I would like to run Gentoo on my new Efika MX.

I've followed the HowTo at http://dev.gentoo.org/~darkside/arm/efi ... nstall.xml which advocates creating two partitions on the internal disk: 1st being Windows Format and the 2nd ext4 (I prefer to use ext3 and presume using ext3 is not a deal breaker).

But then in this forum in the last few days, Stephen Klimaszewski(steev) offered his /boot and /lib files in this topic:
http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=2104

Then, there is the Gentoo install wiki at http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Efika which seems outdated and takes a variety of approaches.

Should I have a SWAP partition? I understand that having a /boot partition is not necessary, I can just have two partitions, with the booting image under the root partition under /boot. But then, the Howto says that the first partition must be formatted with Windows VFAT32 in order for U-Boot to read it. So, I'm getting confused.

I do not have the board that provide serial console access and I think if I had some guidance on a proven install/modification from the factory default I'd be in a position of booting up to Gentoo and then trying to compile my own kernels. Using the Ubuntu on an SD card, I've gone through the stage of creating two partitions on the internal disk and unzipping an in image and portage on the root partition. I've even successfully compiled a kernel. So I'm probably close.

Hi,

The wiki page is definitely outdated (actually it's for the PPC Efika, not the ARM based EfikaMX). Gentoo has its own wiki (after the pre-requisite period of bikeshedding ;) ), perhaps I should look into updating this info and putting it on there.

To answer the questions, number of partitions doesn't particularly matter. In the latest releases, we don't create a swap partition because we use ramzswap and use a file on the filesystem for it. It always helps to have swap though. File system format doesn't matter *too* much, although, I believe that /boot needs to be on vfat, ext2 or ext3 (not sure if our uboot supports ext4, Matt can correct me if I am wrong).

Root can be whatever as long as the kernel has the support built in.

Realistically, it sounds like you are close, I'm more curious as to what you are stuck at. What I tend to do is run off an SD card and get that working first, although the opposite works just as well.

My Gentoo smartbook looks like this...

/boot - ext2 partition
/ - ext4 partition
swap - /dev/sdb5 (usb hard drive)
/var/tmp/portage - /dev/sdb6
/var/overlays - /dev/sdb7
/usr/portage - /dev/sdb8
/usr/lib/debug - /dev/sdb9 (I build everything splitdebug)
/buildbot - /dev/sdb10 - (misc things to be built manually like internal things, and drivers and such)

I don't use ramzswap on there (yet) mostly because I forgot about it until now. I am only working on it in my free time and I'm working on getting Gnome 3 running on there (almost have gnome-shell working!)

But for a "quick howto" this is what I do...

Boot from sdcard (the installer image, using N to enter recovery console)

Set up networking on the sd card and connect to the network.

<partitioning as I mentioned above>

Mount partitions

download stage3 tarball, and extract it
download portage tarball and extract it

build the kernel -
make mx51_efikamx_defconfig;
make menuconfig
< here I remove things that I will never have, and add in things like file system support, since I don't use an initramfs >

install things like wpa_supplicant, system logger, dhcp client, sudo, update any new packages etc.

edit
/etc/fstab (partitioning)
/etc/inittab (we use /dev/ttymxc0 not /dev/ttyS0)
/etc/securetty (so I can log in from serial console if needed)

<set root password!>
<create normal user>
<set user password!>

Cross fingers, and reboot. If it fails, take note of any error messages, and search the internet for them. Odds are, someone has already run into the issue and it's a quick fix.


Now the reason I keep /usr/portage on it's own partition is that there are tons of tiny files in there, and so I prefer to have it on an external usb hard drive. Same with /var/tmp/portage; Also if you attempt to build something like firefox, or libreoffice, which are huge, and you run out of memory somehow, it's possible that it will hose the file system. I have had that happen to me once or twice.

By all means, if you have any specific questions, let me know, I love Gentoo, and am always willing to help someone out :)

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

Thank you, Steev.

I'm following your recommendations. I am unable to find
Here's the November 8th stage3 tarball I used: stage3-armv7a_hardfp-20111108.tar.bz2 and I downloaded the latest portage of same date. I also updated my portage with "emerge --sync" just in case you were referencing something hot off the griddle, so I should be completely up todate. Unfortunately, I'm not finding the the configuration file "mx51_efikamx_defconfig" you referenced. Is "mx51_efikamx_defconfig" something you created or am I missing something I should have installed, such as an overlay?
I

I had not and I am now doing so, that probably is why the configuration file is not showing up. I'll updated after the emerge completes.

