Well well I have finally managed to compile and install an AVR toolchain that works with Arduino on my Gentoo workstation. This was after 3 attempts to install the AVR-GCC toolchain. After installing, it would never compile without errors. Some people have written guides on how to install the toolchain, but they never worked for me. The last one I tried was this Italian guide. After going through all the steps twice I still didn’t have a working compiler. And I couldn’t figure out if it was the compiler or the Arduino libraries causing the errors. A couple of days ago I noticed that the latest GCC version 4.7.1 was available in portage, gentoo’s package manager. So I unmasked the necessary packages and installed them. I first tried compiling a simple blink sketch in Arduino 0023, but I just got a bunch of errors. So I installed the latest Arduino 1.0.1 version and suddenly everything compiled without errors. My toolchain now consists of AVR-GCC 4.7.1, AVR-libc 1.8.0 and binutils 2.21.1. I will now have to update all my libraries and sketches so that they will compile in Arduino 1.0.1. Quite a few things have changed from Arduino 0023, the version I was using until now. If you don’t want to go through all the trouble and just want a working compiler you can install these binary packages. They work with Arduino 0023 but not with the 1.0 or later version…
I love gentoo as well. I have one built on my second hard drive. Its so fast and responsive. The only thing is for some weird reason you can’t just emerge avr-gcc you need something called an overlay. I have avr took chain installed on this Mint linux, but Mint is a bit heavy for my old computer. If you have any tips on how you managed to install avr-gcc on gentoo please let me know. 🙂
Take care have fun
cheers
I built it manually in my home directory without using portage. But the latest versions of the Arduino IDE come with the complete toolchain so you don’t have to worry about the toolchain any more.