Tom at 16

Week of April 1st, 2002

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Thursday April 4, 2002

My long-awaited IBM xSeries server arrived today. Talk about a circle-jerk. Yep, I'll definitely have a few stories out of this one, and that's before I even plug the damn thing in. 'Scuze me but right now, I've got to figure out a way to have a 4' square crate delivered to my house...

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Tuesday April 2, 2002

Heh-Heh. I'm da' man. Gentoo is installed. Grub is grubbing (my fault; pointed the loader to the wrong partition which is an easy mistake under Grub when you're used to working with the Linux/LILO conventions of hda1, hda2, etc). And best of all, I HAVE WIRELESS! I don't mind tellng you, the latter was a real bear. I spent all afternoon "googling" for things to try, and while I found a whole slew of information on PCMCIA configuration, no one place had the missing piece. As it turns out, the solution was (as is so often the case in computing) to take all the nuggets I gleaned, toss 'em in a jar, shake well, and pour everything out onto the desktop. In other words, the answer was a combination of all the individual bits and pieces rolled into a coherent whole.

I'm going to write a HOWTO detailing the complete Gentoo setup for an Inspiron 8000 (network, sound, wireless, X...) but that won't be for a day or two -- I still need to emerge and build X and KDE. Up to now I've been working direct from the command line (as is my tendency most of the time anyway); didn't want to add too many layers of complexity at a time. Baby steps.

The short version is:

Pull all PCMCIA devices. Get the base Gentoo installation up and running and debugged as required. Make sure the system boots (in my case, dual boot: WinXP [NTFS] on the front of the drive, Gentoo [EXT3] on the rear [yup -- it's my nature to want to do things the hard way]), you're happy with your partitioning scheme, you've got all your primary users added, and your partridge is in its pear tree where it belongs.
When you build your kernel, do not build in any PCMCIA wireless/network drivers. Do not activate PCMCIA card services in the kernel; under networking devices do toggle the wireless devices [non-ham radio] option, but do not select any drivers. Bear with me.
Once your kernel is built, your internal networking works as advertised, and everything else is hunky, start emerging any key programs you want on your system. I added: gentoolkit, nfs-utils (to connect to Hydras), wireless-utils, CVS, and a bunch of others I can't remember. Also, emerge pcmcia-cs. This last one is important. You want to use the wireless stuff from the pcmcia tree, not the kernel modules. The pcmcia tree is more stable and far less finicky.
Now you need to edit up several files under /etc/pcmcia: network.opts and wireless.opts should do it providing you're using a reasonably well know card. If you're not, do not attempt to set up wireless under Linux unless you have a ton of time and the patience of a saint. I have neither ;-) If anyone is in a rush and needs some sample config files, give me a shout.
Now -- VERY important for a Dell system. Edit the /etc/pcmcia/config.opts file and remove the port 0x800-0x8ff stuff. That's the bit that was causing my system to have a seizure last night. I can't, of course, speak for other manufacturers.
Next, edit up your /etc/conf.d/net file and uncomment the "eth1" stuff. Also, copy your /etc/init.d/eth0.net to ../eth1.net (or whatever the file is; it's in the Gentoo installation FAQ).
Finally, bring everything up:

# insmod pcmcia_core
# insmod i82365
# insmod ds
# cardmgr -f

If you've got all your ducks in the right row, you should have connectivity; if not, troubleshoot according to the error messages you see.

And, as they say in Hollywood, Ta and Da. Simple ;-). I'm off to grab a bite, then get the kids to bed, then get X and KDE building, then...

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Monday April 1, 2002

Me and my big mouth. Remember my comment last week about spring having sprung? Bad Ju-Ju. It's been snowing and blowing ever since. Sigh. When will I learn...

We had a great Easter weekend. It was my birthday on Saturday. Forty-four years young ;-) I spent the day laying on the couch like a beached whale watching movies. Perfect. Sunday Leah and I cooked up a splendiferous smoked pork shoulder. That was possibly the best piece of ham I've ever had.

Today my well of success appears to have dried up. I Spent the day trying to get Gentoo installed on my notebook. Things went well until I tried to get my wireless working. No joy. I tried everything I could think of. Finally I 'emerged' the latest pcmcia-cs sources, built, set it to start on the default runlevel, and rebooted. When it came time to load the pcmcia config manager, the system locked. Hard. A power-off reset was the only way out. Mmmm. So thinking I had mucked something up, I decided to start again clean (takes 5 to 6 hours beginning to end on my Dell). Which I did. The build process just finished; when I tried to install grub it gave me some mysterious message about the 'stage1' file being missing. It's not. I can see it there. But grub won't grub and I'm at a loss as to why. Bother.

I think I'm going to call it quits and start over again tomorrow.

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