In a previous blog entry, I talked about booting the Gentoo ISO image directly from the disk, without using a CD/DVD or even copying the image to a USB stick.
This is a followup to describe how to boot up Gentoo into a purpose built "kiosk" mode rather than the generic "KDE Plasma" GUI.
I'm going to first show how to boot Gentoo with a "nox" option in the GRUB entry and then set up the .xinitrc to bring up a GUI with just a terminal (and nothing else).
Here's the GRUB entry to boot into the CLI (note the additional "nox" option)
menuentry 'Gentoo LiveCD (kernel: gentoo) with GUI' --class gnu-linux --class os { search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root a40dafdc-35db-4312-8d6c-a69d1ca8470b loopback loop ($root)/boot/gentoo/gentoo.iso linux (loop)/boot/gentoo nokeymap nodhcp secureconsole root=live:CDLABEL=gentoo-amd64-livegui rd.live.dir=/ rd.live.squashimg=image.squashfs cdroot iso-scan/filename=/boot/gentoo/gentoo.iso nox initrd (loop)/boot/gentoo.igz }
Use this entry to boot to the Gentoo CLI. Then set up your .xinitrc and start
up the X server.
echo konsole > ~/.xinitrc startx
This should bring up a GUI with a terminal and nothing else - no window manager and other accoutrements, who needs them anyway ;)
I had to use konsole as the terminal since Gentoo does not seem to ship the
tried and true xterm anymore (on the livecd), but you can emerge it if you
wish.
Note: This is just a "note to self" since I had to do some research to get it working and I'm hoping that having it on my own blog makes it trivial to find