MIA

Posted by BadReligion Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:30:00 GMT

It would seem to be MIA again. Work is super busy and with warm weather on its way I have been working out more. I managed to put my heavy bag back up a couple weeks ago! Getting back on the bag is a really good feeling. Maybe if things die down at work soon I will make a trip to the gym in Akron assuming its still around.

I'm going to go write some code. I would love to go back and clean up some of the code I wrote for this site. It would probably be good for me to code on a recreational level tonight. Well whatever my eyes are already bothering me so I better go make the best of the next half hour. I am trying to get off the computer as much as possible after work and into bed around 10PM. I really need to regain control of my mornings and what time I wake up. It's pretty sad that it requires 3 alarms to get me up...

Sean

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Gentoo Success

Posted by BadReligion Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:11:00 GMT

I have managed to get Gentoo running on my Acer Aspire 5610 laptop. Here is an overview of the specs:

  • CPU: Intel Core Duo 1.86Ghz
  • RAM: 2GB PC25300
  • HD: 160GB SATA 3G
  • Network: Intel Pro/Wireless 3945ABG, Broadcom 44xx 10/100 Ethernet
  • Removable Storage:Unknown 4-in-1 media card reader

I installed using the Gentoo 2008.0 i686 Live CD. I am wishing I would have taken the time to compile my own custom kernel but that can always be done later on. Anyway here are some tips to help anyone with the Acer 5610 series hoping to get Gentoo installed. I only ran into a couple of easy-to-fix problems after the install completed and I was booted into the system.

Getting Networking...Networked...

I had to manually insert the b44 module using

sudo modprobe b44

to get my wired network card to work properly. Before doing this eth0 did not exist and caused a few errors to spring up during boot up. This module can be loaded automatically by adding b44 into /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 as documented here.

 

Wireless networking has not been tested yet but I believe the 3945ABG is well supported among distributions. It seems to be recognized and I know there are modules for it. If you are having trouble try the following commands.

lsmod | grep 3945

If you don't see anything promising from that then try to find the appropriate module.

modprobe -l | grep 3945

Try inserting the modules that the previous command spat out, you only need to type in the module name not the extension nor the full path, look at this example.

modprobe iwl3945

 

Graphics Adapter Support?

I was very surprised with this one. Oddly letting Xorg -configure generate an xorg.conf clearly found an Intel 950 GMA integrated graphics controller. The xorg.conf looked pretty good, at least for now. However I got errors when trying to start X (errors will be posted later). I actually needed to also load a module for this as well, I forget the name of the module you can probably find it yourself though.

modprobe -l | grep intel

After loading that module my X server started up fine.

 

My laptop is not here, which is why some of the above information is not complete. The system was still updating before I left work and I wasn't about to pull the plug to the Inter Web. I will come back to this and update the information once I have it back. I need to see how the multimedia card reader works out so I will update with that info.

It might not be long before I have to take the Ubuntu stickers off the laptop and replace them with Gentoo counterparts.

Sean

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