Sakaki Guru
Joined: 21 May 2014 Posts: 409
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Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:08 am Post subject: Gentoo live USB for Excito B3 (weekly 17.0 binhost) released |
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Hello
Do you own an Excito B3 (an arm5/kirkwood miniserver)?
If so, you may be interested to know that I've just released a new (v2.1.0) live-USB image of Gentoo Linux for the B3, on GitHub.
The live-USB has weekly-autobuild binary kernel and userspace package updates available (from binhost https://isshoni.org/b3pie) so keeping your system up to date should be relatively painless (anything not on the pre-installed list, you still have to build from source, however).
The binhost also hosts a weekly-gated rsync mirror for the main gentoo repo, used to keep the B3's ebuild tree in lockstep.
A custom Gentoo profile, gentoo-b3:default/linux/arm/17.0/armv5te/b3, is provided too, which supplies many of the default build settings, USE flags etc., required for Gentoo on the B3, keeping these also in lockstep with the binhost. You can view this profile (provided via the gentoo-b3 overlay) here.
For this release, all userland packages have been fully rebuilt for profile 17.0, and repo signature checking migrated from porthash to gemato.
Neither the userspace package binhost nor binary kernel package use is mandatory of course; you can easily turn both off for the fully-authentic source-based Gentoo experience ^-^
Although I make no guarantees about the future availability of these autobuilds, we currently use this infrastructure on our own production B3s, so it should be around for a while. Use the supplied binary packages (and kernels) at your own risk.
Installation and Use
You can burn the supplied image to a USB key (>=8Gb), then boot your B3 from it, without affecting any installed system on your B3's hard drive. You can even boot a diskless B3! No soldering, compilation or U-Boot flashing is required.
It's a full (persistent) armv5tel Gentoo profile 17.0 system, not simply a 'minimal install' or 'stage3', so you can run emerge operations etc. immediately.
Full instructions are provided on the GitHub page (including how to ssh in once booted).
If you get a chance to try it, please let me know how you get on ^-^ _________________ Regards,
sakaki |
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