My Gentoo 2006.0

I read Tim Yamin’s announcement about 2006.0 Gentoo release on February 27, 2006.
Till that week end I couldn’t download the package. Now there is a special installer cum live cd for x86 architecture. I thought I will not have much fun this time. But actually I got lot more fun compared with last two years.

As I don’t have laptop with cd writer now, I happened to take help of internet café to burn the iso image. But unfortunately that CD didn’t work for me. CD got a sector error when it is about to start gdm. So nothing was moving after that white screen. I couldn’t believe it first time and tried couple of more times to conclude that it is problem with CD only.

Then thought of booting the from hard drive or USB hard disk. But my machine got old USB(1.1) stuff and even the USB drive is not bootable.

So I thought of using existing gentoo installation’s boot partition (32MB) to hold kernel and initrd binarirs. Then I thought I can point the root at some other ext3 partition. I don’t remember much but that didn’t work quite well. It was always ending up with loop path error. Only thing I could guess is to keep image file on same partition where kernel and initrd are located. By then my enthusiasm is slightly down. And I decided to try alternate methods to do the same exercise.

First I want to increase boot partition size, I am not aware how to do that online. So I thought I can quickly re install gentoo 2005 with increased boot partition. Something I missed even that didn’t work out. And while doing it during midnight I screwed up my MBR. So I couldn’t even boot to XP. Then I took help of Windows 2003 evaluation CD.
I tried to install Win20003 Server on hard disk where my Linux was there. So I get a clean slate on that front and also that fixes my MBR also. Anyway I don’t have key for Win2003 Server, but I know it does over write MBR the moment you select the partition to install Windows. All this exercise took whole night.

And by morning I thought I would Grub for NT. Created just one ext2 partition and took help of grub for NT. After tweaking hear and there in grub configuration file finally I could boot the cd image from hard disk. Rest of the details I will post with the screen shots of my gentoo 2006.0. I am thinking of using crossover office and work on gentoo 2006.0 for quite some time now. Let me hope gentoo supports me.