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bogdan » raspberry pi minimal gentoo

09:58 pm on Apr 28, 2013 | read the article | tags: hobby, raspberry

i love gentoo. mostly for its ability to be small and tight on the machine running it. so, here it is. a small gentoo distro (around 121Mb) that includes the following:

• iproute2 & iptables (no ipv6 though, cause i don’t really like it)
• vim & wget
• lighttpd (wanted nginx, but has some problems with minimum arm cross-compile)
• openssh (wanted dropbear, but same as above)
• ruby (wanted python, but same as above)
• reiserfs root, tools and kernel support (be it as it may, reiserfs is still a damn good file system in my opinion)
• wpa_supplicant for wifi configuration
• update (0.4): fixed ruby socket bug
• update (0.6): fixed ruby ffi_c.so problem (gentoo doesn’t cross compile C extensions from ruby gems ebuilds. soon a post on a workaround). also added a full blown vim distribution: syntax and advanced commands support. added around 22Mb. you can still use the slim 0.4 version, but you have to replace ffi_c.so with this one (sha1: 07e000d78fd8af57c40a47a26dfd685092d03982)
• root password is raspberrypi

the kernel:

• 3.8.8 latest (3.8.y / last night fetched) raspberry pi patched kernel configured with usb LAN95xx network driver (default) and ZD1211 driver (for a USB WiFi SMC dongle i have) with firmware
• for convenience, you get the imagetool-uncompressed.py on the /boot partition

downloads:

• the updated raspberry pi 1Gb img file (including updated vim and a working pi_piper with an example.rb): gentoo-3.8.8-cat-0.8.img.gz (sha1: efe34f9c3c5dbd572f83884e9ef0e76136cecb4d)
• the raspberry pi 1Gb img file (ready to be “burned” on an SD card): gentoo-3.8.8-cat-0.4.img.gz (sha1: 5fe996882533bfd3474bc199e6ee4f124e0f1f52)
• the kernel image: kernel.img (sha1: cf2bcc30bc3da9c5d6d55c8c4d9a83cf7f43e928)
• the kernel .config (as the bcmrpi_defconfig isn’t bootable): config (sha1: a524301b9818e11909206584f2710993c2dbc0d0)

references:

• dustin c. hatch, minimalist gentoo for raspberry pi
• xec design > raspberry pi qemu insights (warning! couldn’t build a bootable qemu kernel, probably because of my qemu version, but could test my build against their kernel.img)
• raspberry pi github (firmware, kernel sources, etc.)
• linaro (tried their 3.9.x kernel which seemed well ahead, but had problems with the compiler)