I doggedly stuck with Gentoo – got over the stupid errors, and with the help of some kind souls on the forums have reached my initial goal – I’m transferring files from the box to my phone using Bluetooth!

I’ve got to write it up while I still remember how I did it, and then start formulating the next part of my plan which is scripting the thing to form a bluecasting rig.

Not this weekend though – I’m quitting while I’m still ahead.

Flushed with the success of getting Gentoo running, I moved on with the next phase – trying to get Bluetooth going. And now I’m pissed off again.

It all seems so simple when you read about it – set a few options in the kernel config (going from the Gentoo bluetooth howto this is), recompile, reboot, check your device appears… PROBLEM – the dongle isn’t even showing up as a USB device.

So I fiddle for a few hours, even resort to posting on the Gentoo forum, still no idea why the box doesn’t recognise any USB device.

I may be about to lose faith in Gentoo, and reach for my Red Hat FC5 install CDs I downloaded a week or three back. I know I need bluez and openobex to do what I want to do, do I need Gentoo grief too?

Had several more attempts using various methods at getting Gentoo installed on my old K6 board, including downloading the full LiveCD Installer – wouldn’t boot that either, but it’s almost certainly built for i686 not i586 – finally decided to resort tp plan B.

I’d treated myself to a new motherboard powered by an AMD XP 2800+ processor to play with MythTV – much fun. So let’s see if I can get Gentoo running on that, so quick hard drive swap last night, tried using the LiveCD Installer but it was taking far too long and I wasn’t comfortable it would work. And it did say in the instructions (yes, I do read them every now and then) you should be happy with doing minimal installs to use the installer.

So back to first principles this morning – reformat the partitions, follow the Quick Install guide (I almost know it by heart now) downloading i686 stage3.

It’s all going far too well, so not much surprose when, although it boots from the hard drive to more of a degree than the K6 (i.e. doesn’t reboot after a few secs) it did end up dying with a ‘Kernel panic’ – VFS: cannot open root device.

So back up a bit, reboot from CD, mount everything up again and have another look at the kernel config. SCott at work advised to not include SCSI support if it’s not needed, but I’m suspecting I needed to select something to get IDE working. A quick inspection of lspci shows ‘IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)’ so hunting round in menuconfig I find something relevant, select it, rebuild, reboot, and …

BINGO! A barebones Gentoo box. Now, what was I going to do with it?