Paulus’ Blog

Introduction

I love Linux so much and my favorite distrubtion is Gentoo. I love Linux so much that I have refused to install Windows on my workstation at work because I would rather have that friendly penguin in my computer at work. Our servers unfortunately run Windows 2003 with Terminal services providing access to our POS.

Initially we used CITRIX to share our POS and setting that up was fun, and I found that printing worked a lot better in Linux than it did with Windows. Just recently we implemented a VPN that uses Netextender from SonicWall. Currently I have not been able to get my Linux Box to jive with the VPN because I am not sure of how our Admin has set everything up. I assure you this, the day will be mine soon!

In the mean time I figured I’d blog about how I installed Gentoo Linux on my workstation. In this fine machine I have:

• AMD Athlon 64 3500+
• Asus A8V Motherboard
• 4×512 (2GB total) DDR400
• ATI Radeon 9600XT
• 80 GB HD, 120GB HD, 250GB HD, 320GBHD SATA Drives

Why all the hard drive you ask? I have so many for storage of CD images, Drivers, and VMs

First things first, we do the basic install of Gentoo, the guide can be found here.

Now that I have the base system installed it’s time to install and configure the system.

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After finishing up an installation of Gentoo, I reboot into the new system only to find that it needs maintenance. The probably usually is that the hard drive is assigned a different device file during the LiveCD than when the actual system is booting up.

After providing the root password I need to edit the /etc/fstab file. Problem is that the file system is mounted in read only. So we must remount the root partition in read write.

mount -no remount,rw /

Now we can make the changes we need and reboot the system.

In Windows CD burning is taken for granted. You can either burn a CD by using the Windows CD burning engine or by popping the software that came with the CD burner in the computer, install it and then burn. In Linux you have to build some features into the kernel in order for this wonder feature to work, followed by the actual burning software.

Device Drivers —>
SCSI device drivers —>
< * > SCSI CD-ROM Support
[ * ] Enable vendor-specific extensions (for SCSI CD-ROM)
ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL Support —>
< * > ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL
< * > Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support
< * > Include IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM support

Recompile the kernel and boot the system with it.emerge the basic tool for burning, which is cdrtools:

# emerge cdrtools

cdrtools is a command line program for burning CDs. To make things easier, you can also install a GUI program that will take care of the work for you:

• xcdroast
• gcombust
• gnomebaker
• k3b

Set the permissions for the programs:

# chmod 750 /usr/bin/cdrdao
# chmod 750 /usr/bin/cdrecord
# chown root:cdrw /usr/bin/cdrdao
# chown root:cdrw /usr/bin/cdrecord

To enable burning for users:

# gpasswd -a $username cdrom
# gpasswd -a $username cdrw

To find out what device id your burner is:

# cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus

If you have an ISO and you want to burn it to a CD:

# cdrecord -v dev=ATA:0,0,0 speed=52 -data -eject file.iso

I’ve seen ATAPI used instead of ATA. I’ve always had problems with that not working.

Using a debugger to help find errors will save you a consider amount of time. Eclipse is a great IDE because not only is it platform independent, but you can use it to program in many different languages. The features and plugins seem endless which is an added bonus.

The main reason why I like it is that it works on Linux.

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