Gentoo Linux


I'm sorry that I haven't been able to help out more. By the time the first Pandoras are shipped (mine included), the semester will be over and I'll have time over the summer to help out with testing and improving.
 
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'Vorporeal' said:
I'm sorry that I haven't been able to help out more. By the time the first Pandoras are shipped (mine included), the semester will be over and I'll have time over the summer to help out with testing and improving.
Click to expand...
No worries, your work with aufs is still here and will be incorporated into a kernel as soon as I can focus back on kernel development. Your contribution in time and effort is greatly appreciated and we hope to see more of you as you have time.

Just to clarify a little about our naming scheme that we decided on...
The official image release will be 0.0.3-base (minimal boot image) and maybe a 0.0.3-desktop (likely mirroring/as-close-as-possible image to whatever is bundled with the official Angstrom distro) from there the community is encouraged to design their own images and contribute them back (in which I mentioned earlier that we would love to host back on our community site)

So, if someone wanted to build a NAND based distro with speed optimizations he could start with 0.0.3-base, modify, add, remove desired software and rerelease as 0.0.3-nand.

If someone want to use maemo instead of whatever is used on 0.0.3-desktop, she could add and remove specific packages and call it 0.0.3-maemo

Same with KDE, e17, Xfce, etc.

This will be very easy done once our binary repo becomes larger. There is work to get cross compiled distcc guides up and pre-built configs so that you can quickly deploy on a dev image for power-users. Otherwise if your not interested in cross compiling or natively compiling that you can still use what is available in the binary repo and let me know what you need compiled and I will get to it. FYI, the gentoo.pandora.devs decided to natively compile the 0.0.3-base image from scratch to see rough performance and I was pleasantly surprised especially for an ARM system, and I am using a BeagleBoard rev. B7 with half the RAM as the Pandora release model. Im not advocating everything be compiled natively, I think cross compiling is still much quicker, but it is not off the table... and I wasnt using DistCC

!!!Strictly using binary packages in Gentoo is as easy as adding ONE of the following lines and a PORT_BINHOST line in a configuration file!!!

To do so you can edit your /etc/make.conf (although these lines will likely be in the image by default and commented in/out depending on the image)
CODE
FEATURES="{$FEATURES} getbinpkgonly"

or
CODE
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS="--getbinpkgonly"

and
CODE
PORT_BINHOST="http://gentoo.openpandora.org/path/to/binary/repo"


I hope this helps, you can almost always find me making noise in FreeNode#gentoo-pandora if you have any questions/comments. Of you can leave me a comment here or on CODE
http://gentoo.openpandora.org


Respectfully,
Viridior
 
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Gentoo Pandora 0.0.3-base is officially released!!!
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=48236

javaJake and I would like to thank everyone that has spent some time talking and visiting us in IRC. This is not the end-all for the project but more like a great hurdle that has been overcome. Thanks to everyone again, and have fun!

Details
--------
optimized CFLAGS for armv7-a cortex-a8 core
no cross-compiled binaries
using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="arm"
gcc-4.3.3-r2, binutils-2.18+
perl-4.8.8+
python-2.5.2+
much much more... http://gentoo.openpandora.org/wiki/index.p...lt_Images/0.0.3

Repos
-------
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~gentoo-pandor...head%3A/native/
http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/embedded/beagle/All/

Kernel
--------
At this time the Gentoo Pandora project is using a custom .30 kernel that does not have all of the pandora/beagleboard functionality. If this is a problem you can easily use the official pandora kernel from the pandora git, http://www.pandorawiki.org/Kernel_build_instructions, or beagleboard angstrom kernel here http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard/

More Info
-----------
http://gentoo.openpandora.org
 
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To expand on this, we plan on providing an image you simply extract to an SD card and plug it into your device of choice! Anything that requires configuration before booting happens will occur as a questionnaire on first boot. How's that for easy? ;)
 
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Prometheus posted on Jun 11 2009 said:
This is great - I look forward to trying it out! :"] Many thanks to all of you for your hard work, and congratulations on reaching this milestone.
Click to expand...
EDIT: I have a quick question, come to think of it. What will the minimum size requirement be for an SD Card to use with this image?[/quote]
Our goal was total footprint size to be < 1GB. That isn't a hard limit for any reason, you just can't find SD cards less then that anymore... in fact I have a hard time finding anything lower then 2 GB lately.
 
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That's fantastic, thanks viridior - I don't have many cards that are less than 2GB, so I guess I'm all set. :D
 
Prometheus posted on Jun 11 2009 said:
That's fantastic, thanks viridior - I don't have many cards that are less than 2GB, so I guess I'm all set. :D
Click to expand...
You are very welcome, and I hope more and more people will become excited about his. Of note also is that when I say < 1GB that is our goal with whatever default software we are going to include. You can easily add your own software after the fact. Or, if you are really trying to get size down, we have documentation on how to make your own varient from the ground up to fit your exact needs.
 
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For those of you that are tracking this project...

We have restructured from the Gentoo Pandora Project and included a few more developers. Our new name is Neuvoo and our goal is to provide a Gentoo solution to embedded platforms. Our focus is the ARMv7a core, but the software can be easily moved to other cores. My focus is the Touch Book and OpenPandora, so you will see a lot of merger between the two communities on our OS.

