These days I can have better performance for less money. And I can spent the money in things like pizza, beer and so on in our family money socks. Yeah!

So what’s wrong? Is it too much weird command line kung fu to create such an machine image? Or is there no demand for Gentoo x86_64 images? People don’t use Gentoo anymore since the Gentoo hype was over long before there was AWS? Gentoo people are unaware there is 64bit available and still stick to 32bit? AWS people don’t want Gentoo people to use Gentoo images since the Fedora machine images are much better for everyone? Yeah.

I deceided to roll out my own AMI. I did some research and read lots of articles about the different ways to create those machine images. Twenty minutes later I felt enlightened:

1. You can convert an existing xen image or
2. create your AMI with VMware and convert this or
3. you can use an existing AMI and base your AMI on it and so forth.

Sounds like crap. I like building things by my own and have more control on the inside of the result.
It took some time to figure out how to proceed and how to solve small emerging hurdles.

Working on a good build host it takes maybe twenty to thirty minutes from zero to have a basic AMI ready to go. Basically you need to create the AMI file, format it with some filesystem, mount the file as a loop device, extract an stage3 archive, install some requirements and modify some config files. The most time is wasted waiting for ec2-upload-bundle to complete. It’s enough time to get another cup of coffee, sit on the sofa and read some pages in the newspapers.

I think the result is pretty good already. I have completed different automations and have begun working on the details to create almost autonomous clusters, this is again funny stuff with crons, bash, sed, awk and perl.

EC2 is definitly very interesting. If you need some help with gentoo AMIs you can just sent me an email or put a line in the comments.

All the best, Emil

“W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/bnx2-09-4.0.5.fw for module bnx2″

In that case you can easily fix the problem with adding the non-free repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib

and then run

aptitude update && aptitude install firmware-bnx2

This will install the required firmware and rebuild your kernel initrd to include the firmware at boot time.

P.S. If anyone at HP Compaq wants his name eternally remembered – you know what do ;P

This seemed to be a problem with Alsa and I have found the fix for this in a flash.

Edit for example /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the line

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio position_fix=0

and then at last (no need to reboot) I did as root

rmmod -f snd_hda_intel && modprobe snd_hda_intel

That solved the problem for me.

emil@xxx:~$ uname -a
Linux xxx 2.6.27.7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 3 09:26:13 CET 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

It’s specs are something like Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, 4 GB RAM, 200GB HD, WLAN 802.1 a/b/g/n, 15.4 WXGA – 1280×800 (that’s one obvious minus point), a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT GPU, Firewire, USB, Bluetooth and a Blue-ray disc drive.

For your info, here comes the output from lspci:

emil@xxx:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G86M [GeForce 8400M GT] (rev a1)
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection (rev 61)
08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8036 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 16)
09:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
09:03.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
09:03.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)

The WLAN device required to fetch the driver from this intel page und to put it in the /var/firmware/ directory.

emil@xxx:~$ ls -l /var/firmware/
total 184
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 187672 2008-12-03 14:56 iwlwifi-4965-2.ucode

My config fle for the network devices looks similar to the lines below, we have of course an encrypted WLAN and so I had to pass some more parameters to the config.

emil@xxx:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up (echo ‘Modprobing iwl4965′) && /sbin/modprobe iwl4965
post-down (echo ‘Removing iwl4965′) && /sbin/modprobe -r iwl4965
wpa-key_mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-pairwise TKIP
wpa-group TKIP
wpa-psk your_Pre-Shared-Key
wpa-driver wext
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-proto WPA
wpa-ssid your_ESSID

This works for me, the screen resolution is sometimes a handicap and I would like a better battery uptime. But altogether this seems to be a good device without anything really ugly per my definition.

For further information about linux on notebooks etc you might have a look at tuxmobil.org.

HTH, Emil

EDIT: This notebook does not support Intel Vanderpool / VT technology !

This really is a big disappointment !

You get the file here and of course at his place, too.

It works like any other vmware-any-any-update:

wget http://uruz.org/files/vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7.tar.gz
cd vmware-update-2.6.27-5.5.7/
./runme.pl

Good luck.

edit: The archives were updated. Thank you, Kang.