The Whet

This is the first of what promises to be multiple posts on my progress against MP's gentoo to cuntoo bridge testing task.

First order of business: install heathen gentoo. BingoBoingo and asciilifeform of Pizarro swiftly and graciously set me up with an appropriate box once it was discovered this experiment wouldn't work on any of the 32-bit laptops laying around these parts.

I've been working with mod6's gentoo installation guide.

As Pizarro included a Gentoo LiveUSB for me, I skipped past 0x01, "Create LiveCD", to 0x02, "Setup Disk Partition Table". This section mentions a "Part B" with partition creation instructions that is not actually included, so I referred to the Handbook's guide. Here's how my partition table ended up before saving:


Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 6143 2048 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 * 6144 268287 131072 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 268288 1316863 524288 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb4 1316864 312477695 155580416 83 Linux


I formatted the above partitions with filesystems as per mod6's guide, and then I followed the mounting steps remaining.

Downloading the Stage3 failed unexpectedly (a pattern that repeated itself with an exasperating insistence worthy of greater glories than a goddamned OS install).

Upon painstaking examination it came to the fore that the domain failed to resolve. I tried IP addressing directly via curl but of course the gentoo mirror's too clever for anything like that. In the end I was reduced to populating my hosts file with their intricate pattern of name allotments. Adding in all other various patches I ended up forced to put on it, my hosts file now reads:


64.50.236.52 gentoo.osuosl.org
140.211.166.134 gentoo.osuosl.org
64.50.233.100 ftp.osuosl.org

64.50.236.52 distfiles.gentoo.org
140.211.166.134 distfiles.gentoo.org


During the tarball extraction stage in 0x03 I had to change the tar command's options as our source's current tarball is in .xz rather than .bz2 format; this means using tar xJpf rather than xjpf¹ .

Moving on to 0x04, I entered the chroot as instructed. Then, on first running emerge-webrsync, I got a friendly eggog:


!!! Section 'gentoo' in repos.conf has location attribute set to nonexistent directory: '/usr/portage'
!!! Invalid Repository Location (not a dir): '/usr/portage'


Which did not reappear on running said command the necessary second time once distfiles.gentoo.org was added to my hostfile. Why domain resolution should affect directory problems is beyond me. At any rate, the second run of emerge-webrsync reportedly completed successfully.

I entered the mysterious mkdir -p /etc/ld.so.conf.d command to avoid the "problems" promised without it² , at which point I went to cat /etc/fstab and discovered it's a 0-length file, completely empty. How this is possible I've no idea given the partition setup described above. I've elected to close this three-hour session of disappointment on the heels of searching for others' rants about empty fstab files, hoping for any notion of how this could be, and watching my browser grey over and crash.

***

1. As tar ran this it spit out "tar:Xattr support requested, but not available", which makes me suspect this set of options may not, in fact, have done all that was intended. [↩]
2. I can't help but think that in this case my confidence in the Republic, which allows me to "just do it" like this comes at a possibly too-high cost of having not the first clue what this step was about. If this wasn't in-WoT I'd abandon the guide right there, you know? [↩]