HOWTO Install Gentoo with Reiser4 enabled using Lxnay's Gentoo RR4 LiveCD

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

[edit] Introduction

This document is different than other installation guides for several reasons:

• There are a lot of great guides out there. I have read most and I wanted to pull my favorite parts into one concise guide.
• This Guide recommends the use of lxnay's Gentoo RR4 CD
• You will be able to install Gentoo Linux to your hard drive with graphical tools like Gparted and Aegis Virus Scanner
• You will also be able to view this document with Mozilla Firefox during your installation
• All of the necessary directions and commands you need to type will be highlighted in green
• All of the optional commands available to you will be highlighted in yellow
• Edited Files will be highlighted in pink
• You need not read this entire document if you just want to follow the color coded commands below.

[edit] Please Note

Current LiveCD's which support Reiser4

• SystemRescueCD - Gentoo-based LiveCD

Until I have time to write a full how-to please visit the following links:

Get the Live CD that this Howto will be based on here: (WARNING: The reiser4progs version on lxnay's CD is very old, they are unmaintained, backwards compatibility is broken and newer kernels will not work. A few alternative reiser4 media would be lxnay's rr4 DVD, or the conrad CD. I've heard of RIP cd.

• Reiser4 Enabled LiveCD - Use Lxnay's Gentoo RR4 LiveCD, alternatively the minimal Conrad LiveCD will do just fine too.

Reiser4 resources:

• Howto Create a Reiser4 Partition
• Installing Packages with Reiser4 - Solve problems emerging packages on a Reiser4 partitioned filesystem.
• Reiser4 Technical Information
• HOWTO Update Reiser4 Partitions

Installation resources:

• Gentoo 2004.2 for linux 2.6 and NPTL
• Installing Gentoo - The Developers Method - Stage1 and NPTL

Special thanks to the authors of the documents above. You keep my 1.53 GHz Athlon still feeling zippy to me.

[edit] Preparing our installation environment

Boot to lxnays Gentoo RR4 Live CD. At the grub menu choose the Gnome option to keep you chatting on Gaim and Xchat while bootstrapping.I had to add irc.freenode.net/6667 to the server list of xchat and joined channel gentoo for help. root password is tecnico. I logged in as root at the login screen, if you leave it the cd will autologin as tecnico...

Changing password for tecnico
(current) UNIX password:
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

(Repeat as root user)

hdparm -d1c1u1m16 /dev/hda
hdparm -d1c1u1 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0

[edit] Partition and Formatting Your Hard Drives

Gparted is available on the LiveCD. I recommend cfdisk for command line installations.

Gparted HOWTO

• /dev/hda1 will be our /boot partition at 100 MB
• /dev/hda2 will be our swap partition at 1024 MB
• /dev/hda3 will be our / (root) partition at 10240 MB or 10 Gigs
• /dev/hda4 will be our /home partition using the rest of the available space

[edit] Formatting our filesystems

The /boot and /home partitions do not need the speed of reiser4, stability is the goal here. Not that Reiser4 isn't stable I just want to give it some more time until Linus says it's stable.

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda4
mkfs.reiser4 /dev/hda3
mkswap /dev/hda2

And lets go ahead and turn swap on, while we're at it.

swapon /dev/hda2

[edit] Mounting our new partitions

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/{boot,home}
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/gentoo/home

[edit] Downloading and extracting Stage1 and Portage Snapshot Tarball

A list of portage mirrors can be found here. Choose a mirror near you. The $MIRROR variable in the code below is the root of the mirror that you have chosen. The second step is important, but left off most installation Howto's. To avoid killing rsync servers or getting stuck on a slow one we are going to download a recent snapshot of the portage tree first. We will sync it later. Change the $DATE variable to the date 48 hours ago in the YYYYMMDD format.

export MIRROR="http://mirror.xxx.net/gentoo/"
export DATE="20041218"

cd /mnt/gentoo/
wget $MIRROR/releases/x86/2005.0/stages/x86/stage1-x86-2005.0.tar.bz2
wget $MIRROR/snapshots/portage-$DATE.tar.bz2

Or download them typing the full URL

tar xjpvf stage1*.bz2
cd /mnt/gentoo/usr
tar xjvf /mnt/gentoo/portage-*.tar.bz2

You might want to keep the tarballs you just downloaded for a few days. If something goes wrong with the installation you won't have to download them again.

[edit] Editing make.conf and Build Options

Open your /etc/make.conf. The gedit editor is available to use regardless of the desktop environment you selected when you logged in.

gedit /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

[edit] Editing USE Variables

The USE variable allows you to customize applications with certain features and support from other applications. For more information on USE flags go here. For and indepth discussion on USE flags go to the Gentoo Handbook.

[edit] Editing CFLAGS

The CFLAGS variable will set your cpu optimizations. A list of cpu types and safe optimization flags for your processor is here. If you are unsure, you can find out your processor info with cat /proc/cpuinfo

CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

[edit] Now choose rsync mirrors close to you.

I live in the US, other locales are available see the /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf.example file to view them.

SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"

[edit] Choosing download mirrors

Note if you are on a dialup connection I suggest editing the make.conf file manually to select mirrors that are geographically close to yourself, instead of running the following comand

mirrorselect -a -s3 -o | grep 'GENTOO_MIRRORS=' >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/make.conf

[edit] Sample make.conf

Your make.conf should look like something below. YMMV, but this is a nice way to start for a basic system with the Gnome desktop environment.

CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
USE="acpi fbcon nptl nptlonly -arts -kde -qt"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
#run portage at highest runlevel for the install
#PORTAGE_NICENESS="19"
ALSA_CARDS="cs46xx"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.datapipe.net/gentoo \
http://mirrorservice.org/sites/www.ibiblio.org/gentoo \
ftp://gentoo.ccccom.com  \
ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo"

[edit] More info on some settings

• PORTAGE_NICENESS
• ALSA_CARDS

[edit] Setting Locales

Specify support for the languages we use. The locales avaiable are listed in /mnt/gentoo/usr/share/locale/. Locales.

en_US/ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8

Now we have to tell portage to build glibc with only the locales we selected.

echo "sys-libs/glibc userlocales" >> /mnt/gentoo/etc/portage/package.use

[edit] Entering the installation environment.

[edit] Mount the virtual filesystems

mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

[edit] Copy DNS information and Chroot

cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/resolv.conf
chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
env-update && source /etc/profile

[edit] Beginning Installation

[edit] Pre-install Check

Double check the date make sure it is accurate

Sat Dec 18 18:34:27 GMT 2004

The message "Sat May 14 16:21:36 Local time zone must be set--see zic manual page 2005" can be ignored, local time zone settings will be taken care of below.

If you have to change the date, the syntax is: date MMDDhhmmYYYY

date 061213052005

emerge --sync

ignore the portage update message.

[edit] Installing

/usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh
emerge -e system

If you fear a internet-connection crash, use the -f argument as well for fetching the files first and afterwards installing them. Now go and do something else for a few hours. Get a friend and play monopoly or risk. Or watch half of the first season of 24. This really will be a while.

Emerge your window manager or desktop of choice:

emerge gnome

And a logger + cron

emerge metalog vixie-cron
rc-update add vixie-cron default
rc-update add metalog default

And other tools we'll be needing

emerge slocate reiser4progs dhcpcd net-tools
rc-update add domainname default

Configure Daemons

Edit logger config - TIP System Logging with syslog-ng

[edit] The Kernel

[edit] Patch yourself

Grab kernel sources for 2.6 and reiser4 patch, (grab the right reiser4 patch for your kernel version )

wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/linux-2.6.12-rc2.tar.bz2
wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.12-rc2/2.6.12-rc2-mm2/2.6.12-rc2-mm2.bz2

I was unable to get the all inclusive patches to work as I was also using LVM on root, so I downloaded the broken-out patches and only installed the reiser4 patches.

cd /usr/src
tar jxf linux-2.6.12-rc2.tar.bz2
cp -rl linux-2.6.12-rc2 linux-2.6.12-rc2-mm2
cd linux-2.6.12-rc2-mm2
bzip2 -dc ../2.6.12-rc2-mm2.bz2 | patch -p1
ln -s linux-2.6.12-rc2-mm2 linux

disable kernel hacking-> 4kb stack option
enable filesystems -> reiser4

[edit] Prepatched (Nitro)

You don't have to patch a kernel, the reiser4 support is already inside the following one! Here's the deal: The package is called sys-kernel/nitro-sources. It should be noted that nitro sources can be a bit unstable at times, so if using an experimental filesystem is enough, then this might not be for you.

First have to get the ebuild, so let's do this

echo "PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage" >> /etc/make.conf

Check out http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-360178.html to get the latest sources. The newest at the moment is [1]

mkdir -p /usr/local/portage/sys-kernel/nitro-sources/
cd /usr/local/portage/sys-kernel/nitro-sources/
wget http://nitro.b3cks.com/2.6.12-nitro5/nitro-sources-2.6.12-r5.ebuild
ebuild nitro-sources-2.6.12-r5.ebuild digest
echo "sys-kernel/nitro-sources ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge nitro-sources
ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.12-nitro5 /usr/src/linux

There we go now

Now:

cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.12-nitro5
make menuconfig
make && make modules_install

[edit] System Time

[edit] Localtime

We're gonna set our local time. This is done by /etc/init.d/clock and /etc/conf.d/clock. Default is UTC, I use local- because of dual-boot, it needs to agree with M$.

If /etc/localtime exists, remove it, then

cd /etc
ln -s ../usr/share/zoneinfo/(Your_Desired_Timezone) localtime

[edit] NTP

Edit NTP configs - HOWTO NTP and pool.ntp.org

• /etc/conf.d/ntp-client
• /etc/conf.d/ntpd
• /etc/ntp.conf

rc-update add ntp-client default && rc-update add ntpd default && ntpdate -b -u pool.ntp.org
ntpd

[edit] Finishing up

[edit] Normal User

First, create a user

useradd your_user -m -G users,wheel,audio -s /bin/bash
passwd your_user

[edit] Networking

Set the system hostname

echo mymachine > /etc/hostname

Set the system domainname

echo mydomain.com > /etc/dnsdomainname

Set the hostsfile, ex:"127.0.0.1 localhost mymachine"

127.0.0.1 localhost mymachine

Setup networking; dhcp-users should set iface_eth0="dhcp"

nano -w /etc/conf.d/net

Modules to be loaded at startup

nano -w /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

If you have multiple network interfaces, create the extra symlinks.

ln -s /etc/init.d/net.eth0 /etc/init.d/net.ethX

• Automatically start at boot if no PCMCIA)

rc-update add net.eth0 default

PCMCIA only: verify /etc/conf.d/pcmcia and load PCMCIA at boot)

rc-update add pcmcia default

[edit] Grub

cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
emerge grub
grub

grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

Now edit /boot/grub/grub.conf

default 0
timeout 15
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title=Gentoo Linux
root (hd0,0)
# genkernel users:
kernel /kernel-<kernel version> root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc real_root=/dev/hda3 ramdisk=8192
initrd /initrd-<kernel version>
# non-genkernel users:
kernel /kernel-<kernel version> root=/dev/hda3

Configure basic system settings: TODO Edit /etc/rc.conf.