Raspberry Pi/Quick Install Guide

Installing Gentoo onto a Raspberry Pi is relatively straight forward and in some ways easier because a kernel image is provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This means you can get Gentoo installed quickly onto you Raspberry Pi.

Preparing the SD Card
The Raspberry Pi boots off a FAT32 /boot partition, you will also require a root and swap partition.

Create the Partitions
Use the fdisk command to create the partitions.

Install kernel and modules
The Raspberry Pi Foundation maintain a branch of the Linux kernel that will run on the Raspberry Pi, including a compiled version which we use here.

Edit fstab
Edit the fstab to match your partition scheme.

Set boot options
You need to create a file cmdline.txt in /boot to pass options to the kernel.

Edit make.conf
The default make.conf includes basic CFLAGS. If you would like to change the settings to something more 'optimal' for the Pi look at the details on the relevant wiki page.

Configure timezone
Find your time zone using this command.

(Suppose you want to use Europe/London)

(Next set the timezone)

Clear root password
As we do not chroot before we boot, you will need to unset the root password. Allowing you to login with a blank password for the root user.

Edit the line for root so it looks like the example below.

Unmount SD and then boot your Raspberry Pi
Unmount the SD card.

Plugin the SD card to your Raspberry Pi, make sure you have a keyboard and monitor also plugged in then connect the power. Hopefully Gentoo will boot giving you a login prompt, login as root and no password. During the first boot you will see a few warnings and errors which we will fix in the next section.

Set root password
Immediately set a root password.

Enabling networking on boot
Assuming you are using DHCP on the eth0.

Select profile
List the available profiles.

Select the desired profile, for example 25

Configuring inittab and rc.conf
Uncomment the linux specific rc.conf rc_sys value, to stop warning in boot up.

Comment out the s0 Serial console to stop "INIT: Id "s0" respawning too fast" messages on the console.

Enable software clock
The Raspberry Pi does not have a hardware clock, so you need to disable the hwclock daemon and enable swclock.

To set the time correctly use ntp to set the clock at boot up.

Overclocking
It is very easy to overclock a Raspberry Pi up to 1000MHz without affecting your warranty

Enabling Overclocking
To enable overclocking select one of the suggest modes from the list above, "Medium" is generally a good starting point. Edit the /boot/config.txt, add the appropriate values and reboot the Raspberry Pi for changes to take effect.

Optional cpufrequtils
To manage the CPU frequency scaling you can use the cpufrequtils.

The default scaling governor can be changed in the /etc/conf.d/cpufrequtils file

Confirm the current scaling and CPU using the cpufreq-info command

Force Turbo Option
The force turbo option turns off the dynamic clocks and runs the Raspberry Pi constantly at the highest arm_freq.  Edit the /boot/config.txt, add force_turbo=1 then reboot the Raspberry Pi for changes to take effect.

Changing memory split
Not strictly speaking speaking overclocking, but the memory used by the GPU can be changed. To change the memory used by the GPU down to a minimum of 16MB add the gpu_mem value to /boot/config.txt, then reboot the Raspberry Pi for changes to take effect.