Gentoo, 8139too & Linux Kernel ACPI 1

p. Well, I finally have my “Gentoo”:http://www.gentoo.org Linux system up… mostly. I can connect to the Internet, I emerged builds of Gnome, KDE, and some apps like Evolution and Galeon. Getting everything configured and running (particularly ethernet) took a couple of days of futzing around and reading up on the “Gentoo Forums”:http://forums.gentoo.org

So far I’ve mostly just been exploring, though I have a couple observations:

* ACPI and the Realtek 8139too driver don’t play nicely. Unless I turn off ACPI in the Kernel, I can’t configure the net card.
* For some reason DHCP doesn’t work, either in /etc/config.d/net or if I run dhcpcd from the shell prompt.
* Until I added it to the /etc/hotplug.d/blacklist, hotplug kept trying to load the 8139cp module, and failing, which seemed to trash my eth0 setup. This is after 8139too was loaded from my autoload config file.

I’m impressed with the speed and the stability. I’m also impressed with (for the most part) how well compiling items as kernel modules seems to work. I definitely am going to want to read up on the Linux kernel architecture. Configuration does not seem to be as difficult as I’d feared, as the built-in tools seem more than adequate, and the documentation is excellent. Of course, this is how I feel after my 3rd attempt at the install…

The Gentoo Portage system in particular seems especially nice, as it has emerged numerous packages and installed them without problems (though the time it takes to compile some large applications like “Ximian”:http://www.ximian.com ‘s Evolution and “OpenOffice”:http://www.openoffice.org is truly mindboggling. Emerging Gnome took several hours, and I left the OpenOffice emerge running before I left for work today.

Right now I think I’m a happy n00b, and I’ll keep writing a bit more about my experiences.