Gentoo on Olimex Teres 1 DIY laptop

DIY laptop is amazing!

Gentoo is the best operating system for a DIY computer: both require time and patience, and both pay back with strong control of what's under the hood.

This repo hosts various configuration files for a Gentoo build on Teres 1 with LXDE, Chromium, Gimp, LibreOffice, Vim, Java, etc. This is a lightweight but functional desktop.

Download

Here is a compiled image which you can run from a micro-sd card, or install to the MMC.

• April 26, 2018: https://github.com/khumarahn/teres1-gentoo/raw/master/teres-gentoo-20180426.img.xz.torrent (Updates: f2fs for the win; some updates and simplifications)
• September 26, 2018: https://github.com/khumarahn/teres1-gentoo/raw/master/teres-gentoo-20180926.img.xz.torrent (Updates: encrypted /home, squashed portage, deadline io scheduler, gcc-8, clang-7, kicad-5, etc)

  # sha256sum teres-gentoo*.img*
  330e2230420d12e4e6997a56f9538009135a891ab4e4a1bc9da8f3f02df9ccd3  teres-gentoo-20180426.img
  a9073851a32fa718ebb3599fca2c3d96d40148bafeb328cbe91a390c083535e6  teres-gentoo-20180426.img.xz
  c218d22520c5212f2a48576b78d0e1640ae5cb9d2c177da5fcfb110c76a13bb9  teres-gentoo-20180926.img
  725af8b2a266f04f6d22143ca90218f78bbc2427b99b1a614c5b6d13dd224b0e  teres-gentoo-20180926.img.xz

Unpack the image and burn it to a micro-sd card:

dd if=teres-gentoo-20180926.img of=/dev/sdX oflag=direct status=progress

Insert the card and boot. The default user is tux, password is olimex. Root's and /home passwords are olimex too.

To install to MMC, replace the contents of your /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/mmcblk0p2 with what is in the respective partitions of the image (using, say, rsync -aAxXhH. Then edit /etc/fstab and /boot/uEnv.txt to point to right partitions.

Encryption

The whole /home folder is encrypted with . A password is asked on boot (olimex by default). The encfs is not perfect: the filenames and content are encrypted, but the directory structure, file sizes and attributes are not. But it is more flexible than dmcrypt, where one needs to allocate a fixed size container.

Binary repo

Compilation on Teres 1 is slow, so I compile on my amd64 desktop in an arm64 qemu chroot. Then I install packages from a binary repo, which holds a snapshot of portage and many prebuilt packages. The settings are in /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf:

sync-uri = rsync://khu.dedyn.io/teres-portage

and in /etc/portage/make.conf:

PORTAGE_BINHOST="rsync://khu.dedyn.io/teres-portage-full/packages"

Change/remove the two lines above to use the official Gentoo repos.

To install a program, make sure that your use flags, keywords and masks correspond to those I use, and run for example

emerge -av --getbinpkg kicad

Notes:

• The kernel is very old and special, and you may need to replace linux-headers with Teres' headers from the beginning. See my package.provided and teres-headers.
• For the sleep button to work (Fn+F1), update the keyboard firmware, see https://github.com/d3v1c3nv11/TERES-KBD-RELEASE/tree/master/upgrade
• ACPI sleep, power button and brightness up/down events are controlled by acpid, they work regardless of the desktop environment, also without it in console. To change the behaviour, see the very simple scripts in /etc/acpi/actions.
• Screenshots are handled by the script /usr/local/bin/screenshot.sh. It silently saves png to ~/screenshots/. PrtScr saves the whole screen, and Ctrl+PrtScr or Shift+PrtScr let you select a window.
• No systemd, because it complains about the old kernel. Using openrc instead.
• Battery indication is tricky, I had to patch lxpanel specifically for Teres. Currently it shows the charge (percentage) accurately, but does not estimate the remaining time.
• Linux kernel is stock, except I changed the cpu governor to ondemand, disabled CONFIG_SECCOMP (for chromium and pulseaudio), compiled in f2fs and changed the default io governor to deadline.
• Hdmi is not tested, I do not have the cable or the monitor.
• Bluetooth is not tested.
• There is a bug in lxpanel with rendering system tray icons with transparent background. I did not find what causes it, but it is a minor inconvenience.