Gentoo 2008.0 install

Hey all!

I'm currently working on getting Gentoo 2008.0 installed on my Acer Aspire One laptop, but am running into a couple of issues that I was hoping people could help me out with.

1 - Which sound drivers do I need to use? I read that the EEE PC 701 uses Intel HD Audio, not sure if the Aspire One does as well (as they are similar CPUs)
2 - How do I get the SSD card ATA drivers to use Serial ATA and not generic ATA? The hard drive currently shows as /dev/hdc, not /dev/sda.
3 - Video drivers for X Windows - which one should I use, and where should I grab from?

If anyone can help me with these questions, I would be very happy. I'll post my success/failures here as well.

 

Maybe you can use the Ubuntu install how-to as a reference.

Please let us know what kind of boot times you achieve with Gentoo!

Good luck!

 

So far, I got Gentoo installed and running with HD Audio as well as Serial ATA disk drivers.

Without the overhead of the ATA drivers (completely disabled in the kernel) I get the following results in hdparm for the 8GB SDA Drive:

Code:

# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1210 MB in  2.00 seconds = 605.09 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   90 MB in 3.07 seconds =  29.35 MB/sec

WOW. That's *FAST*. I can't wait to see how this puppy performs with video and audio playback. Luckily, the Linpus installation I had on here, I yanked the xorg.conf file, so it should be really easy to reverse-engineer the settings for this lappy to get it up and running.

The only complaint I have -so far- is the mouse is really sensitive to movement. I hope to correct this in the update to xorg.conf. Also, if the touchscreen arrives early next week, I'll be using that - most likely - as my main input device instead of the mouse.

I'll be posting about that in another thread.

So far, so good though. I have yet to get the GPS device that I bought embedded inside the lappy, as well as the external HSDPA card that I have that lies dormant with a live 3G SIM card.

Once this research pays off, I'll be using this to build a Linux MID distribution over time, which is completely Java based. I will be posting results of that in another thread as soon as I can.

 

(Follow up to the previous post)

Ran hdparm five times after load.

Results are consistent. 600MB/sec with cache, buffered is 30MB/sec.

Indeed. Wow.

 

Code:

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1194 MB in  2.00 seconds = 597.12 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  112 MB in  3.04 seconds =  36.84 MB/sec

My second try was even slightly faster. I have the P1800 SSD runing standard Acer Linpus.

 

How's your Gentoo installation doing after several days?

I'm looking at getting a One, but haven't yet. I'm running Gentoo/~amd64 on my current home workstation, which is rather heavy duty (dual dual-core Opterons, 8 gigs RAM, 4-disk md/kernel RAID, etc), and intend to install a 32-bit chroot and build the system for the One there, then either copy it straight over or use portage's FEATURES=buildpkg in the chroot, and install on the One using binpkgs.

What CFLAGS are you using and why? A bit of googling has turned up literally NOTHING for the Atom N270 and gcc flags, and I've no idea what -march or -mtune settings to use... keeping in mind that I'll be building on the Opteron machine and needing to run the code in its chroot, so I may not be able to use a perfect match and may /need/ that -mtune. As I've been out of the 32-bit x86 community for several years now, AND on AMD hardware, I don't even know what a normal 32-bit Intel CPU might use, let alone how it'd differ from the Atom.

So yeah, the arch based CFLAGS you are using and/or any place you could point me for info on them would be very useful at this point. =8^)

Meanwhile, I do see the kernel config someone posted. That'll certainly be helpful as well. =8^)

 

So far, so good. I was on vacation for a few days, so I didn't get a chance to post up.

Apparently, there's an intel driver for X Windows that uses the 945/965GL video chip that's used inside this thing. Also, there's drivers for the camera (uvcvideo), and there's support for X Windows in 1024x600 display resolution. I have the xorg.conf file from the original installation.

Audio is standard Intel HD Audio, and the Ethernet r8186 drivers work okay (Although, I would like to use the 8101E drivers - I just can't get them to compile.) Once I switched the hard drive to use the serial ATA drivers, everything screamed. I'm going to be updating more of it, and installing X with the touch mod soon. Hopefully everything will start coming together.

I'll keep everyone posted.

 

FYI:

CFLAGS="-O2 -mtune=i586 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -msse -msse2 -msse3"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"

I'm installing the USB Touchscreen driver (as I added a touchscreen ) and I'm getting the rest of the hardware running. Intel HD Audio is working fine (AFAIK) and I'll be adding the uvcvideo drivers.

 

After some tweaking:

Code:

 Timing cached reads:   1262 MB in  2.00 seconds = 631.01 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  116 MB in  3.00 seconds =  38.65 MB/sec

 

Mind posting your kernel .config? My HDD drive is getting pathetic speeds.
EDIT:
Actually, I disabled the old ATA drivers and now libata is being used and its much, much better.

Code:

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1242 MB in  2.00 seconds = 621.11 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  182 MB in  3.02 seconds =  60.28 MB/sec

with the 120gb hard disk.

Here's my kernel .config, might be useful to you. Gentoo 2.6.25-gentoo-r7
I had to put it in a zip file because this forum doesn't allow .config as an extension, or .txt :/

Audio works, but I might need another option for HD audio or something. Dunno. Alsamixer is kind of empty, just Master, Headphones, Front, and Front Mic.

 

There is an AAO entry on the gentoo wiki that may help with some of the issues:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Acer_Aspire_One_A110L

According to that link everything should be working fine using the info given...