Troubleshooting

It is entirely possible, especially if you are a GNU/Linux n00b and do not know you PC that well, that you made some errors during the install which only the first boot process reveales. Or you configured something, restarted and now your computer doesn't work like it is supposed to or at all. Those “emergency” situations can usually be solved using the Gentoo Live CD and here are the descriptions and solutions to a couple of them I encountered.

GRUB provides a “GRUB shell” - a very simplified version of the bash, which enables you to boot the Gentoo kernel image automatically. All you need to do is specify as root the partition where the kernel image is located (presumable /boot) in GRUB-style (i.e. (hd0,0) or something like that) and then point GRUB using the kernel variable to the kernel image. Then you can say boot and GRUB boots the kernel image automatically.

root (hd0,0)
  Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.17-gentoo-r8 root=/dev/hda3
  [Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1c00, size=0x1c8507]

boot

The Filesystem type [..] and [Linux-bzImage (..)] messages mean that GRUB found what you told it to look for and everything is all right.

In this case you have to first boot the Gentoo Live CD. Once you are inside the Gentoo environment, you need to mount the / (= root) parition of your system to e.g. /mnt/gentoo, mount the proc system as well and the chroot into it. Now you are inside your own system and can fix whatever problem you have.

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo
mount -t proc proc /mnt/gentoo/proc

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash

To fix the missing support for any hardware or software in your kernel, simply switch to /usr/src/linux and run make menuconfig. You will be presented with the typical kernel config screen, which you used during the installation and have the opportunity to fix your problem.

cd /usr/src/linux/
make menuconfig

Do not forget to rebuild your kernel, once you are done with the configuration and copy the newly compiled kernel image to boot! (See the Common Tasks section for more details on how to update the kernel.)

make && make modules_install
cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/kernel-#.#.##-gentoo-r#

Some applications instruct you to delete some files from your system in order to work - the emerge process of this application even provides a bash script to do so. However, once you delete a part of your Portage tree, you can only get it back by re-emerging the kernel sources. But first you have to clean up all dependencies and the make process:

make clean
emerge --clean && emerge --depclean
revdep-rebuild

emerge -av gentoo-sources

The usual places to look for any logged information (since you installed a system logger) is under /var/log/messages and /var/log/auth.log.

If you accidentally enable highlighting in vim you can disable it by using either the :nohlsearch command or adding the setting set nohlsearch in vimrc was ist vimrc?