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+--- Thread: Gentoo on Pinetab (/showthread.php?tid=19646)
Gentoo on Pinetab - istewart - 01-26-2025
Hello,
I've been trying to set up Gentoo on an SD card in my Pinetab2 since I received it a few weeks ago. I am generally more comfortable with Portage than pacman, and I would also like to test and possibly provide support for Gentoo's arm64 binary packages. This means that I have built a partition table up from scratch on the SD card, rather than duplicating an existing installation image. It's a very simple partition table:
mmcblk1p1: EFI boot partition mounted at /efi, FAT32
mmcblk1p2: swap
mmcblk1p3: root partition, ext4
The Pine64 RockPro64 entry on the Gentoo wiki: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/PINE64_ROCKPro64/Installing_Gentoo#Configuring_the_bootloader indicates that whoever wrote it had success using a standalone build of Grub on an EFI system partition to get the RockPro to boot, but I am not having the same success on the Pinetab. Should I instead be installing U-Boot to the boot partition? Or flashing it to the first sectors of the SD card? I am still unsure about the normal procedure for using U-Boot or where it should be installed.
At what point might I also want to consider the rk2aw bootloader? This person had success using it with Fedora: https://www.jistr.com/blog/2023-11-27-fedora-on-pinetab2/
It also seems like the tablet is now not booting at all with the SD card inserted, which was not the case before I formatted the SD card with the boot partition. But it could be possible that it is actually attempting to boot but I just have no video output/keyboard backlight, since the stock Gentoo binary kernel probably doesn't have drivers for these. I can attempt to use the Danctnix kernel patches and build my own kernel, but I am curious, exactly what devices does it patch in support for?
The bes2600 wifi driver is not important to start with, as I have a USB-Ethernet adapter that has Linux kernel support. I plan to install the wifi driver after I have a properly booting system, and also write a Gentoo ebuild for it.