Downloading the Gentoo minimal install image
I feel like if I can get Arch reliably working using the installation guide, I can probably figure this out.

I'm planning on doing similar, but installing to an SSD using a Gentoo chroot from my running Arch installation. :3

@maddy Observe the vixen in her native habitat, scavenging for rare scraps of coherent UX among the rich ecosystem of diverse and alien-like shell commands that can only be found at night. First, she marks her territory by formatting the boot partition...

emerge --ask --verbose --update --deep --changed-use @world

Here we go!

@maddy that’s the update manager.

@bearmine I’m not familiar enough yet to fully understand or know what I’m really doing yet, but I think that’s just to install base system files. I installed nano afterward by entering emerge app-editors/nano

@maddy oh is it like 1) mount all the partitions how you want, 2) run that command?

@bearmine Nah, the partition mounting was earlier.
It grabbed stuff needed to compile base system stuff like curl, portage, linux-headers, etc, compiled, and installed them to the system!

@bearmine Like I said, I don’t quite understand what I’m doing

@maddy ask away if you get confused ☺
(I’m pretty sure you’ll do just fine, but I’ve been running Gentoo for a long time)

@dakkar Will do!
And thank you, I appreciate the offer! 💜

@maddy @bearmine
fun fact: even though the emerge command is named so because gentoo’s older name being “enoch”, i always thought to myself “Emerge, my curl! Rise, from the source!” like a necromancer

@thing @bearmine Heheheh, that’s so dorky, I love it!

@maddy @bearmine another neat thing is that…well…since it’s built from source, it is literally made for cross compiling. so you can run it on pretty much any cpu. and c library. and from a chroot. and from…uhh…things like wsl1.

protip: [set up a binhost](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Binary_Host_Quickstart) so you can avoid compiling *the world* ().

Oh damn it, I get to the point where I get to installing gentoo-kernel-bin, and it fails.

Going back through the guide, I may have forgotten to enter the UUID for the root partition for dracut in a conf file under /etc/dracut.conf.d, so I’m going to try that, and then try again.

Oh… yeah, that worked lol

@maddy “ where the heck is the root partition”
-dracut

Booted into my install for the first time and of course, I had to run fastfetch.

@maddy My Favorite Linux.

Okay, I think I’m starting to understand the whole ‘USE’ flags concept better.

I might start from scratch in a new VM ‘cause I was watching someone go through their own install while reading through the guide in the wiki, and that threw me off a bit.

But first, I want to get to a graphical desktop in a Wayland session.

Considering setting up a minimal Gentoo install on my HP Stream, but I’m worried that all the compilation will not only take forever, but it’ll probably use up what’s left of that poor eMMC’s write endurance.

I could use binaries for a lot of stuff, but especially for that piece of shit HP Stream, I’d want to make sure everything is as optimized as possible, so I’d wanna compile anyway.

…except maybe the kernel

@maddy omgomgomg ok so. so. I would recommend,. honestly, something like Chimera over Gentoo. Yes, you might get a few percentage points of increase in performance if you optimise for Braswell/Bay Trail, but that's going to be severely offset by, as you said, the possible death of the eMMC and the taking forever to compile anything

@maddy get the exact hardware capabilities of it, and cross compile?

also, f2fs helps a lot with emmc ime

@mir Could do - I’d have to figure out how to do that first. I don’t compile things often.

I’ll try f2fs if I end up doing it!

@maddy which Stream? I have a ready-made lubuntu distro for the Stream 7 I can point you at that handles the 32-bit firmware nonsense and makes it kinda useable (though there’s an audio-goes-screech-after-a-while video playback issue I haven’t been able to narrow down)

@crowbriarhexe Oh, thanks, but I’m aiming to play with Gentoo anyway!
It’s a Stream 13, and it actually seems to handle 64-bit EFI fine, unlike some Windows 8 tablets I’ve tinkered with.

@maddy yeah, the Stream 7 is one of those, I really stuck with it trying to get it to work because the size is just perfect for a portable Linux machine, but like all of my cursed intel tablets it’s a lesson in heartbreak >_<

@maddy yeah i think gentoo has tools for it but it’s been a while and ive never gotten a gentoo compiled kernel to work, nor stayed on the distro for more than a day

@freya Maybe another time! I try to stick to learning about a single distro and its quirks at a time.

Holy shit it takes a long time to compile LLVM.

