Gentoo stage4 and kernel install weirdness
At my new job I’m itching to start rolling on a Gentoo box… my days on win32 are almost over! I’ve been working on a shiny new image for the past few days. Tonight I rolled it into a stage4 tarball and installed it on a new 100g Seagate disk. Tomorrow morning I’ll finally have a nice Linux box to work with.
Earlier today I was talking to Jaisen who’s adding ethernet throttling support to his gear. After installing his new kernel, grub kept failing because it didn’t find any data in /etc/mtab. So he did the usual trick of copying /proc/mounts though oddly it resulted in an empty file? We decided to just use cat instead which worked fine. I honestly blew it off until just a bit ago when I chrooted to my shiny new stage4 install only to have the exact same thing happen. What in the world? Since when can’t you do:
cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
Most likely I will upgrade my kernel howto to recommend using:
cat /proc/mounts \> /etc/mtab
I should also note that my new image is running Xfce 4.4.0. Why you ask? Because it’s sweet.