This article is part of the OQO odyssey series – You can find the previous posts here and here.

In general, installing linux shouldn’t be a great problem – I guess those were my words right before powering up the umpc again for starting the bootstrap process as I used to do. But I have missed several things: Battery and heat. The case of the oqo acts as a passive cooling element and got that hot I wouldn’t dare to carry it with me in a bag. As I said the oqo’s a hot thing, I wasn’t thinking of that.

Back to the topic. After trying to build the binutils package the battery was drained again and so I had to change my plans: building the packages in a chroot on my laptop. And so I did – unpacking stage 1, mounting portage, sys, proc and doing the bootstrap which didn’t take that long. Regarding the oqo, I just leave things as they are right now, as the partition scheme can be reused – even portage. You never know.

For keeping yourself busy while bootstrapping and emerging, I recommend a good old classical game like Rock ‘n Roll Racing on the SNES console, reading a book, housework – just something to keep yourself busy. Yeah – even browsing my blog will do fine as the process might take a while.

After the bootstrap process, emerge -e system builds 190 packets which means you want to do something else in the meanwhile. Housework and reading kept me busy – and hacking some configuration files. It won’t hurt, if they are in a good shape.

I haven’t had any further highlights at the installation worth being mentioned. Just one thing: The GRUB Setup should be done on the oqo for having correct data at the boot record. That’s all folks!