Sojourn of the Mind

In the past I have played with various operating systems on my work laptop. I have once again settled on Gentoo and started the conversion process. I decided to go with a 64 Bit System. Since when I looked at it last time 64 bit had some problems because a number of vendors did not release 64 bit versions of commercial software. Currently there are plenty of 64 bit commercial packages such as Flash, Java, etc. Plus the 32 bit compatibility layer helps as well.

First step back up the drive. I bought a little USB/SATA hard drive dock so using new drives is a snap. (I will blog about if soon). The cost of 2TB drive is as low as $180.00 now so it ts easy to backup things.

Here is the information on the laptop so a baseline can be set, and also so that people searching on how to do things on Gentoo have a starting point:
The system is a Toshiba A8 Laptop, it has 2.8 GB of Memory, and a 100 Meg Drive. The CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo Processor T5600 @1.83GHz which is a 64 bit cpu.

Here is the lspci for it:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controller
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
03:0b.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
03:0b.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
03:0b.3 SD Host controller: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller

I will be installing the latest Gentoo on the laptopt, which is version 2008.0. Did you notice it is 2009? Advise to Gentoo team, if you are not  going to release system updates every Year, do not version the distributon based on Year. That way when you read the version number you do not think that Gentoo is a dead distbituion, with this versioning system the gentoo distro feels ancient. The truth is the way the Gentoo manual installation works, there is no way for the distribution to be old, but the download Version number is annoying to me.  Anyway I am off my soapbox now!

I will keep blogging on how the install goes.

Tags: 64 bit, Gentoo, laptop, Linux, toshiba

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