what i learned putting gentoo on my macbook pro

So before we begin this article assumes a wiped drive. So not using parallels or virtualization but a full install with no dual booting.

This article is not going to go through installation. There are plenty of posts across the internet explaining that.

-= Kernel .config =-
At time of writing i was using gentoo-sources-4.11.3 but the config file was originally from 4.9.X.
Here is the .config for gentoo-sources-4.11.3 that i created.

-= Booting =-
So i decided to go with grub2. First thing i did was using efibootmgr, remove all other entries that were not gentoo so that it looked like this when done :
sudo efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 5 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* gentoo

I also had a weird issue where after grub called the kernel that my disk location (/dev/sdX) would randomly change location between /dev/sd{a,b}. Easiest fix was adding the below to /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_DEVICE="PARTUUID=a852b30c-4543-49d6-969c-4e49ee029b14"
GRUB_DEVICE_UUID="8f2de9ac-7e52-44ec-af63-488be87e8908"
which can be grabbed by running “sudo blkid”.
Mine shows this:
/dev/sdb1: UUID="B572-A82B" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI System Partition" PARTUUID="90780068-fc39-4371-9cc9-deaf333d4d99"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="e795a3d1-590d-4c72-86be-fffe93fcb9e8" TYPE="swap" PARTLABEL="swap" PARTUUID="9dc0699e-6830-4279-93fa-70686f94de10"
/dev/sdb3: UUID="8f2de9ac-7e52-44ec-af63-488be87e8908" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="root" PARTUUID="a852b30c-4543-49d6-969c-4e49ee029b14"

Once the UUID & PARTUUID were set, no more issues since old style locations did not matter any longer.

-= keyboard lights =-
I followed this link from wiki.gentoo.org to set keyboard lighting except in the script provided i changed the step to “2” instead of “25” so that there is a more fine tuned stepping.

-= screen back lighting =-
Again, i followed this link from wiki.gentoo.org to set screen back light levels but again, in the script i changed the steps from “25” to “5” so that the screen would change gradually.

-= keyboard iso layout =-
I had an issue where the tilda key was showing left and right carats. To correct this i put this line in “/etc/local.d/02-kbd–iso.start”:
#!/bin/bash
echo 0 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/iso_layout
since its a local.d script it will start up on boot.

-= lid closing and backlight =-
So the link posted above caused weird issues so i installed “sys-power/pm-utils” and changed the acpi scripts a bit like so :

/etc/acpi/events/lm_lid :
event=button/lid.*
action=/etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh

/etc/acpi/actions/lid.sh :
#!/usr/bin/env bash
_DBL="/proc/acpi/button/lid/LID0/state"
if [ $(cat ${_DBL} | awk '{print $2}') = "closed" ]
then
xscreensaver-command -lock
pm-suspend
fi