Well, I finally got things working again. I spent several days playing with kernel modules from various places and loading them in various ways. Finally, this morning, I got it right: load sg.o first, then cdrom.o, then sr_mod.o. It’s not actually easy figuring out what’s been compiled into the kernel and what hasn’t on the Kuro Box, but I looked at my old blog entry and an entry in the forums and realized I had gotten the CDROM working with only the stock kernel modules from the Gentoo distro, not the extra modules like ide-scsi.
So, after this morning, I’m ripping some new CDs that I bought. These are the first new CDs I’ve bought since I did the “big rip” a month ago. I was very crestfallen when the automated rip solution didn’t just start working again. My visions of efficiency went straight out the window. But now I can load the modules on Kurobox startup and all will be well.
Speaking of which, since playing with kernel modules often leaves the machine in a state that requires a reboot to flush things, I was rebooting a lot. I took the time to get the machine to reboot automatically clean. For instance, I didn’t have a default gateway configured in the network setup, so if I didn’t do that I couldn’t get to the machine remotely, and it couldn’t get cddb or load the SuperDateTime plugin correctly. /etc/conf.d/local.start is your friend here. My machine now starts up in it’s properly configured state on startup. The thing only takes a minute or two to boot as well. So although my problem was annoying it let me solve the reboot correctly problem, which up until hadn’t been an issue because the last time I rebooted it was when I brought it back downstairs from up in the family room.