Updated image 06-09-2018
The binaries are being maintained, just the base image is out of date. What this means is that an update will take longer at first. But everything is being kept updated. The joy of Gentoo is that since it is versionless, all this means is that your initial upgrade will take a bit longer.I've played around with the Raspberry Pi for years, and use it in many different ways at home and at work. At home, I have a Pi as my GPS time server, as my music server, as an IRC server, a web server...I think you get the hint. But up until now, I've been running Raspbian as my OS. It was the recommended OS when I started, and I didn't want to deal with any growing pains.
However, my distro of choice is Gentoo. All my servers at home run Gentoo, regardless of how new or old they are. The control over what is installed, and the ability to upgrade in a versionless fashion is prized. So I've been split...Gentoo on the Intel boxes, and Raspbian on the Arm architecture...until now.
The process for the Raspberry Pi has been...unhelpful, to say the least. There has been allusions to images, but they are unmaintained. The NOOBS image that is out there is non-functional...the compiler doesn't work, and it requires a keyboard and monitor to get started. One of the benefits of Raspbian, IMO, is that it works out of the box headless. I can flash the card, fire it up, do an nmap scan, and login. The time is already set, and the system is functional. Setting it up from a Stage 3, though, requires a keyboard and monitor. No DHCP, there are some games I have to play to get a login and a shell working...so yeah...not a good way to begin, and I wanted to change that.
In my opinion, a working Gentoo base system needed to function the same way. It needed to be able to be flashed from a Windows system (using Win32DiskImager), it needed to pick up an IP addresses using DHCP, it needed to set the time, and the work for crossdev and distributed compilation needed to already be done on the Pi. Also, in my opinion, vi and some basic very useful Gentoo tools needed to be installed.
So...that is what I have set out to do. I have a working Gentoo Pi image, as well as a working Gentoo Pi Stage 4. The stage 4 contains all the software that is on the image, but works if you don't want to copy the image over yourself, but would rather untar it to an already built card.
ntp, vixie-cron, syslog-ng, dhcpcd, vim, and various gentoo utilities are all installed, as well as distcc. The system is up to date with portage and current build flags, which were inserted for a minimal headless system. A stage 3 install does not have ntp, cron, syslog, or dhcp installed, all of which I wanted for headless image.
cronie is now in the repo, and replaces vixie-cron -- drop in replacement. When I get the new image up it will reflect the change from vixie-cron to cronie.
visudo, vipw, vigr....vim is now the preferred system editor. /etc/profile will have to be edited if nano is preferred
If you want to see what I installed: cat /var/lib/portage/world . Note that both images do have what was current at the time in /usr/portage -- why take the time to redownload it, especially with the tie it can take for a Pi. Since the image works best when you use my binary repo, /usr/portage contains what was used for the build on the date of the image.
pi user is in wheel, wheel can sudo without password. dhcpd will run on boot, as it is designed to run headless.
There is no root password. Login is pi:raspberry (both the same as Raspbian)
If you are using the Stage 4 a FAT boot partition, a swap partition, and an
ext4 3rd partition is mandatory unless you want to edit /etc/fstab and
/boot/cmdline.txt in the stage 4.
mkfs.vfat -F 16 /dev/mmcblk0p1
mkswap /dev/mmcblk0p2
mkfs.ext4 -N 400000 /dev/mmcblk0p3 # it needs ~300000 inodes to install
mkdir gentoo
mount /dev/mmcblk0p3 gentoo
mkdir gentoo/boot
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 gentoo/boot
cd gentoo
tar -xvjpf DownloadStage4Image
umount the SD card, insert, and boot. At this point the instructions for Stage 4 and the image are very similar.
If you copied the image onto an sd card, sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0,
delete the 3rd partition, and build it again with the entire file system.
Reboot the Pi, and then run resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p3. You will now
have your entire SD card available.
The latest image points to my build server, and these are the binaries that are available and maintaned. If there is a binary that you need and don't want to build, let me know and I will be glad to compile and add it to my list.
I've recently added sound support to the base image, since I'm now replacing the Raspian MPD server that I used to run with a Gentoo Pi MPD server. This means that nfs-utils are also in the repo, as well as mpg123.
The next thing on my todo list is to build a desktop system, both a base system, and one that supports amateur radio. So in the end, yes, there will be at *least* three variant systems.
On the base system...
app-admin/logrotate app-admin/sudo app-admin/syslog-ng app-editors/nano app-editors/vim app-misc/screen app-portage/eix app-portage/epm app-portage/g-cpan app-portage/gentoolkit dev-python/pip mail-mta/ssmtp media-sound/alsa-utils net-misc/dhcpcd net-misc/ntp sys-devel/distcc sys-process/vixie-crong-cpan and pip are on the base system for for Perl and Python. Note that there are both Go and Ruby binaries now available
And in the repo...
app-admin/ansible app-admin/lastpass-cli app-admin/sshguard app-admin/whowatch app-crypt/gnupg app-editors/joe app-editors/emacs app-misc/mmv app-misc/screenie app-portage/genlop app-portage/layman app-portage/pfl app-portage/ufed app-shells/tcsh dev-java/oracle-jdk-bin dev-lang/go dev-lang/php:5.6 dev-lang/php dev-lang/ruby dev-vcs/git games-engines/frotz games-misc/bsd-games games-misc/cowsay games-misc/fortune-mod-all games-roguelike/nethack mail-client/mailx mail-client/mutt mail-mta/postfix media-sound/mpd media-sound/mpg123 net-analyzer/gnu-netcat net-analyzer/hping net-analyzer/iftop net-analyzer/netcat net-analyzer/nmap net-analyzer/tcping net-analyzer/tcptraceroute net-analyzer/traceroute net-dns/bind net-dns/bind-tools net-fs/nfs-utils net-im/pidgin net-irc/irssi net-irc/weechat net-libs/nodejs net-misc/knock net-misc/oidentd net-misc/unison net-misc/whois net-wireless/wpa_supplicant sci-geosciences/gpsd sys-apps/inxi sys-apps/lshw sys-apps/mlocate sys-apps/usbutils sys-auth/google-authenticator sys-devel/bc sys-kernel/raspberrypi-sources sys-process/at sys-process/atop sys-process/cronie sys-process/htop sys-process/lsof www-servers/lighttpd
Current Gentoo Pi Image 6-09-2018 This will run on both the armv6 and armv7 Pis, but I compile for the armv6 for broader compatibility. Both kernels are available.
gcc 6.4.0-r1 (update from 02-11-2018)
4.14 kernel
armv6 build
changes in /etc files (update from 02-11-2018)
misc updated packages and Portage files
The Portage files that I use for this system (make.conf, package.use, package.mask, etc...) can be found here. If you want to keep your system current with my changes, download from here. I may set up a script to download and move these files...thoughts? I use Ansible for my home setup, but a simple Bash script would do.
The point of this image, as I've said, is to get you running asap as if it were a Raspian image. One caveat: if you want to compile yourself you'll need to make changes to /etc/portage/make.conf -- these are included and documented in the current make.conf.
7-Zip Needed to uncompress the image on Windows.
How to set up Intel servers for distributed cross-compilation