Lately I bought a new box it’s an Acer Aspire T180. Maybe you wonder why would I buy an Acer machine instead of buying the same components and assembling them myself the main reason it’s cause it’s CHEAPER (at least here).

Here it comes another story of mines, as you might have guessed I wanted to setup a Gentoo on it. So I download Gentoo 2006.1 minimal cd install for AMD64, burn it and boot it, seems to detect everything correctly, nice, lets start configuring netw… WAIT WTF!? I’m getting flooded I can’t even see what I’m typing damn message:

sky2 eth0: phy read timeout

omg someone stop that!!! Ok, time to do some research at Google and Gentoo forums, seems that there’s a problem with sky2 driver and some kernel versions it’s adviced to proceed the install with the old driver then upgrade kernel to the latest version and change drivers. So there we go:

modprobe -r sky2 && modprobe sk98lin
FATAL: Module sk98lin not found

Damn it today it’s not my day I bet this new box is going to give me some headache… So there we go as far as I remember 2006.0 cd had the sk98lin module I look for it at my cd’s collection “pekaboo I found you” err wait wait why does it have that hole in the plastic (I move my hand) now it’s bigger o_O (I look at my hand and notice that it just disintegrated in my hands -_-”, ok, ok calm down I’ll download it again it’s only 50mb and I’ll be installing it HA! gullible it’s not booting… (by that time I was already thinking going to bed)

This is friggin pissing me off, I’m stuck and I have no clue on what to do I start doing a deeper research, aham seems there’s an alternative method to install Gentoo so let’s try getting the latest Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04, anyways sooner or later I’m going to download it…

Feisty Fawn comes along with 2.6.20 kernel, nice, lets try setting up the network card hmmm it’s working!!! Time to proceed with a normal install just changing the usual way to mount /proc file system for this one:

mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc

Now tell me: “you lost a precious time, this could be easily solved by doing this … and that …” yeah I’m pretty sure there’s an easier way to solve this issue but at least I learn some things while researching and I hope this post becomes useful to someone apart than me.