Bootable 64-bit RPi3/Pi4 Gentoo image (OpenRC/Xfce/VC4) Pt 2

sqeeezy · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2020 Posts: 5 Location: Spain

Hi, trying to get my gentoo vm on my mac to play distcc with my rpi4, as described in

https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit/wiki/Set-Up-Your-RPi-as-a-distcc-Client

and linked pages, I see the tildes (~) in the echo commands below. Doesn’t that mean the unstable branch? Is it two typos?
As we are using a stable-branch compiler on the PC, but the RPi image uses the 'testing' (aka ~arm64) branch by default, begin by downgrading your gcc compiler (and binutils, for consistency) on the RPi to the 'stable' version (this version is also available on the binhost, so the following process shouldn't take long). Issue:
pi64 ~ # echo "sys-devel/binutils -~arm64" >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/binutils
pi64 ~ # echo "sys-devel/gcc -~arm64" >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/gcc
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2020 9:16 pm Post subject:

sqeeezy,

sqeeezy · n00b Joined: 18 Apr 2020 Posts: 5 Location: Spain

Neddy,

thanks for that. I stupidly misinterpreted the minus sign as the dash sign used for arguments. ^^

What’s the difference between, in this case, writing arm64, i.e. stable,
as opposed to -~arm64, i.e. not testing?

Regards,

sqeeezy
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n1ese · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 29 Sep 2019 Posts: 82

I'm blind, and possibly stupid as usual. Where is the configuration for the graphical login manager on the full image? I want to switch to a different WM. Is it as simple as making my own .xinitrc in my home directory. I'm trying to maximize RAM usage on my 2GB PI and, in testing on a lite image, CTWM is working best for my needs.

Edit: I don't want to stay with lite or remove xfce or core from full just yet. I have applications that are picky with alsa and portaudio and having problems figuring out how to configure alsa/portaudio to work with them on my lite with CTWM image. The apps in question are working fine with the full image.

Thanks as usual.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 5:45 pm Post subject:

sqeeezy,

With allowing ~arm64 everywhere putting arm64 in keywords does nothing as ~arm64 implies arm64 too.
Look at your

chris_andrew

Thanks to Sakaki for rekindling my interest in Gentoo....it's been a long time.

As I begin to learn the 'Gentoo Way', I found i'd make a quick note of how I managed to install a 'Masked' package, as this seems to be a commonly asked question, so I thought i'd try to document my experience, for others to find. It seems like a lot of people ask why they can't install masked packages, and I found myself in this situation, when I wanted to install an amateur radio package called JS8CALL, which had HAMLIB as a dependency.

I followed Sakaki's example 'shed', here , but some how messed it up. I wrote to him, and he was kind enough to reply to my individual request. This was one of the reasons i'm posting, here.

Essentially, my understanding is that in this context, MASKING means that the required package hasn't been made available for this arch, but it is available under another arch, such as i686. This theoretically means that the package should be able to be emerged for RasPi.

Hopefully, format permitting, the following will give you an indication of what I did (as root):

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 8:26 pm Post subject:

chris_andrew,

You cannot update Qt piecemeal.

It looks like you have a @world update in the offing.
Do that first. I suspect it will update a lot of Qt.

Come back to

chris_andrew · Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 8:41 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 8:50 pm Post subject:

chris_andrew,

safeness · Posted: Wed Apr 29, 2020 11:44 pm Post subject:

Huge thanks to Sakaki for making this great image! I've been out of the Gentoo scene for several years now but it's nice to be back. Currently building thunderbird (5hrs in with a 4G 4B) just for the fun of it!

I had a question about making some changes and I wasn't quite sure where to look.

While trying to do a 'emerge --sync' it appears that it's just verifying that I'm in sync with Sakaki's overlay. I absolutely want to keep all the raspberry pi specific stuff from the overlay in tact, but I'd like a more recent portage sync from Gentoo proper if possible.

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks again everyone!

chris_andrew · Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 6:02 am Post subject:

safeness · Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 3:36 pm Post subject:

Update: Thunderbird finished after about 7.5 hours. Firefox crashed due to lack of RAM

Trying it again with -j4 -l3.

Edit: It failed all the way down to MAKEOPTS="-j2". I'm over it.

Sakaki · Guru Joined: 21 May 2014 Posts: 409

All,

I've just pushed a fairly major set of package updates to the binhost, and corresponding changes have been released into the custom profile and (gated) Portage tree.

