Gentoo Installation Overview

A typical Gentoo install starts with booting from your CD drive with Gentoo's LiveCD (currently 2004.3 is the latest) in the drive. If you are lucky, Gentoo will detect all the hardware you need for the install. You might run into difficulties with the LiveCD supporting really recent SATA and/or RAID chipsets and with integrated NICs. Worst case I've ever had was needing to install a spare 3com PCI NIC in a system to get Gentoo installed when an onboard NForce 10/100/1000 NIC wasn't being picked up by 2004.2. When 2004.3 came out, that NIC was supported by the LiveCD.

Your first steps after booting the LiveCD is to:

• optionally enable DMA on your hard drive(s)
• configure the network (networkless is possible but not covered here)
• partition your hard drives using fdisk or cfdisk
• create your filesystems, mount them up
• choose your installation method:

Stages:
Gentoo gives the user 3 different installation approaches, and the terminology for each is a numbered ``stage'', vis.:

• stage 1 - everything is compiled from scratch. It's an extremely lengthy install for which Gentoo is infamous. This installation method could easily take up to 48 hours on a slow system, though I've installed it on modern systems (p4 3.2 Ghz. 1024MB DDR400 RAM) in as little as 6 to 8 hours. This installation method is only recommended for masochists, or for people who are using aggressive CFlags and are trying to optimize the hell out of their system for speed or for a specific application.
• stage 2 - skips the lengthy bootstrap
• stage 3 - skips the compiling of the system and uses pre-built packages (this is the least time consuming installation method and it is well argued that if one uses Portage, the whole system will be recompiled before long, so why bother compiling everything during the install process? I think it's a good point.

More steps in installing are:

• chrooting into your new Gentoo environment
• downloading the stage tarball you'll need, untarring it
• setting your environment in /etc/make.conf
• optionally choosing mirrors that are close to you

After you've progressed past the ``stage 3'' portion of the install, you will need to:

• choose which kernel you want to use from the dozens of ``optimized'' versions of the 2.4 or 2.6 branch that are in Portage
• install it, and compile it for your needs (recommended manual compile, but htere is also ``genkernel'' a hellish script that produces bloated kernels. Nice when it works, horrid when it doesn't)
• make sure all your modules will load at boot time
• make your /etc/fstab
• configure your permanent network and hostname/dnsdomainname settings for the host
• Install a system logger (syslogd, syslog-ng, metalog)
• optionally install a cron daemon of your choosing
• install your filesystem tools
• choose your bootloader, install it and configure it and reboot (phew! congratulations!)

By the way, all of the above is quite deftly covered by Gentoo's ``handbook''. If any of that seemed intimidating for newer users, it can be, but the documentation really leaves much of the guesswork out of much of the stuff covered here. (See the resources link at the end of the presentation).

Working with Gentoo

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