Hello, > I've looked around at the Raspberry Pi 3 > > [...] > > I would prefer running Gentoo on it > > [...] > > Any opinions or use cases and stories would be much appreciated.
well I'm running Gentoo on a Raspberry Pi 2. Getting Gentoo basically running on it wasn't too hard. There's some good information on the wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi I got the Raspberry primarily for multimedia type of applications and experimentations. In the end I ended up with quite an array of extra hardware: - a good USB power supply that can provide at least 2.0 A which is recommended - a 32 GB microSD card for holding the (mostly) read-only part of Gentoo - a 16 GB USB drive for holding read/write partitions like /tmp which speeds things up a bit and improves the lifetime of the microSD card - the official raspberry pi touch display https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-touch-display/ - a USB wifi WLAN/Bluetooth dongle for wireless connectivity - a USB soundcard, because the onboard audio on the Raspberry has a terrible sound quality These are my experiences: - compiling your own Kernel for the Raspberry can be challenging until all devices are running as expected. - compilation for the Raspberry for Gentoo is *very* slow even with using distcc to distribute the load on bigger machines. - all kinds of file system writes tend to be slow due to the of memory devices used (microSD card, USB flash drive). - the touchscreen works fine so far even with the touch and some basic gestures working. Some special drivers from Gentoo Portage overlays are required, however. - booting is acceptably fast. I'm running an X server and fluxbox as window manager. It's finished booting after about a minute. - I got hardware accelerated video decoding running but it was a real pain. The broadcom graphics chip is only supported by either a proprietary video player or by the gstreamer framework. I think I compiled gstreamer and OpenGL/Mesa stuff for days in different configurations until I got something out of it. - Getting a fast and fully featured web browser for the Raspberry is something I've still not achieved. Currently I'm running firefox on it which is unbearably slow. So in conclusion it's a fun embedded device to work with. It was not too cheap (especially because of the touchscreen). I use it regularly for listening to music or watching short videos. It's too slow, however, for web browsing and much interactive/GUI use. Compiling software on it requires patience. And getting all the drivers and devices working in the first place can be a challenge. Best regards Matthias -- Matthias Gerstner, Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Inf. (FH) Entwicklung NCP engineering GmbH Dombühler Straße 2, D-90449, Nürnberg Geschäftsführer Peter Söll, HRB-Nr: 77 86 Nürnberg Telefon: +49 911 9968-153, Fax: +49 911 9968-229 E-Mail: matthias.gerst...@ncp-e.com Internet: http://www.ncp-e.com
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