(safeness, chris_andrew: the gated copy of the main Gentoo tree used by the image has been on hold while these changes have been worked through - with this update, you should find you have a much more current copy, 22 Apr timestamp).

Your machine should pick all this up on its normal weekly genup cycle. Please be aware of one possible issue: following upstream, this update will transition you from consolekit to elogind. As a result, once the update completes, you'll need to power-cycle your system to get full session functionality working again.

If you want to pre-empt the weekly update, to flush this change out sooner, then simply run (as root, or using sudo):

Sakaki · Guru Joined: 21 May 2014 Posts: 409

chris_andrew · Posted: Fri May 01, 2020 5:58 am Post subject:

Sakaki · Guru Joined: 21 May 2014 Posts: 409

chris_andrew,

thanks! The message actually comes from eix-sync, which genup calls, and is due to layman not being installed on the base image. It's benign, as the repo sync process still works absolutely fine.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

chris_andrew · Posted: Fri May 01, 2020 12:35 pm Post subject:

Thank you. With regard to elogin, I saw this in the news items, and followed the prescribed steps.

Thanks for all your good work.

Chris.
_________________
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chris_andrew · Posted: Fri May 01, 2020 8:21 pm Post subject:

safeness · Posted: Fri May 01, 2020 8:51 pm Post subject:

Cool, thanks for the updates, Sakaki!

safeness · Posted: Mon May 04, 2020 6:51 pm Post subject:

Ok, so I lied before when I said I was 'over with' trying to compile firefox.

I used MAKEOPTS="-j1" and increased swap to 4G (might be unnecessary) and it finally built in almost 12 hours with a 2GHz overclock.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon May 04, 2020 9:47 pm Post subject:

chris_andrew,

To move to another SD card, partition and format the new SD card.
Now copy the filesystems on the old SD card to their correspondng locations on the new SD card.

If you only dave a single card reader, you need make an intermediate copy on your PC.
rsync is good as it can resume a partial copy.
cp -a works too but there is no resume.

You can cange the size of the filesystems or add extra partitions during the copy if you like.

To use an external HDD effectivery put all of portages bits and pieces on the HDD.
Thats the repos, the build space, distfiles and packages. The Pi will still run without the HDD but not install or update.
You can move /usr/src off the SD card. Thats another build time only thing.
Its possible to have several swap spaces. Make a swap on the HDD with the highest priority and one on the SD card with a lower priority.
The HDD swap will be used first.

SD cards generally, do not have very good wear levelling (if any), so not building on the SD card is a good thing for the SD life.

The Pi3 can boot from USB, no SD card required at all.
Thats under test in the Pi4.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

chris_andrew · Posted: Tue May 05, 2020 8:13 am Post subject:

popetto · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2019 Posts: 27 Location: Italy

Hi all, I'll ask you a very, very stupid question. Is it possible to install gentoo alongside raspbian on the same sd card? I know that it is not recommended, but I've got a 128 GB micro sd card and I'd like to split that space. Is it possible? Is there a guide? Thank you in advance

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There are two types of user: the one who reads guides and the one who writes them. For now, I'm the one who reads

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed May 06, 2020 7:20 pm Post subject:

popetto,

Yes, its possible.

The normal raspberry Pi install does not have a boot menu but lets come back to that.

You would have a filesystem tree for Raspbian and a filesystem tree for Gentoo and separate filesystem trees for any other distro you wanted.
/boot and <swap> should be shared. So far, that the same as you would do to multiboot a PC.

Now you need a boot loader to choose among distros at boot time.
You can have several config.txt and cmdline.txt files but that's a bit clunky. You don't want to edit /boot to switch distros.

I think grub2 runs on arm/arm64. That will provide a boot menu.
u-boot runs on the Pi and I think it can do menus.

One wart. For 64 bit capable Pis, the bitness is set as a part of the CPU initialisation and cant be changed by the CPU.
However a Pi in 64 bit mode must have a 64 bit kernel. It can have a 32 bit userland. There is no multilib on arm64, so its not possible to have 32 bit and 64 bit libraries side by side. You can cheat a little. Statically linked 32 bit arm binaries will run on a 64 bit Pi.

The upshot of all this is that having chosen the bitness for your boot loader you are stuck with it.

Well, there is the horrible hack approach too.
Boot the Pi into <random distro> run a scrip that modifies /boot to boot <other distro> on the next boot.
That would let you have both 32 bit and 64 bit kernels.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.