I'm trying to install my first Alpha system, with a bunch of harddisks in it. I wanted to create a RAID-5 over those disks, with LVM to manage the size of the partitions. Most of the RAID tools are present, although the mdadm tools would be nice to have. The RAID modules are there (although you need to manually load them). However, the LiveCD for the Alpha architecture (I've tried version 2004.3) doesn't contain any LVM tools, so creating logical volumes is not possible. It would be nice if those could be added to the next version. LVM support is a neccessity in my case, and mdadm for easier Software RAID would also be useful. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot the 2004.3 Alpha LiveCD 2. pvcreate /dev/sda Actual Results: The pvcreate command is not available on the minimal LiveCD Expected Results: it should have initialized the sda disk for use with LVM. Since this is a Minimal LiveCD, emerge is not available.
Now that Gentoo 2005.0 for Alpha is released, and a full-featured Universal cd is available, this enhancement proposal is no longer relevant for me. The new Universal cd provides both the raid and lvm software, and is therefore a good replacement for the older version.
