Save your forehead from flattening prematurely

I gave up on trying to get Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to run ejabberd today; it looks like there are some fundamental issues going on between the version of erlang and the version of ejabberd that get bundled together. That was a fairly serious setback to my "Evergreen on VMWare" project.

So I decided to give it a go on Gentoo instead. Yes, I can hear the groans already... but hey, I've been running Gentoo at home now for a long time (four years or something like that) and I like that I can pretty easily switch package versions if I don't like the current blessed versions. However, I ran into the nasty cannot open root device or unknown block Grub error when I tried to reboot into my virgin VMWare Gentoo image.

After much gnashing of teeth -- we're talking hours here -- I finally tracked down the problem: I had failed to compile the correct SCSI driver for VMWare into the kernel. Folks, if you're trying to build a VMWare image with a Linux kernel that you're compiling from scratch, the SCSI driver you need is the Fusion MPT driver. And no, it doesn't happen to be kept in the "low-level SCSI drivers" section of the kernel config menu, for some reason. Gah.

Onward to the next painful barrier!

Update: Also, the net device is an AMD PCnet32 Lance. 'Cause you know, I managed to forget to configure that on my most recent Gentoo install.