Gentoo Take 2!!
Ok, so I got MythTV 0.16 working on my old Sony Vaio desktop. I’m pretty impressed with the OS overall. It has a very generous package database and Portage is an amazing tool. So I decided to rebuild my newer desktop machine (Shuttle SN85G, AMD 3200, 1GB RAM, 160GB SATA). I had originally built this with Fedora Core 2 32 bit.
Now I’m a pretty impatient person. That holds true when installing OSes. So I need to built up a little patience before installing Gentoo…it takes days. I also attempted to install 64bit Gentoo…without going into details, I didn’t complete that installation. I reverted to the 32bit version instead. The installation was relatively easy once again. When booting I specified ‘gentoo noapic’ or else my SATA drive wasn’t available. The LiveCD recognized my hardware so I made sure to note the drivers — this is helpful when configuring the kernel later. My boot partition is ext2 and my main partition is reiserfs. As for kernel configuration, I had to enable forcedeth for enabling the ethernet interface on the nforce3 motherboard. Otherwise it was fairly standard. I think I only rebuilt the kernel about 5 times to get what I wanted. I have the following applications running on it- Firefox 1.0
- Thunderbird 1.0
- Sendmail, Procmail, Dovecot, Fetchmail, Spambouncer for email management
- mplayer
- gaim
- mysql
- my weather app