ThreeFarthingStone's Journal: Copying Gentoo from KDE LiveCD

A quick binary install of Gentoo Linux is possible by copying the KDE LiveCD to the hard disk, if you know how. Scroll down for instructions.

Back a few months before the release of the Gentoo Reference Platform, the GNU/Linux distributor created GNOME and KDE LiveCDs for the PowerPC platform. The idea (similar to Knoppix) was to boot your computer, which had to be a New World Macintosh, off a CD, and use KDE or GNOME without having to install it on the hard drive. My downloaded copy of the Gentoo 1.4_rc7 KDE CD contains a bootable Gentoo Linux system. Boot it, log in as root (no password), use Xeasyconf to create the XFree86 config file, and use kdm to start, and one gets KDE 3.1.2 running over X Window System without any files installed on the hard drive!

The CD didn't work too well for me, so I did some experimenting. My problem was that I have a computer with only 64 MB of RAM. (Double that, 128, is recommended for Gentoo.) So I ran out of memory trying to start kdm. I fixed this by activating a swap partition on my hard disk.

Also, the Gentoo Compressed Loop filesystem is very slow. This is, I think, an ext2 filesystem compressed in a gzip file stored on the iso9660 CD. It would have been faster, except Linux the kernel had almost no memory to cache any files, because my 64 MB was being filled by RAM disks and KDE. So Linux kept rereading (and likely uncompressing again) the files.

So, I made the system faster by copying the system to my hard disk. Then I had a fallback system to boot in case my main Gentoo system, already installed, broke.

Then, I tried to reinstall Gentoo, failed, attempted NetBSD, OpenBSD, and OpenDarwin in turn, then in frustration switched to Mac OS 9 as my only operating system. My problem was that something wrong with my hard disk makes Linux crash under heavy extensive use, such as compiling software. I couldn't install Gentoo from source. NetBSD seemed immune to crashing, but the included XFree86 binary would not start. OpenBSD's XFree86 started; I tried to use the Ports Collection to compile KDE and it crashed on KMail. OpenDarwin's XFree86 wouldn't start. On Mac OS 9, the window system started, and I didn't compile anything from source because I could not obtain source code.

But Mac OS 9 did not satisfy, so I recopied Gentoo.

Instructions

Note: there might be a few errors below, I haven't checked it.

Caution: You probably will prefer using the new Gentoo Reference Platform instead of following this procedure.

1. Boot your Macintosh from the Gentoo 1.4_rc7 KDE CD. (The GNOME CD might work also. Once the Gentoo 1.4 final KDE-GNOME CD is released, it might work a bit differently. Apparently a CD for i386 systems might be created also.)
2. Log in (root, no password).
3. Use mac-fdisk to create partitions, if necessary. The Gentoo CD will copy to one partition (I will call it /dev/GENTOO); I used a 3.5 GB partition. Also create a swap partition and bootstrap partition if needed.
4. Format the partitions with mkswap and mke2fs -j (if you want an ext3 filesystem). Use swapon to enable swap if you want.
5. Create a mount point (mkdir /mnt/gentoo). Mount the partition (mount /dev/GENTOO /mnt/gentoo). The mount points are as follows:
   • /mnt/cdrom contains the iso9660 filesystem on the CD.
   • /mnt/initrd contains the initial RAM disk, a layer needed because /mnt/iso is too big.
   • /mnt/iso is the mounted Gentoo compress loop. A lot of symlinks in / point into here. These are the files we want to copy.
6. Copy the files. The command is cp -av /mnt/iso/* /mnt/gentoo (-a to preserve attributes exactly, -v to show the names of the files as they are copied). Do not use -x (one file system) because /mnt/iso/lib/modules is a separate filesystem (a RAM disk).
7. The system you copied includes everything from the Linux kernel to KDE, but needs a bit of configuration. First edit /mnt/gentoo/etc/fstab. Make sure you know the fstab format! The file only contains a line for proc, so add a line placing /dev/GENTOO on /. Also add a line for swap. These are the only lines needed; I also added a line for my CD drive.
8. When you boot your system, it will mount the root filesystem read-only and later encounter errors, because it does not have the normal scripts for checking filesystems and remounting root read-write. Fix this by adding a line to the start() function in /mnt/gentoo/etc/init.d/checkroot. That script is already in the boot runlevel.

   mount -n -o remount,rw,noatime /dev/root /

   Here, -n suppresses lockfile creation (root fs isn't read-write yet), -o provides options. The remount option is needed of course; rw means read-write. Replace noatime with whichever options you want (presumably the ones in /mnt/gentoo/etc/fstab). The convenient symlink /dev/root was created by devfs.

9. If you just created a new bootstrap partition and do not have yaboot installed, you need to set up yaboot. Run yabootconfig -t /mnt/gentoo (do not use chroot).
10. Use umount and swapoff to unmount everything, and reboot.
11. If you have an existing yaboot partition, use it to boot your existing GNU/Linux system and add your new Gentoo CD copy to yaboot (one method is to edit /etc/yaboot.conf and run ybin). You might need to copy the kernel image, /boot/vmlinux on your new Gentoo CD copy partition, to somewhere on your existing system's root partition.
12. Boot into your new Gentoo CD copy. If it complains about the root filesystem being readonly, then log in, remount the system read-write, and edit /etc/init.d/checkroot again.
13. Configure the system. Things you might want to do:
    • Set up networking (/etc/conf.d/net, /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, rc-update add net.eth0 default)
    • Replace /etc/localtime with symlink into /usr/share/zoneinfo
    • Edit /etc/rc.conf and do rc-update add xdm default
    • Add users. (useradd -m -G wheel,audio username )

I am running my Gentoo CD copy now, and it works. I need to fix the log-in message on my text consoles. The Konqueror from the CD has a problem displaying some images, so I have to use Mozilla to browse.

The next thing to do is get a portage tree working so I can replace/add software.