Installing Gentoo on a ThinkPad T43

Harddisk Upgrade

The T43 has a Problem with non-ThinkPad hard disks, so if you want to upgrade it you look at the mentioned page and/or use the Example of an update on a drive with unsupported firmware. It might work.

Booting

The T43 has a special PATA-SATA-bridge, not every LiveCD will work. This is unfortunately also true for the Gentoo 2008.0 LiveCD. Use Knoppix 5.x instead, this is also nice because you can use a GUI and browse the internet during the installation. Knoppix (and later Gentoo) will see your HD-drive as /dev/sda.

Gentoo has started providing nice weekly stages, you can find those on your mirror under ~/releases/x86/autobuilds/. They work very well.

make.conf

My USE might be a bit bloated, but it works...

 # These settings were set by the catalyst build script that automatically
 # built this stage.
 # Please consult /etc/make.conf.example for a more detailed example.
 CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -msse2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
 CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
 # WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
 # Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before changing.
 CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
 
 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"
 MAKEOPTS="-j2"
 AUTOCLEAN="yes"
 FEATURES="${FEATURES} parallel_fetch"
 
 #X11 installation
 VIDEO_CARDS="radeon fglrx"
 INPUT_DEVICES="mouse joystick keyboard synaptics"
 LINGUAS="en fr de ar he"
 #source /usr/local/portage/layman/make.conf
 
 SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
 GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gentoo/ ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/gentoo/"
 GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://ftp.solnet.ch/mirror/Gentoo http://gentoo.mirror.solnet.ch"
 GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/gentoo/"
 GENTOO_MIRRORS="${GENTOO_MIRRORS} ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/gentoo"
 
 USE="3dnow 7zip  a52 acpi alsa aac -arts audiofile bluetooth bzip2 cairo cddb cdr cjk css dbus dga dhcp directfb"
 USE="${USE} dri dts dvd dvdr dvdread encode exif ffmpeg firefox flac ftp gif gimp glitz gnokii imagemagick"
 USE="${USE} gstreamer gtk hal hdaps htmlhandbook icq java javascript msn imagemagick imlib ipod irc jpeg jpeg2k"
 USE="${USE} kde lame laptop mad mmx mng mp3 mpeg networkmanager nsplugin ogg openexr opengl pam pcmcia pdf php"
 USE="${USE} plasma pmu png -qt3 qt4 quicktime raw ssh speex spell svg szip taglib tiff theora truetype unicode"
 USE="${USE} usb vcd vorbis wma wmf xml xv samba sse sse2 svg webkit win32codecs xvid xcomposite X xine xosd wifi"