[ANN] Gentoo on N8x0
 

Hello, maemo community.

I'm proud to announce availability of Gentoo port to N8x0 tablets. Only chroot is possible at the moment, however I'm working on a bootable system. It isn't intended for novice users, previous Gentoo experience is strongly recommended.

You can read the full story: http://slonopotamus.org/gentoo-on-n8x0

Or download stage tarball: http://slonopotamus.org/gentoo-on-n8x0#resources

Benefits:

• many packages from Gentoo repository
• no SDK required (Gentoo is 100% self-hosted)
• latest software
• strong cpu-specific optimizations (-march=armv6j -mtune=arm1136jf-s -mfpu=vfp)
• EABI support

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Thats really great news, being a gentoo-user myself I really look forward to trying this on my n810!

Now bootable!
 

See updated docs for details.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

wow.... i'm using gentoo on 3 boxes meanwhile, it would be so cool to make my N800 the 4th. - i'll need to try this as soon as there's progress at least on X and wifi. (could live without BT...)

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

I know your primary purpose is to make this bootable, but one of my constant quests is to find ways to speed up heavy non-maemo apps on the tablets. So I wonder if you have tried running any applications in the chroot with your set of optimizations.

The one everyone wants to know is, how long does it take to start OpenOffice?

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Isn't Gentoo that cheap pkgsrc knock-off? (I'm running a NetBSD system at home, so I have a license to be a UNIX elitist now. :p)

While I like the notion of optimizing builds to our hardware, instead of Debian's maximum compatibility, I do wonder how well the self-hosting build method works in practice; pkgsrc builds of Xorg and such take long enough on my 1760 MHz Athlon to be annoying, so I'd think it would be close to unworkable on the N800.

While it is self-hosting, is there an optional way to offload compilation to another system with a cross-compiler, or are hours of installation and updates just something to put up with in exchange for optimization and self-hosting? (And how long does the initial rebuild take, anyway?)

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

I can't answer this question until i build openoffice. It's too huge to build on tablet (cpu is not a problem, just wait longer, but I'm afraid it won't have enough ram). I'm going to setup distcc environment to build it. However OpenOffice is low priority for me.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Gentoo is very similar to FreeBSD ports (all is built from source by default).

You don't need to build Xorg every day. There are packages that take much time to build (openoffice, kernel, firefox, gcc) but they do not update often.

Of course there is. I can use initial cross toolchain to build packages. Or I can configure distcc. I didn't benchmark full rebuild, but I know that gcc-4.2 rebuild takes 8 hours.

Now with X!
 

See updated docs for details.

Re: Now with X!
 

That's impressive. Do the optimizations seem to offer much of a benefit?

Re: Now with X!
 

Actually I don't have any benchmarks on Maemo. Kernel build with stock maemo configg takes ~100 minutes in Gentoo chroot.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Now with wireless! See wireless howto

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Thanks for the port !
Please, did you made any speed comparison between the Gentoo chroot and Easy Debian ?

I there is a notable improvement, then it's worth a try ...

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Just a bump that we now have Gentoo *booting* with WiFi, GPS (slow TTFF, so leave gpsd running when not in use), and Bluetooth.

Distcc works decent as well, though qt-webkit still runs out of memory linking...

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

do you need distcc? i find it easier to mount the slow machine via nfs, chroot there and have the whole emerge process run on my quadcore which hardly ever runs out of memory. - i only work on x86, though, i don't know if this could possibly work with an arm target.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Maemo/Gentoo BINHOST anyone? ;)

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

I used http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/ to setup
a cross compiler for the N810 and emerge system with slonopotamus' CFLAGS.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get it past GNU gdbm -- the build fails due to some library being in an "unknown format". I assume libtool is searching the amd64 library path instead of the arm one.

I think this is the way to go; selfhosting is a nice thing to have but even syncing the portage tree is a way too slow operation. Not to say I prefer building the image once (on my HDD) then writing it to the SD Card instead of building it on-the-fly to the SD Card (considering write cicles and such).

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Published updated stage3 tarball: http://slonopotamus.org/gentoo-on-n8x0#resources

Includes gcc-4.3.2, glibc-2.8, python-2.6

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

I don't know about these optimizations but I tried a stock gentoo ARM4 softfloat stage3 http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases...090726.tar.bz2
or here

So anyway I used wget to download it and then (as root) tar -xjvf to untar it. Copied it to a SD card (used 8 gig because of "out of space error" with 2gig on environment update) must be formatted as ext3 (use GParted) with cp -R and popped in the card.

