Gentoo live USB for Excito B3 (with Linux 3.15.9) released

[Sakaki]

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 live-USB image of Gentoo Linux for the B3, on GitHub.

It uses kernel version 3.15.9 from the mainline, with the necessary code to switch off the L2 cache prepended, and the kirkwood-b3 device tree blob appended.

You can burn the supplied image to a USB key (>=4Gb), 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 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 specify initial network settings, so you can ssh in once booted).

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

[Sakaki]

FYI, I've recently updated this image, to version 1.3.0 (available, with full instructions, on GitHub here).

The new version uses kernel 3.18.6 from gentoo-sources, and has a larger pre-compiled set of packages available. Please see this forum post for further details.

There's also a public wiki associated with the project. I have put a few notes there on how to set up your PC as a cross-compilation / distcc server for the B3, to accelerate builds (you don't need to do this just to play with the image, of course). Feel free to add your own material!

[Sakaki]

I have recently updated the image to version 1.4.0 (available as before on GitHub, here). All included packages are up-to-date against the Gentoo tree, as of 2 May 2015.

The new version uses kernel 4.0.1 from gentoo-sources, and includes a patch for the recent PCIe bug affecting Kirkwood devices. Please see this forum post for further details.