Arduino and Gentoo, a bad cocktail.

Rant:
Installing Arduino on Gentoo is a b*tch. For Arduino you need the avr gcc toolchain, this you can install through a portage overlay. But because of some bugs in avr gcc this won’t compile correct code for the Mega 2560. After googling for hours and reading dozens of forum and blog posts I got nowhere. I thought about installing a fresh gcc in a chroot environment but this seemed pretty complex. Luckily I found some interesting threads on the avr freaks forum. Someone has made .deb packages of the avr gcc toolchain, you can download them here. To install them you just untar them and extract the files to your hard drive. Then you only need to add the path so you can compile stuff with avr gcc. That was really easy 🙂
Arduino itself I just downloaded from the official site, I’m not using the latest 1.0 version. I quickly found out that some libraries don’t work with the 1.0 release so I stuck to the older 0023 version.