Installing Gentoo Linux on the Genesi EfikaMX (unboxing) is fairly simple. I have completed documentation for this process here. I have enjoyed working on this platform and will highly suggest it for applications that need low power and non-extreme hardware specs. Anyway, I’m not the first to have Gentoo Linux running on EfikaMX, but the first to document the process. Thanks go to Raúl (armin76) for working on the Gentoo stages, [Genesi][5] for the support, et al.

It is no surprise that Gentoo Prefix works fine on arm-linux given the great work being done in Gentoo Linux by the ARM team (armin76, maekke, et al). For the Genesi Efika MX (unboxing), I now have a binpkg repo setup (for Gentoo Prefix only). This was mainly a fun proof-of-concept that I did. I went from installing 70 packages in about 18 hours, to about 30 minutes using binpkgs. What does this mean: Given the relatively small set of arm users and the highly specific use cases for arm hardware, well, there isn’t a very big percentage of users that will keep Ubuntu on their Efika MX when they get it.

In the mail today, I got the Efika MX Open Client. My first impressions are pretty good. No noise and no moving parts, it should last for a long time. It comes with Ubuntu 9.10 minimal on it out of the box. That HDMI output makes it the best text console I have ever seen on my 40” 1080p LCD TV! Seriously though, on my TODO: Analyze the possibilities for a HTPC.