It is called CloverOS and it is quick.
The CloverOS image is about 1.1GB, it has a live system with various WM (window managers) that start and the installer window will pop open once the WM is up. It asks you to partition and specify the partition for the installation’s root, root password, username and pw, and 10′ later you have a complete Gentoo installation ready to boot.CloverOS is like a cheater’s Gentoo installation. If you were given an assignment in school to install Gentoo and come back a week later to show it off, as the rest of the class will be laboring and cooling their CPU, you will take 10′ and beat them to it. Nobody will be able to tell you didn’t build the system from scratch as Gentoo prescribes. Is it libre? No, it has linux-firmware added to it so it will boot on any hw, then if you don’t need any of this non-free firmware you can remove it. If you are really into compiling and authenticity you should just go through the true Gentoo installation.
One adverse action of the simplified installer is that you can not specify whether you want grub or lilo installed in MBR or have another boot system start it. You specify the root partition (best if you have it ready), it asks you if everything is ok then it installs grub in your MBR. It mounts that partition you specified, it rsyncs the system in the mounted partition, then it runs some post-installation script to set everything up. I suppose one may be able to edit the simple installer script before it runs (or quit and run again) and avoid this problem. If by any chance the installation does not produce a bootable system then you need another usb to revert the MBR back to where it was. In any case this is a much better experience than Redcore.
Once you boot the system you see the colorful screen of OpenRC in the installation that made it famous. The only red indication I got was about wpa-supplicant not being able to run as I don’t have wifi. Then a console login prompt comes up, you log in and you are asked to choose one out of the many WM or skip and get to console. Once you choose a wm (awesome, openbox, fluxbox, fvwm, etc) the script downloads the appropriate wm, installs it, and runs it.
Portage is the real package manager for Gentoo, and evolution from BSD’s porting system. Then there is emerge (which is a wrapper for portage) which is simple to use. # sudo emerge openbox will install openbox. Then there is a gui, similar to Pamac in Manjaro/Arch/Artix, or synaptic in Debian world.
CloverOS has built everything that comes standard in Gentoo, by compiling in a strict lean way everything from Gentoo source, so a large number of standard pkgs come as binaries ready to run. And it does run quick. Not everything is available through CloverOS, some pkgs are there to download but will not install as some dependencies are not there yet. You turn source download and building on and you can have everything you can imagine.
This is a step of exploration into Gentoo world so we will report back anything encountered that appears unique to Gentoo One glitch we discovered must be coming from OpenRC scripts. If you wanted to logoff from your X/wm and return to console, you can’t. The system eventually freezes and no console comes up.
If we learn about a fix we will report back.
References:
https://cloveros.ga/
https://gitgud.io/cloveros/cloveros
for everything related to operation of the Gentoo system look here:
systemd-free linux community 
Thank you for checking it out. I’m watching them too.
Is there an option to install nothing to MBR? I usually go that direction anyway, and then just update-grub from another installed distro. If I can.
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Some systems grub syntax peculiarities are not produced properly with os-prober. All debian related distros seem to be ok no matter who is producing their entries, but arch related distros seem to be sensitive and go into kernel panick if the syntax is messed up. Void is really funky. What I do is use /boot/grub/custom.cfg and every time there is a change somewhere I transfer that entry into custom.cfg, of the installation that handles MBR, that only changes manually. It still is a pain, but the bright side of arch is they use simple kernel names like linux, linux-lts, linux-ck, linux-zen, that even when they are revised/upgraded they retain their name so grub does not change. Debian seems to be picking up on this trend but still if you go from linux4.14 to linux4.15 grub changes.
Gentoo’s portage and emerge need some extensive studying. Veterans praise it as the ultimate pkg system (BSD inspired) but newcomers seem to have a hard time with it. A quick guide is to locate one of those cross boards that show the equivalent pkg commands between distros, but still you need to read some manuals as not all options of one transfer to functions of the other. If I find a good one I will replicate it here.
There is not much help that is clover specific but with Gentoo being very well developed in wikis, manuals, forum, FAQ, I suspect after installation you forget clover existed and focus on Gentoo. At least once you get the hang of it you can feel more confident in installing Gentoo the Gentoo way. Too many people have tried it and given up before they got a bootable system, even though they realized what they had done wrong, but didn’t want to repeat the lengthy process.
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1st mistake this cloveros page is very helpful it is their main web page that is only good for locating the .iso
https://gitgud.io/cloveros/cloveros
Although I had read through this yesterday it had left the impression that it was a Gentoo page.
