Gentoo EPIA Install (part 1)

So... time to install Gentoo (also see epiawiki.org - Installing Gentoo on an EPIA system). A good book to have handy during the install is "Linux in a Nutshell", especially for looking up option flags for the various commands.

Popped the boot CD (Universal CD for 2004.0 Gentoo) in and let it boot up. It reports my hardware as a "VIA Samuel 2 599MHz, 64KB cache". It's now sitting at the '#' prompt (er, shell prompt). When I was setting up the BIOS, I changed the shared memory for the video card from 128MB (default) to 32MB. I also disabled things like the audio ports, serial ports, parallel port, leaving only ethernet, firewire and USB.

Looking at the content of /dev/ ("cd /dev", "ls -l hd*"), I see that I have (3) hard disk devices (DVD-ROM counts as a "hd" device) labeled hda, hdc and hdd. "hda" is my primary IDE, master drive (the 7200rpm 80GB). "hdc" is my secondary IDE, master drive (the 5400rpm 120GB). "hdd" is my DVD-ROM. Each of the two hard-drives have 1 partition each (hda1 and hdc1) which I'll be wiping out when I setup Gentoo. Using the "hdparm -i /dev/hda" command will display a quick summary about hda.

Verify networking using "/sbin/ifconfig". My box automatically grabbed a DHCP address from my network's DHCP server so I'm good to go.

Time to partition the drive. I actually planned this out a few days ago, but I might make a few changes. My plan is to use the primary disk for the operating system, and use the secondary disk for any temporary files and swap. I also want to limit the amount of space set aside for the operating system and keep it all in a seperate area from any user-data to make backing up the config with Norton Ghost easier. Things are a bit complicated as I plan on using LVM to manage portions of the disk instead of creating individual partitions for some things. Basic steps that I did (have to exit out of fdisk using the 'w' command to switch drives):

1. Wipe out all partitions on /dev/hda and /dev/hdc
2. Create the boot partition on /dev/hda (primary, active, 64MB)
3. Create the swap partition on /dev/hdc (primary, 2048MB)
4. Create the root partition on /dev/hda (primary, 2048MB)
5. Create LVM partition #1 on /dev/hda (primary, 24576MB)
6. Create 2nd LVM partition on /dev/hda (primary, rest of disk)
7. Create backup root partition on /dev/hdc (primary, 2048MB)
8. Create 1st LVM partition on /dev/hdc (primary, 16384MB)
9. Create 2nd LVM partition on /dev/hdc (primary, rest of disk)

Basically, I have a 2GB root partition, a 2GB swap file, a 2GB backup root on the 2nd disk, 24GB of operating-system space on the primary disk, 16GB of temporary file space on the second disk. User space on disk 1 is around 50GB and around 95GB on disk 2. I plan on having (4) seperate LVM volume groups (vgos, vgtmp, vguser, vgmedia) rather then combining all (4) partitions into a single volume group.

Time to create the file systems, and setup the LVM volume groups. Boot volume (/dev/hda1) is ext2, root (/dev/hda2) and root mirror (/dev/hdc2) are ext3. Swap partition is /dev/hdc1, LVM partitions are vgos (/dev/hda3), vguser (/dev/hdd4), vgtmp (/dev/hdc3) and vgmedia (/dev/hdc4).

mke2fs /dev/hda1
mke2fs -j /dev/hda2
mke2fs -j /dev/hdc2
mkswap /dev/hdc1
swapon /dev/hdc1
pvcreate /dev/hda3 /dev/hda4 /dev/hdc3 /dev/hdc4
vgcreate vgos /dev/hda3
vgcreate vguser /dev/hda4
vgcreate vgtmp /dev/hdc3
vgcreate vgmedia /dev/hdc4

To create the logical volumes inside each volume group, I used the following commands. "vgos" is going to hold /opt (2GB), /usr (4GB), and /var (4GB). "vguser" is going to hold /home (32GB to start). "vgtmp" is holding /tmp (4GB) and /var/tmp (4GB).

lvcreate -L2G -nopt vgos
lvcreate -L4G -nusr vgos
lvcreate -L4G -nvar vgos
lvcreate -L32G -nhome vguser
lvcreate -L4G -ntmp vgtmp
lvcreate -L4G -nvartmp vgtmp

mke2fs -j /dev/vgos/opt
mke2fs -j /dev/vgos/usr
mke2fs -j /dev/vgos/var
mke2fs -j /dev/vguser/home
mke2fs /dev/vgtmp/tmp
mke2fs /dev/vgtmp/vartmp

What fun! Time to mount all of the volumes (no need to mkdir the "root" partition, which is why the first command here is a mount instead of a mkdir):

mount /dev//hda2 /mnt/gentoo
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

Mount the LVM managed volumes:

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/opt
mount /dev/vgos/opt /mnt/gentoo/opt
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/usr
mount /dev/vgos/usr /mnt/gentoo/usr
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/var
mount /dev/vgos/var /mnt/gentoo/var
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/home
mount /dev/vguser/home /mnt/gentoo/home

Mounting the two temporary folders requires special permissions to be set (per chapter 4e of the handbook).

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/tmp
mount /dev/vgtmp/tmp /mnt/gentoo/tmp
chmod 1777 /mnt/gentoo/tmp

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/var/tmp
mount /dev/vgtmp/vartmp /mnt/gentoo/var/tmp
chmod 1777 /mnt/gentoo/var/tmp

And the "proc" file system (last bit of chapter 4e in the handbook)

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

Taking a break for a bit. (continued in next post)