Unofficial Install Guide

WARNING This article is completely unofficial. |Read the discussion page before editing.

Preparing the Chroot
This section assumes you have booted into a "live" system, be it the official Gentoo live medium, SystemRescueCd or any other bootable live linux medium.

Time
You will have to make sure that the systems current time is correct. An example output is:

Tue Aug 9 00:08:37 CEST 2011 If you need to correct it use the syntax below:


 * MM = Month
 * DD = Day
 * hh = Hour
 * mm = Minute
 * CCYY = Year(4 digits)

Partitioning
In this guide we use the following example layout:

Use, or your partitioning tool of choice, to create the partition layout:

Now with partitioning done with you need to format the partitions with a appropriate file system. Note that we will use the -L  argument to label the file system when its created, this will come in handy later on. In this example we use ext2 file system for, which is a simple, tried and tested file system that works well for as its only used to hold the kernel(s) and the boot loader.

For the partition that will hold the actual system and we use the ext4 file system,

Lastly we create the swap partition using :

You of course don't need to use the file systems exampled here, a comparison of file system can be found here.

Man pages of interest: cfdisk, mke2fs and mkswap.

Mounting
With the file systems ready we mount them under, which will be your Gentoo chroot. Begin with creating this directory:

Now we mount the file systems. Note that we mount by asking for a label, which we do by using the LABEL= argument. This should of course be the label you set when you formated the file system. Begin with the root file system which will then house the mount-points of "Boot" and "Home":

And with the mount-points created in the root file system we mount "Boot" and "Home":

Lastly we "active" the swap partition:

Man pages of interest: mkdir and mount.

The stage3 tarball
In this example we download an x86 tarball. Make sure you get the tarball that's appropriate for your machine and recent(example tarball is from 2011-07-26). Begin by creating the directory and  to to it. The reason we work in because here we know we have free space(assuming you used a partition layout similar to the one above):

Now download the stage3 tarball. Note that is executed with the argument --limit-rate&#61;1000k so it doesn't clog up all bandwidth:

When is complete, extract the tarball to :

Man pages of interest: wget.

Finalizing Preparations
A chroot will usually need the ("process information pseudo-file system") and the  (containing the device nodes) file systems to function properly. The directory can be bound, or "mirrored", to another directory using mount's --rbind argument:

The file system is mounted by specifying --types proc and proc(as the pseudo "source" of the file system):

After this your chroot is essentially ready, but without a network with DNS access. Copy the file or to your chroot: