by on November 11, 2012
After having tried the ubuntu and archlinux distributions on my Raspberry Pi I came back to my favorite linux distribution gentoo. You can find a short walkthrough of my installation steps below.
First you have to download the files necessary for the installation:
$ cd /tmp
# arm stage3 autobuild
$ wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/arm/autobuilds/current-stage3-armv6j/stage3-armv6j-20121107.tar.bz2
# latest portage snapshot
$ wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/snapshots/portage-latest.tar.bz2You can get the latest Raspberry Pi kernel from github:
Now that we have all necessary files you can insert your SD card. In the following steps I am using /dev/mmcblk0 to identify the SD card. This identifier may vary on other systems - you can check with dmesg after inserting your card.
I chose to create a FAT32 boot partition of 32 MB, a swap partition with 512 MB and the rest for the root EXT4 partition.
The SD card is formatted and ready to be used for gentoo installation.
I am using the directory /tmp/mnt/gentoo for the installation directory. You are free to substitute this to your liking.
$ mkdir /tmp/mnt/gentoo
$ mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 /tmp/mnt/gentoo
$ mkdir /tmp/mnt/gentoo/boot
$ mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /tmp/mnt/gentoo/bootNext we can extract portage and the stage3 image on the mounted SD card:
# extract stage3 files
$ tar xvf stage3-armv6j*.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/mnt/gentoo
# extract portage image
$ tar xvf portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/mnt/gentoo/usrNext we have to copy the kernel and its modules from the cloned github repository:
Before being able to use the new installation we have to adjust a few configuration files.
Next you have to edit your fstab to match your partition scheme:
My fstab looks like this:
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot auto noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/mmcblk0p2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p3 / ext4 noatime 0 1After that you have to create a cmdline.txt file to pass the required boot parameters:
After that you may want to edit your make.conf file to set your desired make parameters like CFLAGS and set some default USE flags.
Next you will want to set your current timezone. Find a list of available timezones like this:
Set your desired timezone by copying the zoneinfo to the new file /etc/localtime. In my case I chose the Europe/Berlin timezone:
$ cp /tmp/mnt/gentoo/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /tmp/mnt/gentoo/etc/localtime
$ echo "Europe/Berlin" > /tmp/mnt/gentoo/etc/timezoneAs we don’t want to chroot into the newly created gentoo installation we just reset the root password by editing the /tmp/mnt/gentoo/etc/shadow file to the following:
root::10770:0:::::Before booting your Raspberry Pi you first have to unmount the SD card:
After inserting your SD card into your Raspberry Pi and turning on the power you should see a gentoo startup sequence and a login prompt.
After logging into root without a password you should immediately set a new password for root:
In order to activate networking on boot you can add an entry via rc-update:
$ nano -w /etc/conf.d/net
$ cd /etc/init.d
$ ln -s net.lo net.eth0
$ rc-update add net.eth0 default
$ /etc/init.d/net.eth0 startIn case you get error messages like INIT Id "s0" respawning too fast on boot you may want to comment the first two serial console entries in /etc/inittab:
After editing the mentioned entries should look like this:
# SERIAL CONSOLES
#s0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 9600 ttyS0 vt100
#s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 9600 ttyS1 vt100The Raspberry Pi does not have a hardware clock so you need to disable the hwclock service and enable swclock instead:
Optionally you may want to emerge ntp and synchronize the clock on startup:
You probably want to ssh into your Raspberry Pi from time to time:
After all necessary installation steps are passed you can update your system and start using gentoo on your Raspberry Pi: