Monday, October 27, 2008

Gentoo on the U100

I finally got gentoo to install on the MSI Wind U100.

First i tried the minimal install cd (usb stick) which worked great, but then when it came to fetching the stage3 tar ball & portage snapshots... & kernel... it couldnt because it had not networking drivers... (both wired & wireless were not working )

so i downloaded the livecd install & made a bootable usb of it. it booted, but after it set the clock, it would come with a message... something about the delta...

Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = -338627902 ns)

if wait about 5 minutes it continues to boot the livecd...

gdm fails to start up becasue of a the video driver...

just do nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the driver to vesa, then killall gdm, then gdm and you should have the gui XFCE.

i clicked on GUI installer, made my partitions...
100M ext2 /boot
10G ext3 /
44G ext3 /home
1.5G swap

continued with the instillation... which failed near to where the end of the install should be...
grub could not list all the kernels in /boot... here is the bug...
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=230998
after reading that, i mounted / and /boot, copied the "gentoo" kernel that was on the livecd to boot, then manually installed grub & wrote a grub.conf.

then i added myself as a normal user... useradd...
unmounted everything... & here is the result


gentoo boots on natively on the MSI Wind U100!

My next step would be to:
  1. get the installer to install more packaged
  2. get the networking sorted out... im guessing it will be easier to get the wired interface to work...
i just cant believe that there was not default wired driver in that livecd kernel...
the drivers are all here... http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=downloaddetail&type=driver&maincat_no=135&prod_no=1474 im just going to have to fiddle with it when i get more time.

3 comments:

Shaheen said...

very cool

rodhia said...

Hi!I'm trying to install Gentoo on my WIND U100 and my biggest problem is to compile the r8101e driver for the ethernet card. Sources can be found here : http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=7&PFid=7&Level=5&Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#RTL8100E/RTL8101E/RTL8102E-GR/RTL8103E(L)
RTL8102E(L)/RTL8101E

Do you have achieve the compilation of this driver?

Sorry for my poor english, i'm french!

OuZo said...

hi, rodhia. I ran out of time building gentoo on the U100 so I installed kubuntu. But I recently sold the U100... I was not getting a lot of use out of it.

In any case, I don't think I build X or KDE on the U100 when it did have gentoo on it.
good luck