Intro

When I finally accepted that you cannot do serious work on a single-core 1,3GHz notebook machine with 500MB RAM (running Xubuntu, to save compilation and manual disk encryption setups) I started looking for a notebook fast enough to really run Gentoo.

I was looking for ..

• a Lenovo machine
• Intel dual-core 2GHz or more
• 4GB RAM or more
• 14.1'' 16:10 display with more than 1024x768
• CD/DVD drive
• 200GB disk or more
• any non-NVIDIA graphics card
• 3x USB or more

Variations of T400, T410 and T400s seemed to be my options. I went to buy a T400 and started feeding Gentoo to it. These details may be interesting:

Result

• Gentoo ~amd64 system, stable GCC, XFCE, and a bunch of KDE4 apps mixed in
• Full disk encryption (including swap)
• /var/tmp/portage on 2GB tmpfs
• WLAN works, sound works, even camera works. (Card reader, FireWire, modem, GPU switching, and hibernation untested)

On the hardware

• Machine fast enough for Gentoo compilation fun (Core 2 Duo T9400 @ 2.53GHz, 4 GB RAM). See compile times below.
• Good keyboard (both typing and layout)
• Rather low noise so far
• Excellent Linux support so far
• Small keyboard (buffering?) issue still to be resolved. May be on software level though, no idea.
• No fingerprint reader

Things I learned

• Setting up disk encryption (LVM over dm-crypt) on the shell.
• Building an initramfs using genkernel. Awesome pointer by rbu, thanks!
• How li-io batteries like to be treated and what tp_smapi can do to help.
• Setting up NetworkManager.
• ThinkWiki and Gentoo Linux Wiki have useful bits of information, e.g. on WLAN.
• XFCE does not depend on HAL anymore?!

Traps I hit

• Forgot to install DHCP client first time.
• Entered non-ASCII passphrases with wrong keymap activated. No fun.

Odds I came across

• "dokeymap keymap=de" boot options are not documented
• LUKS="yes" genkernel config is not documented
• Without "export TERM=linux" not even htop works on a Xubuntu 10.10 live. No, really.
• gentoo-sources is licensed under the "freedist" license?
• Kernel module auto-loading does not work here. Still need to figure out why. EDIT: The line modules_2_6="tp_smapi" in /etc/conf.d/modules did the trick. As the installation handbook only covers baselayout-1.x, that's sadly not documented.

Compile times

• 03:31:02 — OpenOffice 3.2.1-r1
• 00:25:29 — GCC 4.4.4-r2
• 00:06:27 — Linux Kernel 2.6.36-r3

Grub entry

title Gentoo GNU/Linux + genkernel initramfs  LATEST
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz dolvm dokeymap keymap=de \
    crypt_root=/dev/sda2 real_root=/dev/gentoo/root
initrd (hd0,0)/initramfs