Re: Gentoo Alpha questions

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 03:16:38PM -0500, Jean-S?bastien Guay wrote:
> > Which LiveCD?
> The Gentoo-alpha LiveCD, as found at <any gentoo
> mirror>/experimental/alpha/livecd/

Try the test version LiveCD you'll find at
http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/gentoo-alpha-1.4-test2-20040225.zip . You'll
still need to boot MILO from a floppy to run it, but it at least has the
legacy start address option which MILO needs defined. There are also
corresponding stage tarballs at stage[123]-alpha-20040225.tar.bz2 in the
same directory.

> > In general, you will not be able to boot from a Gentoo LiveCD directly
> > with ARC/AlphaBIOS. You'll have to use MILO from a floppy. I don't
> > believe it's possible to make a CD bootable for both SRM and ARC.
> Ok, that's what I tought from my experience with Debian. So what is the
> preferred installation method then? Start from a separate partition of
> my existing Debian installation?

If your Debian installation is running a 2.4 kernel, that will work fine.
Otherwise, you need to build MILO on a floppy for your platform, boot it
from ARC, then use the MILO command line to boot the kernel off the CD. Look
at the /etc/aboot.conf file on the CD for the options you need to pass to
the kernel. It's been long enough since I've booted with MILO that I can't
be a lot more specific than that.

> > I did have to do 
> > ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>
> > several times, but I won't have to do that again, because Aron was good
> > enoguh to mark everything I installed and am running as stable in
> > response to my bug reports. :-)
> Err, what does that mean? Sorry for being a neophyte, but
> "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha' emerge <package>" doesn't mean anything to
> me... :-)

The command you use to install a package on Gentoo is "emerge <package>". By
default, unless you've altered the /etc/make.conf file as the install doc
mentions, you'll only install those versions of packages, and those
packages, that are marked as stable. Unstable or untested packages are
marked with a leading ~ on the name of the architecture. Adding
"ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~alpha'" (without the "") at the beginning of the command
passes the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS environment variable to the emerge program, and
setting that value to ~alpha tells emerge to consider unstable versions of
the packages to be installed when deciding what to install.

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