While installing Gentoo I ended up with Kubuntu

So today I thought would be a good day to switch my desktop back to Linux. As normal when i try out Linux again I tried Gentoo. Last time I tried I managed to get a booting kernel on the first try and everything worked. Well this time it couldn’t been further from the truth. I didn’t start with high hopes. I spent some time this morning reading some of the Gentoo blogs and to say the least the amount of fighting the Gentoo developers are doing right now is pretty scary. Little did I know that the developers relationships were in better condition then there installation documentation.

While trying to install the 64bit version of Gentoo I managed to find numerous places in the Gentoo handbook where there were either files mentioned that no longer seemed to exist as well is a complete lack of updates (they had no mention of ext4 but still mentioned reiser as though its something people really use still). In the end I managed to get my setup configured or at least I thought though with the instructions I felt as though I messed up smoe of the networking. That didn’t matter though as on boot it got to USB loading and just stopped. Well normally I would recompile the kernel and try again but tonight I figured the few hours I had already spend were enough.

Well I pulled out my Kubuntu 11.04 disk and amazingly it worked… for the most part. I managed to crash the partition manager by attempting to click the format checkbox for the swap partition but that was about all. In the end I got a fresh install of Kubuntu now. Going to have some fun tomorrow playing with Go now that I don’t have to work in VM’s to do the work.

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openSUSE 11.1 and Gentoo hate me and Vista is confusing me

WARNING: This is a rant. I don’t mean to be rude to anyone but I needed to vent. Also it is technical.

So I had a very interesting day today with Sakura (my main computer) being down all day. It all started with me deciding to go back to Windows Vista from Windows 7. Now I also decided I should open up 50gigs on my SATA drive (that holds my OS’s) for me to install GNU/Linux onto. Well a odd mistake took place and I somehow managed to remove the 3MB unallocated space on my PATA drive… Now you wouldn’t think this causes any problems but even though my SATA is supposed to boot first for some reason windows installs all the boot configuration stuff onto the PATA drive. This boot order has been known to me for awhile now. Now who would expect losing this 3MB space would cause all the chaos that would follow.

Well since I was stupid and lost the 3MB space by trying to shrink my NTFS partition on my DATA drive (this is the PATA one mind you). I say I was stupid cause I didn’t realize I was manipulating hda instead of sda when using the GParted LiveCD I resize with normally. Now after accidentally trying to resize it and having that fail somehow I had filled up the DATA drive with an NTFS partition. Now I panic thinking something horribly wrong has happened and boot into Windows (yea it runs still) and it repairs the NTFS partition on DATA and so I feel slightly relieved and decide I should just delete the windows partitions on the SATA drive.

So I now go and configure a Windows partition on the SATA drive to leave 50gigs open on the drive and press install. Now for some reason it tells me it doesn”t have the required space. So I reboot and try the Vista disk a few times and the Windows 7 disk both giving me this error. So I figure I will install gentoo and fix that later.

Now installing Gentoo works out fine (I was excited to see the new Athlon64-sse3 optimization in gcc now) until I rebooted. Once I reboot I install X11 which should be easy enough but no AMD’s driver is pretty old school and so I need to reboot and reconfigure the kernel 3 times before I got everything I need turned on in the kernel. At this point I thought I was done as I had gotten Ati-Drivers installed but X -configure was not making me stuff and failing saying it didn’t have a fglrx section and aticonfig failed saying it needed a template. Ah the wonderful catch-22. So I solve it by running xorgcfg -textmode and configuring for ati and then running aticonfig the only problem is when I finally run startx to test the server i get a messed up screen with nothing good showing. At this point I figure I will stop while I’m behind (spend most of my afternoon reading and doing this install) and just try openSUSE since ATI and Gentoo don’t get along.

So now I move to openSUSE 11.1 which is made by Novell. Now they also are the people behind the radeonhd driver which is the open-source driver that is supposed to support my graphics cards (Radeon HD3870) so I wont have to worry about fglrx. Now I get everything configured even installed mplayer and suddenly mplayer cannot play sound (now this for me is a hopeless problem since it turns into guess and check for me) and in the process of configuring mplayer the buttons and everything in the preferences dialog go white and doesn’t refresh. Now this isn’t a major issue but about this same time I realize what I had not noticed hours early that that 3MB unallocated space might be important on the DATA drive! Once again I quit while behind (radeonhd still not up to par for me sorry Novell) and decide to remedy this.

I install GParted on openSUSE and through some odd glitchy stuff with the NTFS partition on the PATA drive I manage to remake the 3MB of unallocated space on the back of the drive. So I decide “hell my setup isn’t guna natively run GNU/Linux” now I’m sure with more fussing I could get openSUSE to work right but at this point I am just going back to Vista right now its updating (oddly it installed fine now that the 3MB is back) and will probably be using this till my thesis is done. At witch point I will probably try openSUSE again.

Overall from this experience I have decided that Gentoo is not guna work for me anymore. I don’t know if Sakura will ever run Gentoo since the fglrx driver is so problematic with Gentoo for me. I know that openSUSE would work if I spent time with it. I though am still disappointed with how preconfigured I felt as though the system was not ready but if i had a afternoon I am sure it would be fine. By the time I was running openSUSE though I just wanted this disaster to end so I just went on to Vista which is hopefully getting close to being done updating.

Oh and the overall question at the end? Why is it that that 3MB unallocated space is needed by Vista to install?