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Gentoo Foundation, Inc. is the owner of the Gentoo trademark. Gentoo Project
GentooX is an -O3 and LTO optimized x86_64 LiveCD Gentoo distribution with a simple install.sh CLI installer.
GentooX supports BIOS and UEFI x86_64 systems, at minimum requires AVX capable CPUs released since 2011 such as Intel Sandybridge or AMD Bulldozer, and among KDE, it includes Steam, flatpak, and phoronix-suite out-of-the-box.
GentooX comes absolutely with no warranty and I'm not responsible for any possible data loss, use it at your own discretion. GentooX is a 1-man army project. This website was designed to be simple and lightweight, it is entirely contained in 1 HTML file with minimal inline javascript just to implement a slideshow and navbar subpages.
(Q) what are the user/password credentials for LiveCD?gentoox and gentoox
what is the main motivation behind GentooX?I found it rather tedious to setup a clean Gentoo install and LTO all the packages, not only gcc has to be rebuilt to support graphite, but then your entire stage3 install needs to be recompiled, not to mention already installed software. GentooX aims to provide pre-compiled and LTOed packages from the get go with easy installation and convenient LiveCD. Since GentooX mandates AVX support, this allows further optimizations to all packages.
how can I start KDE?login to tty1 using gentoox/gentoox and type 'startx'
why does theme look like it didn't apply correctly? e.g. fonts are enlarged or dolphin looks dark-and-white?make sure to logout/login after initial 'startx' startup in LiveCD or after installation
what are the minimum requirements?any AVX capable CPUs released since 2011 such as Intel Sandybridge or AMD Bulldozer, 4GB of RAM (mostly due to LiveCD being 4GB squashfs file), and 16GB of disk space for root partition where openSUSE's style BTRFS will be setup and 128MB boot partition
how can GentooX be installed?boot LiveCD, login with gentoox/gentoox credentials, sudo su, and run ./install.sh, the install script is interactive, BIOS and UEFI systems are supported
how does the installation work?The installation carried by install.sh is very simple, besides interactive partitioning the setup extracts 4GB image.squashfs into root partition that ends up taking 13GB of space which includes all the pre-compiled software such as KDE and Steam.
is GentooX source based? How can I install additional software or update the system after installation?GentooX is source based, you should run
emerge --syncafter the install. After that, to update the system run:
emerge -avuDN --with-bdeps=y --exclude gentoo-sources @world
can I use login manager such as SDDM instead of 'startx'?yes, SDDM can be enabled, follow https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/SDDM#Service
how does the custom GentooX KDE theme get applied?when 'startx' is issued the ~/.xinitrc contains a 1-time line to run /usr/src/postinstall.sh
can I build GentooX from scratch myself? Could I e.g. optimize it solely for 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen?Yes! I will include a write up at some point. Building GentooX from scratch involves building a stage3 tarball with help of build-stage3.sh and then building actual GentooX with gentoox_build.sh
why GentooX name?I couldn't come up with anything better at time, I know there's a Gentoo distribution aimed at original XBOX named 'gentoox'. My distro uses capital X at the end for now (GentooX).
rc-update delete hwclock boot
The downloaded .iso can be written to an USB stick with dd, Win32DiskImager, or burned to a standard 4.7GB DVD, no different than you would do with Ubuntu/Fedora image. BIOS and UEFI modes are supported, altough Secure Boot has to be disabled for latter.
The LiveCD uses squashfs which means you can fully boot it up, login with gentoox/gentoox user/password and the start the GUI with startx without need to install or do any modifications to the underlying system, it is a convenient way to testdrive and check compatability of your system against LTOed Gentoo.
The install.sh script is interactive and supports automatic partitioning (will take over a whole disk that you specify) or manual (where it will ask you for an EFI and root partition) allowing you to install GentooX side-by-side other OS. The whole GentooX's OS is basically contained in a ~4GB ztsd image.squashfs LiveCD file, the installation is lightning fast and the whole OS can be installed&configured under 4 minutes from start to an end on typical system once you get hang of the process!
Gentoo is a rolling meta distribution, to stay up-to-date run the following:
emerge --sync emerge -avuDN --with-bdeps=y --exclude gentoo-sources @world
if you're having trouble booting the ISO on latest RTX 3000 series cards make sure to choose the following menu:
'Boot LiveCD (kernel: gentoo) (blacklist nouveau for RTX 3000 series)'
to install the drivers emerge nvidia-drivers, disregard the "CONFIG_I2C_NVIDIA_GPU: should not be set. But it is." error, it is safe to ignore
emerge -av nvidia-drivers append modprobe.blacklist=nouveau to /etc/default/grub so it looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="zswap.enabled=1 zswap.compressor=lz4 zswap.max_pool_percent=20 zswap.zpool=z3fold dobtrfs modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1" and lastly regenerate the grub.cfg grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg reboot
Compiling newer PATCH release such as 5.11.5 to upgrade existing 5.11.3 may be as easy as patching the kernel sources at /usr/src/linux with incremental patches and recompiling the sources while reusing existing shipped .config. However this does not always work especially when there are lots of changes in Linus' upstream PATCH releases. Anyway here are the steps you would take:
cd /usr/src/
rm -f linux
cp -a linux-5.11.3-gentoo/ linux-5.11.5-gentoo
ln -s linux-5.11.5-gentoo/ linux && cd linux
make clean
cp .config.bak .config
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/incr/patch-5.11.3-4.xz
wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v5.x/incr/patch-5.11.4-5.xz
unxz -dc patch-5.11.3-4.xz | patch -p1
unxz -dc patch-5.11.4-5.xz | patch -p1
sed -i "s/SUBLEVEL = 3/SUBLEVEL = 5/g" Makefile
make oldconfig
make -j8
if things went well and everything compiled then you can delete old kernel
rm -f /boot/*5.11.3*
rm -rf /lib/modules/5.11.3
and install the new 5.11.5 to /boot and its modules to /lib/modules
make install
make modules_install
before you regenerate the ramdisk you have to recompile zfs so its vermagic gets bumped from 5.11.3 to 5.11.5
emerge zfs-kmod
genkernel --kernel-config=/usr/src/linux/.config --compress-initramfs-type=zstd --microcode --luks --lvm --mdadm --btrfs --zfs initramfs
and lastly regenerate grub.cfg
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
reboot
the /usr/src/linux may end up quite large in size after all is said and done, you can slim it up with:
rm -f /usr/src/linux/.tmp*
find /usr/src/linux/ -name "*.o" -exec rm -f {} \;
find /usr/src/linux/ -name "*.ko" -exec rm -f {} \;
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GentooX includes quite of patches over vanilla Linux kernel, they mostly come from sirlucjan 'kernel-patches' repo.
To see exactly how GentooX compiles its kernel take a look at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fatalhalt/gentoox/master/gentoox_build.sh (look at 1/3 of the way in the file)
Consult with https://gitlab.com/sirlucjan/kernel-patches/-/tree/master/5.11 to see whether there have been new patches to let's say clearlinux, btrfs, ntfs, or futex for 5.11.x.
And you are always free to compile your own kernel anyway you want it and disregard what has been written here.
You may install some flatpak packages such as Discord or Visual Studio Code
flatpak install com.visualstudio.code com.discordapp.Discord -y
If you use nouveau you can try uplocking your graphics card, also if you have Intel CPU you should consider toggling 'performance' mode
echo 0f > /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate
cpupower frequency-set -g performance
To have these settings take effect at boot-time take a look at /etc/local.d/my.start, uncomment the lines there and/or insert your own commands