TIL - there are benchmarks based around how long it takes to compile LLVM
https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-llvm

@maddy thanks for that warning…
i was almost gonna force my poor phone to compile llvm with 20 make jobs, for zig…

@maddy

next, do an LFS build 😃

@maddy valid! I could never get on with gentoo, it has very much the "I am nothing but a pile of loosly connected pieces with little relation to one another" vibe

@maya_b One distro at a time :p

@thing That maneuver might cost you a few days

@maddy opinionless, is perhaps the best description of it?

LLVM just finished compiling in this test VM. That was probably two hours.

@maddy dear…god…
my condolences to the ci runners and other things making these binary packages…

@thing Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve had the Linux kernel compile faster on less powerful systems.
Though it’s been a while, I could be remembering wrong.

@maddy at work we have an old machine we use to do builds for the rest of the machines. i recently changed the timeout from 36 to 48 hours so that llvm builds could run to completion without being killed

@SleepyCat Holy moly.

clang is also taking quite a while to compile. I’m probably gonna have to interrupt the process when I go home.

@maddy

you know it's not actually a distro - it's *linux* itself

@maddy twenty years ago I had a laptop, with Gentoo on it. I'd spent like two days recompiling everything for upgrading the distro. And it was finally done. The day after(?), we had a break-in and it got stolen. I was... unimpressed.

@anyia Ugh, that fucking sucks.

@maddy it was so rude. The joke was on them tho, that laptop had a Norwegian keyboard 🙃

@maddy Oh hey you actually got it to boot, I tried for 3 days and couldn't get the system running.

@FleurC Oh noo

clang is done, and I am now waiting for mesa to compile

…I don’t think I’m gonna see a GUI tonight.

@maddy Hey, at least you have a system rn.

The more I think about distro hopping to experiment with other Linux perspectives the more I become tired and choose to never move away from arch-based systems. I know how they work and that's good enough for me.

@FleurC Oh yeah, I’m more than happy with Arch (EndeavourOS specifically), but I was bored and wanted to see if I could learn more.

@maddy @mir resolve-march-native from app-misc/resolve-march-native will tell you which CFLAGS -march=native is equivalent to on your CPU

@noisytoot @mir This is helpful, thank you! ^.^

I gave the VM two more cores and doubled the RAM. Builds appear to be going faster now!

@maddy Ye, same reason for my attempt at Nix and the 3 day failed attempt at Gentoo. I might even retry Void eventually just to see it.

My current flavor of Arch is CachyOS because it feels like a true successor to Antergos than EndeavourOS. Antergos was my first Linux Distro, I cry remembering hoa it shut down a few months after I found it.

@crowbriarhexe @maddy I have another Baytrail laptop/tablet thing (Toshiba Satellite Click Mini) with the same 32-bit UEFI and audio problems. I installed postmarketOS on it (the generic-x86_64 port supports 32-bit UEFI) and it’s the most broken x86_64 device I’ve used:

• It has a 32-bit UEFI with no CSM
• Audio only works for a few seconds before just becoming a constant buzzing sound
• There’s apparently supposed to be a boot menu on fn+f2 but there isn’t and the UEFI configuration doesn’t seem to have any boot menu or way to control the boot order
• With newer kernels the display is wrapped around at 1/3
• When I close the lid the backlight turns off and I don’t know how to turn it back on (ACPI doesn’t work and intel_backlight crashes with SIGFPE)

I’m afraid of breaking my installation and not being able to recover it since there’s no boot menu and it’s booting from eMMC which I can’t just take out and mount elsewhere. I couldn’t obtain a dump of the boot firmware either since it’s on a 1.8V flash chip and I only have a 3.3V programmer.

I had the VM build/install KDE Plasma starting last night. It was still chugging along this morning, so I had to save the state of the VM so I could sleep my laptop and bring it to work to continue.

Also, I brought my ThinkPad E495 so I could try a Gentoo install on bare hardware.

Started the minimal installer, created and formatted partitions, used nmtui to connect to my phone’s hotspot, downloaded the stage3 tarball, and now I’m about to set compile options!

Nice, now to run emerge-webrsync and start installing things to the drive!

@maddy hmm…
that laptop’s specs are similar to mine…
maybe i should tri-boot gentoo in there too

Compilations to fall asleep to

@maddy

❌ Abstract Syntax Tree
✔️ Actually Sleeping Tablet

@maddy nope.

You're going to ~~brazil~~ Portage!

(/lh /j)