dive into mark

I have utterly failed to install Gentoo Linux. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is the newest and geekiest Linux distribution around. Hardly a distribution, really; more of a philosophy (Linux should be as intimidating as possible). You download just enough to get you started, burn it onto a CD, then manually partition and format your drive, manually configure your networking, manually mount the CD, unpack the few precompiled utilities, then use what appears to be a fairly advanced system of build scripts that download source code and compile it from scratch. The first thing you download and compile is the kernel. (And that’s for the easy install. For the custom install, the first thing you download and compile is a compiler.) It’s like 1995 all over again.

So here’s my problem: I can boot off the CD and set up my wireless networking like this:

insmod pcmcia_core
insmod i82365
insmod ds
cardmgr -f
dhcpcd eth0

This works fine, and I have full Internet access for the rest of the installation. I managed to follow all the other instructions and not blow up my computer. I even successfully uninstalled the bootloader from my old RedHat installation and reinstalled a new bootloader that boots into Gentoo, all without destroying or making my existing Windows partition unbootable. Fabulous.

The problem comes when I try to compile my own kernel. The install instructions are no help here; they just say okay, go run make menuconfig and come back when you’re done. I have built a few custom kernels in my day, but never on a laptop, and certainly never on a laptop with wireless networking. The kernel sources that come with Gentoo are 2.4.19r1, so all this stuff should be supported (in fact, I know they’re supported because it works off the install CD). I enabled all the PCMCIA stuff and all the wireless networking drivers (as modules), but when I reboot with my compiled kernel, I can’t bring up the card. I have only a handful of wireless drivers in /lib/modules/blah/blah/blah/pcmcia/wireless/, and I don’t have pcmcia_core; I don’t even appear to have the cardmgr program. That’s probably a bad sign.

(On a side note, I’m wondering why anyone in their right mind would use a distribution like this. No, I don’t really wonder; there are niche markets all along the spectrum — on one end is Mandrake, which has friendly wizards to install everything and retails for $54.99 at Amazon; on the other end is Gentoo, which has 17-step installation instructions that include compiling your own compiler.)

So anyway, if you’ve had success compiling your own kernel with PCMCIA and wireless networking support, and especially if you’ve done it in Gentoo, please let me know what I’m doing wrong. I’ll just be over in the corner, banging my head against a wall.

Update: Jeremy Bowers thinks I need to emerge pcmcia-cs and do some other stuff which he documented in a private email. I’ll let you know how it goes. Total elapsed time between question and answer: 59 minutes.

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