimedia Codecs, VLC.

3. Recommended installations through Applications > Add/Remove...: 7zip, RAR, Ace, Inkscape, Blender, Audacity, GnuCash, FileZilla, Celestia.

All personal recommendations, of course. GnuCash is the excellent open-source finance-managing software, and 7zip/RAR/Ace all plugin to the Archive Manager to allow you to open pretty much any archive you'll come across.