I’m being stubborn, and have returned to Plan B to get Gentoo running on my MiniITX - discovered it was bacause I was using a ludicrously small hard drive - 1.6GB - scratched around dead machines and found a 3GB one and it seems to be fine so far.

Still doing the initial install, but looking good. Trying to sort the pam-login / shadow blocking

I’m now looking forward (?) to the long process of getting everything up to date and stable - the question is: should I try recompiling the kernel and installing the bluez / ussp-push stuff first?

As Dell-Boy says ‘He who dares, Rodney!’

Somehow I managed to screw up a Gentoo install on my MiniITX system (what finally did it was lost networking so I couldn’t fix broken packages, and a lot was broken) so I thought I’d think of alternatives.

I’ve played with Pebble in the past which is based on a stripped down Debian, and I got on with it quite well, so I downloaded a minimal install CD image, and quickly got a system up, even managed to get bluez-utils installed without much trouble.

It was too good to last though - the last tool I needed was ussp-push to do the OBEX push, and it turns out it’s not a stable Debian package yet.

Unless I want to take a big chunk of the system to unstable packages, I need a plan C.

I doggedly stuck with Gentoo - got over the stupid errors, and with the help of some kind souls on the forums have reached my initial goal - I’m transferring files from the box to my phone using Bluetooth!

I’ve got to write it up while I still remember how I did it, and then start formulating the next part of my plan which is scripting the thing to form a bluecasting rig.

Not this weekend though - I’m quitting while I’m still ahead.

Flushed with the success of getting Gentoo running, I moved on with the next phase - trying to get Bluetooth going. And now I’m pissed off again.

It all seems so simple when you read about it - set a few options in the kernel config (going from the Gentoo bluetooth howto this is), recompile, reboot, check your device appears… PROBLEM - the dongle isn’t even showing up as a USB device.

So I fiddle for a few hours, even resort to posting on the Gentoo forum, still no idea why the box doesn’t recognise any USB device.

I may be about to lose faith in Gentoo, and reach for my Red Hat FC5 install CDs I downloaded a week or three back. I know I need bluez and openobex to do what I want to do, do I need Gentoo grief too?

Had several more attempts using various methods at getting Gentoo installed on my old K6 board, including downloading the full LiveCD Installer - wouldn’t boot that either, but it’s almost certainly built for i686 not i586 - finally decided to resort tp plan B.

I’d treated myself to a new motherboard powered by an AMD XP 2800+ processor to play with MythTV - much fun. So let’s see if I can get Gentoo running on that, so quick hard drive swap last night, tried using the LiveCD Installer but it was taking far too long and I wasn’t comfortable it would work. And it did say in the instructions (yes, I do read them every now and then) you should be happy with doing minimal installs to use the installer.

So back to first principles this morning - reformat the partitions, follow the Quick Install guide (I almost know it by heart now) downloading i686 stage3.

It’s all going far too well, so not much surprose when, although it boots from the hard drive to more of a degree than the K6 (i.e. doesn’t reboot after a few secs) it did end up dying with a ‘Kernel panic’ - VFS: cannot open root device.

So back up a bit, reboot from CD, mount everything up again and have another look at the kernel config. SCott at work advised to not include SCSI support if it’s not needed, but I’m suspecting I needed to select something to get IDE working. A quick inspection of lspci shows ‘IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)’ so hunting round in menuconfig I find something relevant, select it, rebuild, reboot, and …

BINGO! A barebones Gentoo box. Now, what was I going to do with it?

I did what I should have done in the first place - RTFM - and realised where I’d gone wrong with the kernel configuration (hopefully) in that the default config had the wrong processor family - now changed to K6/K6-II/K6-III. I also added ext3 journalling, and bluetooth subsystem support for good measure.

The kernel is compiling as I type - sure it won’t all be right, but I hope at least to get the system to boot.

Things I probably missed - I left networking alone so it might not find my card, and I left USB untouched too, so it might not find my Belkin bluetooth dongle. I didn’t want to tinker too much at this point as I could have made things worse by mistake.

<time passes… />

Kernel’s compiled - bugger- still not working.

Might be having to ask for help. Let’s have a look on the forum first like a good noob.

Kernel compilation took 36 minutes - won’t be doing that too often. I tinkered with ‘generic x86 support’ or somthing like that, recompiled and went for tea.

Just came back, tried rebooting, and it still reboots itself after a message saying ‘Bios data check successful’.

Must be something else then…

At the end of my last wrestle with getting a Gentoo box up and running, I’d got to the ‘remove install CD and reboot’ bit, but the box gets stuck in a reboot loop so something’s wrong - knew it was going too well.

As I type, it’s rebooting with the install CD in again to have another attempt - I’ll scrutinise the Quick Install guide again to spot something I missed, but I’m highly suspicious of the kernel configuration section which I briefly looked at, then left everything as default.

Wish me luck…

Why? Because I want to play with bluetooth, and I found a howto based on the Gentoo operating system.

So I dig out an old box and go to install Gentoo. It can’t be that hard can it?

Five attempts later and I still can’t get more than a dozen steps through the quick install (?) guide, and as a last resort I post a message on the forum.

Almost instantly get a reply helpfully pointing out that my AMD K6-2 processor needs an i586 stage3 not the i686 as in the instructions.

So I’m further along a tortuous road, but there’s still a long way to go before I even get a bare box that boots itself - as I’m writing this the kernel is compiling and I have no idea if I’ve got all the modules I need configured.

Don’t know what the odds are of getting anything that I can achieve my (limited) goals on - I’ll report back.