Emerging gentoo-sources and vanilla-sources did not bring it in:

Hi John,

You can find our kernel source and the defconfig file you're looking for on our git repo:

https://github.com/genesi/linux-legacy


Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

I pulled the image from the GIT repository and built a uImage. Unfortunately, Lilo is not a part of the Gentoo image and when I tried to emerge it, it failed. I logged a bug with Gentoo: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391755

Thinking I could use Debian's lilo, I tried to install it and was blocked:
Would grub work? This is not going to be easy: [/b]

Hi.

Neither Grub nor Lilo will work since the Efika uses UBoot.


Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

I guess I left that portion out.

For booting, we use uboot, which you don't need to compile or install yourself. All you need to do is install u-boot-tools and then in the /boot partition you should have your uImage (kernel) and then a file called boot.script with the following contents: Once that file is in place (you could even just copy it from the already installed system, or off the installer sdcard although the installer's boot.script is a bit more involved as it can be used to update uboot (not advised!), you can generate the boot.scr that uboot looks for by running the following command

_________________
Steev Klimaszewski, Genesi USA Inc.
Senior Software Engineer

Yippeee! I did it.

Now, to document the entire process and make the files available so this becomes a 1 hour install (not including compile or unzip times).

Thank you, Stephen and Johan!

So, I to update my install; then: to bring me up todate. One of the items to update was gcc and during the compiliation of that I maxed out the number of inodes to my /dev/mnt/sda2. Basically I can not add any more files which is effectively running out of disk space even though I have 30% supposedly available.

Here's my partition information that I chose base upon the Gentoo Efika install How to:
I have traditionally monitoring my disk usage with "df" and kept an eye on the percentage of blocks used. So here I am with: and thinking I've got enough room to update me system before I embark on rerouting portions of the disk to other spaces (USB disk or external hard drive). But, then my attempt to compile is broken by an error message "No space left on device." I have now learned that "inodes" play an important part in the design of what file system you create. I've never had this problem before, but it sure has bitten me now: As you can see, I have used up all my inodes, so I cannot create any more files despite the fact that I have 30% space available.

Ouch. I looks like I'll have to start over and re-image the partition with a file system and use more inodes. I've never run into this type of problem before, so anyone else venturing into the area is warned -- learn about what inodes are and consider a strategy that will not leave you in a predicament such as I am in: a disk only 70% utilized in blocks, but 100% utilized in inodes.

I guess, I could add another USB drive, copy everything over, then reboot to an SD Card, install a new file system with more inodes and then copy my tree back over to the newly formatted (and more accomdating) /dev/sda2.

Hi,

The way I usually work with Gentoo on small systems is that the portage tree goes on an external harddrive, preferably formatted with XFS or another filesystem which supports dynamic inode allocation.

You could do the same and just move the portage tree to another drive, and put a symlink in place. That should free up some inodes...

Johan.

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

Yup, I wanted to get some basics going before I started moving directories off of the internal memory.

Just for the record, I had erroneously unpacked portage to root rather (in addition to /usr) so I had a duplicate portage at /portage. This contributed to the consumption of the available inodes. I did not want someone reading this thread to think that an early start of a fresh install resulted in a shortage of inodes -- the problem I encountered was a result of my carelessness a week ago when I was preparing the disks, I forgot to remove the /portage node. My inode count after removing portage is back to normal: I also want to take the opportunity to warn that installing the GIT of the Genesi kernel consumes a good amount of space. I'm going to keep mine for study. The directory linux-legacy is the GIT pull, as you can see it is double in size to the gentoo, linux-3.0.6-gentoo, and plain vanilla, linux-3.0.6.

I moved /usr/portage off to a USB memory Stick (16GB). After the move, here are the numbers: The conclusion: Portage consume about 30% of the inode space on the Efika's 8 GB internal memory. 310,155 Used inodes before the move, 161,103 after the move. That's a difference of 149052 which represents 30.56% of the available inodes.

(And I erroneously had a 2nd Portage tree when I started to update my install, so I was starting off with 60% of my available memory being consumed by Portage.)

Hi.

Keep in mind that 'git pull' pulls in a lot of data representing the changes made to all the files over the entire lifetime of the project. What you should do in your case is just remove the hidden .git directory in the linux-legacy directory which contains this data. Of course, from that point on, it's no longer a git repository.


Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet