Mike Gerwitz

Well, it’s that time again. Gentoo is great – you have an incredible amount of control over the distribution. However, that can also be a bad thing. I screwed a few things up, and it got to the point where it’d be faster to spend the two days reinstalling and reconfiguring Gentoo than it would be to fix everything.

Then I screw up again by accidently unpacking the stage3 tarball into the root directory instead of a subdirectory (to use for 32-bit chroot) and that completely ahnilated a number of things (as it replaced a number of necessary files – it didn’t even recognize me as a user anymore! “i have no name!”). So, that’s what I’m up to now. Reinstalling it.

But yet another problem – this time, PAM went crazy. At first, I noticed that I could not log into the box via SSH. I forgot exactly what it said – access denied, permission denied, something along those lines. So I reboot the system hoping it’d somehow fix it (since restarting SSHD did nothing). But – even bigger problem. I could not log in! It prompted me for my username, but as soon as I entered it, said that authentication failed. It never asked me for my password. Not even for root. So I obviously had a delema.

This is where Ubuntu comes in. It is excellent for installing Gentoo. I prefer the bootable CD to Gentoo due to ease of use – I can simply get right into it. Not only that, but I can easily browse the web or even play games (included on CD, from my other HDDs, or quickly download from the repositories). I then chroot into my gentoo environment and there I can re-emerge anything I need to – something I can’t do normally because, well, I can’t log in. I considered simply deleting /etc/pam.d, but I wasn’t sure if that’d create even more problems. (I wanted it to fail to load so it’d let me in.)

Anyway – for those of you also having PAM problems, try the following (ensure you’ve already emerged gentoolkit). Run “equery depends pam” and re-emerge all packages listed. You may want to use the –nodeps option if you have a long list. If you are unable to log in, re-emerge shadow. That should solve that problem. SSH problems? Re-emeber openssh.

Don’t forget to run etc-update!

Edit: Alright – I give up on PAM. Too much trouble. Never liked it. Do yourself a favor: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Remove_PAM

Don’t forget to remove the pam use flags: “euse -D pam”

It’s odd that I had this problem only this time around. Hopefully it finishes soon so I can start GNOME compiling before I head off to bed. It’s 6:00 in the morning; I’m tired.

Oh – and for those who are wondering. Despite the incredible amount of time I have spent installing and configuring gentoo (with all the use flags I use, it needs constant attention as packages fail to compile all the time), it is definatly worth it. I love Ubuntu to death, and it is my first choice all other times, but I can not sacrifice the incredible amount of control and speed improvements Gentoo provides. Because I compile everything for my system and choose only the features I want, it is a god compared to Ubuntu in regards to performance. So, keep that in mind when you consider switching.

Tagged: Gentoo, GNU/Linux