Gentoo on the Genesi Efika MX Open ClientInstalling Gentoo in the Efikamx is pretty simple. You can either use a sufficiently sized SD card (>=2GB for ease) or the internal SSD drive. If you are familar with the Gentoo Linux installation process, there is not much different here. To be able to install Gentoo, you'll need the following:
3. Booting the installation environment The Efika MX comes with Ubuntu on it from the manufactor. In order to install Gentoo on the internal drive you can't be booted from it. It is probably easiest to extract a SD card image because if the SD card has a kernel and rootfs on it, the efikamx will automatically boot from that. You can find a basic Gentoo image here: http://dev.gentoo.org/~darkside/arm/efikamx/install/ The installation on this device is more or less the same as any other kind of machine. So please read and follow the ARM Handbook from the beginning, just skip the 10th chapter, as its irrelevant for our machine. I'll just explain what we have to do differently. Please read below first so you know when you have to go back to this document during the installation. If you are comfortable keeping the installation on the SD card that you made from above, that is fine. You can start customizing the installation as you see fit. Installation on internal drive This document assumes that you will not want to keep the Gentoo installation on the SD card, as such, more detailed instructions are below. As I already explained, we don't need a boot partition, although you can create it anyway if you want to have your kernels and initramfs separated from the main partition. The key here for those unfamilar with u-boot is that the first partition should be vfat. Your partition table should look similar to this:
Here's some information about the stages.
We'll be using the new EABI, also called gnueabi, instead of the old ABI. That is armel on Debian. There's no exact reason for why we should use this EABI and not the old one, apart that this one is better than the old. Therefore, we need an armv7a-unknown-linux-gnueabi stage3, available under the releases/arm/autobuilds directory in your favorite mirror Configuring and installing the kernel The Efika MX is not yet supported in the mainline kernel. You can find source and binaries at the Power Developer site. I suggest using the binaries at first, at least until you are able to get a working system. Place the uImage, u-boot.bin, and type-id.bin file in partition 1, place the kernel modules on partition 2. Now we add sshd to the startup of our system so we can access it when we boot into our new system.
Enabling serial console access By default the ttyS0 port is configured. However, the machine is configured with ttymxc0 at 115200bps. So this should be added to the /etc/inittab file:
Also, need to add ttymxc0 to /etc/securetty so that root can log in on the serial console, should you need to. This is pretty much all the installation, read all the recommendations of the handbook, and remember to change the root password and/or create some users. Once you've finished the installation of Gentoo into your Efika MX, you can simply power it down and remove the SD card. Then it will boot from the internal drive. If it does not boot, then you can put in the SD card and reboot to fix the mistake. You may find more documentation about the device itself and Linux-related at the following links: Gentoo would like to thank Genesi since they provided us some hardware to do this porting and they've been very helpful. The contents of this document, unless otherwise expressly stated, are licensed under the CC-BY-SA-2.5 license. The Gentoo Name and Logo Usage Guidelines apply. |
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