If you’re installing Ruby 1.9.1 on Windows, you might get a “Ruby Unable to Locate Component” dialog. What this means is that the readline.dll library to be installed.

The solution is to download the binary .zip from
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/readline.htm,
extract the bin/readline5.dll file to the ruby bin folder (it should be C:\ruby\bin). You then rename it to readline.dll, and that should get rid of that annoying error message.

some good doc over at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml

Anyway, hope you enjoy your Gentoo-powered laptop! I’m very happy with mine.

I eventually figured out that block device names were changing because of softerblue.com’s kernel options. He had both “ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support” and “Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers” compiled into the kernel, when it should really be only the latter. After I completely disabled the former option, my block device names returned to normal.

I found myself frustrated between the different USB devices I had (camera, thumbdrive, backup drive, etc), so I decided to use UUID instead.

Also, another way to find the UUID of a partition (or FS, really) is to see this:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

This will show a bunch of hex entries being symbolic links to /dev/sdx or /dev/hdx entries.
Then in fstab your entry you can use it in this format:
UUID= / ext3 notail 1 0

I find this a more direct approach than using labels, as it requires less utilities for a base system (UUIDs will work with basically just udev iirc), which means less chance of needing a livecd if you happen to break a whole bunch of core libraries during emerge (and ~arch is known to do that every once in a while).

I was having issues seeing my CD drive (wasn’t sure what P-ATA chip on installed), and the reason I was getting the kernel panics was because my kernel didn’t have the Advanced Partition selection set (duh! who decided the DOS partition table should be in the advanced setting?).
Anyways, I’m not fully booted, with (almost) full hardware support, ready to emerge the rest of my system.

I hope I can pay you back for the help somehow. At least now I can move on to tackling issues with mono and monodevelop. On to C# for me!

By the way, do you find yourself constantly trying to wipe your laptop to stay as shiny as it was when you opened the box? The fact that it seems to just attract grease drives me nuts! fingerprint magnet they say? I’d call it a tool to turn anyone into an obsessive clean freak!

I didn’t know much about OSS, and was kind of waiting to see what was going to happen with the future of the ALSA drivers.

There was some post on the ubuntu forums about managing to use the mics properly with the Hermosa chipset, though, so I figured I’d just wait and see.

I’ll give this a shot as soon as I can get Gentoo to boot again (unfortunately had to re-install and atm getting kernel panics because it can’t find /dev/sda4… very strange.)

Can you let me know (on my blog would be nice) what the .config section for your S-ATA/IDE kernel looks like? I assumed just using AHCI + PIIX (for the CD drive) would be fine, but it doesn’t seem happy about it.