What does this mean?
Well, simply put, we will be using the power of Gentoo to build and tweak our custom OS images. We are Gentoo users and we are an extension of the Gentoo embedded community from which we our coordinating our efforts in order to be able to build a complete desktop environment for embedded devices.

What do you provide?
Our immediate goal is to routinely provide two Gentoo-based images that can be immediately used on embedded devices. No reading of the extensive Gentoo Handbook is necessary. Tools will be installed and configured as you would expect from a corporate OS. The first image will be a "minimal" build that advanced Gentoo users can start with and then configure to build a completely custom OS from the ground up to fit their needs. No fat, bloat, or excess. The second image will be a "desktop" image and it's purpose is what most users would consider a multipurpose modern desktop.

What makes you different?
Gentoo gives us the flexibility and resources to make a highly efficient and customized build that can be tailored specifically for our needs. There is a large library of software to pick from. "I heard that you need to compile everything for Gentoo!" The default method is to compile, however we are providing a binary repository, similar to Debian/Ubuntu/Angstrom/etc. We have developed a cross-compiling tutorial if you wish to use it. Not all packages will cross-compile, so we will also compile packages for you if necessary. "Why not just use Debian/Ubuntu/Angstrom/etc and its software?" We can. Gentoo has support for debs/rpms/ipkgs and its own ebuild system. Another thing that we hope to offer is a large collection of community packages, software, and customizations from across the many devices out there. Such as: Beageboard's hardware support, OpenPandora's extensive game emulation projects, and Touch Book's netbook software library.

Not really convinced yet, but where can I learn more?
The Neuvoo devs are already in your community. You can find us in the forums and in IRC channels. We also have our own, please visit us in IRC @ FreeNode#neuvoo and you can visit our website at http://neuvoo.org We will provide instructions for setting up a dual-boot system, if you want the option of keeping your default system. Hope to see you.

Cheers!
 
Looks like the project has grown a bit. :)
So does the "minimal" Gentoo build mean the user gets a very basic command-line Gentoo pre-compiled for the platform (one for Pandora, one for Touchbook, etc.), and the user compiles their own window managers and so on?
 
Wheels said:
Looks like the project has grown a bit. :)
So does the "minimal" Gentoo build mean the user gets a very basic command-line Gentoo pre-compiled for the platform (one for Pandora, one for Touchbook, etc.), and the user compiles their own window managers and so on?
Click to expand...

You have pretty much described it. The minimal build is to get you from boot to a command prompt with the necessary tools for you to start adding the software you want immediately. So basically a few portage tools, networking support, and some hardware support to get you started. After you login, you should be able to start 'emerge ...' and packages should start flying in ;) While our binary repo may have an extensive list of packages installed, it may not include all packages that can possibly be installed (and the options enabled for each) so we will also be providing a binary repo format for people to use so others can share their custom repos. We have all of the tools that we use to set up cross-compiling, etc on our wiki and I will be more then happy to show you the ropes (its fairly easy).

The advantage to a minimal install is that you will have complete control over how you build your OS and therefore you can decide on what software packages, window manager, etc that you want. I will warn you though, it can be complicated for certain packages to cross-compile right (which is what we are spending our time fixing) so we also have a Gentoo overlay with all of the cross-compiling ARM patches to fix whatever problems we have ran into.

Please join us in IRC and I can give you a much more detailed overview of what we have experienced in our project.
 
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Well, I thought at first that you compiled the packages ON the Pandora, but I guess that would take forever and a half so the actual compiling gets done on a desktop and then put on an SD card for the device?
 
Wheels: Cross compiling so far is working fairly well for us. For the Gentoo portage tree I would guess around 90% of the programs that I attempt to cross-compile actually work start-to-finish. The other 10% is where we spend most of our time working on. Some of that is just poor coding or missing ARM compatible code. Sometimes is just a Gentoo issue and the package doesn't know how to work with a cross-compiler. Most of the time you could then compile those natively to resolve the issues, but we are still working on patching so theoretically we could cross-compile a complete system end-to-end. One of our eventual goals is to have a web interface where you could specify exactly what your requirements are for your embedded OS and our system would cross-compile all of it for you and give you the tarball.

Hope this answers your question.
 
*** THIS IS NOT A BUMP ***

neuvoo-0.3.0 is nearing completion

highlights
----------
* compiled for armv7a cortex-a8 fpu=neon
* xorg-server 1.7.6 w/ xf86-video-fbdev & xf86-video-omapfb
* lxde (default, e17 compiled, xfce in progress)
* chromium
* pidgin
* mplayer & ffmpeg
* wireless-tools, wpa_supplicant, wicd, networkmanager
* other utils
you can see the running binrepo here:
http://neuvoo.org/neuvoo/packages/armv7a/0.3.0/official/

I am looking for user inputs on desired apps for me to add into the compile que.

neuvoo-0.3.0 should be in the next AI Touchbook OS release pack. I expect to get some good user feedback to incorporate in follow-on releases which will make it's way to the Pandora.
 
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