A collection of scripts to prepare a Gentoo tarball for the pinebook pro

Disclaimer:

I do not recommend Gentoo for people new to Linux. This script, while unable to damage your running system, is a beta release.

READ THE GENTOO HANDBOOK!!! https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64

./prepare.sh -h to display usage, this is safe to run in any environment and will not read or write anything.

Do this on your pbp or another aarch 64 environment, qemu works aswell. Download a Stage 3 arm64 tarball - usually from http://distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/arm64/ Extract the tarball as root, otherwise you'll mess up file permissions! Put the files of this repository into the tarball - preferably into /var/tmp/gentoo-pinebookpro Chroot into the tarball as explained in the Handbook - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Copy_DNS_info Execute the script prepare.sh - it is recommended to not change the default options unless you really know what this will do, and what will break if you do. Should the script fail you can run it again without having to unpack a new tarball. NOTE: there's a bug in glibc which causes EBADFD errors while in the chroot sometimes - rebooting and entering the chroot may fix this, it may not. Any help in debugging this is tremendeously welcome. This seems to only affect the systemd tarballs right now.

This script doesn't ship with a bootloader or similar, please consult README.md in the boot directory

From there on, do the usual tarball installation following the Gentoo Handbook. Use sys-kernel/pinebookpro-manjaro-sources as the kernel

It's heavily recommended to run the latest mesa, to do so add media-libs/mesa ~arm64 to your /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords . Similarly, running the latest versions of your DE and the underlying Qt / GTK libs is often a good idea.

I have changed or added some ebuilds via my overlay pinebookpro-overlay . It is installed by the prepare script via layman. The Kernel ebuild sys-kernel/pinebookpro-manjaro-soruces has been added. virtual/linux-sources has been adapted accordingly. The Vanilla and Gentoo sources do not work right now and have been masked. The wifi firmware is packaged as sys-firmware/pinebookpro-firmware , from sys-kernel/linux-firmware only rockchip/dptx.bin is needed, the configuration is done by the script (see /etc/portage/savedconfig/sys-kernel/linux-firmware-yyyymmdd) An ebuild for miscellaneous fixes sys-firmware/pinebookpro-misc has been added. Please emerge this after having booted into Gentoo, it will most likely fail in a chroot. It is required for full functionality. An ebuild that applies profile overrides app-portage/pinebookpro-profile-overrides has been added, this is auto-installed and you really really shouldn't uninstall it. The xorg server x11-base/xorg-server has been changed to disable glamor when wayland is enabled, as this breaks xwayland applications. This comes at a significant performance cost, to disable this the useflag USE=glamor has been added. You can ignore this if you don't want to use wayland. The 2D Xorg driver x11-drivers/xf86-video-fbturbo has been added. It is required for most DEs that use full OpenGL instead of gles

Ebuilds (the scripts that configure, compile and install a package) are sometimes not released as stable or not released at all for all architectures. This is called keywording: for example, KEYWORDS="amd64 ~arm64" indicates the ebuild is marked stable for amd64, testing for arm64 and masked for all other architectures. You can and will override this a lot by editing /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords . Adding category/package keyword to this file will emerge the latest version that uses the respective keyword. For example, firefox has all LTS releases marked stable and all others marked testing. www-client/firefox ~arm64 would always select the latest release. Dependencies that require keyword changes can be automatically unmasked and the changes merged with dispatch-conf

General:

Issue:	The keyboard / touchpad is unresponsive sometimes
Fix:	Make sure you have updated the keyboard / touchpad firmware, see https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater

Issue:	The PBP charges a lot slower after a while, the charging LED starts blinking
Fix	This is a weird safety feature of the battery controller. It usually goes away after charging to full or restarting

Issue:	The Kernel takes ages to boot!
Fix:	Make sure CONFIG_CRYPTO_RSA is a module. Additionally there's another issue where some uboot versions initialize the big cores at 12 MHz, which will slow down things quite a lot until the Kernel loads the cpu governor. This can be fixed by adding maxcpus=4 to your kernel line and then onlining the two big cores afterwards.

Issue:	Wifi bad
Fix:	The wifi powersave seems to be broken, disable it with `iwconfig wlan0 power off` - what an unfortunate naming

KDE Plasma:

Issue:	system settings crashes when trying to open some submenus
Fix:	Add LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 to your /etc/environment, restart the session, do your changes, comment that line out, restart the session

Issue:	SDDM crashes / becomes unresponsive
Fix:	This only seems to happen in the SDDM login menu when you don't login within ~1m. Restart SDDM and be quicker next time :P . Help in debugging this is welcome