Re: [gentoo-user] Compiling Gentoo for Raspberry Pi (Was: List of base system packages)

[Nilesh Govindrajan <me@nileshgr.com>]

On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Yohan Pereira <yohan.pereira@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I recently got a minimal gentoo running on the pi (without running
> emerge/compiling on the pi), here's what I've learned.
>
> Cross compilation is FUN <\sarcasm>. Lots of packages (like python)
> don't like being cross compiled. A good number of  failures occurred
> because of missing build time dependencies on the host, Some times I had
> to copy certain files need at build-time from the host to the arm
> sysroot (mainly for the x11-proto/* packages).
>
> For the really adamant packages (like python) I used the method
> described here [1] to build binary packages using a native arm chroot +
> qemu-user (a rather interesting way to go about it).
>
> However I've not compared the performance (wrt compilation time) to
> running a full blown arm qemu vm so you may want to try that and see
> what works better for you. But I reckon any of these methods should be
> faster than compiling on the pi on a modern CPU.
>
> Also note cross-compiling is way faster than this method so I preferred
> cross-compiling and only resorted to this for packages like python.
>
> In the end I got it to boot. Then I decided I wanted to try xbmc, after
> seeing the long list of dependencies, I went ahead and installed
> openELEC :D. Which works great BTW (Still trying to find some indian
> news streams).
>
> [1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/?part=1&chap=5
> (Note that page is a bit dated, app-emulation/qemu-user is masked in the
> tree. Use app-emulation/qemu instead)
>

Emulating the Pi on my machine would be slower since I have a dated
E2180. It would be rather easier to get distcc on the Pi and make use
of the 3 processors.

But need to first figure out how to install emerge there...
alternatively, could go with paludis which is written in C++, so the
nagging python thing won't be there.

--
Nilesh Govindrajan
http://nileshgr.com