Talk:Gentoo installation tips and tricks

Leaving your Terminal
tmux equivalents should be noted. 666threesixes666 (talk) 08:05, 12 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Section outdated. If someone wants to do so, then do it. --Grknight (talk) 16:31, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

disabled root account
disabled root installs as noted in sudo talk page should be referenced also.666threesixes666 (talk) 08:05, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Sudo


 * Section outdated. If someone wants to do so, then do it. --Grknight (talk) 16:31, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Some Tips Don't Work as Advertised
"Using the Installation CD Kernel" (section 2.3) says to issue the following commands:

root #cp /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/${KN} /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/${KN}.igz /mnt/gentoo/boot

root #mkdir -p /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules

root #cp -Rp /lib/modules/`uname -r` /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules 

These instructions will not work for me. Here's what happens.

cp /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/${KN} /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/${KN}.igz /mnt/gentoo/boot

cp: -r not specified; omitting directory '/mnt/cdrom/isolinux/'

cp: cannot stat '/mnt/cdrom/isolinux/.igz': No such file or directory

Apparently the environment variable KN is not defined by the scripts in the .iso file I downloaded (install-amd64-minimal-20200607T214504Z.iso, downloaded 6/8/20 11:33 AM CDT from the osu (Oregon) mirror). If I add the "-r" option cp is complaining about, the "isolinux" directory gets copied to my new /boot directory, but no kernel, etc. I did some poking around, and it looks as if the requisite files are in the "boot" directory on the USB stick I created:

root@david-XPS-8930:/media/david/Gentoo amd64 20200607T214504Z# ls -a

. ..  boot  EFI  gentoo.efimg  grub  image.squashfs  isolinux  livecd  README.txt

root@david-XPS-8930:/media/david/Gentoo amd64 20200607T214504Z# cd boot

root@david-XPS-8930:/media/david/Gentoo amd64 20200607T214504Z/boot# ls -a

. ..  EFI  gentoo  gentoo-config  gentoo.igz  System-gentoo.map

So I'm guessing that if I copy "gentoo.igz" and "gentoo" from the /boot directory on the USB stick to my newly created /boot and reconfigure grub2 (I have an EFI system) then the kernel from the installation medium will show up in the grub menu as "gentoo". But that procedure is a lot different than the instructions in this article.

I didn't run the "mkdir" command given in the instructions above (I have already compiled a kernel, so the .../modules directory already exists). But when I run the "cp" command to copy modules from the USB stick, I get another error:

cp -Rp /lib/modules/'uname -r' /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules

cp: cannot stat '/lib/modules/uname -r': No such file or directory

And sure enough, there is no "lib" directory on the USB stick.

I'm guessing that these instructions used to work with a larger version of the installation .iso file, and that the desired modules are buried in "image.squashfs" somewhere.

If these instructions can't be corrected, the whole section probably ought to be removed. --Davidbryant (talk) 19:36, 29 June 2020 (UTC)


 * First topic $KN. You must have missed the note above the commands that says: " Note ${KN} is the kernel name, usually something like 'gentoo' or 'smp'."
 * Second topic. cp -Rp /lib/modules/'uname -r' /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules should be cp -Rp /lib/modules/`uname -r` /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules.  It can also be cp -Rp /lib/modules/$(uname -r) /mnt/gentoo/lib/modules in most shells as well --Grknight (talk) 20:40, 29 June 2020 (UTC)