ublo
bogdan's (micro)blog

bogdan » raspberry pi minimal gentoo (details)

12:11 am on May 3, 2013 | read the article | tags: hobby, raspberry

a few details on running gentoo-3.8.8-cat-0.8.img.gz on your raspberry pi:

• lacking a hwclock, the openrc will complain about the skew clock of some files. use touch to fix their clock and rc-update -u to update the openrc deptree. a reboot will show no more complains.
• above is one of the reasons net.wlan0, sshd and lighttpd are not added by default to the “default” runlevel. more, the net.wlan0 symlink is missing. use ln -s /etc/init.d/net.lo /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 before running rc-update add net.wlan0 default. same for eth0.
• to make it easier to configure the net, both /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/conf.d/net are linked in /boot/config/wireless.txt and /boot/config/network.txt respectively. you can edit those from windows (while creating the bootable SD card).
• the kernel contains a fix that enables the nat table in iptables. who knows, a pi router might be a nice idea.
• you can login via serial console =). it should be interesting connecting a serial LCD to see it.
• also, lighttpd is pre-configured to use files in /www directory. there, each .rb file is parsed as a cgi script. i’ve minimized the config so it fits only .rb, .html, .js, .css., .jpg, .png files. more than enough in my opinion.
• the linux includes pi_piper to access pi’s GPIO. including the SPI.

i’m thinking to build an arduino interface to protect the pi’s GPIO and to extend the functionality using the serial port. don’t know when i’ll have time to do that, but it’s in my plans.