Gentoo GCC-3.3.6 and mplayer or xine

Got a new VIA EPIA EN12000E mobo over the weekend and plan to set it up as a set top box and file server, among other things. It's a pretty nifty little gadget and best of all has no fan.

I'm building a new gentoo instance on it. So far I've built the core OS on a mirror RAID pair of drives and plan to move 4 SATA drives to it when all the services are completely built and it works with my 1080i HDTV. For now I'll probably just stick to using the VGA interface, hoping that'll be easiest.

I've had a few hurdles to get through during the build. For example, I wanted to do a network boot and install, but the gentoo network boot and install instructions weren't clear. So I reverted to an Ubuntu network boot I set up a while ago and went through the rescue interface.

I set up a RAID1 pair for the root partition, and LVM over RAID1 for a few other partitions. Considering my first gentoo installation is still going strong since being built in 2002, I figure I'll make sure this one lasts too.

It took a while to get going. I generally remember how to get started with the gentoo install since I started doing it years ago when we would start from stage1 (if fanatic enough). Unfortunately the Ubuntu 7.04 rescue boot doesn't provide SSHD so I had to get the stage3 and portage installed and chrooted before I could get SSH to the box.

Once that was done I tweaked the CFLAGS and USE flags for the hardware and did the bootstrap.sh to make sure it's fully optimized for the hardware. I then built a custom kernel (2.6.22.6) to enable most of the embeded hardware that I'll be using to start with.

When I booted the new kernel none of the LVM partitions mounted. Duh! I forgot to emerge the lvm2 package. Luckily LVM was compiled in the kernel, so I just copied the static vgscan and vgchange binaries from my other box and started the LVM partitions up.

Next I diff'd the /var/lib/portage/world file to see what I want from my old box and started working through the USE flags. I noticed a dependancy for gcc-3.3.6. The core system already came with gcc-4.1.2 so why should i put an old gcc-3 on it? It turns out that all that is needed is to 'emerge libstdc++-v3'. Note that the package is not simply libstc++.

I'm not sure why libstdc++-v3 isn't included in the 2007.0 stages since they're packaged with gcc-4. I eventually found the answer on an IRC log (http://dbforms.oxxus.net/dependency-question-appemulationwine-world-corefonts/index.php), which references the Gentoo GCC Upgrade Guide.

Next I have ccache and distcc set up to speed up the builds and I must wait a couple of days for everything to install. I hope the configs won't be too complicated and I'm looking forward to seeing the performance of this system.