[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?