Venkat’s Views

Essential Gentoo Linux Tools

I have been running Gentoo Linux for the past couple of years and I like it for a lot of reasons. I had it very easily customized and optimized for my now decommissioned Dell Dimension L600r (Pentium III 600MHz) server. I also have it installed, optimized and customized for my new self assembled Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor based PC/server (that is running this blog among other things). The package management system combined with USE flags in Gentoo Linux make it easy to install and maintain only the packages that I absolutely need (with only the features that I absolutely need for each one of them).

Due to this reason (of having only the packages that I need), I sometimes find that a command or a tool that I always took for granted (to be available) in other Linux distributions is not available in Gentoo Linux. As fans of Gentoo Linux often say, such commands are just one “emerge” away. Given below are some of the packages that I have found useful and installed as part of my Gentoo Linux installs:

• app-editors/vim (Editor)
• app-text/aspell (Spell checker)
• app-misc/colordiff (Colors in diff output)
• app-misc/screen (Virtual terminals)
• sys-devel/bc (Who needs a GUI calculator when you have this)
• sci-calculators/units (For unit conversions)
• sys-apps/pciutils (PCI bus utilities like lspci)
• sys-apps/usbutils (USB enumeration utilities like lsusb)
• sys-power/cpufrequtils (Set and retrieve CPU frequency settings - cpufreq-set, cpufreq-info)
• sys-apps/smartmontools (SMART related disk tools - smartd, smartctl)
• sys-apps/lm_sensors (Hardware monitoring utilities)
• app-admin/hddtemp (Hard disk temperature monitoring utility)
• app-admin/sysstat (System performance tools - sar, iostat, mpstat, sadf)
• sys-process/lsof (For process or file level debugging)
• dev-util/strace (For process level diagnostics)
• net-analyzer/nmap (Network snooping tool)
• net-analyzer/netcat (Versatile network connection level utility - nc)
• net-analyzer/traceroute (Trace the network route to a host)
• net-dns/bind-tools (BIND tools - dig, host, nslookup, nsupdate)
• net-ftp/ncftp (FTP client for those few times it might be required)
• net-misc/whois (Whois domain registration information lookup client)
• www-client/lynx (Text based web browser)
• media-gfx/jhead (JPEG EXIF information tool)

I have only included tools that I found were missing after a basic stage 3 install of Gentoo Linux 2007.0. I have also not listed packages that are already mentioned in the Gentoo Handbook.

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Gentoo Linux 2007.0, Intel DG965WH and IDE CD/DVD Drives

The following error showed up when trying to boot Gentoo Linux (from a Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Live CD) on a machine with an Intel DG965WH motherboard (Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, Intel DG965WH motherboard, IDE DVD drive, SATA hard drive):

Attempting to mount media:- /dev/sda
No bootable medium found. Waiting for new devices...
Could not find CD to boot, something else needed!


The machine did not boot after this point. A little research about this problem led me to quite a few websites where it has been mentioned that booting up linux with the “all-generic-ide” option will fix this problem. A little more digging up led me to this Linux kernel patch posting from Alan Cox which explains what this option exactly does. It looks like the “all-generic-ide” option forces the generic IDE driver to claim any unknown IDE storage devices. The Intel DG965WH motherboard uses a Marvell IDE controller chip that does not seem to have any support yet in the Linux kernel 2.6.19 (that is in the Gentoo 2007.0 Live CD) and hence the fall back using the “all-generic-ide” option is required.

A less serious warning that showed up while booting from the same Gentoo Linux 2007.0 Live CD was:

PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at f0000000 is not E820-reserved
PCI: Not using MMCONFIG.


The “pci=nommconf” option while booting up linux got rid of this warning (by explicitly disabling the MMCONFIG PCI configuration space access method). Apparently, the Intel DG965WH has a BIOS that exhibits a particular MMCONFIG problem. This Linux kernel related discussion thread has some more details.

Combining the above two options with the “nodhcp” option (for a static IP based server install) resulted in the following command line that worked like a charm with this particular configuration:

gentoo nodhcp all-generic-ide pci=nommconf

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