Gentoo on an Asus Eee 1000

I posted up my notes on putting Gentoo on a Dell M65 laptop just in time to put these notes up. It’s way out of date, but I wanted to show how much easier the process has become since then.

Ubuntu

The Eee came with some hacked up version of Xandros on it. Ug!

That came off like a prom dress in favor of Easy Peasy, which got wiped out pretty quickly in favor of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It installed in about 10 or 15 minutes. From experiementing with Debian and Ubuntu before, I knew how to add the software I wanted. It automatically configured itself for my bluetooth mouse, the wireless chipset, the multimedia keys on the keyboard, the touchpad, and handled suspending like a champ.

Virtual Machine

Now, I’m a big fan of Gentoo, but those that are familiar with it will immediately understand my reluctance to put it on this hardware. This netbook is slow, relatively speaking, and has limited disk space. Technically, this model has two SSD’s that make up the 40 GB of space, an 8 and a 32 GB chip. Word on the street is that the 8 GB chip is basically a normal-speed hard drive, but the 32 GB chip is slower, but I haven’t done any testing to know for sure. I just know that 8 GB is really pushing it, size-wise, to have more than one kernel build directory and a copy of the portage tree on it, along with everything else.

My technique here was to use a virtual machine to do the initial build, then transfer the image to the netbook using a stage4 backup and restore. This should save wear and tear on the SSD, and be faster. When convenient, I could use the VM to do normal software installs, large batch changes (like changing a major USE flag or installing a new version of Gnome), doing kernel updates, etc. I can take advantage of portage’s ability to create binary packages during the normal install process. Whenever I install a package on either system, I’ll get a package I can quickly install to the other, or reinstall later.

As an aside, I used VirtualBox for my VM software. This took some amount of hassle. It turns out that the weekly builds that the Gentoo project is doing these days won’t load up in either VirtualBox or KVM. It dies around trying to uncompress the squashfs. I tried to go back to the 2008.0 release, but the problem there is that the kernel in that version of the boot disk doesn’t have drivers for the network card in the Eee 1000. I finally found a version of the boot disk from around May that worked. Getting the base system up and running in a VM was then straightforward.

To facilitate keeping the netbook and the VM in sync, I just wanted to use one portage tree, so I put that and the kernel directory (/usr/src) out on my network, and symlinked them. Later, I may put them on the root partition, symlink them from the 32 GB partition, or even try putting them into some sort of squashfs.

Configuration

There were a couple tricks I used to get ready to move to the actual hardware. One was that I put my main machine’s portage tree out on my network’s file server, and mounted it in the VM, saving space, and perhaps speeding up the process a little more, but mainly so that I could also mount it to the netbook later, and have the two perfectly in sync. I also put the following into /etc/make.conf so that I could easily install any packages to either the VM or the netbook, depending on which machine they were built.

PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages/eee"
FEATURES="buildpkg"

The first thing I needed to tackle, of course, was X. However, this wasn’t the problem. X has gotten some serious love in the past few years, and I didn’t even need to create a config file! Everything was automatically detected and setup, except for the touchpad. Sure, it worked fine as a regular mouse, but I wanted it to work with multi-touch scrolling. You need some extra stuff in /etc/make.conf:

INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev synaptics"
VIDEO_CARDS="intel"

To get a basic /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, I just did a `Xorg -configure’, and moved the resulting file into place. Then I edited one line to change the “Driver” for the mouse to “synaptics”. I also unmasked the latest version of “xf86-input-synaptics”, which is 1.1.2, at the time of this writing.

The big, BIG problem I had was bluetooth. I spent 4 hours trying to configure bluetooth for my mouse. There are two “stacks” of bluetooth software in the portage tree at the moment, and I kept switching back and forth between the two. I tried to use what was unmasked and stable. I tried to configure things the “new” way, like they worked on Ubuntu. I tried to configure things like they worked on the old laptop. Finally, I ran across something that said that everything should “just work,” so I gave up, unmasked the very latest versions of hal and dbus, and let it install everything that pulled in with them. Lo and behold, not only did that get the mouse working, NetworkManager could now see and activate my wireless network card! However, I found some conflicts in the stuff I had emerged, so I rolled out “bluez” and “gnome-bluetooth” in favor of “bluez-libs”, “bluez-utils” and “bluez-gnome”. Plus, they were stable. I wound up unmasking these packages:

=x11-libs/gtk+-2.16.1
=dev-libs/glib-2.20.3
=dev-libs/libunique-1.0.8
=dev-util/gtk-doc-am-1.11
=sys-apps/hal-0.5.12_rc1-r6
=sys-apps/dbus-1.2.12
=sys-auth/consolekit-0.3.0-r1
=gnome-extra/gnome-power-manager-2.24.4-r2
=sys-power/pm-utils-1.2.5

Surprisingly, with these changes, and even without anything in the xorg.conf file to support it, my bluetooth mouse magically works. This is even better than fooling around with pairing it, at least for me. I guess if you worked around other people using bluetooth mice and keyboards, this might become a problem, because I can’t see how the Gnome bluetooth applet would prevent them from mucking about on my system.

Interestingly, this package line up led me straight to getting suspend working. Something in here complained about the older version of gnome-power-manager, so I installed the newer version. I quickly found out it couldn’t do anything without pm-utils, but that was easily fixed. Now the machine goes to sleep when I press the suspend key combo, and that’s all I ask.

See this post about the font issues.

I ran into a problem with nm-applet, which I opened a bug for here. To support the latest and greatest, I have the following packaged unmasked:

=net-misc/networkmanager-0.7.1-r6
=net-misc/networkmanager-openvpn-0.7.1
=net-misc/openvpn-2.1_rc15
=sys-auth/policykit-0.9-r1
=gnome-extra/policykit-gnome-0.9.2-r1
=gnome-extra/nm-applet-0.7.1-r1
=net-wireless/wpa_supplicant-0.6.9

Update

At this time, there are two problems with my setup. One is that there’s a long timeout when udev starts on boot. It takes about 2 minutes or something. I normally wouldn’t really care, but on a netbook — that might be running on battery — it annoys me. For now, for convenience sake, I’m sticking with Ubuntu Netbook Remix.