Installing linux (gentoo) on a usb pen...

I've just received my newest toy; a Zotac ITX-F board (Atom N330 and nVidia ION).
I'm going to use it as my media center because (oddly enough) it is the only Pc in my house that can play 1080p files (because of the vpdau support in mplayer).

The real issuse here was to install gentoo on it. First I wanted to do a NFS (diskless) install on it, but since my server is only running 32bit gentoo, I could not chroot into the new installation dir.
Instead I decided to use a 8gig usb pen drive, and just use that as primary storage.

The installation went just fine, but once rebooted the kernel would panic and complain about not being able to mount root:
Root-NFS: No NFS server available, giving up.
VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy.
VFS: Cannot open root device "sda2" or unknown-block(2,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(2,0)

I found out you have to append rootdelay option to your kernel, this should give the usb storage time to settle and thus be scanned and become available to the system.

My kernel boot line is now:
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.31-r7 root=/dev/sda2 video=uvesafb:1280x1024-32@60,ywrap,mtrr:3 rootdelay=5

And it works :-)


And just a note on my previous post.
I found two program that might do the trick:

• GO Contact sync (http://www.webgear.co.nz/Products/GOContactSync.aspx)
• Sync2 for Microsoft® Outlook® (http://www.sync2.com/)

GO Contact sync is open source, and thus free, but I could not get the program to work (Match not found).
The other program is not free, but you can download it as a fully functioning trial, and so I did.
It works, and syncs like it should, with just one exception: It does not sync contact images (luckily the HTC Tattoo can match people with their facebook profiles, so I'll just just the profile pictures from facebook).