# umount /medika/mmcblk1p1
# mkdir /mnt/gentoo
# mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt/gentoo
# cd /mnt/gentoo
# mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev/
# mount -o bind /proc/ /mnt/gentoo/proc/
# chroot /mnt/gentoo

Now in chroot
#env-update
#source /etc/profile

compiled coreutils and copied uname program to OS2008 and ran it fine. Newer version knew i was on RX-44 while stock busybox version just outputted unknown.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Those stages are OABI and won't work correctly because of bug in diablo kernel: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=462677

And they don't use VFP (float-point unit) so will be very slow at such operations as video decoding.

That's why we built our own stages.

Besides that, you only got chroot that way. And we have bootable system with X, wifi and bluetooth.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Now Gentoo on N8x0 has sound!

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

how does it affect the battery life??(i mean the bootable version)
i used KDE and was excellent, but the battery life decaresed a much!!!

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Dont know yet, I'm using tablet very actively so it runs out of battery in 3-4 hours with any OS :)

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

lol, it is the life-time i have with a normal use in KDE (a lot of music and a lot of browsing via bluetooth!), but in Diablo I have like 5 or 6 hours (probably it's an impression, but with kde I had to recharge at every night, with diablo I recharge every 2\2,5 days!!!=)

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Published updated stage3 tarball (20091115): http://slonopotamus.org/gentoo-on-n8x0#resources

Includes gcc-4.3.4, glibc-2.9

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

is anyone still running this regularly?

update: now successfully booting gentoo on the n800!

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

I have this running very good in chroot but when I try to boot I get the white screen that says it is booting from the correct partition but then it just hangs. I haven't installed xorg yet and I wasn't able to successfully apply the bootmenu.conf patch (maybe I already did it in the Mer days).....any tips? I did apply Fanoush modules though. Do I need to have x first or should it dump me to a console?

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

it'll be a regular linux boot, first console, then eventually Xorg will switch to graphics.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Hmmm....I intalled xorg and added xdm thinking it might boot, but it still hangs at the white screen. Somehow I do not have the fb in bootmenu configured properly.....any tips?

EDIT: This may be a stupid question but do I need a boot partition on the SD card? I'm having a hard time locating dated info on the advanced bootmenu........where does it look for the kernel at?

EDIT: Got it working by applying the patch to /etc/bootmenu.conf. Had to patch it on laptop using patch -p1 *.patch then copy to n800....

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Time flies and current Gentoo userspace is no longer compatible with ancient diablo kernel. So, I'm in the process of switching to modern kernel. If anyone has time/knowledge to play with, I would be very happy to accept some help (especially with N810 hw since I don't have one). You should also understand that this is by no means Gentoo-specific and would help running any modern Linux distro on N8x0.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

good job slono. as you know im following your efforts on github, but it'll take some time for me to put in additional effort on these. existing stuff and harmattan take a lot of resource away.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

So, https://github.com/slonopotamus/n8x0.../modern-kernel contains current HW status. Most important missing bit is TSC2301 that provides sound/touchscreen/keypad for N800. Also, I talked to mb__ (author of kernel patches) from #openwrt-devel @FreeNode, he said charging driver isn't finished yet, but he's working on it. Also, he's working on sound for N810 (he has one). Meanwile, I'll try to hack on TSC2301 support (though don't expect high chances of success since I'm not a kernel programmer).

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

For those who still track this, we now have functional N800 touchscreen/keypad with 2.6.38

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Are these patches going to be upstreamed? Otherwise in a few months they're going to bitrot (again).

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

As a short-term measure, I plan to merge my patches into openwrt patchset (which I use as a base). What'll happen after that - don't know yet, time will show.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

FYI: the armv7a-rootfs is useable in chroot on the n900. i just had to comment out the mounting of /var/tmp in qchroot and emerging takes a lot of time...

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

if gentoo can boot in n900, we will have one more os that we can boot on. Although I have to say that I don't have any idea about this os (probably one more flavor of linux is all I can guess). Anything special about this os so that n900 (or even n9) users will want to boot this os (when someone makes it possible)? Sorry for noob question.

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

gentoo builds nearly everything from source, so you are able to optimize compiling! it should be possible to boot into it without (much) modifications, but there's no effort because you are able to use (nearly) every application in chroot (easy debian/chroot)...

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

We now have both N800/N810 running 3.1.0 kernel (updated docs at https://github.com/slonopotamus/n8x0.../modern-kernel )

Re: [ANN] Gentoo chroot on N8x0
 

Latest news:

1. Kernel is updated to 3.1.1
2. Since yesterday N800 LED works properly