Bootable Gentoo images for Novena released (libre+std)

[Sakaki]

Hello

Do you own a Novena single board computer, and would like to try running Gentoo on it?

If so, you may be interested to know that I've just released two bootable Gentoo images for the Novena on GitHub (here).

You can burn either image (both ~800MiB compressed) to a microSD card (>=8GB), then boot your Novena from it directly.

Both images contain a complete (OpenRC-based) Gentoo system (including a full Portage tree) - so you can run emerge operations immediately - and both have a reasonably populated userland (Xfce v4.12, Firefox v49.0, Claws Mail v3.14.0, Thunderbird v45.3.0, VLC v2.2.4, abiword v3.0.1 etc.) so that you can get productive without having to compile anything first (unless you wish to do so, of course ^-^).

Additionally, both images contain the full set of Novena-specific apps (novena-eeprom-gui etc.), ported across from xobs' Debian packages for your convenience (including the custom armada X.org video driver), as described here.

The images differ from each other in that one is full-libre (including a deblobbed 4.7.2 kernel), and the other has a non-deblobbed 4.7.2 kernel (and includes sys-kernel/linux-firmware, so Bluetooth works).

Full instructions may be found on the project's GitHub page.

If you get a chance to try it out, please let me know how you get on ^-^

PS: running either of these images will not affect any existing Debian system you may have installed to your Novena's hard drive (if fitted) (unless you explicitly perform mount, fdisk or similar operations targeting the HDD, of course). Assuming you choose to write your chosen Gentoo image to a separate microSD card, when you are finished using Gentoo, you can simply power off, swap back to your old Debian card, reboot, and your system will be just as it was before you started.
_________________
Regards,

sakaki

[Sakaki]

Hi,

if you have a Novena with an eDP daughtercard fitted (laptop, desktop or heirloom configuration) and have experienced boot problems when trying out either the Novena-patched 4.7.2 kernel or the Gentoo microSD-card images for Novena (see my other recent posts in this forum), then please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused ><

Happily, the issue (more details here, if you are interested) has now (I believe!) been resolved. As such:

• If you are interested in trying out the gentoo-on-novena images (full-libre or regular), please download the newly released v1.0.1, which has the updated kernel pre-installed; instructions here; or
  
• If you are using the "novena" Gentoo overlay directly, please first refresh this (emaint sync --repo=novena), emerge the appropriate new kernel ebuild (either sys-kernel/novena_hardened-sources-4.7.2-r2 or sys/kernel/novena-sources-4.7.2-r1), then compile and install your kernel, modules and dtb as usual; or
  
• If you would like to try the 4.7.2 kernel on your Novena, but are not using Gentoo (O_o), then just pull the updated patchset from GitHub and apply it, as described here.
  

"Just the board" users need take no action (although upgrading will do no harm).
_________________
Regards,

sakaki