{"id":130,"date":"2006-06-07T23:11:44","date_gmt":"2006-06-08T04:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/2006\/06\/07\/my-gentoo-amd64-install\/"},"modified":"2006-09-20T21:35:42","modified_gmt":"2006-09-21T02:35:42","slug":"my-gentoo-amd64-install","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitpost.com\/news\/2006\/my-gentoo-amd64-install\/","title":{"rendered":"My Gentoo AMD64 Install"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are my notes on installing the AMD64 build of Gentoo on my EPoX 9NPA+SLI with an Athlon 64 3000+. It’s my primary Windoze box, for development and gaming, but it’s now being dual-booted as a testbed for a future MythTV-based media center… hopefully IN TIME FOR THE WORLD CUP! \ud83d\ude1b
\nThe Gentoo Handbook<\/a> has pretty much everything you need. This is just a set of notes I’m writing during my installation. The first piece of advice I have is to let go and have fun – you won’t be in control of things at all times, which can be frustrating if you’re champing at the bit to get things running – just view it as an adventure, grab a beer pull up a chair and kick back, here we go.<\/p>\n

Grab the latest Gentoo live cd for your architecture (mine is AMD64), pop it in your drive, and reboot. Setting up networking is the first step, and it sucks if it doesn’t go smoothly because you feel completely isolated from any help – at best you have another machine that you can use to browse all the documentation that you can’t copy\/paste from. Many eons ago, my friend John and I were both stuck on this part for months, trying to get our first Linux installs off the ground. At that time, the eventual solution was to only use gear that was confirmed to be supported. Network support is much more complete these days, take your time here, you’ll get it running. If it gets bad, go out and plop down a few bucks for a 3Com network card, throw it in your machine, and try again.<\/p>\n

Gentoo recognized my mobo’s built-in Nvidia Networking Controller and set it up as eth1, for some reason. I spent a little time trying to get eth0 working before I realized I should just reconfig eth1 to use my pre-assigned LAN IP address. Humming along now.<\/p>\n

Once networking is up, save yourself some trouble and take Gentoo up on its advice to ssh from another machine. It’s like installing from your LazyBoy instead of your neighbor’s lawn chair. Just set a root password, start up sshd, and ssh in from a more comfortable location:<\/p>\n

passwd root
\n(type something you will remember, it’s only temporary)
\n\/etc\/init.d\/sshd start
\n(then ssh from another machine to the LAN IP address)<\/div>\n

Now that you’re in your LazyBoy, put up the footrest and make sure you’ve got the Gentoo handbook<\/a> up in a browser.<\/p>\n

The next major step in the handbook is to set up your disk partitions. If you’re dual booting (I am), you will probably want to shift around and resize existing partitions (unless you dropped in a fresh new hard drive just for Gentoo). I went through all my CD’s looking for that Partition Magic CD that I need without fail every other year or so to no avail. Then I thought – ridiculous, there must be open source partition managers. Viola, found two nice ones:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. GParted<\/a> – Grab the livecd ISO. It’s small and made to do what you need.<\/li>\n
  2. QTParted on the Knoppix<\/a> live CD – OK I could get distracted for HOURS on this one… (two hours and a beer later…) \ud83d\ude1b<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These babies kick ass, they even find drives for all the media I happen to have plugged in to my USB media reader. Fire up GParted, it’s sweet – and I got a bonus – I found I had an old Linux drive in the Windoze box that I forgot all about – to quote Jack Handy, “because eh, free dummy!” Here’s what it looked like:<\/p>\n