# Gentoo FreedomBox

## Covracer

If you haven't watched or read the transcript of Eben Moglen's Freedom in the Cloud talk, go do that and come back.

Plug computers are starting to take off, and the Debian FreedomBox seems to have the biggest mindshare at the moment. I haven't been active in the Gentoo community for some time, and would be grateful if folks could maybe point out any equivalent or related Portage-based projects.

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## cyrillic

I read that article, and it seemed interesting.

Do you have any of the hardware that was mentioned ?

It should be easy enough to replace Debian with whatever distro you prefer (Gentoo).

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## Covracer

 *cyrillic wrote:*   

> Do you have any of the hardware that was mentioned ?

 

I ordered the GuruPlug, which is a ARMv5TE processor with 512 MB RAM, 512 MB on-board NAND flash, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g, USB 2.0, and Bluetooth, but it could be a month before it actually arrives.

In the meantime, I'm experimenting with building target images on my x86. Due to the resource constraints, I don't think it's worthwhile to try to put a full toolchain and Portage installation on the device, so cross-compiled target images (and packages?) will be the order of the day. I might take a look at how Chromium OS does their incremental updates when I get that far along.

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## chithanh

According to some user reports on the web, the GuruPlug is not so great when it comes to the power supply. You may want to reconsider that purchasing decision, or wait until a better designed model is released.

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## Covracer

 *chithanh wrote:*   

> According to some user reports on the web, the GuruPlug is not so great when it comes to the power supply. You may want to reconsider that purchasing decision, or wait until a better designed model is released.

 

Interesting. I had heard about the heating problems and figured I could just crack open the box and add a heatsink, but the PSU issues may give me reason to improve my solder skills. The PogoPlug would have probably been a better investment, but oh well, I'll make the GuruPlug work well enough for development purposes.

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