User talk:Davidbryant

My First Post
Hi! My name is David Bryant. I was born in Alaska, attended college in Pasadena, California (Caltech), and worked as an actuary and as an assembly language programmer (IBM S/360 & S/370) for many years, mostly in Denver, Colorado. I'm now retired and living in Canyon Lake, Texas.

I've been using Linux since 2003, mostly openSUSE until recently. A friend of mine, Jack Ostroff, is an avid fan of Gentoo Linux, so about two weeks ago I downloaded the .iso image and started building a Gentoo system. After a couple of false starts I succeeded in getting it working moderately well. I signed up for this wiki because there are a few things in the AMD64 handbook that were not real clear during the installation process: I intend to make a few suggestions about clarifying some ambiguities.

If you'd like to learn more about me, please feel free to visit my personal web site at https://davidcbryant.net. Or drop me a line on this page.

--Davidbryant (talk) 15:00, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

About "New Stuff"
"Those who like the user interface of fdisk can use gdisk (GPT fdisk) as an alternative to parted." This is misleading, because Gentoo has replaced "gdisk" with "fdisk". The following is from my Gentoo installation. user $fdisk /dev/sda -l user $gdisk /dev/sda -l -su: gdisk: command not found So gdisk no longer exists, and ought not be mentioned. How about this? Those who prefer fdisk's user interface may use fdisk with either a GPT or an MBR partition scheme.

No, Gentoo has not replaced gdisk with fdisk. They are two totally separate programs. The install environment provided by Gentoo will have both. However, to get gdisk inside the real system, you'll need to emerge gptfdisk (which provides gdisk). --Grknight (talk) 19:39, 22 July 2020 (UTC)


 * You know, I thought better of this, so I removed it from the comments I posted on the Handbook:AMD64 page. But writing it up was a lot of work, so I kept a copy for myself. Better just to copy it to my hard disk, I guess. If I really want to make a comment, I'll post it on a Wiki page. Stuff on my own page is just a scratch pad, so far as I'm concerned.


 * I did figure out that there's a package "sys-apps/gptfdisk" available in the Gentoo repository (which I have not installed -- I don't really need it). I also rebooted the minimal installation USB stick I used to create my Gentoo system, and I see that "fdisk" is present in the /sbin directory. But I can't find "gdisk" anywhere on that system. So I still think the "Preparing the disks" article needs some patching up. At that point, a new Gentoo user can only run the programs provided by the intallation system. Why muddy the waters with a program he can't use?


 * I'm also curious: do you know of a utility program that can read a "squashfs" archive? It looks as if that's where all the executables live on the Gentoo installation USB stick. The Linux kernel can obviously expand it. It would be more convenient to poke my nose inside the "image.squashfs" -- if I knew how -- than it is to reboot the installation system each time I need to veify something about the installation environment. --Davidbryant (talk) 13:27, 23 July 2020 (UTC)


 * is still included in the minimal ISO's environment as evidenced by the spec. A squashfs is a file system. So as long as your running kernel has support, it can be read easily.   --Grknight (talk) 15:56, 24 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Duh. Why didn't I think of that? Actually, I did. But I'm accustomed to think in terms of mounting devices, not files. Anyway, I actually have to mount the device, then mount the file, to get it to work.
 * Thanks for the hint. --Davidbryant (talk) 19:58, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the hint. --Davidbryant (talk) 19:58, 25 July 2020 (UTC)