Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Gentoo on my RPi: module loading when I don't want

Why am I writing a blog post on Christmas night?
Maybe I'll explain that some day but for now I want to talk about my Gentoo install on my Raspberry Pi.

By the way, I'm now running it on my new 512 MB RAM RPi that I got delivered last Saturday after a wait time of just 6 days.
That's so much better than the first time when I was waiting for two whole months.

So, what's the verdict, have I noticed any speed difference?
In all honesty, nothing very noticeable so far.

Anyway, to get my Gentoo SD card to boot on my new RPi, I had to replace the /boot partition with the one I found on the latest Raspbian image.
Without this, it booted either to a blank screen or froze during the boot.
To get the /boot partition, I had to burn the Raspbian image to a spare SD card I had lying around.
I then inserted the SD card into the reader on my EeePC 901 and copied the /boot to the Desktop of my Ubuntu install.
Then, I replaced the SD card with the Gentoo card and copied the /boot to the Gentoo card.
Now, it booted fine.

However, on boot, I persistently got this message repeated several times:

modprobe: FATAL: Error inserting ipv6 (/lib/modules/3.2.27+/kernel/net/ipv6/ipv6.ko): Operation not permitted

Although a supposedly fatal error was announced, Gentoo performed just fine.

Nevertheless, to get rid of this annoyance is very easy.
Just nano (as root) into /etc/modprobe.d/aliases.conf and note where it says "Uncomment the network protocols you don't want loaded".
So, just uncomment the line
alias net-pf-10
and reboot and you should no longer see those fatal errors.

OK, so that's for modules that try to load but can't.

I also had a problem trying to get the sound module loaded (snd_bcm2835).
According to /etc/conf.d/modules, I only need to add
modules="snd_bcm2835"
to the bottom of this file.
OK, I did that but the module still didn't load at boot and I had to manually load it with
sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

Nothing for it but to apply some brute force.

So I opened up with nano (as root) /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart and added this line
@sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

Now it loads fine.



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