Particularly this is what makes the difference between CloverOS and Gentoo (relying on ready built binaries or building from source)
— quoted from above link —-
Edit /etc/portage/make.conf and change
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=”–keep-going=y –autounmask-write=y –jobs=4 -G”
to
EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=”–keep-going=y –autounmask-write=y –jobs=4″
Your system is now Gentoo Linux.
After emerge determines what it needs to install and checks dependencies, the -G switch tells emerge to check the binhost before it starts building source. Removing -G reverts to regular emerge operation. It’s exactly the same as running PORTAGE_BINHOST=”https://cloveros.ga” emerge -G package on any Gentoo install. Because it still uses Gentoo repo (versions, ebuilds), and only uses CloverOS as a binhost, you still need to run emerge –sync.
CloverOS is a default Gentoo install with programs and with the above defaulted in /etc/portage/make.conf. There’s also some configuration files and scripts in the user’s home directory for making things easier. With those files removed, CloverOS becomes a default Gentoo install.
—————— end of quote ———
lxterminal exists as binary in Clover but will not run, nor give out an error or has a -debug option.
lxterminal from source just doesn’t build (today)
obmenu-generator doesn’t have a binary (because it is just a script) but when built from source (Gentoo) it gives out an error.
This is getting interesting 🙂
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Related: It appears Slontoo snuck in an update in March.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/slontoo/files/18.03/
I’ve pulled down the big .iso with 3 IDEs and will report back if there’s interest. Last time with 17.12 xfce-only, I could not get wireless to work.
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I know just enough to think that slontoo is really funtoo (it is fun too) and funtoo is almost like gentoo, and clovero I tried the other day was supposed to be precompiled gentoo … and you only had to change one bit of information in a conf file to make a cloveros a gentoo installation.
I didn’t give up or removed the partition yet, but what I started with (a complete “functional” installation) was a partially functioning system. Getting x up and running, having “some” terminal available, doing an update and an upgrade is not the whole story, the other part or partially was a disappointment. What pkgs were available through cloveros were understandably limited. The weird thing is that “very common” (some ranking as number one most popular choices in asklinux-forum) were available but not all of their dependencies were. Some were available and installable but did not run. Lxterminal for example did not run from terminal but will not produce an error why it didn’t run, or something indicating the problem. Switching to gentoo’s repository of sources and more, did produce an upgrade but didn’t install missing dependencies or built pkgs. Again missing dependencies. I guess I can look upstream for each specific one and compile them from scratch. If I sit and do this for something as simple as a terminal pkg, I can imagine how many days of research and compiling a more complex pkg would require. Upgrading some of the existing installed pkgs with Gentoo’s repository, broke some of the pre-compiled CloverOS pkgs. So I ended up having more problems that I did after installatio.
I accept I may be missing some big piece of the puzzle, huge piece maybe, and I have to keep reading and trying, but it is hard to believe something of the fame of Gentoo is reduced to such a limited functional system. I have to admit the little that was there after installation seemed to be working, but I don’t see any magic to this mysterious world of *too linux (and non-linux).
I can compile kernels and software in arch and it seems so much friendlier of an environment.
Again I shall continue the hunt for the missing puzzle pieces only due to the fame of the distro. Anything else would have hit the gparted-trashing-can in less than half the effort. And don’t anyone say that apart of debian and arch based systems I am not willing to learn anything. I learned void and it did everything well, so well I was bored with it. It is still around and updated weekly, so I can confirm the rumor that void hasn’t broken once (except for moving the same installation to different hardware) in all the months I’ve had it. Similar but worse was my experience with kwort (crux based) which is so minimal I can barely read any text in it, let alone finding out how to change resolution or scale fonts so I can read more.
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My installation is about 4 weeks old now, and time hasn’t been able to cure it, with updates/upgrades.
I installed openbox and later lxde because openbox wasn’t working too well. Very common tools, such as lxterminal will not work, and many lxde basic packages are not even installable because of missing dependencies.
I can’t even change the way the desktop looks, font size, colors, etc. The rights in the user’s space I thought were messed up. Actually they weren’t set at all. I changed them so the user can edit anything under ~/user/ but still nothing can be changed.
This is very tiring and discouraging. I can’t even have a decent terminal with visible fonts. Terminator was about the only thing I found that was functional so I can work with. But this is a sad state of affairs.
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Still not giving up, I think CloverOS is a really good idea but it is still not mature enough. There web/wiki page is still a maze, one day we find information the next day it is gone. There seems to be a new image out in June so we are starting from scratch. The glory of compiling everything from scratch to get a minimal Gentoo system running is not very appealing, although the legacy of the distribution saves the show. To have a running Gentoo system, that is 100% Gentoo, and go from there seems more appealing than Gentoo’s way itself.
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