Rpi Bootloader firmware updating HOWTO

After a few weeks of hearing about the new rpi firmware and how one could now boot from a USB device along with an SD card; I got fed up with hearing about how I needed to use Raspian, Arch, or some non-slackware OS to flash my Pi4. Below are the steps I followed and there's a couple of slightly different ways to do it but it's maybe 30 minutes well spent.

do all of this as root

"cd /root"
"git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/userland.git"
"cd userland/"
"./buildme"
"git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom.git"
"PATH=$PATH:/opt/vc/bin"
'echo "/opt/vc/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf' or 'echo "/opt/vc/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/vc.conf'
"ldconfig"
"cd rpi-eeprom"
"vi rpi-eeprom-update"
change FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS to beta

"./rpi-eeprom-update -a" or skip the previous step and run "./rpi-eeprom-update FIRMWARE_RELEASE_STATUS=beta -a"
"./rpi-eeprom-update" and you should see the latest beta bootloader firmware date
reboot

<SOAPBOX>
Finally, I think that adding userland to SARPI would be a big positive. Making the PATH change happen on boot and the libs that the programs in /opt/vc/bin need non-root friendly would be very nice. Making slackbuilds of both userland and rpi-eeprom would also be a good thing.
</SOAPBOX>

Jim