| 1 |
Hello, |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
> I've looked around at the Raspberry Pi 3 |
| 4 |
> |
| 5 |
> [...] |
| 6 |
> |
| 7 |
> I would prefer running Gentoo on it |
| 8 |
> |
| 9 |
> [...] |
| 10 |
> |
| 11 |
> Any opinions or use cases and stories would be much appreciated. |
| 12 |
|
| 13 |
well I'm running Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi 2. Getting Gentoo basically |
| 14 |
running on it wasn't too hard. There's some good information on the |
| 15 |
wiki: |
| 16 |
|
| 17 |
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi |
| 18 |
|
| 19 |
I got the Raspberry primarily for multimedia type of applications and |
| 20 |
experimentations. In the end I ended up with quite an array of extra |
| 21 |
hardware: |
| 22 |
|
| 23 |
- a good USB power supply that can provide at least 2.0 A which is |
| 24 |
recommended |
| 25 |
- a 32 GB microSD card for holding the (mostly) read-only part of Gentoo |
| 26 |
- a 16 GB USB drive for holding read/write partitions like /tmp which |
| 27 |
speeds things up a bit and improves the lifetime of the microSD card |
| 28 |
- the official raspberry pi touch display |
| 29 |
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-touch-display/ |
| 30 |
- a USB wifi WLAN/Bluetooth dongle for wireless connectivity |
| 31 |
- a USB soundcard, because the onboard audio on the Raspberry has a |
| 32 |
terrible sound quality |
| 33 |
|
| 34 |
These are my experiences: |
| 35 |
|
| 36 |
- compiling your own Kernel for the Raspberry can be challenging until |
| 37 |
all devices are running as expected. |
| 38 |
- compilation for the Raspberry for Gentoo is *very* slow even with |
| 39 |
using distcc to distribute the load on bigger machines. |
| 40 |
- all kinds of file system writes tend to be slow due to the of memory |
| 41 |
devices used (microSD card, USB flash drive). |
| 42 |
- the touchscreen works fine so far even with the touch and some basic |
| 43 |
gestures working. Some special drivers from Gentoo Portage overlays |
| 44 |
are required, however. |
| 45 |
- booting is acceptably fast. I'm running an X server and fluxbox as |
| 46 |
window manager. It's finished booting after about a minute. |
| 47 |
- I got hardware accelerated video decoding running but it was a real |
| 48 |
pain. The broadcom graphics chip is only supported by either a |
| 49 |
proprietary video player or by the gstreamer framework. I think I |
| 50 |
compiled gstreamer and OpenGL/Mesa stuff for days in different |
| 51 |
configurations until I got something out of it. |
| 52 |
- Getting a fast and fully featured web browser for the Raspberry is |
| 53 |
something I've still not achieved. Currently I'm running firefox on it |
| 54 |
which is unbearably slow. |
| 55 |
|
| 56 |
So in conclusion it's a fun embedded device to work with. It was not too |
| 57 |
cheap (especially because of the touchscreen). I use it regularly for |
| 58 |
listening to music or watching short videos. It's too slow, however, for |
| 59 |
web browsing and much interactive/GUI use. Compiling software on it |
| 60 |
requires patience. And getting all the drivers and devices working in |
| 61 |
the first place can be a challenge. |
| 62 |
|
| 63 |
Best regards |
| 64 |
|
| 65 |
Matthias |
| 66 |
|
| 67 |
-- |
| 68 |
Matthias Gerstner, Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf. (FH) |
| 69 |
Entwicklung |
| 70 |
|
| 71 |
NCP engineering GmbH |
| 72 |
Dombühler Straße 2, D-90449, Nürnberg |
| 73 |
Geschäftsführer Peter Söll, HRB-Nr: 77 86 Nürnberg |
| 74 |
|
| 75 |
Telefon: +49 911 9968-153, Fax: +49 911 9968-229 |
| 76 |
E-Mail: Matthias.Gerstner@×××××.com |
| 77 |
Internet: http://www.ncp-e.com |
Archives