On May 1, 2004, at 9:06 PM, Kevin Brown wrote:
>>> What follows is a message I sent to the Gentoo-ppc mailing list. I
>>> thought I'd post it here in case anyone has experience with the
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> I'm trying to install Gentoo on a Dual G4 and an iBook using the
>>> Minimal LiveCD. The problem is that I can't get a network connection
>>> from the LiveCD. What's got me stumped is that the right drivers
>>> don't appear to be anywhere on the CD. Checking Yellow Dog, the G4
>>> needs a sungem driver and the iBook needs a gmac.
>>>
>>> It hard for me to believe that the LiveCD doesn't support such
>>> common machines. What am I missing?
>> Here I am answering my own question for the record. It turn out that
>> gmac and sungem are compiled into the appropriate kernels. All I
>> needed to do was dhcpcd. Why they chose to put all the intel drivers
>> where modprobe would expect to find them and compile in the ppc
>> drivers is an open question. I suspect it has something to do with
>> how few ppc drivers there are. The probably want to keep the
>> distributions as similar as possible.
>
> Depends on where they got the source for the Intel cards. I know the
> e1000 drivers come from Intel itself and so might just be legalese
> that makes it simpler and safer to build them as modules since modules
> don't have to be GPL.
That's really an interesting point. It explains why they don't just
compile the intel drivers in as they do with the ppc kernels. It leaves
open the question of why they include the Intel drivers at all on the
ppc LiveCD.
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